351–360 of 613 posts
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> both the Touch Bar and the butterfly keyboard are gone now Everybody was surprised by that because they've so rarely admitted that they were wrong. It took Jony Ive's departure for it to happen.
I realise it's uncool to say so, but I quite like the Touch Bar on my MBPro.
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Have you seen how wide the bands can be (especially when factoring in appreciation)? Some L4s can make more than L6s. What is bonkers is that you can care about levels so much - but pay is wildly disconnected. What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?
>What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing? At a company like Facebook, the difference between L4 and L6 is over $100k in salary, and $80k in stock (difference in 4 year refresh grant of $325k). $180k a year difference isn't almost nothing.
I spent over 9 years at Google. Got promoted 3 times. Was a manager. Google is absolutely bonkers when it comes to promotions. At every opportunity to provide feedback towards upper management, I had one consistent refrain: Everyone needs to chill the f### out. The stakes (seem) too high. The amount of time invested is too high. The amount of discussion, rehashing, tinkering, rejiggering, and calibration is just too…
What is a packet?
This turns into your annual (sometimes 6 monthly) review packet.
In engineering, you and/or your manager can decide to put you up for promotion.
In this case, your review turns into a "promo packet", and it is sent to a promotion committee who decides whether you are clearly operating at the next level.
A critical point is that your peer reviewers can see a 'P' next to your feedback request, so they know if you are up for promotion. In theory, promo feedback should match normal review feedback, but in practice promo feedback follows game theory dynamics.
This premise does not apply to everyone, there are many people who are perfectly happy with their current income and their current set of responsibilities. It's indeed likely that most people do their work for the money, and promotions do contribute directly to that incentive. But there is a sizable population who are not in it for the money, and they contribute to the company culture as well.
Related, this article reminds me of comments on an earlier article:
"Do Not Change Your Job": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30437733
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…
Real meritocracy is a market economy (barring corruption).
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…
I don't know what the solution is. I've been at amazon, and the number of abandoned promo projects are insane. Microsoft has like 7 billion levels, maybe they have it right, you can promo someone without it meaning a whole lot, but it still gives them greater pay and a sense of progression.
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> If you are a developer who just implements what the PMs tell you to (more or less) then I agree that you shouldn't get extra credit when the project is a massive success. If the product earns a billion or loses millions you didn't have anything to do with that - you just implemented the designs of other people. Actually I think you should be rewarded, just with money rather than a title.
Why? Should you be penalized if the project fails?
I spent over 9 years at Google. Got promoted 3 times. Was a manager. Google is absolutely bonkers when it comes to promotions. At every opportunity to provide feedback towards upper management, I had one consistent refrain: Everyone needs to chill the f### out. The stakes (seem) too high. The amount of time invested is too high. The amount of discussion, rehashing, tinkering, rejiggering, and calibration is just too…
It would be great if promo wasnt such a big deal. But when I look at the comp for an L3 software engineer, and the comp for an L5 software engineer, I have a hard time seeing how you could make people pay less attention to promo. 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.
Whereas at early-stage startups, the only way to really make a lot of money is to grow the pie, which usually involves serving customers better.
Now that there are so many well-funded startups (https://topstartups.io/) there are more paths to escape the promo BS and still make a great living