Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have also worked at Google (in an unrelated department) and completely disagree with this. Maintaining old code & services is a problem everywhere. Monorepo vs multirepo, monolith service vs microservices etc. all have nothing to do with it. There will always be a broken dependency, a service/API/library you rely on about to deprecate, new urgent security patches, an outage somewhere upstream or downstream which yo…
The "you must make something new to get promoted" was a common meme (literally) at Google, but I never saw that myself. I got promoted, and I sat on promotion committees, and it didn't seem that important. I did sort of start a new project to get from 4 to 5 (rather a prototype was handed to me by my more senior team members), but it was clear to me that the path to 6 was not starting a new project -- it was increasi…
I've worked a couple places where getting a "meets expectations" on your annual review was expected
Their review processes were calibrated such that you should [almost] never get a 5 ("always exceeds")
A handful of 4s ("sometimes exceeds") was good - but not a requirement ('too many' 4s indicated you were in the wrong role, so titles/pay/etc would be adjusted)
More than one 2 ("sometimes doesn't meet") was reason for extra mentoring, one-on-ones, etc
There were no 1s ("fails to meet") - if you would otherwise have earned a 1 in any category, you'd've been let go already