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The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

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

#531

Post by kziojzwsndppqgg »

sokoloff wrote: post #73
nineplay wrote: post #31

My experience has been that some companies pressure engineers to want to advance. If you come into a performance review and say "actually I'm happy where I am" it's seen as a lack of motivation and will count as a mark against you. I had a boss say to me "I always want to move to the next level and I expect the same of my reports". Whatever, I guess I'm a poor employee because I like my job.

I’ve openly stated that I want my retirement job to be an SWE3-ish role somewhere. High enough to have interesting, somewhat challenging work, but with negative desire to climb the ranks any further.

Can confirm, it’s a great choice. Step one, convince a FAANG/MAGMA to let you work remote at the same salary level you already have. Step two, move to an extremely cheap cost-of-living area. Step three, avoid promotion at all costs, and just fix bugs.

Provide value, but _never_ get promoted. Every year come review season, talk about how your goals for the next year are to improve latency/perf/whatever. It doesn’t have to be specific, just something that’s important enough to be useful, but don’t be ambitious. Just keep your head down and make enough improvements that people consider you to be a good “grunt” worker.

Yeah yeah, inflation sucks and technically I’m making less because my RSU’s have mostly vested and my yearly grants haven’t made up for it, but I don’t care. I’ve saved up enough that I could retire now if I really wanted to.

Every day for me, I work 9-5, fix a few bugs, provide some value, then work’s over and I get to play with my son and completely forget about my job. Then once he’s in bed I smoke some weed, watch shows with the wife, talk about the good old days. It’s heaven.

(By the way, I say all this, but I kinda failed at it because I got promoted last year anyway. I got hella worried because I thought they’d start expecting more out of me, so I actually slowed down my pace even more. I just got a mid-cycle bonus last month. Maybe I’m not so great at keeping my head down after all…)

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

#532

Post by ertian »

thethethethe wrote: post #518
ertian wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> This doesn't really align with my experience.

Well TBF, I was an SRE while at Google, so I worked with a whole bunch of other teams. And tech talks were considered a good way for SREs to familiarize themselves with partner teams' various systems. So my calendar had several weekly meetings for tech talks and other presentations...and they were usually pretty yawn-inducing. And at the same time, I felt a fair bit of pressure to prepare talks about my various projects and present them: it would help to spread my knowledge and (ahem) raise my visibility. But they weren't interesting projects, and I was not interested in making presentations about them (or in general).

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

#533

Post by deviation »

Husafan wrote: post #476

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 laten…

I'm going through the Google interview process right now, second round. My interviewer has rescheduled three times in the past week, each with less than 24hrs notice and without a reason given.

Is there a 'safe' space I can give feedback regarding this that doesn't damage my chances of making it through the process?

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

#534

Post by klabb3 »

analyst74 wrote: post #17

The author did a really good job of pointing out problem of promo culture, but the solutions suggested are more inspirational than actionable. All founders/execs/early employees are easily aligned on compabt success. But how do you align incentive of later hires? In order to reduce time spent on perf, you'd have to rely on a few people who knows an employee's work instead of a larger peer group and committee. The per…

> The author did a really good job of pointing out problem of promo culture, but the solutions suggested are more inspirational than actionable.

Totally agreed.

One thing that killed my motivation in mega-corp(tm) is that your peers are, in reality, your competitors, despite the constant barrage of HR propaganda indoctrinating the opposite. Either directly or indirectly, you are incentivized to take high visibility projects for yourself, take credit for other people's work, and reinforce a narrative about yourself where you are better precisely than those around you.

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

#535

Post by danielmarkbruce »

Husafan wrote: post #476

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 laten…

Reducing latency is mostly easy to measure, has directly understandable implications, is likely (and understood to be likely) quite difficult to pull off on a product like maps. It's basically a perfect promo packet project.

The example given by the author - fixing lots of tiny features in sheets - is the opposite. Difficult to measure, lots of little and difficult to explain implications, sounds kinda easy - many individual items probably are just work.

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

#536

Post by Husafan »

deviation wrote: post #533
Husafan wrote: post #476

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 laten…

I'm going through the Google interview process right now, second round. My interviewer has rescheduled three times in the past week, each with less than 24hrs notice and without a reason given. Is there a 'safe' space I can give feedback regarding this that doesn't damage my chances of making it through the process?

During my interview process, my recruiter was very much my advocate. Have you talked to them honestly about this? It should not hurt you. I'm sorry you're going through this.

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

#537

Post by danielmarkbruce »

deviation wrote: post #533
Husafan wrote: post #476

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 laten…

I'm going through the Google interview process right now, second round. My interviewer has rescheduled three times in the past week, each with less than 24hrs notice and without a reason given. Is there a 'safe' space I can give feedback regarding this that doesn't damage my chances of making it through the process?

Don't. It isn't going to help you or them.

Just roll with it. It's all upside from the interviews. It's largely a good place to work and worth the headaches during interviews. Smile and carry on.

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

#538

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sokoloff wrote: post #73
nineplay wrote: post #31

My experience has been that some companies pressure engineers to want to advance. If you come into a performance review and say "actually I'm happy where I am" it's seen as a lack of motivation and will count as a mark against you. I had a boss say to me "I always want to move to the next level and I expect the same of my reports". Whatever, I guess I'm a poor employee because I like my job.

I’ve openly stated that I want my retirement job to be an SWE3-ish role somewhere. High enough to have interesting, somewhat challenging work, but with negative desire to climb the ranks any further.

I hope I can down level myself after I go over 65 or 70 (depending on my health of course, hopefully I have that option). I think it is an option at some companies (older talent getting ready to retire but still have a lot to contribute).

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

#539

Post by thethethethe »

joshuamorton wrote: post #142
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…

So what happens when you promote someone for maintaining the same system for years? When do you stop promoting them? There's a person on my team who is happy to maintain what he works on. He has worked on fundamentally the same project for over a decade. He's a senior level engineer, and as far as I know doesn't have aspirations beyond that, which is perfectly fine. Assuming he keeps doing that work, and no more, doe…

> So what happens when you promote someone for maintaining the same system for years? When do you stop promoting them? There's a person on my team who is happy to maintain what he works on. He has worked on fundamentally the same project for over a decade. He's a senior level engineer, and as far as I know doesn't have aspirations beyond that, which is perfectly fine. Assuming he keeps doing that work, and no more, does he get promoted again?

I know a few of these people who have been on the same product at Google for a decade and they generally cap out at L6, which is staff engineer.

L7 engineers are typically careerist and have larger a scope, focusing on higher level cross team collaborations. Some L6s are like this but there are plenty of them that are just chilling

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

#540

Post by kajecounterhack »

Husafan wrote: post #476

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 laten…

> 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.

If you put yourself in the shoes of an L3 or L4, you know this is not exactly true. Who your manager is and what their priorities are, and how they view the promo process can greatly affect your ability to get a promo. I mean, before you can apply you need to get "strongly exceeds expectations" for two consecutive halves. If you do great work that you think benefits Google, but your manager doesn't think you've sufficiently demonstrated things on the rubric (e.g. "google-quality delivery" or "autonomy") you won't get a promo. Managers also have their own agenda and list of things they need to deliver, so you end up having to work on things they want you to work on, even if they don't help you tick the boxes in the rubric. If you're lucky and get a good manager who helps you play the game, these things aren't problems. If you're well-informed, you know how to bail when you encounter such folks. If you get unlucky or don't wise up to how it works, you can be set back many years in career progress.

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