The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures • Hacker News Board

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#471

Post by Perseids » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:06 AM UTC

mecha_ghidorah wrote: post #460

alisonatwork wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably those folks who left didn't do quite as good a job as they perhaps should have when they were still there. A high quality developer leaving a service behind should have already written sufficient documentation so that another high quality developer (especially one at the same company) can ramp up more quickly than 3-4 weeks. I think this is just another symptom of many tech companies throwing up their hands…

This is true but only so long as they have been given time to do it. I've left a company, with notice, and they had me working on building stuff almost to my last day. Sure I did have a few "hand over" sessions in my schedule where I was expected to walk other devs through some stuff I was the owner for in a broad sense, but they never gave me time to produce solid docs for anything even knowing I was headed out the…

It can get worse: me and my teammate trained a new dev for half a year with the explicit intention for him to take over should one of us leave. When the day came, said new dev was moved to another team, the product was given to an outsourcer and I was told to train them how to develop in two 2h sessions before I left. (The product was a legacy mess we were in the (multi year) process of refactoring into something maintainable. Documenting the intentions midway or even the status before was beyond the time budget we were allotted. All of this while doing feature development, without having proper requirements or user stories or access to customers who understand their use case, of course.)

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#472

Post by Hermitian909 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:09 AM UTC

burnoutgal wrote: post #52

Hermitian909 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head: 1. More money means less time till I hit FU money and can choose work without any consideration of pay 2. 200k/yr is not as much as it seems if you're in the bay area and have kids 3. Bigger title -> more input on core design decisions. Hate some idea coming from the higher ups? You're in a position to do something about it. 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to wo…

Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many years than try to race to retire. A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the way to go. If you want to be a…

> Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money?

No. I don't work that hard, and my work is generally enjoyable, I've made a lot of good friends, and get to live in the area I grew up in near my family.

> A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas

Well, my response was to a poster asking "why do you care about making more if you make 200k?" and the answer for some people making that amount of money is that they are only able to find work paying 200k+ in a high COL area.

> More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp

The thing driving more interesting problems and more input is a title bump, which in my neck of the woods means a 50% or greater pay bump, so I would say that's not for the same comp. Whether it's more responsibility is variable, but I know engineers two levels above senior who more or less have the same responsibilities as a senior engineer except their project is "harder" and more important to the company (this does not mean the more senior engineer is actually working more hours though).

Perhaps a meta point here is also useful. Once you're senior, most engineering work available is not interesting and does not help you grow as an engineer. Engineering work that helps you grow as an engineer often makes you more valuable. Companies usually give interesting work to their best engineers. If you can quickly climb the ladder to where your job feeds you interesting work you can enter into a "winners-win-more" sort of feedback loop. This is a strong incentive to front-load your career growth by working really hard for your first decade in industry (or at least years 5-10).

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#473

Post by mirker » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:16 AM UTC

colonelxc wrote: post #18

baby wrote: post #2

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. The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion.…

The "nobody dares giving bad feedback" thing isn't about retaliation (though I suppose that could happen). It's because perf is actually the worst place to provide "honest" feedback to a person about their performance. It's complaining to managers/directors instead of talking to the person themselves (the recipient wont get to read your feedback for a couple months after). Even if you want to talk to a manager about…

I’d say this goes with letters of recommendation, too.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#474

Post by tormeh » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:18 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #404

madeofpalk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably one of the causes of this is high salaries and only hiring (supposedly, I have no personal experience) Very Smart Developers. You're going to pay Google salaries for someone just to keep the lights on?

The rationale for developing Go is that Googlers are fresh out of school and only barely smart enough to program Java, so I think they’ve eased off on the notion they only hire super-geniuses.

I think it's more that they're smart as hell but know very little or have poorly developed taste. So you have to give them a short leash otherwise they'll hang themselves with it through over-engineering and accidental complexity.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#475

Post by austhrow743 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:23 AM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #438

qzx_pierri wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

It’s not much different at large corporations, just far less money.

Large corporations?

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#476

Post by Husafan » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:36 AM UTC

I've been at Google for 12 years, and this has not been my experience. While it is a popular narrative, it is by no means dominant, and is fairly specific to individual teams. I got my second promotion leading the Google Maps Desktop Latency team. We demonstrated impact solely by reducing load latency and increasing performance while advocating for latency consciousness across the product space and implementing latency regression tests and monitoring. Google has some of the most complex infrastructure in existence, and there are thousands of engineers that are getting promoted and finding gratification in maintaining and improving this infrastructure.

My experience at Google has been characterized by collaborating with the smartest and most driven people I've ever worked with. And I worked at several companies before Google. I think a side-effect of this personality type is that the engineers themselves want to make a difference, whether through maintaining Google's complex infrastructure or launching new products. And while it may be easier to show impact by launching a new product, it is by no means a problem unique to Google. Startups find it much easier to show impact by launching and buying users, rather than measuring how useful the product actually is.

I have come to believe that, lean-startup style, a good engineer should be able to demonstrate how the work they are doing is important to a company, a product or a product's users. With a little bit of thought around how to show that the work you are doing actually is valuable to your organization's OKRs, you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#477

Post by aix1 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:37 AM UTC

JJMcJ wrote: post #435

aix1 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For software engineers, the expectation is to get to L4 eventually (new grads get hired at L3). I've not seen any concrete guidance on what "eventually" means in this context. This used to be L5 until a few years back.

So if they make one promotion, they are OK indefinitely?

They have to continue meeting the requirements of their level (in this case L4) but there's no expectation of growth beyond that level.

Even the old system, where there was a formal expectation for every SWE to grow to L5, wasn't uniformly enforced. One person I know joined as an L4 SWE twelve or so years ago; they're still an L4 SWE.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#478

Post by IX-103 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:50 AM UTC

twayt wrote: post #451

titzer wrote: post #226

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…

Google hires a ton of really competent and motivated people with low experience at a low level. Many times undeservedly so. I’ve seen some phds with 3-4 years of experience being hired at L4 (starting phd level), some masters with 3-4 years of experience, sometimes even leading teams at previous companies at L3 and some experienced managers with 10 years of experience at L4. Why do these people accept offers? Because…

This ^ Exactly this.

I worked at Google for a while. I started there at 50% more than my previous compensation, but two steps down in terms of responsibility. After a couple of years of my manager saying that I'd be ready to apply for promo when the current project finished and watching projects fly by, I started shopping my resume around.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#479

Post by samhw » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:51 AM UTC

TuringNYC wrote: post #402

xoofoog wrote: post #43

Former Googler here. This person has correctly identified that a key reason why google sucks is that people very often... > choose between doing what’s best for users or what’s best for their career But the root cause isn't that people want to get promoted. It's that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving US…

>> But the root cause isn't that people want to get promoted. It's that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems. Not saying this is the best thing, but it can get much, much worse at other places. I started my career at Accenture (then, Andersen Consulting). People go promoted for either sales…

> Set the wrong incentives, get the wrong behaviors.

I don't mean this as a slight at your comment - rather at the shockingness of the reality that your comment (really) needed to be said - but isn't this blatantly implied by the meaning of the word 'incentive'?? I'm astonished that people keep not realising this. The whole culture of OKRs/KPIs at startups feels like it's tempting this problem - I don't see why any but a very small number of companies should need to optimise metrics which are non-obvious. Having an OKR/KPI which one needs to deliberately decide on feels like a very pungent 'bad smell' of an XY problem.

Re: The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

#480

Post by pgeertsema » Thu, May 05, 2022, 12:55 AM UTC

"If you have other ideas on how to avoid the slip into promo-culture, I’d love to hear your thoughts"

Proper bonuses (proper = multiple of base salary). If promotion is the only way to get comp then obviously it matters a great deal. However, if you can get good comp based on your performance (and not your rank), then promotion matter much less. At most investment banks/hedge funds the highest paid employee is NOT the CEO; it is somebody that made the the firm $248m last year and that got to keep a fraction of it as a bonus.