It gets worse than promo-driven development. Recently we had a chat with a lead from another team. Their product has a lot of similarities with ours so we sync up every now and then to bounce ideas off each other. They recently release a big change that we thought didn't provide much value, so we asked him about it. His candid answer was "you know how it works, we have a service running in production, so we need to m…
> If you have a team, you need to "justify" their existence. Is not enough to keep the lights on or slowly polish the product, you need grand roadmaps to keep yourself busy the next year or two. Ideally you want to justify that you need extra headcount to keep the product expanding. This. It generates the Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber talked about. As a middle manager or tech lead (Taskmaster) you hire people (Flu…
> and that's because those get moved to MTV and fast tracked to the executive suite.
"The Goon" is the analyst from an investment firm who tells your directors and CEO how many of you are going to be fired to make him happy.
Can you list example of "toxic femininity"? If not, you're just sexist, full-stop. (c.f. "toxic blackness" or "toxic Jewishness")
I'm not the one who named it. You're welcome to try and establish a new name for the phenomenon. Also, yes, "toxic femininity" is also a term (and is even linked from the other page), but for some reason I don't think you were asking in good faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalized_sexism#Toxic_femi...
ah, yeah, of course, "toxic femininity" is defined in such a way that men are still evil
> such beliefs and expectations "[suggest] there is no a priori female self" apart from the needs and desires of men and boys
> The other perverse incentive is that you will end up with engineers trying to extract as much value from other engineers as possible, because it becomes part of leveling up: how much you make other people deliver. Even as an IC. Raising up and increasing the productivity of your peers sounds like a good thing. I think I'm missing how this is a bad outcome due to a perverse incentive. Are you saying the value extrac…
> the focus on your raising your peers detracts from more important business goals? It's this. Actually doing work is seen as simple and unworthy of a higher-level engineer. Good engineers focused on problems (fixing complex bugs in distributed systems, adding fallbacks and failovers, improving the UI or performance of internal tools, etc) can add significant value to the company...but they won't be rewarded for it,…
You described many of reasons I left a previous company. As one of the higher level engineers, I was constantly writing "tech specs", reviewing tech specs, doing code reviews (one week I had 12), and forced to present slide decks full of fluff against my will. Usually I'd push the slide shows off for a few weeks, but eventually I'd run out of excuses. Occasionally, I'd get to do some real work, but it mostly involved refactoring an almost decade old smoldering dumpster fire, so I left.
> There was nowhere near enough big projects to get everyone the evidence they needed for promotions. Would the goal be to promote everyone ? Who's going to do the work they all used to do?
At Google at least, if you stay low level for too long, you get fired. If your team is full of low level people maintaining a project that's stable, you need to invent work to justify your existence.
You only need one promotion, L3 (entry level) to L4 (mid level), to not get fired at Google. And the company is quite generous with how long it gives you to get there. L3 to L4 is basically about writing good code on your own, and isn't really affected by promo culture -- doesn't really need shiny work.
Several years back, you had to also eventually get to L5. This was more affected by promo culture, but was also largely unenforced, which is why they get rid of the formal requirement to get to L5.
I spent over 9 years at Google. Got promoted 3 times. Was a manager. Google is absolutely bonkers when it comes to promotions. At every opportunity to provide feedback towards upper management, I had one consistent refrain: Everyone needs to chill the f### out. The stakes (seem) too high. The amount of time invested is too high. The amount of discussion, rehashing, tinkering, rejiggering, and calibration is just too…
It would be great if promo wasnt such a big deal. But when I look at the comp for an L3 software engineer, and the comp for an L5 software engineer, I have a hard time seeing how you could make people pay less attention to promo. I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.
Any promo process with any randomness (especially a promo process that changes over time as upper management changes) is effectively a stochastic version of "promo after N years after not being fired." I don't worry much about promos, but still randomly get promos because the stuff I found important for a few years was also nicely slotted into the promo standards at the time. And the obsession on titles and such book-cover-like triva does seem to get worse the more they try to systematize the process. When it's clearly equivalent to rolling dice, people worry less about it. The more rigorous they make the process and the more they have panels and packets and so on, the more people start introducing each other with their title. My first ten years in software, no one cared about titles at all unless you met with a non-engineering org and met dumb people with an exalted titles (in which case you felt bad; titles only serve to harm morale, they never improve it). The last ten years, people act like becoming Senior Principal Staff Engineer is like becoming a different sort of human. It does correlate with more pay, so it's hard to say it's completely trivial, but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever, it's less important to happiness than fulfilling work, good co-workers, flexibility to meet your family or parenting obligations, autonomy over your work, and so on. One imagines one gets more autonomy by having a grander title, but really you get autonomy by just exercising the autonomy you have by being in control of the scarce and valuable resource of being able to create and improve software systems. If what you find important is valued by the organization you work in, then it will work out that people trust you, no matter the levels.
> the focus on your raising your peers detracts from more important business goals? It's this. Actually doing work is seen as simple and unworthy of a higher-level engineer. Good engineers focused on problems (fixing complex bugs in distributed systems, adding fallbacks and failovers, improving the UI or performance of internal tools, etc) can add significant value to the company...but they won't be rewarded for it,…
It’s basically cargo cult engineering. There’s the appearance of engineering and sophistication but the actual substance is hollow.
Yep. The truth is, most of the work we do isn't that important, interesting, or useful, so the pomp and circumstance is necessary to raise its "visibility." Truly sad.
“ We have around 50 people on staff, and for the past couple of years, we have leveled new employees based on years of relevant experience. We had three levels, each with a single, non-negotiable salary that was the same across locations, and everybody was assigned to one of those levels. We've always been completely remote” I guess the main question that comes to mind is “why would a strong-performing, early-in-care…
Normalizing pay to years experience is a bad move in general, IMO. You are going to have a distribution of high and low performers at all levels of experience. If you pay all the senior people the same, you have less money to pay your high performers. And maybe they go get that pay from elsewhere. There's a difference between having 20 years of experience and one year of experience 20 times.
The root of the promo and hiring problems is this focus on individual performance. The appropriate unit of analysis for most human efforts is the group level. Just have some livable base salaries, and then give everyone a big chunk of the profits each year.
I don't know if it's always true for people, but my performance goes up and down quite a lot depending on how much I believe in the group mission and the group dynamic. I'll occasionally stay late working for some abstract metric that might impact 10% of my pay, but I'll stay up 48 hours working fanatically to make something work for my friends and co-workers and the dream of success in changing the world that the group is striving for together.
And if that filters out the people that only do software for a princely salary, leaving the people motivated to transform the world for the better, so much the better. Greedy people are a bit demotivating to work with.
The problem is a bit more insidious than that As an engineer, you want to be working on cool new features too! Very few folks will be content sitting on their laurels just fixing the occasional bug or adding a touch more polish to a product that's already "done" If you setup a team to work that way, very soon you'll find that most of your engineers have left. Heck, the manager might get bored and leave too. "Okay, th…
Isn't the 20% time to work on whatever cool shit you want enough ? (like how googlers created that garbage angular1 because they were border, have no clue about GUIs and had some fun scewing around ) ? I know people that are fine with getting paid to maintain shit so maybe the problem is Google only hires cool developers and the cool developers only want to work on cool stuff and in 2 years the newest cool stuff of-c…
> Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused and not business focused. That’s why after 20+ years almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising. All of the other major tech companies have multiple billion dollar profitable revenue streams. Is that true of other ad-tech driven companies as well? Companies like Meta and Twitter. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are used to charging user…
Twitter is not exactly a shining light on the hill as far as being a good business. Facebook is also starting to see the issue with being a one trick pony. But as for as Google, how many failed “other bets” have they been throwing money at since they were founded? Google was founded in 1998. About the same time that Apple was close to bankruptcy. One year they introduced three messaging platforms. How many failed fir…
> In Louisville, Google Fiber reportedly was burying cables in "nano-trenches" that were just two inches deep.
> "When you're walking around the neighborhood, [the lines are] popping up out of the road all over the place," resident Larry Coomes said at the time. "People are tripping over it."
This is the most obviously Google thing I've read ever. Half-ass a job and then saying "screw it" and leaving because it's too difficult? Name another company that would do this. Not even Spectrum is this incompetent. They have the attention span of a stoned teenager. Their Toronto Sidewalk Labs also comes to mind. Probably for the best they pulled the plug early on that one. Imagine parts of your city just stop functioning because some private company got bored one day and left.