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

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

#491

Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:35 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…

Your last sentence sums it all up for me. Having come into Google through acquisition (and product then killed off) maybe biased me, but still. That's how I see it.

I worked at Google for 10 years and didn't have more than a few minutes of job satisfaction and jumped from team to team hoping to eventually find a place where I could fit in and maybe get promotion. But I never went for promotion ever. The whole process looked meant to demoralize. I was clearly not a "culture fit" -- as they call it -- but somehow I soldiered on and nobody cared.

Until eventually, after 10 years of L4, it became clear me I had wasted 10 years of potential career progression because the money was (at least) twice as good as what I would have gotten in a smaller local company where I would have more impact and creative input. The rest of the industry was off doing other stuff, and my friends moving into lead and management jobs, while I putzed around moving protobufs (with just the right comments, indentation and stylistic flourishes) around Google's walled garden. Any interesting work was snatched up by others faster than you could get it.

Promotion level at Google is only loosely corelated with programming or engineering talent. It's a measure of political skill and motivation, and your ability or desire to thrive in a large organization.

Don't get me wrong, the money was excellent and my priority was feeding my family. But it wasn't "retire early" money, not without a lot of severe financial discipline and restraint anyways.

Google got lucky 15 years ago and managed to turn on an absolutely massive firehose of money in ads. Now Google hoovers up as much talent as they can in hopes that they'll strike it lucky and turn on a second or third revenue faucet. But spoiler alert: they never will. So they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.

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

#492

Post by klipt » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:37 AM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #466

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.

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…

> but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever

That's probably where Bay Area housing inflation has an effect - houses that used to be affordable to "normal" engineers are now only affordable to staff engineers. Tech companies are hiring more and more people scrambling for a fixed supply of housing. Of course it's dystopian!

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

#493

Post by flappyeagle » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:39 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…

How does the important, money-making stuff at Google get done?

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

#494

Post by erik_seaberg » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:43 AM UTC

nharada wrote: post #312

> Post-hoc design documents written specifically to explain work to a promo-committee after the feature has been built I actually wish these would get written all the time. Not because of a promo-committee, but because post-hoc documentation explaining how the system works after it's already been built (as opposed to a design doc from the planning stages that may or may not reflect the actual state of the built syste…

My dad used to go aboard a ship, take measurements, and draw what they call an as-built blueprint for this reason. He’d find crazy stuff like “they must have moved this wall a little because the equipment wouldn’t have fit in the space on the plan.”

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

#495

Post by coredog64 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:47 AM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #458

colonelxc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worked at a place that did perf reviews every 6 months. 360 degree style, where you got manager feedback and a bunch of peers that you nominated. None of the feedback I received was ever actionable or useful. None of the feedback I gave was ever really useful, either! People rated you on a bunch of silly, vaguely described sliding scales from 1 to 5, then answered a couple of equally vague questions. It probably di…

I gave a coworker honest feedback during our 360 review period and now I feel bad.

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

#496

Post by hibikir » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:51 AM UTC

ZainRiz wrote: post #46

angarg12 wrote: post #16

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…

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…

You can find maintenance experts too. When someone tells me that they have this important, dangerous, buggy system wthat has trouble handling its ever growing load, and they need someone to come in and fix it, I cannot be any happier. But I know the system has to be really important, and that the fire has to be so bad that upper management is willing to spend the money to let some specialists come in, few questions asked, knowing that they will be rewarded as if they were building a new shiny, high visibility doodad. What is difficult is to have management that will keep that level of attention, instead of realizing that the reason that nobody has heard a bad thing from the system in months, if not years, is because there's a lot of work being done trying to make the system invisible.

What usually happens is that after a year or two they forget, and the maintenance programmer jumps to a different fire, typically in a different company, because there is far less reward to keep improving the system than to stop it from being a raging fire.

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

#497

Post by coredog64 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:53 AM UTC

grog454 wrote: post #361

bostik wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think promotions to the next level should just be considered a new job (in the same company), and you don't 'win it' or get promoted - instead you apply for it and go through an interview process. That sounds like a recipe for an incredibly toxic environment. Not only are you hired for a specific pigeonhole, you are expressly forbidden from progressing through it : at least in some sane companies promotion is prece…

The other posts in this thread make it sound like internal promotion has higher barriers than an external apply/interview/offer process. Bizarre when you think about it, but it does seem to be the norm. The person you're replying to is suggesting that employees should be encouraged to apply to other positions within their current company as if they were an external hire. I've worked at a company that did both (intern…

It’s far easier to get a boomerang promotion at Amazon than it is to work through the process.

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

#498

Post by sjtindell » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:54 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…

I often have the feeling that if almost everyone at Google just took a 1 year vacation, the thing would run itself. It's a money printer (search + ad auctions) surrounded by all this other busy work. Just leave the Borg to its business and take a break already.

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

#499

Post by ModernMech » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:57 AM UTC

qzx_pierri wrote: post #399

hotpotamus wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, and then I read stuff like this and I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, but for different reasons.

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

> soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers

The saddest part about the ladder is that it's not even fun. In academia, our ladder has fun names, and on each level you get to dress up in a different outfit that gets more elaborate the higher you climb on the ladder, which is basically the driving concept behind every MMO ever made, so that's cool. The whole promotion culminates in a parade and a blessing from the church elders, I mean University leadership.

At Google, they creatively dubbed the levels "L1-L10", and there's no outfit or parades. I assume they throw you a party or something at least? With cake?

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

#500

Post by strongpigeon » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

flappyeagle wrote: post #493

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…

How does the important, money-making stuff at Google get done?

It’s easy to demonstrate impact with the money-making stuff as you can put a dollar figure in your perf. The stuff that doesn’t get done as much is where your impact isn’t as easily demonstrated (e.g small incremental improvements that add up to a lot in term of overall quality)