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

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

#481

Post by IX-103 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:04 AM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #326

GoatOfAplomb wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you seen how wide the bands can be (especially when factoring in appreciation)? Some L4s can make more than L6s. What is bonkers is that you can care about levels so much - but pay is wildly disconnected. What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?

Because you get less of an annual raise at the high end of the bands. This means if you stay at the same level you drift to the center of the band. It's better to be a the lower end of a band so the model causes you to drift up.

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

#482

Post by dolni » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:06 AM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #468

dolni wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dy…

> 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.

This is an awful idea.

Rewarding individuals based on the group outcome is a great way to drive rockstars away from the team. Why would any high performer want to anchor themselves to lower performing team members? That is a surefire way to get a lower bonus. Why would I volunteer to take on a crummy or particularly hard task when I can just hope someone else does it and I reap the rewards?

> 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.

Peoples' performance changes for every reason under the sun from "I decided to stay out late and drink on a Wednesday" to "my boss is an asshole" to "I just don't feel like working today". Personally, I want control over my own destiny and my own bonus. I don't want to feel obligated to push myself harder for someone else's bonus. And just the same, I don't want someone else's shortcomings to tank my bonus.

The actual answer here is to make sure that your review process accounts for how individuals impact the group dynamic.

> 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.

This is a super ignorant take.

Any person who has a family and works to support them wants to provide the best they can for their family. That's not greed. Kids are fucking expensive by themselves, let alone trying to send them to college.

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

#483

Post by brokencode » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:13 AM UTC

thereddaikon wrote: post #344

brokencode wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Apple has done a fantastic job of incremental improvements on their products rather than chasing the next cool thing. Can you name a company that has actually been doing this better? For instance, they often resist new technologies like high refresh rate or OLED screens, 5G, etc., until they feel the technology is developed sufficiently and won’t impact battery life. There are other brands that compete by mak…

I can't really think of anyone who has done it well but I don't think Apple has either. They have released plenty of half baked products. The original apple watch is a good example, it was retroactively made the Gen0 and quickly killed. They had similar problem with the first Intel macs too and the original M1s weren't 100% either. I think sometimes they over estimate how ready a product is. The iPhone was amazing at…

I wasn’t saying that every product they release is perfect right out the gate. If your bar is perfection, then prepare to be disappointed.

But Apple will stick with a product and keep on improving it generation after generation until it is excellent. It’s rare to see them go all into something then give up to chase the next shiny project like Google does.

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

#484

Post by RHSeeger » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:14 AM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #393

dolni wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your manages appropriately manage the employees, it'd require letting go poor performance.

Even if you let go the poor performers, there's still a wide range of ability in the rest. It also means people will do just enough work to not get layed off (or appear to do that much work), because there's no benefit to doing better.

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

#485

Post by mhss » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:15 AM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #454

HWR_14 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why combine two problems working overtime without compensation and promotion focused culture?

A culture where I'm supposed to be working for "the user" rather than for my own benefit is inherently exploitative. Employment is a contract. If I stop delivering value, the company will fire me. As they say, the reward for being good at your job is more work. Expecting me to put in top effort for "the users" without compensating me doesn't work. The idea that you can fix this with culture is wrong. It's been tried…

> As they say, the reward for being good at your job is more work. Expecting me to put in top effort for "the users" without compensating me doesn't work.

You do not work for free. You are being paid. 'Top effort' needs not to translate to working overtime, more hours, etc.

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

#486

Post by lumost » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

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…

It's an arms race. Promotion reviewers expect some portion of candidates for promotion won't pass promotion - otherwise the bar isn't being set high enough. The answer to this is that managers refine the promotion packets to ensure their employee's promotions are in the upper bracket - which in turn forces reviewers to recalibrate.

Eventually you are left with an over the top expectation of what a promotion case looks like. As an engineer at a FAANG I recently moved out of a team where I had built a range of services and was close to PE, because I found that I was closing in on a point in my career where I was spending ~80% of my time on promotion oriented activity... which in turn means politics.

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

#487

Post by lumost » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:22 AM UTC

dolni wrote: post #482

lanstin wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dy…

> 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. This is an awful idea. Rewarding individuals based on the group outcome is a great way to drive rockstars away from the team. Why would any high performer want to anchor themselves to lower performing team members? That is a surefire way to get a lower bonus.…

The best way for someone who wants to be a rockstar to win is by anchoring themselves to a low-performing team. If pay is based on relative performance, then you should find the lowest performing coworkers you can.

I wouldn't inherently mind explicitly tieing individual performance to (small) team level performance. In practice this often happens when management looks at performance holistically anyway.

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

#488

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:22 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #90

UncleMeat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) over-engineering a feature that should be simple into something with architectural significance (e.g. a new set of services that could have just been a feature in an existing service) Ideally this gets people fired, not promoted. Google explicitly calls out "solutions to hard problems are easy to maintain" on its ladder, for example. People can fail to identify these cases, but the intention is to promote based…

Do they consider fixing easy bugs are hard problem? Should someone ignore a bug report "The is not spelled teh?" until it has bounced around unsolved for months on end, then spend 2 weeks "investigating" to show that it is a hard bug? I've seen real bugs that bounce around for months, each time to someone who looks decides it isn't in their code and points to someone else: eventually we tell one engineer to solve it…

> Do they consider fixing easy bugs are hard problem?

No.

> Should someone ignore a bug report "The is not spelled teh?" until it has bounced around unsolved for months on end, then spend 2 weeks "investigating" to show that it is a hard bug?

No. Grungy work has to get done, but it also won't build a promo case. If a leader isn't finding ways to make sure that the grungy stuff is being completed then they are a failing leader.

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

#489

Post by google234123 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:23 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…

Experience is not equal to ability.

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

#490

Post by dave250 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:24 AM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #468

dolni wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dy…

> 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. ---

I think it is primarily people who find a strong sense of identity in work and careers that think this way. For many, their passions lie outside of work and they do indeed want to maximize their value and time so that they can focus on things they care about.

So to say filtering out "greedy people" is quite demeaning IMO.