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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

#561

Post by mecha_ghidorah »

Perseids wrote: post #471
mecha_ghidorah wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

That sounds rough. It's very painful not having time to do things properly, and it's also painful when you don't have proper requirements so you can't even be totally sure what properly even is. I semi-recently left a job (the one I was talking about originally) after more than once being told "we just want a toy, proof of concept version and any time you spend on things like performance is a waste of time and we will scold you for it, even if there isn't any other work for you to do" before they decided to ship my "toy proof of concept" to a client requiring an ungodly rework of it while it was running in a production environment.

I honestly think people denigrate having at least some actual design work and requirements done upfront as being "too waterfall" and think doing it is a bad idea so we as an industry end up with not even the intentions of how a piece of code should work written down and no idea how stuff works once the original author moves on

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

#562

Post by bryanrasmussen »

acchow wrote: post #517
_j5l3 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless

at the scale of Google I'm not sure I would consider that useless. But it would definitely feel useless.

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

#563

Post by fancl20 »

xoofoog wrote: post #130
cvhashim wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm that’s not true at all.

Okay, Googler, how about some data to back up that assertion? Let's have a googley-argument where we're respectful in showing that we're smarter than the person we're putting down. Here's my data. Google values consensus - fact. This "wisdom of the crowds" philosophy was core to founding google - Larry & Sergey's brilliant insight that the collective votes of hyperlinks was a stronger signal than things like H1 tags…

That's a little over simplified the complexity of making a decision. A decision rarely reach a fully supported level of consensus in any cases. The process is more focused on reaching an accepted level for everyone, which usually means "I don't like it but that's FINE so I won't block it". The consensus of decision is grey instead of black or white.

Also, "the holders of divergent opinions must be minimized", not really. You can even continue without a consensus as far as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

"wisdom of the crowds" means respect everyone's opinion IMO. Direct attack to your colleagues will end up with warning from managers or being fired. It doesn't have any meaning of enforcing maximium level of consensus.

The problem of "try my best to prove I'm not WRONG" is much broader than Google's company culture. It's part of our self defense process and has been well identified in psychology (Well, same emotion as what you feel in this thread when someone opposed your opinon, your are trying to prove you have better understanding of the problem or smarter than them as you described yourself). Google's culture is trying to (maybe not that successful) minimize that type of self defense since it's harmful in many cases.

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

#564

Post by conradfr »

alimov wrote: post #74
ZainRiz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Experienced something similar, but it was not an outage. Had several knowledgeable people leave the company, and they all happened to be experts in a particular service. Positions weren’t backfilled even though the people gave advance notice. About two months later we ended up getting out butts kicked when nobody knew the details of the service implementation and the service was expected to be updated to support some…

Kind of experienced that when interviewing for one of the well-known music steaming companies years ago.

They had one critical service in Erlang and the developer who coded it had left years ago and nobody knew the language so they wanted to rewrite it.

I was starting using Elixir back then and said I could maybe took that code over but they chose the other candidate ;)

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

#565

Post by biztos »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #171
epaulson wrote: post #36

This is only sort-of related, but a while back there was a beautiful Twitter thread, I think about Google product managers or engineering leaders, who come into a product, revamp a bunch of features and come up with metrics to show that they were successful with it in the short term, and then use that as the case for their promotion and time it just right so they can disengage and bail over to the next product, just…

Reminds me of the parable of three envelopes

For anyone else who didn’t know that one:

https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/

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

#566

Post by twayt »

twayt wrote: post #527
google234123 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experience is not equal to ability.

That cuts both ways, ability to excel and take on responsibility within Google isn't equal to ability to succeed at Google. That's an argument against making outside hires start at a lower level.

Sorry, I meant "ability to excel and take on responsibility within Google isn't equal to experience at Google"

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

#567

Post by thn-gap »

I've seen one case at Google where a Manager was going for promotion, in part based on some metrics claiming the product usage increased a lot. Someone found that the metric was broken and was overcounting, but the report chain was explicitly told NOT to fix the bug until the manager gets promoted. This was kept broken for months. He did get promoted to L7 (senior staff), since the metrics were very positive, even though it was not deserved and the product was worsened in the process.

Make a huge incentive of promotion, behind well defined rules, and smart competitive engineers will tlgame the system. Even if it's an actual negative value for the product and company. You can always change teams after promo and start fresh with your increased total compensation.

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

#568

Post by bambataa »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #187
digitalgangsta wrote: post #151

What often happens when an employee doesnt get promoted? they leave and usually are able to get that next level role in another company. Why is that?? Why does the current company require employees to show a track record and data points to be promoted, while they hire externally for the same position and often only look at resumes, interview and maybe an assessment. Why isnt it the same bar for internal vs external.…

That just gives you a huge incentive to apply externally, which most employers don’t want.

That’s the problem the GP is describing though: it’s easier to get a promotion externally than internally. Their proposed solution wouldn’t really improve things but companies have got themselves into a really weird position when boomeranging is an efficient promotion path.

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

#569

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

ceras wrote: post #464
_j5l3 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google at least, if you stay low level for too long, you get fired. If your team is full of low level people maintaining a project that's stable, you need to invent work to justify your existence.

You only need one promotion, L3 (entry level) to L4 (mid level), to not get fired at Google. And the company is quite generous with how long it gives you to get there. L3 to L4 is basically about writing good code on your own, and isn't really affected by promo culture -- doesn't really need shiny work. Several years back, you had to also eventually get to L5. This was more affected by promo culture, but was also lar…

It was worse than "largely unenforced", it was unevenly enforced, depending on your management chain.

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

#570

Post by Terry_Roll »

bluedevilzn wrote: post #415
Terry_Roll wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why dont people work for themselves, you can earn alot lot more, like over 20x more!?!

Please tell me how I can make $10M per year (20 x $502k) And I’ll quit my job right now.

I wrote a program which did months of coding in hours.

Is this juvenile? https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ud3vhp/pro...

A bit of this helps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3hAnAnJwyU

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