The Google career path, Part 3: Performance reviews and promotions

It was even worse at British telecom where there might be only 20-25 MPG 4 (L4 or r 5 in google terms) slots every 18 months or so for all of Systems Engineering (a division with more employees that goggle has now) - competition to just get past the paper sift to an actual interview as brutal.

Its interesting my boss said well if you get an interview we think you can do the job its just deciding who gets a promotion or not

1. The best-paid job you can get pays just barely enough to keep your family in decent conditions. So you take that job, for the money. It costs 1/3 of your life, but the benefit is that your spouse and children get not to starve or live in squalor. Wasted?

2. You give a substantial fraction of your income to charities that save the lives of desperately poor people in Africa. You take a well-paid job, for the money. It costs 1/3 of your life, but the benefit is that every year you're working one more poor African gets to live instead of dying.

3. You have a choice between a job you like pretty well, and a job that's merely OK but pays a lot more. You take the well-paid job, for the money. It costs 1/3 of your life (or, more precisely, 1/3 of your life is somewhat less satisfying than it could have been), but the benefit is that you retire at 50 instead of 60 and have an extra decade of (according to taste) leisure, or working for the public good rather than for money, or starting your own business with the security of knowing you won't starve if it fails, or whatever.

All of these involve working "for the money". The only one of these people I'd feel sorry for is the first -- and not (as in your remark) because s/he is making a tragic mistake, but because s/he is in a difficult situation where no course of action is satisfactory.

Someone said exactly that to me when I was at Google. That's kinda how closed allocation works.

What I always tell people: If you want to get promoted, just start acting like someone at the next level up.

At any company, that's the quickest way to get fired. Getting into a turf war with someone with a much higher title? Not a good idea. To be honest, if I were to do Google again, I'd have kept my head down and said "Yes, sir". It can do a lot for your career to work there, but it's not a place where you can safely overperform.

However, there is a way to provide private feedback that can only be seen by your manager; in my experience this backchannel is rarely used.

"Yes, I realize that a murder count of 2,500 in a city of 1 million is horrifying. But look on the bright side. That means there were 997,500 people who were not murdered last year."

Managers take all of your reviews as input and determine a performance rating, which is a score in one of five buckets to indicate how well you're doing overall.

As of 2011, you actually get a score between 1.0 and 5.0. Almost everyone is between 3.0 and 4.0. The buckets are very large. "Meets Expectations" is everything from a 3.0 (acceptable for new hires, but damning if you've been there for a while) to 3.4 (slightly above average). If you're in this bucket, you don't know if you've been marked as a loser (and rendered unable to transfer) or are getting 65th-percentile ratings. You can literally waste 18 months on a loser project only to find you can't transfer because your boss gave you 3.0's.

These scores are also calibrated against other managers across the organization, to prevent managers from biasing their scores -- an individual manager can't game the system.

That's a nice way to present stack ranking. Each boss gets a finite number of calibration points and has to pick who does well and who doesn't. If he gets a crappy allotment and desperately needs to use all his points to promote the guy who'll do a startup unless bumped, you could get stuck with a (career-ending) 2.9.

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The important thing to remember about Google's promotion process is that it's bicameral. Manager-assigned calibration scores are one component. Peer reviews are another. You need both to advance at Google. Google provides multiple paths to failure, not multiple paths to success. If your manager likes you and gives you 4.0+, you can still get dinged for lack of visibility. On the other hand, if your manager is giving you shit for calibration scores, all the peer review in the world won't get you out of the muck. I've known many Googlers to damage their careers by playing their manager but not the crowd, or vice versa. You need to play both games at the same time.

For a better analysis of Google's promotion/review system, read Piaw Na's essays, such as this one: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html

This is also worth reading: http://valleywag.gawker.com/eric-schmidt-personally-ruined-g...