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

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

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Post by lanstin » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:34 AM UTC

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #294

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 reduced the bias in the system from ICs writing up their own packets, which disadvantaged poor writers and poor self-promoters less. It got employees thinking less about promotion, since there was less they could control or do. I agree that this seems positive, but you lose some things with this sort of change as well. ICs often have knowledge of their own performance that their managers don't, even when you're…

I have been using git logs and cvs logs to see who does what, across hundreds of developers, since 1997. I don't understand how people, managers, claim to not be able to figure it out.

And if people are doing work in an engineering organization that isn't backed by commits to some durable and versioned system, that is a huge red flag. They should probably not get promotions till they automate and make their work flow use version control. Even in the 90s this was true (the "install the OS on the new hardware" team would have things more automated than many "application dev" teams). Now in 2020s, the whole AZ should be in git and the change implementation procedure should be a variation on a big button that does "push master to n% of live; wait for monitor/validate scripts roll back or push more; repeat"

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

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Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

digisign wrote: post #506

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Occasionally I've landed a boring job with good pay. Yes, I'd keep an eye out, but while waiting I worked on floss projects. Not sure if that would've worked for you.

The problem with this approach is the FLOSS stuff being more interesting ends up impacting the success of $work, or the $work distracts you enough that you can never focus long enough on the FLOSS. Plus the guilt.

Plus, at Google in particular, you have to make them aware of your OSS work and go through the motions of getting the licensing set up so either they own it or you get permission.

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

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Post by icedchai » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:41 AM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #495

icedchai wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really depends on the corporate culture. The last review heavy place would put an overly positive spin on everything. In one review I wrote, I could've said "Jack's project has been taking an excessively long time to complete. He needs to work on delivering changes incrementally", instead I spin it as "I'm really looking forward to the delivery of Jack's work on X! He's been working on since the last review cycle. It will be exciting when it is finally completed."

Leave it up to the manager to interpret and read between the lines. At the end of the day, the better managers know it's all bullshit anyway.

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

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Post by astrange » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:42 AM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #474

astrange wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The literal quote from Rob Pike is "They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.".

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

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Post by makeitdouble » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:42 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #301

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.

Why exactly does it seem worse? Last year I switched from a FAANG to a Series B startup that does experience-based levels, and in my observation it's just better in every way. Here's a blog post explaining their approach: https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-s... Maybe it's not possible to switch from a cutthroat promotion-oriented environment to this, but it's worth thinking about for anyone bu…

Japan traditionally has that “getting promoted after X years” approach.

At scale it encourages coasting and not doing much until your manager moves on for whatever reason and you have a window into moving up. It also means the Peter principle is in competition with getting promoted while not being very competent.

I think there are specific fields and job where it’s a decent approach, but not at scale and not with salaries tied to promotions.

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

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Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:47 AM UTC

dougmwne wrote: post #459

ShamelessC wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to say that I can't believe some of the smartest people in the world are willing to put up with all of this off-putting corporate bullshit. No disrespect.

I would say that a high affinity for playing the games invented by others for the rewards invented by others is orthogonal to raw intelligence. In fact, smart people usually have a lifetime of being rewarded for exercising their intelligence on command. Where are they supposed to learn a healthy disrespect for authority when they have always been the darlings of authority?

And now you know why Google, etc. have a strong bias for hiring out of academia and out of the higher levels of education. (Not just because the founders never worked industry, just academia, when they started Google, but I digress...).

The interview process is highly highly biased towards recent grads (algorithm/data-structure courses) and the kind of people who do super well in university show-and-tell.

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

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Post by acchow » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:50 AM UTC

_j5l3 wrote: post #319

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.

> 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. Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets. 6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input cre…

> 6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years.

Can you explain how this gets them promos? I feel like a promo-focused culture would result in 6 engineers creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless, but much more work.

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

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Post by thethethethe » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:56 AM UTC

ertian wrote: post #276

chestervonwinch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> What the process _does_ reward is whitepapers, tech talks, daily updates, and delegation. It sometimes felt like the goal was to make every little change as noisy as possible: if you just fix something yourself, you get no points. If you plan it out, generate whitepapers, announce it, convince other people to work on it, send daily updates to every possible stakeholder and then a triumphant announcement, and then do a round of tech talks on every piece of it, you're a shoo-in for promo--whether on not the 'it' was actually important or valuable to the company.

This is absolutely my experience at Google. If you want to move up quickly you have to write docs to convince people to work on your ideas.

> Forcing _everybody_ to follow the one path to progress means a lot of noise. A lot of tech talks from people who have no real interest or talent for giving them, on topics that nobody is particularly interested in, just for the sake of a line on their promo packet.

This doesn't really align with my experience. Most people I interact with at Google do not try to do this. They are happy being ICs at L4 or L5 doing their own thing. There is plenty of room to be an L5 or even L6 IC without constantly self promoting, it will just take you much longer to get there and you will never move past L6.

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

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Post by alasdair_ » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:56 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.

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

That’s very inaccurate. Some of us use Ritalin instead.

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

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Post by mattbrewsbytes » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:58 AM UTC

austhrow743 wrote: post #475

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Large corporations?

Pick any company on the Fortune 500 and you’ll see the same behavior to climb the “ladder”. A small corporation could be less than 1000 or so people and might not have that culture as much.