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

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

#581

Post by banannaise » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:08 PM 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…

There are plenty of people who like fixing the occasional bug and adding a touch more polish. The problem is that this is actively disincentivized on every level. On top of that, a lot of people have internalized this.

If the world weren't so obsessed with differentiating pay, you would have people who are enthusiastic about a wider variety of things.

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

#582

Post by banannaise » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

cjbgkagh wrote: post #6

baby wrote: post #2

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. The other problem is that it becomes this game where nobody dares giving bad feedback to one another, because you know they could retaliate which could damage your chances to get a promotion.…

Were strict hierarchies really that bad? It seems that just about anything else devolves into an ontological mess of Byzantine proportions. At one stage in my career I was reporting to 4 different bosses in this weird interleaved hypercube topology. I spent most of my time giving status updates

I have a scrum master, a product owner, a tech lead, and a team manager. All four of those are management relationships, but only 1.5 are hierarchal (the manager and sort of the tech lead). The most effective and efficient relationships we have, IMO, are with the scrum master and product owner, who aren't above us in a hierarchy.

There's no inherent reason for management to be hierarchically superior. If you want productive relationships, you have to level the power dynamic more.

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

#583

Post by daemin » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #383

ryandrake wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with that is due to inflation, you're making less and less compensation every year. Standard "you're doing a good job" raises often do not meet inflation, and certainly are not right now where inflation is higher than the recent historical mean. This is not a problem for some people, maybe including you, but I think most people have a general vague career expectation of making more when they're 60 than they m…

If you had a paid off house, and no kids to take care of, you should be able to live off a junior engineer’s salary no problem.

That reminds me of the guy getting a burger flipper job in the film American Beauty.

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

#584

Post by stonecharioteer » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

blobbers wrote: post #204

YES! I worked at a start-up that was later acquired by a mega corp. When it was a start-up, it felt like we were focused on growing the pie. Once we were acquired, everyone just wanted a bigger slice for themselves. I also felt like we had a ton of terrible presentations, and it felt like a braggy culture whereby you had to promote the work you did and make it seem more important. The reality was we all knew who the…

Yes. I worked at a big fintech company and all people cared about was marketting what they were doing and never solving the actual problem. Everyone knew who the bad developers and bad leaders were. No one did anything about it. At the end, my friends and I left because we were fed up

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

#585

Post by geekraver » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

Couldn’t agree more. I took a level cut when I went to Google from Microsoft after being assured by the recruiter that, as a tech lead, getting promoted would be easy. Unfortunately due to two teams using the same code names I was put in Ads, last place I wanted to be, and took a non-lead role in another team instead. It quickly became apparent that the game at Google was very dysfunctional, and the “manager-bias” problem they were trying to avoid, while sometimes a real problem, was still a much better system that Google had cooked up. I lost interest in trying to get promoted and tried to focus on interesting work for the next four years. Meanwhile, I saw crappy engineers around me get promoted (and sometimes immediately use their new level to jump to Facebook) while hard-working engineers who cared about glue work, quality and meeting customer needs get overlooked (and sometimes leave too in frustration). Combined with having line managers with 16-25 reports (rendering them effectively useless), it was a pretty broken culture.

(This was 6-10 years ago; I know some things have changed, but I hear from people there it’s still crazy).

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

#586

Post by mrtranscendence » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #434

mrtranscendence wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original contention was that women held out for higher-status men, leading to selection pressure such that men evolved to be more competitive. If women are only very recently even able to be more selective, then I don’t see how all this is supposed to work. Is there even any evidence that modern women are more “choosy” than men? You’d have an hypothesis like: among married 40-something women, the distribution of…

>If women are only very recently even able to be more selective, then I don’t see how all this is supposed to work. That's not what the above implied. You can still fulfill the condition "be more selective" if the male populace as a whole was earning way more than the female populace before, which it very clearly was. This directly questions the notion of there being a bunch of old ladies who'd have held out: the maj…

> You can still fulfill the condition "be more selective" if the male populace as a whole was earning way more than the female populace before, which it very clearly was. This directly questions the notion of there being a bunch of old ladies who'd have held out: the majority would've found their "better off financially" peer.

But the original idea was that women prefer men better than their peers -- that's a direct quote from that top-level comment. You seem to be saying something distinct from that, that women prefer men who are better off financially than they are. These are very different claims.

Further, if you're right that women tended to satisfy their desire for higher-status men simply due to the fact that men used to have more money on average than women did, then where is the selection pressure supposed to come from? There's no pressure -- it wasn't hard for a woman, who had few career prospects, to find a man with a job who could bring home consistent pay.

> you only have to look for a few minutes to see the hoards of anecdotes and studies pointing towards women putting vastly higher weight on a man's finances than the other way around

Take your pick between "I don't really care about anecdotes" and "I have my own anecdotes that tell me that women don't place significantly more weight on socioeconomic status than men do". I'm curious about the studies, but I'd have to find a copy of the article you cite before I'd place too much stock in it. What I'd like to see is some proof in the data that conditioning on socioeconomic status does not significantly alter marriage rates for women but does do so for men.

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

#587

Post by specialist » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

> Alternatives to promo-cultures

What would a co-op look like?

aka Worker Self-Directed Enterprise. https://www.democracyatwork.info/democratizing_the_workplace

Could a co-op technology startup raise capital? I have zero clue about such things. My guess is that VCs want to control the board and exec roles, so wouldn't fund an efforts where they can't replace the leaders.

What about the co-ops and FOSS? I've been casually poking around, trying to see how misc projects are organized, governed. eg ZeroMQ, SQLite, Zig.

What about the maturity of an industry? Sure, emerging markets and hyper growth are probably hostile to co-ops. BDFL vs democracy. But search is now mature. Take away the advertising biz model and it's just a bog standard IT project. Surely something like DDG could be a co-op.

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

#588

Post by prakhar897 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:41 PM 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…

This is Amazon 100%.

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

#589

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:44 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#590

Post by rnk » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #491

twayt wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This experience fits mine at Google too. If I had only pushed to start at level 6 my life would have been different. Instead I was level 5. My group was full of people at level 5 who wanted to be level 6. No one ever got promoted. I eventually left Google and have been principal and architect at other companies, like I was before Google. G did pay a lot.