[HN Gopher] The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promoti...
___________________________________________________________________
The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented
cultures
Author : zachlloyd
Score : 421 points
Date : 2022-05-04 15:04 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.warp.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.warp.dev)
| sna1l wrote:
| I think the problem with the promotion culture is that you can't
| demote someone after they've been promoted. If you just focus on
| showing impact and cross team projects, your engineers will
| naturally build more complex projects than needed to hit those
| targets. The key is to track the long term maintainability and
| quality of the systems built. E.g. time to land diffs, incidents,
| performance metrics, etc. If a system starts to quickly fail
| these things or don't last then it is a pretty good sign that the
| project wasn't actually built well. Things aren't always under a
| single person's control but a lot of people will work on a big
| complex (seemingly good) project and then bounce after they've
| gotten their promo.
|
| I do think there is a balance though because at a lot of startups
| the incentive is to just crank out a lot of product code but not
| really think about multiplier type work.
| goatcode wrote:
| I clicked the link ready to read and then feel critical about a
| criticism of meritocracy, but found the exact opposite. This
| makes me realize that promotion in the current state of tech and
| likely other types of businesses is pretty far removed from
| merit. Great article, and it's sad that business has made it
| necessary to point out that doing a good job and being awesome
| are the most important parts of promoting employees. There's a
| lot of fat to be trimmed in organizational structures, I would
| hypothesize.
| baby wrote:
| 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.
| Everybody becomes "fake friend".
| kps wrote:
| > _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._
|
| It's good to have people who understand the difference between
| the prisoners' dilemma and the iterated prisoners' dilemma.
| derbOac wrote:
| Phwewww... this blog post and all these comments ring so true
| to me way outside of contexts resembling software development
| or business that it seems to me it's getting at something very
| fundamental.
|
| A corollary to this in my opinion is that if promotion is
| expected at some point, I think the
| business/organization/institution has a responsibility to try
| to facilitate people moving toward that through mentoring or at
| least clear expectations. If nothing else, it makes the
| expectations clear, which clarifies how those might be at odds
| with other goals such as what the blog poster is articulating.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The whole point of a tech company is to pay engineers $X and
| find a way for them to create some over-unity multiple of $X in
| value.
|
| If the problem is "this incentivizes engineers to make each
| other deliver more value", that sounds like not a problem (and
| opens everyone up for increasing $X).
|
| It's a problem when you start to see your fellow employees as
| the competition instead of your actual competitors being the
| competition.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| It's a problem for people who value working on things that
| actually get used for more than a few years and aren't
| duplicate efforts to make some line on some graph go up
| somewhere.
|
| These are of course people, after all. Not robots.
| colonelxc wrote:
| 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 some performance concerns, you should do
| that directly, instead of putting it in a record that sticks
| around for a persons whole employment
|
| It's a bureaucracy game, and people who give bad feedback don't
| know how to play.
|
| (I'm not endorsing the system at all, just rejecting the idea
| of it being retaliation-based. Anybody giving bad feedback
| doesn't understand what is going on)
| chestervonwinch wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Raising up and increasing the productivity of your peers sounds
| like a good thing. I think I'm missing how this is a bad
| outcome due to a perverse incentive. Are you saying the value
| extracted from peers is not real value or that the focus on
| your raising your peers detracts from more important business
| goals?
| ertian wrote:
| > the focus on your raising your peers detracts from more
| important business goals?
|
| It's this. Actually doing work is seen as simple and unworthy
| of a higher-level engineer.
|
| Good engineers focused on problems (fixing complex bugs in
| distributed systems, adding fallbacks and failovers,
| improving the UI or performance of internal tools, etc) can
| add significant value to the company...but they won't be
| rewarded for it, because the perf process considers those to
| be simple, the domain of lower-level employees.
|
| What the process _does_ reward is whitepapers, tech talks,
| daily updates, and delegation. It sometimes felt like the
| goal was to make every little change as noisy as possible: if
| you just fix something yourself, you get no points. If you
| plan it out, generate whitepapers, announce it, convince
| other people to work on it, send daily updates to every
| possible stakeholder and then a triumphant announcement, and
| then do a round of tech talks on every piece of it, you're a
| shoo-in for promo--whether on not the 'it' was actually
| important or valuable to the company.
|
| Of course, people with those planning and communication
| skills are really valuable to a company. But somebody also
| has to do the work. Forcing _everybody_ to follow the one
| path to progress means a lot of noise. A lot of tech talks
| from people who have no real interest or talent for giving
| them, on topics that nobody is particularly interested in,
| just for the sake of a line on their promo packet. And a lot
| of effective engineers getting frustrated and quitting
| because they don't want to spend their days working on slide
| shows.
|
| It feels to me like the people in charge of the perf process
| just tend to overemphasize their own strengths and skills.
| Kinda by definition, the people designing the system are
| going to be senior people who are interested in communication
| and process, so that's what they look for in others. If they
| were the kinds of people who were interested in identifying
| and solving particularly devious or consequential issues on
| their own (or as part of one of their peer's projects), they
| wouldn't be working on the promo process in the first place.
| thewarrior wrote:
| It's basically cargo cult engineering. There's the
| appearance of engineering and sophistication but the actual
| substance is hollow.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Your peers are rewarded for accomplishing their goals. In the
| best-case scenario, the incentive is to find ways to
| synergize your goals so you are all benefitting.
|
| In the common-case scenario, you figure out how to bribe /
| cajole / coerce them into putting time in on your project and
| don't really care about how things are going on their
| project, because we're all responsible engineers who can
| time-manage ourselves, right? So you get your promotion and
| they get screwed because the work they did to deliver on
| something valuable to the company isn't reflected in their
| OKRs.
|
| It degenerates what should be a collective goal of
| accomplishing the company's objectives the best way possible
| into a slotting game of making sure you're always listed _on
| paper_ as being on the _right_ project, because your work won
| 't have value if you applied it outside your bullpen.
| ylou wrote:
| No good deed goes unpunished. No decent coworker goes
| unexploited.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| svachalek wrote:
| At least for performance reviews it's so much easier. If your
| boss hates you for some reason, that sucks, but you can just
| move on. It's a lot simpler than trying to please a dozen
| different people simultaneously though.
| derbOac wrote:
| I do think more democratic, less hierarchical systems can
| work well if they're implemented in the right way. I saw a
| shift from that, where it was functioning well, to something
| more hierarchical and everything play out as this blog post
| is criticizing. It became really clear very quickly how aims
| shifted from more institutional mission-statement-type goals
| to promotion criteria and personal power agendas.
|
| There's a limit I guess, but sometimes having multiple people
| to report to can lead to checks and balances.
| arethuza wrote:
| I once had a similar situation and seriously contemplated
| building an application to manage my status updates so I
| could enter the raw data once and have all N people who
| needed to be updated sent the right information in the right
| way at the right time....
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| This is a great idea!
| avianlyric wrote:
| I think someone already built it... and called it Jira.
| trelane wrote:
| Seems like if your boss is a receptacle for status updates,
| the company is doing management wrong. Sure, it works less
| bad with one, but that doesn't mean it's good.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Half of me wishes we just got rid of titles and just adjusted pay
| based on the value perceived/demonstrated to the company YoY.
| People would probably be more inclined to work harder and on more
| challenging stuff if their comp was more outcome driven like a
| sales type role.
|
| Incentives make people do the weirdest stuff. It becomes pure
| politics at a certain point and largely a cool kids club of who
| you know to sponsor you and being generally well-liked. I'm not
| going to kiss ass for a title. I'm going to demonstrate I earned
| it the hard way. While most companies don't recognize that path
| as much anymore, it's not very hard to get the title at another
| company.
|
| The people who bring the most value to each team are often the
| unsung heroes who don't get promoted fast either. Good leaders
| will take notice however.
|
| The book "Staff Engineer" by Will Larson has some good bits on
| this topic.
| digitalgangsta wrote:
| 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.
|
| I think promotions to the next level should just be considered a
| new job (in the same company), and you don't 'win it' or get
| promoted - instead you apply for it and go through an interview
| process. If you study/train and get through the interview, then
| you get the job and all it's benefits. This way, employees can
| focus on doing the right things for the company and if they feel
| they're ready for the next level, apply for it.
|
| If they don't get it, its based on merit - they can go back, get
| more experience/study etc. and reapply later. Their ego isn't
| destroyed, they're not pushed to to do the wrong things simply to
| get promoted, and I bet most people will remain at the company.
| gowld wrote:
| > they leave and usually are able to get that next level role
| in another company.
|
| how do you know that's what _usually_ happens?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| That just gives you a huge incentive to apply externally, which
| most employers don't want.
| digitalgangsta wrote:
| not at all - i think it's the opposite. Why apply externally,
| when you know the ins and outs of the current company and
| have to go through an interview process anyway
| irishcule wrote:
| I worked at a company with a process like that when I was an
| "Engineer" looking for a promotion to "Senior Engineer", at
| least for me it felt insulting that I had 3 years of
| performances reviews "exceeding expectations" and "already
| performing at the level of Senior Engineer" to then be told, ok
| now you have to do an interview and a presentation to say why
| you deserve to be promoted to Senior. I declined to go through
| the process and then left a few months later to become a Senior
| Engineer at a different company.
| bostik wrote:
| _I think promotions to the next level should just be considered
| a new job (in the same company), and you don 't 'win it' or get
| promoted - instead you apply for it and go through an interview
| process._
|
| That sounds like a recipe for an incredibly toxic environment.
| Not only are you hired for a specific pigeonhole, you are
| expressly forbidden from _progressing through it_ : at least in
| some sane companies promotion is preceded by already having
| done the new role for a time and the title jump merely
| formalises the situation.
|
| In fact, I thought the pigeonhole hiring in traditional finance
| was bad enough. You just managed to outdo decades of
| dysfunction in one try.
|
| The last thing we need in tech is a codified caste system.
| grog454 wrote:
| The other posts in this thread make it sound like internal
| promotion has higher barriers than an external
| apply/interview/offer process. Bizarre when you think about
| it, but it does seem to be the norm. The person you're
| replying to is suggesting that employees should be encouraged
| to apply to other positions within their current company as
| if they were an external hire.
|
| I've worked at a company that did both (internal promotion
| and internal re-hire) and IME people that actively applied to
| new positions had faster "career progression".
| digitalgangsta wrote:
| codified caste system? Have no idea what you mean.
|
| You're hired for a position, when you feel you're ready for
| the next level you apply, if not, just continue where you
| are. This doesnt mean you dont get paid more the better you
| perform. Why do you need someone above you to say you're
| ready for the next level?
| bern4444 wrote:
| I've begun developing a philosophy under the idea that I have
| less interest in touting my accomplishments and successes in the
| aim of getting a promotion and instead expect my lead/manager to
| notice and actively reward that either through promos, raise, new
| equity grant etc.
|
| If a company, or speaking more locally, my manager doesn't do
| that, I'd rather just leave and try somewhere else. Some may view
| this as childish, picking up and leaving just cause I don't get
| what I want. I view it as exercising my market power and refusing
| to be pigeon holed into a system that exists just because that's
| the way it's always been.
|
| This philosophy certainly benefits from the current job market
| and this makes me feel more empowered knowing I can just pick up
| and leave and get a better raise, promotion, new equity round
| etc.
|
| A good signal for identifying these types of companies where this
| approach can work IMO is
|
| - Smaller companies
|
| - Ask and look into engineers seeing if there are lots of
| internal promotions
|
| - Learn what the promotion process is at a company before
| joining.
| suketk wrote:
| A fantastic blog post that dives into the same problem:
| https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google
|
| It inspired me to quit years later and write my own version:
| https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Can we now, finally, stop thinking that everything Google does is
| smart? In the 90s, everyone wanted to copy Microsoft culture.
| Maybe we just always need to have one company that's worshipped.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| > The main problem with promotion-oriented culture is that it's
| very hard to align promotion-criteria with business objectives,
| and so engineers end up doing a lot of work that doesn't
| necessarily most benefit the product, users, or business - or
| even potentially their own growth.
|
| Welcome to Amazon! Just about everything in this article rings
| true at Amazon. In fact, I'd say Amazon is even worse.
|
| I think L4 to L5 and L5 to L6 promotions have certainly gotten
| easier over the years, and promotions have actively been used as
| a retention tool, given all the other (dis)incentives that would
| convince talent to leave.
|
| What I saw in Amazon retail and Alexa was a culture of:
|
| 1) refusing to work on valuable projects unless you could
| actively claim to be the lead
|
| 2) taking credit for others' contributions, or deliberately
| throwing a teammate under the bus and saying X didn't work
| because of some thing specific they proposed (even if you agreed
| with it at the time)
|
| 3) general culture of back stabbing and not helping your own
| teammates, especially out of concern that your teammate would
| reap the promo benefit over you
|
| And at a higher level, L7 managers will attribute a failed
| project, mismanaged project, or other issues to a partner team.
| "Our team is blocked on this other team Y" - never mind the fact
| that all the contracts have been agreed upon and this L7s team
| never wrote a line of code.
|
| By the time I left, Amazon had gotten horrendous with
| organizations trying to invent "frameworks" so A or B can be done
| in 1 click, and this became the way for Sr SDEs and Principals to
| get their promotion. They create complexity and deliver some half
| baked, constrained way of solving problem X. This lets you show
| "impact" across an entire organization, even if this new
| abstraction has made engineers' lives a living hell.
|
| This was a major reason I left Amazon. The company was running
| out of ideas, and instead of focusing on products and customers,
| the engineering culture was heavily focused on inventing
| complexity for the sake of promotion. 9 times out of 10, the son
| of a bitch creating this complexity would take his or her promo
| and then move to another org, a new greenfield project. Never
| sticking around to deal with the pain they've caused.
| sytelus wrote:
| Promo-culture cannot be ignored because with each level, your
| total compensation often increases by 50-100% at many big tech.
| You can absolutely expect people to alter their actions to
| whatever promo-culture demands. As the article says, one answer
| is to simply align the incentives which is to make promos based
| on customer satiesfaction and adoption. The issue is this: when
| you release new product, your adoption/satiesfaction/revenue
| increases infinitely because denominator is zero. Often media
| blitz follows which raises the profiles of small team and
| increasing their market value than usual bug fixer. The new
| learning experiences of new-product teams and ability to do
| aggresive hustle on impossible schedules also adds into their
| market value relative to Joe, the minor feature developer. These
| people become important because one of the growth criteria for
| big tech is ability to diversity, aka, release new products and
| excite the hopeful investors. So companies are _forced_ to
| associate product releases with promos. Current promo-culture at
| big tech is not a bug but a feature. I think very few understand
| this dynamics.
|
| There is one extremely bad aspect of promo-culture not discussed
| in the article: Many promos in higher level have _requirement_
| that the person must become the people manager. The idea is that
| at certain pay level you must be able to "scale" you impact by
| directing others as opposed to doing things by yourself. In tech,
| this is extraordinarily flawed idea. Scale can be achieved by
| being manager but also by being individual contributor. People
| like Jeff Dean has contributed far more as IC than probably most
| VPs at Google. I don't know how many brilliant technical ICs have
| killed themselves by trying to be people manager to get that
| alluring promo.
| Arainach wrote:
| This all sounds nice but it's missing the concrete details and
| that's the most important part.
|
| "Build into core values wanting to create a culture where the
| end-user is the priority, not individual advancement up the
| ladder"
|
| Is there any non-exploitative way to interpret this? The only
| thing worse than wasting my time on features for promo rather
| than users is working overtime to make more money for those with
| significant equity/ownership in ways that will never seriously
| affect my comp. Without promo or "promo by a different name" i.e.
| money, how do you incentivize people? How do you decide who to
| allocate your finite equity and money to?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Why combine two problems working overtime without compensation
| and promotion focused culture?
| billllll wrote:
| It reads a bit unintentionally exploitive as well. You're
| essentially asking employees to put the companies growth ahead
| of their compensation.
|
| This passage specifically:
|
| > For as long as possible, make the success of the company the
| primary motivator, rather than promo
|
| How do you simply make the success of the company the primary
| motivator? IMO, you either try real hard to pay/promote them
| based on the success of the company, which feeds into the promo
| culture problem, or you find people to work towards the
| company's success without explicit promises of rewards, maybe
| by alluding to potential rewards you may/may-not give them (aka
| maybe exploiting them).
|
| One alternative is you can find people who are satisfied with
| their place in life, and willing to just crank out work
| regularly without promises of increased rewards. IME, people
| like that AND skilled enough are very rare. It would be very
| hard to build a company of solely those people.
| omoikane wrote:
| > you're likely focused on one career question: when am I going
| to make it to the next level?
|
| 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
| nineplay wrote:
| My experience has been that some companies pressure engineers to
| want to advance. If you come into a performance review and say
| "actually I'm happy where I am" it's seen as a lack of motivation
| and will count as a mark against you. I had a boss say to me "I
| always want to move to the next level and I expect the same of my
| reports". Whatever, I guess I'm a poor employee because I like my
| job.
| toast0 wrote:
| Some (many?) companies have an 'up or out' requirement where
| each position has a time limit to get promoted, unless it's a
| 'terminal position' which is ok to stay at.
|
| When I was at Facebook, this was administered by using the next
| level review guidelines after you had a position for N months
| (depends on the position), and if you don't meet those
| expectations, putting you into the firing pipeline (PIP, etc).
| One of many reasons I was happier when I stopped having people
| reporting to me.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Only true for E3/4. After that you can stay forever. I know
| someone that's been E5 for 12 years
| ShamelessC wrote:
| I just want to say that I can't believe some of the
| smartest people in the world are willing to put up with all
| of this off-putting corporate bullshit. No disrespect.
| effingwewt wrote:
| I'd argue they are far from some of the smartest people
| in the world. Smart? Sure, some (many?) but I've known
| quite a few idiots in software. But I'd hardly compare
| the regular software engineer at a FAANG to some of the
| geniuses in the world.
|
| But they put up with it because it's a career and not a
| job. Many of them couldn't handle a minimum wage or
| working class job. No breaks, short lunches, no wriggle
| room for life, permanent fast-tracks to firing.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| You are being pressured to get higher salary for the same level
| of work you are currently doing and this is a problem? Strange.
| kmonsen wrote:
| I have worked in three FAANG's and that was not true in any of
| those once you reach a certain level. This is somewhere between
| 4/5. The reason is that at that point the employee is
| considered mostly independent and can be expected to solve
| their task without too much intervention.
| iamevn wrote:
| I've experienced managers pressuring me to either go for promo
| or find a different team.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I've openly stated that I want my retirement job to be an
| SWE3-ish role somewhere. High enough to have interesting,
| somewhat challenging work, but with negative desire to climb
| the ranks any further.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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
| make when they're 50, than they make when they're 40, and so
| on--even if they don't plan to be an overachieving "ladder
| climber".
| sokoloff wrote:
| I may have been unclear. By retirement job, I meant a job
| that I took during (read: after) retirement, not the one
| I'd walk away from at the moment of retiring.
|
| At that point, financial arrangements are presumably
| already all set.
| throwaway_1928 wrote:
| You can always move to the same level in a different
| company to readjust your pay.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| 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.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I agree, but this isn't as bad as you might think once
| you're a senior engineer at a top-end company. A lot of
| your compensation is in the form of stocks that will
| appreciate in value with inflation, so assuming you're in
| good graces with your director and VP, it's possible you'll
| fall behind the market rate very slowly
| bluGill wrote:
| i want to retire as an engineer. If I went management I'd be
| much more likely to get to this high paying jobs in the
| executive suite. What I don't want is to be doing the same
| thing again and again with no recognition of how useful I am.
| If I'm not useful, then I need to get into a different
| position.
| titzer wrote:
| 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 high. It's off the
| charts how obsessed seemingly _everyone_ is about it. It 's off
| the charts how much company time was _blown_ on it and
| psychological stress people were subjected to. IMHO, the process
| at Google doesn 't need to be readjusted or tinkered with, but
| somehow _de-escalated_ ; like it needs to not be such a huge
| f'ing deal.
|
| One positive development ~5 years ago is that promotion to levels
| L5 and below were mostly moved out of the IC's hands and into
| their manager's. Despite being a manager at the time (and
| creating more work for me), I thought this was great. It reduced
| the bias in the system from ICs writing up their own packets,
| which disadvantaged poor writers and poor self-promoters less. It
| got employees thinking _less_ about promotion, since there was
| less they could control or do. There were other biases that crept
| up, but it helps the psychology of day-to-day life to not be
| stressing over the frantic ladder climb.
| iamevn wrote:
| Even after the shift, both managers I had requested very firmly
| that I write the initial draft of the packet. I left Google in
| September and my last day was a week after packet due date. I
| straight up refused to waste my time on a packet when I should
| be documenting any and everything that people might need after
| I left. My manager put tons of pressure on me and threatened me
| saying I was burning bridges and that word gets around.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Definitely much more to this story, but they basically wanted
| you to do a part of their job for them. It's common and
| mostly understandable, as they might not remember everything
| that you did. They'll have to re-word everything anyhow.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Can't speak to Google, but I can say that having ICs write
| their own packets has been hugely enabling for me at other
| companies. It means their success isn't reliant solely on
| implicit visibility of their work by me (which in turn meant I
| either had to maintain visibility on everything to the nth
| degree, get everyone to give _constant_ feedback on each other,
| or fail to recognize their successes). I still come in and help
| consolidate and tweak it (I ask for a brag sheet from them that
| fits the packet format), with a 1-on-1 or three to ensure any
| questions I have get answered, and that we 're aligned on the
| message, but taking it off my plate was -huge-.
| metadat wrote:
| As stated in TFA and throughout this thread, moving the
| burden to the ICs means they will be incentivized to focus on
| Promo Packet instead of real work.
|
| No offense intended, but in your comment it comes off a bit
| selfish and bears the hallmarks of a classic archetype of
| _terrible_ manager. I 'd never willingly work for you. Being
| in management isn't for everyone, it's a people-focused
| domain. The whole job is about supporting the team and
| setting things up for successful outcomes.
|
| There is nothing wrong with being an individual contributor.
| If your organization limits how far ICs can go, take this as
| a sign of toxicity and consider finding a higher quality
| organization to join.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Hey, agree to disagree on basically every point you make.
|
| But, just to provide some context you're missing, I had
| someone promoted the last promo cycle without any mention
| of features or new products in her packet. It was entirely
| support work, tackling tech debt, etc, all of which was
| stuff she personally was passionate about, and which had
| led to her being passed over for promotion -for years-
| prior to my managing the team.
|
| The incentive I'm working to create is "document your
| successes so we can ensure they're visible", not "focus on
| work that is by its nature highly visible", and, yes,
| definitely not "ignore the visibility of your work and rely
| entirely on your manager instead". It's no different than
| "maintain a brag sheet", except that I want them to be
| aware how that brag sheet feeds into the actual promo
| packet, and provides a common place for us to connect and
| discuss. If that means you'd never work for me...okay.
| metadat wrote:
| There is no single correct take, and I appreciate you
| filling in more of your perspective on the matter.
|
| I'd be curious to understand what exactly you feel my
| points were, and why you think differently. I can't help
| but feel like I must be missing something or
| misunderstanding your comment.
|
| Fortunately we're unlikely to ever collide in real life
| :). Again, I mean no disrespect. Genuinely would like to
| understand your point and see how it maps to higher
| overall team health and better output.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Sure -
|
| >> moving the burden to the ICs means they will be
| incentivized to focus on Promo Packet instead of real
| work
|
| Such has not been the case. In fact, I've had to
| repeatedly remind people to add things to their promo
| packet. The point is that documenting successes as they
| happen means they get to own their own visibility; I've
| walked into multiple teams where people chafed at being
| passed over, because their past managers didn't have
| suitable visibility on their successes, and so while the
| IC was like "I have achieved all these amazing things!",
| the manager was like "I can't make a strong enough case
| for them", and the net result was no promotion and poor
| morale. To fix that, I could either insert myself into
| everything to know who is doing what (slowing everything
| down, taking away their feelings of autonomy, and taking
| up all my time in doing so), and still risk missing
| things, or I can ask individuals to maintain a brag sheet
| that I can then rework into something to submit at promo
| time. Every task has value on a promo packet now, not
| just those leadership cares about/remembers, and in
| practice it has meant people take work that grows and
| challenges them, rather than just work that has innately
| high visibility.
|
| >> your comment you come off a bit selfish and bear the
| hallmarks of a classic archetype of _terrible_ manager
|
| I mean, you're entitled to your own read on it, but in my
| book a terrible manager is someone who insists on
| inserting themselves into every little thing rather than
| trusting their team, giving them autonomy, and instead
| spending their time looking for ways for the team to
| function better, while clearing out
| people/organization/process obstacles. I've had multiple
| people say I'm the best manager they've ever had, as well
| as one person memorably fighting back tears when I told
| them I'd gotten them promoted (with a packet they filled
| out, then I reworked, as mentioned above) after years of
| being passed over for doing work that wasn't high
| visibility. You mean no disrespect/no offense you say,
| but that's a hell of a follow up, that I 'come off as
| selfish and bear the hallmarks of a class archetype of a
| _terrible_ manager '. I'm not sure how to say this
| politely, but if you want people to engage with you, you
| really need to learn how to not come across as offensive;
| just saying you don't mean to be doesn't really cut it.
|
| >> The whole job is about supporting the team and setting
| things up for successful outcomes. There is nothing wrong
| with being an individual contributor. If your
| organization limits how far ICs can go, take this as a
| sign of toxicity and consider finding a higher quality
| organization to join.
|
| All of this feels very much a non-sequitor; I have no
| idea what I said that you think this runs counter to
| (since I agree with every word of it), and so I disagree
| with the implication that this is a relevant argument.
| ylou wrote:
| Wow, what a classy af response. You hiring?
| shanusmagnus wrote:
| This has been my experience too, and is a frustration for
| managers that, in my experience, ICs don't understand: we
| _want_ to help you. But we've got a lot of shit to do. So
| we need evidence to draw from to rep you to the Powers
| That Be, both formally and informally. I always tried to
| have good ambient awareness of what my people were doing
| and how they were contributing, but that gets stretched
| thin. I am not omniscient, and cannot, and do not want
| to, micromanage your every action.
|
| The best solution I found is the one you described: get
| people in the habit of incrementally building a case for
| how they contribute. Some people bought into this
| strategy and they benefited bc I became way more
| effective in advocating for them, not just at set times,
| but always. Some didn't, and they were constantly dis-
| satisfied with the company, and with me. I never was able
| to solve the issue for them before I resigned.
| metadat wrote:
| lostcolony: thanks for following up and clarifying. Your
| response makes it clear you probably aren't a googler or
| xoogler, but that's a plus imho.
|
| You've persuaded me. You don't sound bad at all, and I'm
| confident I'd actually like working with you, and I
| apologize for jumping to conclusions prematurely.
|
| Note to self: Ask better questions first.
|
| Best wishes~
| lostcolony wrote:
| Hey, no worries. I'm not a googler or xoogler. It
| definitely seems like maybe what I said, the way I said
| it, viewed through a lens different than my own, may have
| come across quite differently than I intended it.
|
| I can't speak to how particular patterns have played out
| at Google, I just wanted originally to respond that the
| advice being given runs counter to my own lived
| experience at other places. Not to undermine the original
| post, just to say it may not apply universally.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| It's hard to believe that someone can write these sentences
| based solely on the OP's statement. You have no idea who
| this person is.
| samhw wrote:
| Some people think that if they look down hard enough at
| someone else, they can lift themselves up. Especially if
| that 'someone else' is someone clearly high-status by an
| agreed standard (which 'senior software engineer at
| Google' undoubtedly _is_ , on this forum, no matter what
| we tell ourselves).
|
| So the GP comes on here, sharing a perfectly nice and
| candid opinion, and our friend sees the chance of a
| lifetime (" _terrible_ manager ", "would _never_ work
| under _you_ ", "management isn't for _everyone_ ", "find
| a _higher-quality organisation_ ", etc). Simples.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > It reduced the bias in the system from ICs writing up their
| own packets, which disadvantaged poor writers and poor self-
| promoters less.
|
| It could be a blessing and a curse. Sometimes managers are
| rotated right before the next round of appraisals, and the new
| manager knows nothing about you or your contributions.
| [deleted]
| GoatOfAplomb wrote:
| 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.
| bspear wrote:
| This is why promo culture is impossible to remove at bigger
| companies. Perks of promotion (higher salary, title, status)
| far outweighs just trying to do right by customers.
|
| 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
| pavlov wrote:
| Why exactly does it seem worse? Last year I switched from a
| FAANG to a Series B startup that does experience-based
| levels, and in my observation it's just better in every way.
|
| Here's a blog post explaining their approach:
|
| https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-
| and-s...
|
| Maybe it's not possible to switch from a cutthroat promotion-
| oriented environment to this, but it's worth thinking about
| for anyone building up a software engineering workplace.
| elefanten wrote:
| " We have around 50 people on staff, and for the past
| couple of years, we have leveled new employees based on
| years of relevant experience. We had three levels, each
| with a single, non-negotiable salary that was the same
| across locations, and everybody was assigned to one of
| those levels. We've always been completely remote"
|
| I guess the main question that comes to mind is "why would
| a strong-performing, early-in-career engineer want to
| join?"
|
| In other words, aren't you capping junior hires to come
| from the bottom ~60%?
| pavlov wrote:
| For one thing, Daily (intentionally) doesn't have a lot
| of junior engineers, so I don't really know firsthand how
| they feel about the system. It may well be that this
| appeals more to mid-career people with families and other
| life to worry about.
|
| But consider that Daily is fully remote, hires globally
| paying SV-level salaries, doesn't do whiteboard torture
| interviews, and has an interesting product space where
| you can make a visible impact. I'd imagine this
| combination would be appealing to early-career people,
| especially if they don't live in a FAANG hiring market or
| aren't set on acquiring that kind of resume.
| dolni wrote:
| Normalizing pay to years experience is a bad move in
| general, IMO.
|
| You are going to have a distribution of high and low
| performers at all levels of experience. If you pay all
| the senior people the same, you have less money to pay
| your high performers. And maybe they go get that pay from
| elsewhere.
|
| There's a difference between having 20 years of
| experience and one year of experience 20 times.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| If your manages appropriately manage the employees, it'd
| require letting go poor performance.
| gowld wrote:
| > In other words, aren't you capping junior hires to come
| from the bottom ~60%?
|
| Why do you think you need the top 40%?
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| > 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 credit
| cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Sometimes I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, and
| then I read stuff like this and I don't think I could make
| it at a FAANG, but for different reasons.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless
| ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and
| amphetamines.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Yes, and it doesn't stop there:
|
| L3: $192,064
|
| L4: $268,758
|
| L5: $358,423
|
| L6: $502,465 (!)
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Why dont people work for themselves, you can earn alot lot
| more, like over 20x more!?!
| bluedevilzn wrote:
| Please tell me how I can make $10M per year (20 x $502k)
| And I'll quit my job right now.
| [deleted]
| dekhn wrote:
| Better than $500K/year plus best-in-class benefits and
| access to a large number of very bright people? How,
| exactly, did you manage this?
| astrange wrote:
| You might be forgetting self-employment tax there?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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?
| fatnoah wrote:
| >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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Not if the L4 started 3-4 years before the L6. Their
| original RSU grant might have been substantially more
| than they are handing out due to price appreciation, and
| thus their TC is much higher. This happened to hilarious
| effect at Amazon, where I had some coworkers that were
| receiving insane comp and were Sr, but not PE level.
| Originally they got a grant that was worth 500-600k that
| went up 5x.
| gowld wrote:
| That's not L4 vs L6, that's start in 2015 vs 2108 or
| whatever.
| ffggvv wrote:
| price hasnt appreciated at meta lol
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| IIUC, there's a >$100k range in TC (grants, bonus,
| salary) - WITHOUT appreciation for L4s. It's >$150k range
| in TC for L6s.
|
| If there's a ~$180k difference between the average L6 and
| the average L4, and the bands are that wide - you have a
| lot of L4s making more than L6s.
|
| If an L4 is "Exceeding Expectations" enough to get huge
| grants and bonuses, and an L4 is "Needing Improvement"
| enough to get terrible grants and bonuses... Why is the
| L4 an L4 and the L6 an L6?
| gowld wrote:
| > it reduced the bias in the system from ICs writing up their
| own packets,
|
| and replaced it with manager bias.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| What is a packet?
| cjsplat wrote:
| At Google you do a "self-assessment" for your annual review,
| and you pick some number of peer reviewers who you want to
| also provide feedback. Your manager can add or subtract from
| this list. Your manager then provides that perspective and a
| rating that is normalized across the organization through
| managerial "calibration meetings".
|
| 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.
| chrismcb wrote:
| A promo packet is a document explaining why you should be
| promoted. Includes link to the evidence, your design docs,
| your check-ins, and anything else you think might help.
| philjohn wrote:
| It's a precis of what an IC has achieved over the last
| performance cycle. Can't speak for Google, but where I am
| it's focussed on the impact you've achieved in various axes.
| openfuture wrote:
| Inevitable with bureaucracy unless we solve the oracle problem
| in a tragedy of the commons resistant way.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| > It reduced the bias in the system from ICs writing up their
| own packets, which disadvantaged poor writers and poor self-
| promoters less. It got employees thinking less about promotion,
| since there was less they could control or do.
|
| I agree that this seems positive, but you lose some things with
| this sort of change as well. ICs often have knowledge of their
| own performance that their managers don't, even when you're
| having highly effective 1-on-1s. You definitely don't want
| engineers spending huge amounts of time and energy selling
| themselves, but you probably do want them to at least a little
| bit!
| WYepQ4dNnG wrote:
| In my experience, most engineers won't even get the chance to
| work on something so impactful and cross team/org to land a
| promotion.
|
| Not their fault. Sometime, as everything in life, you are in the
| right place at the right time. You get to work on a good project
| and bingo. But most of the time you will end up fixing bugs in
| some half baked, broken PoC that someone launched in production
| just to get that promotion, and now you got to make it to work,
| while the person who got promoted get to move on and draft
| another broken PoC, launch it etc ...
|
| It depends if you are the one fixing shit and make things work
| (you rarely will get a promotion) or you are the lucky one who
| get to write spaghetti code on the next thing, cash out and move
| on onto the next thing ...
|
| Life is not fair I know ...
| syndacks wrote:
| In other words, "hire people who want to work hard for the
| founders at the expense of their self-promotion".
| MattGaiser wrote:
| If job posts were honest, they would say "our ideal candidate
| is a martyr."
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Or incentivize them with a form of profit-sharing that isn't
| tied to "promotion" per se?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Some ideas: hire fewer people, well remunerated, but make normal
| pay increments guaranteed and promotions less frequent. Then
| there isn't such a glut of new engineers constantly creating an
| "up or out" culture, and people aren't laser-focused on promotion
| to win big. And lower the early 3 years' RSU allocations.
|
| Basically, turn it into a marathon not a sprint.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > and even if you care deeply about other things (your product,
| your users, etc), you can't really avoid caring about promotion
| as well.
|
| I can honestly say I didn't care about promotion while I was on
| the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft (as a Software
| Engineer II). The quoted assertion makes me wonder if I was being
| naive or lazy. I truly believed that I didn't need to care about
| promotion because the work I was doing was worthwhile for its own
| sake, i.e. I cared about the product and the users. In
| retrospect, maybe I didn't make the most of the opportunity I had
| there; I suppose I could have had more impact if I had leveled
| up. But I wasn't thinking that way at the time.
| toast0 wrote:
| The way I looked at it was: if I'm being paid _enough_ , I care
| about being happy more than being paid more. Jumping through
| hoops to get promoted is going to get me more money and also
| make me do more stuff I don't want to do. I was happiest when I
| had a clear, important job to do, that everyone knew wasn't
| enough work for one person, and then the expectation that I'd
| spend the rest of the time fixing stuff that was nobody's job
| and freedom to set priorities for the most part (after all, if
| it was important, it should be somebody's job). Of course, at
| the last place, I think they have four engineers now doing my
| important job that left me mostly idle. Not sure how four
| people can work on it, but not my circus.
|
| I briefly had one person reporting to me (well two people, in
| sequence), and navigating performance reviews on behalf of
| someone else is not for me.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Is Google an up or out company?
|
| That is, if you don't get a promotion in a certain number of
| years, you will be encouraged to leave?
|
| That would encourage making projects more complex than they need
| to be, to get that promotion.
| aix1 wrote:
| For software engineers, the expectation is to get to L4
| eventually (new grads get hired at L3). I've not seen any
| concrete guidance on what "eventually" means in this context.
|
| This used to be L5 until a few years back.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| So if they make one promotion, they are OK indefinitely?
| epaulson wrote:
| 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 before all of
| the short-term decisions they made blew up and hurt the original
| product. The punchline of the tweet thread was that they move on
| to the next product - and the final tweet in the thread looped
| back to the first tweet in the thread.
|
| Does anyone remember this thread?
| fhrow4484 wrote:
| is it this one?
| https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1440138354390016003
| llaolleh wrote:
| That is hilarious. It's a real life example of catastrophic
| forgetting.
| feintruled wrote:
| A co-worker of mine described this as 'surfing ahead of the
| wave of responsibility'
| panda88888 wrote:
| This is great. I am going to borrow it.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Reminds me of the parable of three envelopes
| rpowers wrote:
| Ex-googler here. I hated the promotion process with a passion. 20
| pages of "evidence" which is usually just links to green/blue
| docs, CLs, and just flowery puff language to argue your case. My
| org skipped the promo committee process at the start of the
| pandemic when I was up for it. When we had teammate that changed
| teams join us for a virtual meet up to tell us _he_ got promo in
| his org. I quit the next week.
| protomyth wrote:
| So, if you have a company that depends on uptime, then pay the
| people doing the maintenance programming / sysadmin twice as much
| as the normal developers since they don't get to play with the
| new thing, they are much more likely to have to deal with things
| at odd hours, and need to be promoted based on keeping the
| business running.
| [deleted]
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| When I was younger I was aware of the idea of perverse and
| misaligned incentives, but I never would have expected the extent
| to which they pervade practically every human institution.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| There would need to be something big to override individual
| interest.
| defen wrote:
| Historically this was achieved via religion. Small-to-medium
| size startups can sometimes pull it off with the concept of a
| "mission", although that's probably less effective these days
| since everyone wants to "change the world". I think someone
| would have to be pretty naive to have a similar level of
| belief in the mission of a multinational corporation. Or
| they're high enough in the org chart that they don't have to
| worry about anything else.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| It is very instructive to read Deming and Weber.
|
| Max Weber pretty much defined the modern conceit of
| bureaucracy. [1]
|
| W.E Deming wrote extensively on the "American Disease". [2]
|
| In a few words management and measurement are both inescapable
| beyond a certain organisational size, and they _are_ the
| problem, because in almost all scenarios they will expand to
| displace /strangle the actual work.
|
| It is a recognised general structural problem in systems.
|
| Of course there is much more to it than the above
| simplification which may sound like an extreme philosophy - but
| I have yet to encounter good refutations or counterexamples to
| this tendency.
|
| The answer, perhaps, is that small and many is beautiful.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation. I am a big fan of Weber, not
| familiar with Deming but his work sounds very relevant. In
| general I tend to agree that beyond a certain size
| organization these problems seem unavoidable. I've read
| Systemantics/The Systems Bible and it seems to come to a
| similar conclusion.
| cjsplat wrote:
| Based on my Google manger time and prior experience, the problem
| isn't necessarily the promo orientation - it was the emphasis on
| tech heroics to justify the promotion.
|
| Rumor I heard was that pre-IPO the only was to get a stock
| option/grant boost was to be prompted. I believe the first actual
| annual refresh was in '06. For several years after that it was
| 100% managed at the SVP level, so you needed to be known at the
| top of your management chain to get a refresh beyond the
| algorithmic minimum.
|
| Also there was top level compression because Google didn't have
| L8, 9, or 10s for a long time - if Jeff Dean is a L8, a new hire
| previous "Director level" engineer lands at 7 if they are lucky.
|
| Given that Google frequently hired at one or two job grades below
| typical Si Valley, promo was a MAJOR motivator, and you needed to
| seem as though you fit in at the next level up. Google's approach
| to the Peter Principle was that if you got promoted and then
| didn't meet expectations, they would manage you out.
|
| The question was always "Is that project really L6, L7, L8, L9
| work?" I saw someone who changed the way a longstanding internet
| protocol was seen and replaced it based on their research stuck
| in the "only L6 level work" category.
|
| And of course the promo committees were filled with people who
| got promoted under these regimes.
|
| Corporate culture gets set and maintained in strange and
| interesting ways.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| I feel such a disconnect from all the comments. Seems most
| engineers/manager in the comments are pulling by my estimates,
| $400,000~$1,000,000+ a year arguing over culture. I don't get it
| because it's not an issue outside of FANG. Seen far more ugly
| stuff in companies that pay 90% of that in Canada. It explains
| why there's a big brain drain here.
| activitypea wrote:
| I don't understand this comment. Are you saying people should
| take their money and stop complaining?
| tomatowurst wrote:
| Seems you understood it just fine.
| dqpb wrote:
| The main problem is that promo-culture is fake meritocracy.
|
| Real meritocracy is a market economy (barring corruption).
| foota wrote:
| :eyes:
| babl-yc wrote:
| I wonder how much newer trends of transparent career ladders are
| at play here.
|
| The old way wasn't perfect either, but generally high performance
| was rewarded with broader scope. I assumed hard, high quality
| work was the way to get promoted.
|
| Now with many public career ladders, employees realize they
| should take on broader scope (larger, complex projects) to look
| the part of a more senior engineer, even if that doesn't match
| their team's immediate needs.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| Those who stayed later Fridays and logged in to work on the
| weekends, those who rattled some cages and when yelled, yelled
| back, where promoted. The rest of us who enjoy our evenings with
| our families and married feasibility with sustainability got
| burned out and left for greener pastures. Good article.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| Most promotions I've seen are when someone has a huge amount of
| tribal knowledge about some system and the company cannot afford
| to have them leave. So they get promoted. This is even within
| FAANG, where this narrative about impact or 10x developers is
| common. Not saying promotions dont happen for those reasons, just
| that huge systems that few people understand lead to promotions
| for those who do understand them
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| Not really? Promos incentive "up and out" culture, where people
| switch teams after getting promoted. Machiavellian managers
| respond by _not_ promoting their best people, instead forever
| dangling the carrot of "deliver this and get promoted next
| cycle!".
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| 100%, have worked at two FAANGs and this is what I have seen.
| Complex business knowledge leads to promotions
| strongpigeon wrote:
| "You got a really high CME this cycle" is the meme du jour
| I've heard
| surement wrote:
| This is very common! What's worse is these engineers likely
| created or at least contributed to a situation where tribal
| knowledge is valuable, rather than developing simple decoupled
| systems that can be picked up by new engineers.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Yeah it's your usual "hire a bunch of underpaid and under
| skilled-for-the-job" "engineers" at the beginning of your
| startup that write piles of crap code that then become
| knowledge pullers of the business. When if you paid good
| money in the first place you wouldn't need that knowledge in
| the first place.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| An interesting way of looking at this is that it's the Iron Law
| of Bureaucracy at work.
|
| The Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
|
| In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the
| bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to
| the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have
| less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle
|
| Also called the tragedy of the commons.
| astrange wrote:
| It's obvious why these mid-century SF authors like Pournelle
| and Heinlein wrote all these cool-sounding aphorisms - that's
| their job - but it's not clear why anyone listens to what a
| grumpy old conservative SF author thinks.
| dvirsky wrote:
| One thing that could make this less problematic - make levels
| hidden.
|
| Another more radical approach - get rid of levels completely.
| Increase pay significantly, similar to a promo if someone is
| doing good consistently, don't if they're just okay, fire them if
| they suck, but make levels implicit.
| angarg12 wrote:
| 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 make changes". This sounds
| simple, but the implications are deep. Unlike individual
| engineers, moving entire teams around is difficult. If you have a
| team, you need to "justify" their existence. Is not enough to
| keep the lights on or slowly polish the product, you need grand
| roadmaps to keep yourself busy the next year or two. Ideally you
| want to justify that you need extra headcount to keep the product
| expanding.
| WithinReason wrote:
| This sounds like Eric Weinstein's Embedded Growth Obligation
| (EGO) concept. Notably also occurs in academia and economics.
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| I think this is one of the key frustrations I have with modern
| software development, change for the sake of change. I feel as
| though many products degrade over time and as a user I'm
| generally quite hesitant to upgrade anything if I don't have
| to.
| oicU00 wrote:
| They have to show on investor calls the line went up.
|
| We're propping up the wealth of a generation that has no idea
| how anything works, but they got there first so of course
| they are now the de facto deciders of our agency.
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| True, it's difficult to know how things work when they
| become needlessly complicated and one is unable to move on
| from a project that is essentially complete.
| oicU00 wrote:
| It's presumed needlessly complicated is necessary to make
| the line go up; behind the scenes, they say, mathmagical
| forces exist that only the chosen few truly understand.
| You see everything is really a graph of infinite brand
| names, and the flow of value is determined by the
| taxonomy of brand ownership.
|
| Many a study have been attempted to quantify what
| character qualities or technologies boost productivity.
| Their model becomes so nebulous no reasonable conclusions
| can be made.
|
| But now of course computers learning helps us untangle
| that web and low and behold the same economic winners
| emerged! Wow!
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| It's a whole "growth" thing.
|
| Like, it's not good enough to have a quality product that
| generates a sustainable revenue stream year after year. You
| have to "grow" because companies don't really do dividends
| anymore, they want a constant increase in stock prices,
| product be damned.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Arguably one of the causes of this is high salaries and only
| hiring (supposedly, I have no personal experience) Very Smart
| Developers. You're going to pay Google salaries for someone
| just to keep the lights on?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It would be a smart business decision. A Google mid-tier
| employee or two just isn't a large cost to keep a project
| running. It's not cheap, sure, but to have a product running
| at scale?
| astrange wrote:
| The rationale for developing Go is that Googlers are fresh
| out of school and only barely smart enough to program Java,
| so I think they've eased off on the notion they only hire
| super-geniuses.
| tfp137 wrote:
| > If you have a team, you need to "justify" their existence. Is
| not enough to keep the lights on or slowly polish the product,
| you need grand roadmaps to keep yourself busy the next year or
| two. Ideally you want to justify that you need extra headcount
| to keep the product expanding.
|
| This. It generates the Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber talked
| about. As a middle manager or tech lead (Taskmaster) you hire
| people (Flunkies) to make yourself seem more important as well
| as for roles (Box Ticker) that you might not need but that any
| "important" project will retain. In the end, this generates
| duplicate effort and needless work that requires fixing (Duct-
| Tapers). The only one of the five Graeber categories not
| represented is the Goon, and that's because those get moved to
| MTV and fast tracked to the executive suite.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| 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, that's fine," you might think "The product is still
| doing alright even without an owner. Higher level leadership
| should be fine with that"
|
| Until the day comes when the service crashes unexpectedly, and
| you realize that no one left on the engineering team has enough
| context to debug the issue properly
|
| Hello two week long outage
|
| Examples: Heroku -
| https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1520770263977271296
| Atlassian -
| https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1513605414029516806
| somethoughts wrote:
| I think you nailed the crux of the problem.
|
| The challenge for engineering management is how to provide
| metrics to measure your bus factor reduction efforts and the
| strength of your insurance prior to the emergency.
|
| It is highly possible though that the new support team
| members are actually coasting up until the disaster so you
| didn't really have the insurance you thought you were paying
| for.
| simion314 wrote:
| Isn't the 20% time to work on whatever cool shit you want
| enough ? (like how googlers created that garbage angular1
| because they were border, have no clue about GUIs and had
| some fun scewing around ) ? I know people that are fine with
| getting paid to maintain shit so maybe the problem is Google
| only hires cool developers and the cool developers only want
| to work on cool stuff and in 2 years the newest cool stuff
| of-course.
| angarg12 wrote:
| There is that too, but you could solve that by having
| engineers/teams working in new, cool, and useful products. I
| feel my company doesn't have a good mechanism to maintain
| services that aren't actively developed.
|
| We experience it first hand when one of our services got
| deprecated and we moved to a new org. The solution was
| literally to hire a new team in a low CoL country and hand
| over the service to them. Needless to say it was difficult to
| hire for those positions.
| alimov wrote:
| 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 new features.. couldn't get it updated for about
| 3-4 weeks because we couldn't afford an outage.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Arguably those folks who left didn't do quite as good a job
| as they perhaps should have when they were still there. A
| high quality developer leaving a service behind should have
| already written sufficient documentation so that another
| high quality developer (especially one at the same company)
| can ramp up more quickly than 3-4 weeks. I think this is
| just another symptom of many tech companies throwing up
| their hands and pretending like "legacy" services are
| inescapable technical debt, when really they just never
| bothered to emphasize to their employees that services
| should be built in a maintainable way from the outset.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > couldn't get it updated for about 3-4 weeks
|
| That doesn't sound like a large issue (but the details can
| completely change it). Maybe it was the right decision.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Part of this is due to companies shooting themselves in the
| foot over and over, recruiting developers looking for
| challenges rather than grunt developers okay doing largely
| maintenance for a solid income. If they advocate themselves
| as providing the challenges for the former and filter out the
| latter, yes, obviously your employees are going to leave
| after they have to move that one div by 5 pixels for the
| umpteenth time and get no mental stimulation for months.
| [deleted]
| MivLives wrote:
| Does anyone recruit grunt devs like that? That honestly
| sounds like what I'd prefer. I just want to come in, keep
| the lights on, and have enough mental energy for other
| stuff after work.
| rileyphone wrote:
| All across corporate America, there are devs who make
| 80-120k a year and keep it 9-5 (but really like 11-2).
| Especially with the recent turmoil in the market, you can
| find a very easy yet well paying (for normal people) job.
| Now if only HR would advertise the jobs this way...
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I don't know too much about Google, but I can talk about
| other companies. Everyone recruits grunt devs like that.
| That's what every job in Silicon Valley is. It's just
| that some companies and teams want you to spin it like
| you're some amazing lone wolf 100x genius while you're
| scraping dogshit off the bottom of the company's shoes.
|
| A big part of it is that the executives decide what's
| making money for the company, and they'll focus on that.
| If you're scraping turds on the "rockstar" team in the
| "rockstar" org, you'll get showered with bonus money and
| RSUs. If you're scraping turds on a product that none of
| the VPs care about, you'll probably get screwed over.
| Some of the people in the non-"ninja"/"wizard"/"rockstar"
| orgs will do OK because they look like indispensable
| geniuses, and I think that's what a lot of this sentiment
| comes from.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| > That's what every job in Silicon Valley is
|
| I am curious - is this informed by your experience of
| having sampled every job in SV? Or perhaps a
| representative sample? Is it possible other people might
| be different than you and have a different perspective.
|
| What a fucking joke of a comment.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I could see a market for that guy, and he takes 10 jobs
| like that Reddit thread.
| leros wrote:
| I used to manage engineers at another large tech company and this
| was a big problem. There was nowhere near enough big projects to
| get everyone the evidence they needed for promotions.
|
| As a result we ended up doing two things a lot:
|
| 1) over-engineering a feature that should be simple into
| something with architectural significance (e.g. a new set of
| services that could have just been a feature in an existing
| service)
|
| 2) de-prioritizing important things that were small in order to
| ensure everyone had a big project every quarter.
|
| We ended up having to hire contractors to work on the small stuff
| because it was piling up and causing problems.
| jstanley wrote:
| > There was nowhere near enough big projects to get everyone
| the evidence they needed for promotions.
|
| Would the goal be to promote _everyone_? Who 's going to do the
| work they all used to do?
| leros wrote:
| It's a retention issue. If people don't level up fast enough
| and get raises they'll leave for another company.
| akmr726 wrote:
| This is underlying problem with promotion culture, I am in
| a big financial firm, my whole team wants to get promoted
| every 1-1.5 year. I feel people are not really learning how
| to write and manage software systems properly due to this.
| bigcat123 wrote:
| darth_aardvark wrote:
| 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.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > 1) over-engineering a feature that should be simple into
| something with architectural significance (e.g. a new set of
| services that could have just been a feature in an existing
| service)
|
| Ideally this gets people fired, not promoted. Google explicitly
| calls out "solutions to hard problems are easy to maintain" on
| its ladder, for example. People can fail to identify these
| cases, but the intention is to promote based on _hard problems_
| rather than _complex solutions_.
| xmprt wrote:
| It's all about how you twist it. If you say "I built 2 new
| services that could have just been a feature in an existing
| service" then you'll probably get a bad review.
|
| However, if you give a reason for building the 2 new services
| (eg. more extensibility, enables a new flow, easier to use
| for other teams) then all of a sudden the complexity is
| justified and you'll appear to have solved a hard problem. No
| one is going to look super deeply and ask if those reasons
| are valid and if you even need the extra extensibility or if
| other teams will use the service.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| I think there just aren't enough reasonably solvable hard
| problems. All the low hanging fruit is taken, and the result
| is artificially complex solutions as a way for engineers to
| demonstrate craftsmanship.
| bluGill wrote:
| Do they consider fixing easy bugs are hard problem? Should
| someone ignore a bug report "The is not spelled teh?" until
| it has bounced around unsolved for months on end, then spend
| 2 weeks "investigating" to show that it is a hard bug?
|
| I've seen real bugs that bounce around for months, each time
| to someone who looks decides it isn't in their code and
| points to someone else: eventually we tell one engineer to
| solve it an a few weeks latter she traces it down through
| many different layers to figure it out. I've seen other cases
| where a great engineer spent weeks fixing bugs only slightly
| more complex a misspelling. In the end what counts it the
| quality of the product not the effort put into it.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| No, this wouldn't get someone promoted, because it doesn't
| actually solve the problem. The _problem_ here is that the
| triage process is a mess. Fixing that, so that bugs don 't
| bounce around for months, would probably get someone
| promoted, or at least be a significant factor.
| xmprt wrote:
| What if the solution to that hard problem is improving
| the incentive structure and paying/promoting people for
| fixing bugs? That's something only ELT or SVPs can do and
| they aren't getting promoted for that.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| If you think the problem can only be solved by management
| attention, and you cannot demonstrate to your management
| that the problem is impactful enough that it deserves
| their attention, either you are incapable of making a
| clear enough argument to focus on the right problem, or
| the problem isn't actually as dire as you think it is (or
| management is bad and wrong, or at the very least
| mismatches your values).
|
| Two of these are a signal that perhaps you shouldn't be
| promoted. The third is a signal that you should leave.
|
| In a less generic sense, I think that there are almost
| always ways to improve incentive structures and encourage
| people to focus on specific problems that don't directly
| involve SVPs. Your manager has some control over your
| rating. If you can argue that "customer happiness" should
| be a priority and as part of that, end to end bug triage
| time will impact ratings, you have successfully created
| an incentive structure that will reward that, without
| involving anyone who can modify compensation structure.
| bluGill wrote:
| Many outsiders have noted that googles incentive
| structure is not around customer happiness in general.
| Thus articles and discussions like this one.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Sorry but shouldn't you have just taken the initiative and
| fixed the bug yourself? This is the sort of thing I would
| hope a company would reward - not passing the buck.
|
| If that's "below your pay grade" _and_ you're still capable
| of doing it, well that's kind of the problem then, isn't
| it.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Sorry but shouldn't you have just taken the initiative
| and fixed the bug yourself
|
| Why should I spend a week learning a different domain
| when someone with experience in that code can possibly
| fix the bug in an hour? Passing the buck to the right
| person is the correct answer when you are not an expert
| and someone else is. Passing the buck too many times
| happens very rarely, most of the time it is the correct
| answer, so long as you pass it to the right person.
|
| I can go into anyone's code and fix a misspelling.
| However if the problem is less obvious someone with
| experience can take a few days off my time just because
| they don't have to figure out how the code is supposed to
| work before figuring out why it doesn't do that.
| riku_iki wrote:
| It sounds you had bottleneck in product management pipeline.
| Product managers should generate enough creative and
| significant features to justify stream of large projects.
| astrange wrote:
| Meanwhile at Apple, there aren't product managers and the
| business doesn't create an expanding stream of new products.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Sorry, can't comment on this, never owned anything from
| Apple :)
| analyst74 wrote:
| 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 person entrusted with this decision
| (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power
| over others. This leads to a different set of problems, like "B
| player hires C player", yes-man culture, ICs spending effort
| brown nosing instead of creating value, etc.
|
| Building a culture is all about incentives, it's easy to identify
| and reward user/company impact when the team is small. But as
| number grows, it becomes harder to do that, and the declared core
| values gets ignored as the reward system departs from that.
| em-bee wrote:
| i remember reading in some startup oriented text that founder
| driven values works up to about 50 people. once your company
| grows beyond that a culture shift is inevitable.
|
| i don't know what the answers are to manage that shift and
| avoid it going into the wrong direction.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Maybe just don't go above that. Whatsapp was at that level
| when acquired fwiw.
| sg47 wrote:
| Should avoid hiring people from big companies that are used
| to promotions every year.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| No big company I know of, certainly no FAANG, anyone
| expecting to be promoted every year. Even every two years
| would be considered quite fast.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Doesn't Microsoft bump levels ~yearly?
| pillowkusis wrote:
| > The person entrusted with this decision (typically the
| manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others.
|
| This happens anyway in Google's "objective" promo system. Your
| manager assigns your projects, gives you your non-promo
| performance ratings, sets direction for your team, they sit in
| the room with the promo committee, and their feedback is
| critical to the promo committee's decision. You need their help
| and support to get promoted. If they didn't have significant
| impact on your work, they're not a manager.
|
| Ostensibly you can go try for promo even if your manager
| disagrees. I never had any evidence this worked for anyone and
| I have no idea how it would work. Sometimes borderline promo
| cases would go up for promo when their manager thought it was
| unlikely, and it would succeed. But if your manager doesn't
| think you should get promoted, they're going to tell the
| committee that, and I don't know what the promo committee would
| see that would cause them to overrule the manager.
| analyst74 wrote:
| I worked at companies where managers are little tsars of
| their turf, and Google.
|
| The difference with Google is that: 1) you can give feedback
| to your manager, both anonymously and explicitly, and they'll
| affect their perf; and 2) your success, in terms of impact
| and promo are part of your managers success; 3) perf
| committee will challenge and can override your manager if the
| rating given seems too low/high given the evidence.
|
| These forces while do not take power away from manager
| completely, they provide some checks and incentivize managers
| to respect and support their reports.
|
| Of course, all these nice things come at a cost, that is perf
| becoming a somewhat transparent and heavy process that eats
| everyone's time and mental energy.
| malfist wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with you totally. The promo culture is certainly
| broken, but the solution they propose seems....like startup
| worship at best, exploitation at worst (work harder without a
| payout and be happy).
|
| 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.
| sytelus wrote:
| The deeper issue you are pointing out is that only early
| employees get to capture the majority of the value while late
| employees only get the bread-crumbs. So everyone wants to be
| "early employee" of new products. In a way, this is inherent
| problem with capitalism where the idea is that if you have the
| capital, you pay the workers generating your capital only
| through _return on capital_ as opposed to part of the capital.
| This way you can grow your networth exponentially in
| capitalistic system as long as you can begin with _sufficient_
| initial capital somehow. Anyone without such capital must live
| on month-to-month or year-to-year wages generated by the
| return-on-capital.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| This echoes my read of this article as well. Any system for
| promotion has tradeoffs. You can't just say "this system's
| tradeoffs suck, we should have a new system with no tradeoffs."
|
| I'll admit, I don't really have a good solution. My strategy
| has been to just stick to early-stage startups where everyone
| is aligned on company success. Would love to hear some more
| meaningful discussion of alternative systems for managing
| career ladders.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Experience points. Every you complete a task, you gain
| experience points. Gain enough, you go up a level. Flavor
| them for different job tracks, tweak the rewards to
| incentivize the behaviors you want and not the ones you
| don't. If someone isn't gaining experience at a good rate,
| take a closer look to see whether they are doing things that
| should be worth XP, or whether you need to have a different
| conversation.
|
| Give people some choices on leveling up -- maybe most people
| just want a bump to salary, maybe other people would like to
| gain more vacation, stock, half days Friday, a private
| office, a good parking spot, etc etc.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Could be worse. You could be on a small team where there's no
| room for promotion and then get a 3% yearly raise based on your
| production despite the fact that you were rated "excellent"
| across the board because company policy dictates that 4/5 and 5/5
| ratings are specifically for people they intend to promote, and
| alas your team isn't large enough for there to be promotions....
| so you have to deal with your manager saying "I wanted to give
| you a 5, but I was only allowed to give you a 3 due to company
| policy."
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Then there are ultra-micro companies where there can never be a
| promotion, only a raise, because the team is one or two people.
|
| Then it's likely 3% forever.
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| I was talking last week with a friend working for Google and
| worked at Facebook before. The overhead to show that you are
| worthy for promotion is ridiculous. But he was giving for granted
| that was part of the "game."
|
| I was never interested in climbing the corporate ladder and
| prefer to impact the users but I found that unfortunately trying
| to avoid wasting time in this overhead is eventually working
| again the users because who prefer spending time improving the
| product does not get promoted.
| carl_sandland wrote:
| This is a fascinating, complex topic. Why are a group of very
| clever, smart people spending ANY energy on giving each other
| high-school level report cards? Why does one of our best ever
| tech companies become focused on everything but the customer ?
| I'd like to think they are dumb but c'mon, they are not dumb
| people.
|
| It doesn't mean I can't feel sad and deeply upset at this is what
| it takes to 'succeed' at a company I have honest admiration for.
|
| BUT; I've been researching this 'problem'; which boils down to
| "is a hierarchical management structure needed" for a group of
| 'activists' to achieve great things? So far I have found no
| alternatives, why do we have to keep track of our 'success' and
| relative worth so intensely so share the pie around?
|
| as the top responses says; everyone needs to chill out and I'd
| add "try to be nice and do no harm".
|
| The only point I have to add is that as someone who wants to not
| participate and does not care what "level" they rank; f### off?
| blobbers wrote:
| 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 good engineers were and who the bad ones were. It
| was just annoying to have to listen to people talk about a widget
| they'd built that tbh nobody really cared about.
|
| I worked with people to make their talks less about promotion and
| more about education; that at least made the presentations
| bearable and engineers felt like they might have learned
| something from them. Eventually though I realized I didn't want
| to be in that sort of culture and joined a smaller company.
| lesgobrandon wrote:
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Another issue is that "promotion" can mean any number of things
| which someone may desire or not care about. This "promotion" may
| mean a private office, more flexibility with your time, more
| money, respect, control over what you work on, meetings with
| higher-ups, direct reports, and so forth. Not everyone wants all
| of these things in a single bundle.
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| The Netflix model is worth considering as an antidote. In short:
|
| 1. Don't hire junior engineers.
|
| 2. All ICs have the same title: Senior ____ Engineer.
| charlespierce wrote:
| Even Netflix is moving to have levels, however. At great cost
| to morale it seems, with people who were formerly all at the
| same title being grouped into potentially different levels.
| tdiff wrote:
| Can it be that the aim of this system is limiting the number of
| potential promotees, similar to how leetcoding limits number of
| candidates for hiring?
| burnoutgal wrote:
| Seriously, why do people care about being promoted beyond
| senior/staff? Even at a smaller company you're making 200k/year,
| you probably have a good handle on your job, why not just coast?
| There's a big discontinuity in comp if you can make it to the
| director level, but being a manager or senior staff seems like a
| ton of work for no benefit.
|
| I work like 20 hours a week at my job, I almost quit because it's
| extremely boring and dysfunctional, but then I realized I can
| just disengage and enjoy my extra free time instead of pushing to
| exceed expectations. And I still get paid the same.
| dub wrote:
| Performance reviews in corporate culture often have a "what
| have you done for me lately?" mindset.
|
| If you're senior or staff and haven't launched anything
| exciting lately, middle management might become less interested
| in whether the service is running well and more interested in
| having "career" conversations about how your role description
| says you're supposed to be launching cross-functional projects
| more frequently.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| At Google specifically, even being promoted _to_ staff is a
| huge undertaking. And until recently, there was an expectation
| of forward career trajectory built into the lower ranks, i.e.
| every engineer was functionally multi-year probationary. If you
| found something valuable to do but you weren 't progressing
| your career (because, say, the work was necessary but boring,
| like micro-optimizations, feature polish on a mature product,
| or documentation / example creation), you'd start to have talks
| with your manager about your future at the company.
|
| I believe they relaxed that process when someone at the top
| took a look at their org-chart and realized they've become a
| big company where they need a critical mass of not-actually-
| interested-in-progressing engineers to keep the lights on and
| if they actually followed their policy, they risked churning
| those reliable workhorses out of the company because they
| couldn't actually afford to find a slot to promote them all.
| cjsplat wrote:
| I don't know because the change was decided way above my pay
| grade, but I always assumed that the reason was HR legal.
|
| It is hard to look at people who are objectively doing as
| well as each other, and rate some lower only because they
| have been at that job grade "too long".
|
| The fig leaf was always that the ladders encourages keeping
| up with technology and the company, which meant people
| couldn't tread water at the lower grades.
|
| But if the "new technology" isn't necessary for the job
| duties, labor lawyers can have a field day.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Off the top of my head:
|
| 1. More money means less time till I hit FU money and can
| choose work without any consideration of pay
|
| 2. 200k/yr is not as much as it seems if you're in the bay area
| and have kids
|
| 3. Bigger title -> more input on core design decisions. Hate
| some idea coming from the higher ups? You're in a position to
| do something about it.
|
| 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems
| to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"
| geodel wrote:
| In general I agree. It's just that I don't know if salaried
| job lead to FU money. The only person I had or will be able
| to say FU is to myself sitting alone in living room.
| ketchupdebugger wrote:
| You'd be able to reach FIRE money as a SWE. Possibly FU
| money if you get to vp level at a FAANG and then work for
| 10 years.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Depends on who you are and what your growth potential is. I
| know SWEs getting offers in the 7-8 figure range. That's
| not in any way typical but if you're smart enough,
| hardworking, and get the right breaks hitting a 7 figure
| income isn't something I'd consider _weird_ and is
| definitely FU money.
| burnoutgal wrote:
| Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU
| money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many
| years than try to race to retire.
|
| A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living
| areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you
| want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a
| smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the
| way to go. If you want to be aggressively careerist, you have
| to be face-to-face in the bay networking.
|
| More input and more interesting problems both feel like more
| responsibility for the same comp, imo, which might be
| appealing for some people but is anathema to me. The people
| higher up got there by being more argumentative, or
| backstabbing, or ingratiating themselves, and instead of
| going along with them now you get to fight them. No thanks.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'd rather work twice as many hours per year for half as
| many years. It's not that one choice is obviously dominant
| over the other across all people.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yes, given "getting hit by a bus" is a probabilistic
| event that is independent of my working hours, I would
| rather make 2x for half as many years, all other things
| being equal. I'd also rather make 3x for a third as many
| years, and so on, if it were possible. Given time value
| of money and compounding interest, it's always better to
| front load your working time and make Nx for 1/N as much
| calendar time worked.
|
| And for the controversial part: The above is why I think
| it's insane to, for example, take 1-2 years of not
| working, early in your 20s, to go see the world and "find
| yourself." Those 1-2 years, if spent earning, could mean
| retiring an extra 3-6 years earlier.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree with your conclusion, but I think there's a fair
| argument to say that an extra week of leisure in your 20s
| is worth more than an extra week of leisure in your 50s
| or 60s. That is even more true if you're working 48
| weeks/year in your 20s and zero weeks in your 60s.
| happimess wrote:
| I think it's insane to, for example, work at an office
| early in your 20s, to put a couple grand in your 401(k).
| Those 1-2 years, if spent exploring, could mean finding a
| happier and more thoughtful way to progress through the
| latter 70% of your life.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Early on the money is probably the least important part.
| Momentum seems like a lot more important.
|
| If you finish uni and take 1-2yrs off, that puts you
| wayyy behind someone who goes straight into a job. If you
| take 1-2yrs off your knowledge won't be fresh and you'll
| not really be a new grad anymore.
| spacemadness wrote:
| I think this points out a difference in viewing
| everything in life as an efficiency problem focused on
| retirement age and overall wealth. Makes sense for a
| forum of engineers to see it this way I suppose.
| burnoutgal wrote:
| "getting hit for a bus" is a hyperbolic example meant to
| stand in for a catastrophic event. It really means you
| (or a family member like a parent, partner or child) has
| a major health event, for instance. Some things are
| random, some things tend to become more likely with age.
| Even just chronic pain or other health issues might make
| retirement less fun than travelling in your 20s (speaking
| as someone with chronic pain from surgical implants).
|
| Besides health there's a lot of reasons why being certain
| about doing something now might be preferable to putting
| it off for 10+ years.
| bluGill wrote:
| My todo list will keep me busy until I'm 3000 years old. I
| might not be hit by a bus, but I have no reason to think I
| will ever get to the end of that list. Money can buy things
| required for the list that are not on the list, but I have
| to work to get them. In many cases I spend less time
| working then I would just doing it. I could make a canoe
| from scrap wood and row to New Zealand, but in a week at
| work I get enough money to pay for a plane ticket, while
| paddling across the ocean would take months (people have
| taking canoes across the ocean so I know it is possible -
| though I'm not sure how risky it is)
| summerlight wrote:
| > 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting
| problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be
| a priority"
|
| This is probably one of the most dominant non-financial
| factor for engineers. Because if you want to make a visible,
| critical design decisions for billion-user products you
| usually want to be at least L6~L7, the level where you're now
| an owner of a non-trivial product/system spanning across
| teams.
| ctvo wrote:
| I understand the perspective of people who view their
| profession as solely a job, checking out after their 9-5 and
| doing other things with their life. This isn't me. I _enjoy_
| the work. Idealistically, I _think_ I can make a large impact
| on people with my knowledge and experience. Shave off a seconds
| on a workflow in Google Docs end-to-end, that 's a net good to
| humanity. It's not all about compensation. At some point it's
| almost only about impact, and impact often requires higher
| titles and putting in hours due to systems that govern these
| large companies.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| If you aspire to be a homeowner, 200k in the Bay Area will be
| difficult.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| As of 2022, it's now difficult anywhere in most US
| metropolitan areas.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| "Most of the US" != the five places you'd be willing to
| live. Outside of the HN bubble, a $200k salary _easily_
| affords a home in most markets.
|
| https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro
| -...
| babelfish wrote:
| Okay, but the important part is "the five places you'd be
| willing to live". There are significant reasons most of
| us aren't moving to the middle of nowhere to be able to
| afford a home.
| [deleted]
| Invictus0 wrote:
| To be clear, your question is why do people want to grow? Or
| why do they want to make more money? Or why do they want more
| status/power/recognition?
| lesuorac wrote:
| A promotion (pre-director in CA/NYC) can easily be an increase
| of 50k (~25%) in comp so it's pretty meaningful.
| fullshark wrote:
| My main motivation for work at this point is to provide for my
| children and buy my retirement. More money via promotion helps
| me achieve those goals.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Because coasting costs me mentally. I want more than that. I
| coasted for a year and it was disastrous to me, mentally.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You are counting on that job to always be there for one thing.
| burnoutgal wrote:
| In the boom time there's an unending appetite for mediocre
| engineers to inflate headcount, making managers look good
| (more reports) and companies look good (to investors). In the
| bust time, I don't think even the smartest people will be
| safe, and the top of the ladder may well be pruned more
| aggressively because they're expensive. Having positive
| reviews may protect you, but being high in the org won't.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Depends on how high. You don't want to be in the _" off in
| the corner"_ research group which is usually comprised of
| very high level engineers (senior or staff level or
| higher). You definitely don't want to be high up in the
| middle tier either. What you want is to be known to your
| Vice Presidents and above. That's when you reached "high
| enough" to avoid the great cull.
|
| I witnessed this more times than I can count.
|
| Otherwise its all balance sheet calculations and _maybe_
| your manager can pull a punch or two if the product area is
| critical enough.
| water-your-self wrote:
| Try having a family as a sole earner on 200k in the bay area.
| Or new york.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Is this a joke? What is median _household_ income for
| families in both of these cities? Fairly sure it 's below
| 100k.
| burnoutgal wrote:
| But you need a house with a backyard, two teslas, a wine
| cellar and a college fund or you aren't really living /s
| aroman wrote:
| In San Francisco, the median household income was $120k.
| That's 2 years ago mind you, and a lot of inflation has
| occurred since then.
|
| https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycaliforni
| a
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The median household only has 2 people so presumably the
| median income for a family is higher.
| bradlys wrote:
| Doesn't account for the fact that many are under rent
| control, own houses from decades ago, etc.
|
| It's better to look at the average incomes of people who
| are _buying_ houses in SF.
| srean wrote:
| Do their budgets balance or do they take on credit card
| and other debt to manage the deficit ? I am not claiming
| its one way or the other as I do not know the answer.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I'm going to guess that software developers, especially
| ones at FAANG, aren't aiming for a median household
| lifestyle. 200k post tax is easily ~140k a year. A san
| francisco mortgage is easily 4-5k a month for 30 years. And
| if their kids don't get lucky on the school lottery,
| they're going to be sending them to private school. And
| then there's college savings to account for.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > What is median household income for families in both of
| these cities?
|
| What is the median credit card debt for them in these
| cities?
|
| What is the median annual savings for them in these cities?
| es7 wrote:
| When I was at Google this was a huge problem.
|
| I worked on features/products that could be built and supported
| by small teams. Once those projects were 'done', those same teams
| inevitably turned to unnecessary rewrites, expansions and
| redesigns. And they all got promoted for it. For turning a
| 5-person project into a 25 person project that did the same
| thing, but with more moving pieces.
|
| Because you can't usually reach L6 by maintaining a project, no
| matter how impactful.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The first thing that comes to mind reading this is that
| 'corporate ladder' is the wrong visual concept. Corporate
| hierarchies are trees with root at the top. The problem is then
| comparable to the academic world, where each PI will have a
| series of PhD students who themselves want to become PIs, but the
| PI replacement rate is too low to accomodate this. Unless the
| global academic world is expanding, inevitably the majority of
| PhDs will not become PIs.
|
| One general solution is to flatten the hierarchy, which
| ultimately would reduce the spread in compensation and rewards
| from the bottom layer to the top layer. This would make promotion
| somewhat less attractive particularly if it came with heavier
| administrative responsibilities (generally less fun and more
| hassle).
| jeffbee wrote:
| There sure is a thriving subculture of telling people how to not
| repeat the "mistakes" of an 1800-billion-dollar organization.
| sytelus wrote:
| I wonder if any company has successfully eliminated promo-
| culture. One possible option (in tech context) is to have same
| base for everyone (like Amazon used to have) with a $0 to
| $1billion stock range for everyone. Then you select actual stock
| amount in proportion to increased customer satisfaction, product
| impact and adoption. No promos ever. All the mess of titles
| "Staff", "Principal" etc are gone too. No one talks down to
| anyone exercising their titles.
|
| What would be problem with such a system?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| A lot of work is hard to evaluate in terms of those metrics.
| Especially comparing people across different areas of the
| stack.
|
| Also it encourages a cutthroat competitive culture of stealing
| credit. At least with levels higher level people don't need to
| steal credit from lower level people and aren't directly
| evaluated against them.
| kodah wrote:
| There's just a lack of ability to own a product as an engineer.
| Those things are delegated to managers and product owners; lead
| engineers are really just there to align work - not really to
| make broad vision beyond suggestions.
|
| If engineering firms wanted to improve they'd ensure that
| everyone who has decision making power over a product, whether
| from a business or technical perspective, is at the same level
| and has the same input. That way refactor is weighed the same as
| a new feature or service.
| xoofoog wrote:
| Former Googler here. This person has correctly identified that a
| key reason why google sucks is that people very often...
|
| > choose between doing what's best for users or what's best for
| their career
|
| But the root cause isn't that people want to get promoted. It's
| that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very
| simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving
| hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.
|
| Imagine if people did get promoted for fixing bugs instead of
| building a new product (to be abandoned)! Or if maintaining an
| existing system was somehow on par with building a new system
| (which is just a bigger more complicated version of something
| perfectly good). The googler would say "well those useful
| problems are too easy to merit a promotion. Anybody can solve
| easy problems - we're google, and we're too smart to work on
| those easy problems." Grow up.
|
| Y'all value the wrong things. That's why your culture is broken.
| usrn wrote:
| It's much more boring and you don't hear much about it but it's
| ultimately more pleasant to run things this way.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> But the root cause isn't that people want to get promoted.
| It's that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put
| very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for
| "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.
|
| Not saying this is the best thing, but it can get much, much
| worse at other places. I started my career at Accenture (then,
| Andersen Consulting). People go promoted for either sales
| (SrManagers or higher) or controlling issues (Managers and
| below.) Note, the aim was to _control issues_ (documenting,
| writing up mitigation plans, briefing clients, deploying fixes,
| etc.) -- _THE AIM WAS NOT TO PREVENT ISSUES_. So code quality
| didnt get you promoted.
|
| Several years in, a group of individuals passed up for
| promotion realized this all-together and literally started
| turning a blind eye to minor bugs, which eventually passed into
| PROD. Then they would solve them (which is what Management
| wanted.) Shockingly they got kudos for controlling issues. Many
| got promoted.
|
| Set the wrong incentives, get the wrong behaviors.
| lisper wrote:
| Another former Googler here (from waaaaaaayyyy back -- I was
| employee #104).
|
| The reason Google is the way it is, and many organizations are
| the way they are, is that they are trying to reproduce the
| circumstances that led to their initial success. Google
| initially succeeded by solving what was at the time a Really
| Hard Problem, and so the people at the top want to reproduce
| that by encouraging people to solve more Really Hard Problems.
| Apple has fallen into the exact same trap. Their initial
| success came from building a Cool New Thing, and so they are
| constantly trying to build the next Cool New Thing. The problem
| is that at some point the product has actually converged to a
| local design maximum and so making further changes to it in
| order to produce something New and Cool is not actually an
| improvement.
|
| But it doesn't work because it's sn inductive fallacy. Just
| because solving a Really Hard Problem or making a Cool New
| Thing led to success once does not mean that doing these things
| will lead to success in general. But the memory of that initial
| success is really hard to get past, especially when it was as
| earth-shattering as the initial Google search engine, or the
| Mac or the iPhone.
|
| (Apple has actually done better than most companies at
| reproducing their initial success. They've done it at least
| five times, with the Apple II, the Mac, OSX, the iPod and the
| iPhone. But then there is the touch bar, the butterfly
| keyboard, the flat look...)
| brokencode wrote:
| I think Apple has done a fantastic job of incremental
| improvements on their products rather than chasing the next
| cool thing. Can you name a company that has actually been
| doing this better?
|
| For instance, they often resist new technologies like high
| refresh rate or OLED screens, 5G, etc., until they feel the
| technology is developed sufficiently and won't impact battery
| life. There are other brands that compete by making a list of
| features rather than a coherent product.
|
| Of the examples you named, both the Touch Bar and the
| butterfly keyboard are gone now, and the latest Macs are the
| best Macs ever. That shows a willingness to try new things,
| while also showing that they have good judgement in the long
| term and a willingness to move away from what doesn't work.
|
| Also, the iPad and Apple Watch haven't been as important to
| Apple as the iPhone, but they are still original and
| category-defining products that I would call innovative. Not
| every new product needs to double your company's market cap
| to be a big success in the category.
| lumost wrote:
| I haven't worked at apple, but I suspect that this is the
| result of only having <20 core products (including services
| such as the app store). This generally implies that there
| are a very small number of internal employees who built
| those core products, and in most organizations this leads
| to a resistance to change.
|
| Some companies like to spam new products, others like to
| perfect what they have.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Apple spent ~22B in R&D in 2021, but they definitely have
| large-scale decision makers expecting near-perfection on
| anything considered for released, probably before they
| even push it to DVT.
| dekhn wrote:
| R&D spending at FAAMG includes all software development
| work, regardless of whether it's research.
| lumost wrote:
| Resistance to change has an odd correlation with R&D
| spending. A company that refuses to change their products
| may spend _more_ on R &D than one changing products all
| the time, as the cost of each change is much higher.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're saying it's a bad thing that they
| have <20 core products? I've always considered that a
| strength and a remarkable show of discipline, especially
| when they're willing to kill perfectly good products in
| order to create imperfectly great ones.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| I can't really think of anyone who has done it well but I
| don't think Apple has either. They have released plenty of
| half baked products. The original apple watch is a good
| example, it was retroactively made the Gen0 and quickly
| killed. They had similar problem with the first Intel macs
| too and the original M1s weren't 100% either. I think
| sometimes they over estimate how ready a product is. The
| iPhone was amazing at launch but in retrospect it was
| missing almost everything.
| guelo wrote:
| > 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.
| jfk13 wrote:
| I realise it's uncool to say so, but I quite like the
| Touch Bar on my MBPro.
| macintux wrote:
| I find it valuable on occasion; I certainly understand
| why they were reluctant to give it up, but they should
| have either pushed harder for its success or given up
| sooner.
| lisper wrote:
| > Can you name a company that has actually been doing this
| better?
|
| No. But that doesn't mean that Apple hasn't fallen prey to
| this phenomenon. It just means that they set the bar
| incredibly high to begin with.
|
| My first Apple was an Apple II, and I have never been
| without an Apple product since then. I currently own three
| Apple phones and eight Apple laptops. But for me the
| overall usability and quality of Apple products has been in
| decline over the last decade or so. I still run Mavericks
| on many of my machines because it was the last version of
| MacOS that Just Worked.
| majormajor wrote:
| The MacBook design has only changed step-by-step in small
| increments since the 2003 aluminum Powerbooks. The iPhone
| has pretty similarly used just a couple of basic designs
| since 2013.
|
| So I'd definitely say Apple is best in class at
| incremental changes with the exception of the
| touchbar/butterfly MBPs. I'd just disagree with you over
| the quality: my M1 MBP is a big improvement over even the
| pre-touchbar ones in basically every way.
| lisper wrote:
| I'll see your M1 and raise you a trash-can Mac Pro, and
| the fact that anything other than a Mac Pro can't be
| upgraded.
|
| But it's actually more about the software than the
| hardware. Once upon a time Macs were the computer that
| Just Worked. But recent devices, including phones,
| tablets, and laptops, have major usability issues. It's
| more about the software than the hardware, but with Apple
| you literally cannot separate the two.
|
| Here are some war stories.
|
| I bought a brand new M1 MBA. I installed XCode. The
| install process produced a tiny little progress bar that
| required a microscope to see. It got very near the end
| and then got stuck for several hours just short of being
| done. There was absolutely no indication whether the
| process was actually hung and no apparent way to inquire.
| So I tried starting XCode and it worked. I assumed that
| all was in order and the progress bar just hadn't gotten
| updated.
|
| Then I updated the OS, which required a restart. But when
| I tried to restart I got a modal dialog saying that I
| could not shut the machine down because XCode was still
| in the process of being installed, and shutting down now
| could "damage my machine". Worse, the button to dismiss
| this dialog was inactive. There was no way to get rid of
| it. I ended up having to do a hard reset.
|
| And this is just one of many, many similar experiences.
| I've tried transferring data from one iPad to another,
| waited many hours, only to have the process fail. I've
| tried importing old iPhoto libraries to Photos, waited
| many hours, only to have the process fail. When these
| failures happen there is no indication of what went wrong
| or what I might be able to do about it. Just, "Sorry, an
| unexpected error occurred".
|
| I also really despise the new UI look and feel. Once upon
| a time it was easy to tell what was clickable and what
| was editable and what was static because all of these
| elements had different standardized looks. Now everything
| looks the same. Many UI elements are hidden until you
| hover over them. Apple devices have become the exact
| opposite of the easy-to-use discoverable devices they
| started out as. Using an Apple device today feels more
| like an old-style adventure game, complete with grues
| that randomly jump out and kill you for no apparent
| reason.
|
| But other than that, yeah, Apple devices are great.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| Apart from the look and feel, there are severe
| regressions with the operating system in a lot of places
| - external non-Apple hardware that would just work just
| fine on the existing OS stops working with a new OS
| version, etc. The quality of their OS has gone steadily
| downhill over the last few years.
|
| At this point I would never do a macOS update unless I'm
| forced to do so for security purposes. I can't even begin
| to fathom why anyone installs the beta and does free QA
| for Apple.
|
| I get the impression everyone at Cupertino works with
| only Apple Cinema displays and a lifetime supply of
| insanely priced Apple hardware; and no one bothers to
| test out compatibility with third-party devices at all.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I somewhat disagree?
|
| To be honest, the current UI look-and-feel hasn't
| bothered me at all. I can't recall ever being confused by
| it (with one exception: iPad multitasking). Perhaps I've
| simply internalized it to such a degree that I accept it,
| warts and all, without thinking about it critically. But
| it's difficult for me to be too upset by a UI that really
| has "just worked" for me.
|
| As long as my customized keyboard shortcuts still work,
| I'll be happy, I guess.
|
| I also haven't experienced the software stability issues
| that you point out, though I have no doubt this is
| because I rarely do things like transfer data from one
| device to another (though when I _have_ done so it 's
| worked well enough). YMM(and does)V.
|
| > I'll see your M1 and raise you a trash-can Mac Pro, and
| the fact that anything other than a Mac Pro can't be
| upgraded.
|
| The trash can Mac Pro was a mistake, though at least it's
| one they eventually remedied. Their recent lineup has
| been almost universally praised, except for cost and (as
| you point out) upgradeability. I'm not too bent out of
| shape about upgradeability because I've never tried to
| upgrade a laptop, but I see the annoyance.
| lisper wrote:
| I think this is a topic about which people can reasonably
| disagree :-)
|
| I'll just add that my complaint about inability to
| upgrade does not just apply to laptops. It's the whole
| product line (other than the Pro) including the Mini and
| the iMac. If I have an iMac and I need more RAM, I have
| to throw out a perfectly good SSD, processor, _and
| display_. There is just no excuse for that. I have a NUC
| that is essentially a hardware equivalent of a (pre-M1)
| Mini. The NUC is both smaller than a Mini and upgradable
| so I know it 's possible.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| You are correct to say there is no excuse for the lack of
| upgradability, but not for the reasons you believe.
|
| There is no excuse because "excuses" are not germane to
| making trade offs. Apple chose to not make devices easily
| upgradable because it enabled them to be amazing in other
| dimensions (sturdiness, manufacturing efficiency, design,
| aesthetics, plus most users don't give a flying fuck
| about upgrading)
|
| Why would you need an excuse for defining your own
| products your way?
| lisper wrote:
| But this is exactly my point. Apple is optimizing the
| wrong things (for me) because it's trying to build Cool
| New Things rather than things that are actually useful.
| My NUC looks perfectly fine, and it sits under my desk so
| no one ever sees it anyway. It is superior to a Mac Mini
| in every conceivable way. It's smaller and it costs less
| for the same tech specs. The _only_ thing that a NUC
| doesn 't do that a Mini does is run MacOS legally.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| > It is superior to a Mac Mini in every conceivable way
|
| Based on the dimensions you feel are important and are
| visible to you. That is only one perspective on the
| elephant.
|
| If you built that machine, and you made decisions that
| were not necessary tradeoffs AND these decisions went
| against your values, you would need an excuse. Apple is
| not you, and they do not need any excuses - they have a
| different set of values and built to those values.
|
| Those values are what the market, aka other people, care
| about.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| But you don't have to throw those things away. Just sell
| it, for a decent percent of what you bought it for -
| because they have good resale value - and buy one with
| more RAM.
| lisper wrote:
| Then I have to transfer all my data. That's time
| consuming even when it goes well, and not once has that
| process ever gone flawlessly for me. Something always
| gets lost. Passwords. License keys. Settings. It has been
| a colossal PITA every single time.
| [deleted]
| nunez wrote:
| seven times if you include AirPods and the Apple Watch
| LegitShady wrote:
| google should work on some really hard problems they've
| ignored - customer service, privacy, etc.
|
| It's why the only business I do with google now is in places
| where they essentially don't have competition, and only when
| I absolutely have to.
| apozem wrote:
| That makes sense. Googlers keep dumping out technically
| interesting products with no go-to-market strategy because
| one time doing that, they made a perpetual money machine
| (search ads). The problem is it's 20 years later, technology
| has changed and not all markets are like search.
|
| Throwing something out there is fine when it's a magic
| website that answers your questions. When it's, say, a half-
| baked messaging app none of your friends use, not so much.
| bern4444 wrote:
| I think Apple continues to innovate in new product
| categories.
|
| Apple Watch
|
| AirPods
|
| M1 Chip
|
| Services (Apple TV+, Apple Pay, Music, Fitness, iCloud etc).
|
| I include iCloud for services likeHide My Email and Private
| Relay.
|
| They do this all while maintaining a consistent release cycle
| of upgraded versions of their hardware (new iphones, macs
| etc).
|
| Also, everything in the list above has been developed under
| Tim Cook which is also impressive. He's been able to maintain
| Apple's ability to expand into new products and services.
| jldugger wrote:
| You realize that's his point right? Each of those is trying
| to be the Cool New Thing, and part of what distracts the
| company while it ships butterfly keyboards, touchbars
| without escape keys, AntennaGate, whatever plagued HomePod
| so much they quietly discontinued it. Polish and Attention
| To Detail is outsourced to execs, who are increasingly
| spread thin.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| AirPods in their first year shipped more bluetooth
| headsets than the all bluetooth headsets from all other
| manufacturers combined ever (or something insane like
| that). AirPods by itself is a Fortune 500 company. Apple
| Watch is a Fortune 100. AirTags is a 1B revenue business.
|
| Their scale is so immense that "flops" means "not a
| breakout success that resulted in a massive instantaneous
| increase to their bottom line". It also means the
| pressure is on them to have everything right (from the HW
| side) from the initial launch in terms of volume, build
| quality, reliability, & value add or they will have a
| meaningful setback to an expensive proposition (no room
| for exploring with smaller-scale things which is where
| competitors should start - Oura for example).
| bern4444 wrote:
| But it hasn't distracted the company. Each of those
| things I listed are massive successes in their own right.
|
| Not everything Apple does is a success, but they have
| gotten it more right far more often than wrong. The M1
| chip affects also their entire existing computer line.
| AirPods work beautifully across iphones, macs, and ipads.
| Apple watch integrates flawlessly with my iphone (answer
| calls, play pause etc). These are accessory products that
| reinforce the main ones which they continue to upgrade
| beautifully every year.
|
| They are able to balance both (Cool New Thing and upgrade
| cycles) and through it all, keep their product list to a
| relatively small number of items/skus. Compared to google
| who offers so many additional services and applications.
| gowld wrote:
| > ships butterfly keyboards
|
| a Cool New Thing
|
| > touchbars without escape keys,
|
| a Cool New Thing
|
| > HomePod
|
| a Cool New Thing
|
| Cool New Thing was not distracting from these things.
|
| > Polish and Attention To Detail
|
| gets harped on at Apple because they are so much better
| than everything else (and charge $$$ for it), that
| customers and opponents don't tolerate mistakes. Maybe
| being perfect is actually, really too hard to reach?
| loudthing wrote:
| ... the Lisa, the Apple III, firewire, calling wifi "Airport"
| for way too long, that home speaker boombox thing, the weird
| round mouse that came with the iMac, ...
|
| But seriously, I remember reading on here a comment from a
| previous Apple employee that all of their products are
| designed with the primary goal of looking good in a keynote
| presentation, which makes sense for their image, but results
| in underdeveloped products that "disappear" after a few
| years.
| somethoughts wrote:
| At least in my own small company - I'm hoping to promote the
| concept of the T shaped technical leader ladder.
|
| You're rewarded/measured on two metrics - breadth and depth
|
| - a depth metric - leadership in your own specific project team
| where you add features.
|
| - a breadth metric - you've demonstrably shown that you've
| gotten other teams outside your own to contribute to your
| project effectively. Additionally and perhaps more importantly
| you must show that you can act in a supporting role on multiple
| other projects outside your own core project. Supporting other
| projects outside your core project include signing up for
| triage support, updating documentation, improving testing, etc.
| without frustrating the primary maintainers.
|
| IMHO - focusing on depth as the only way to technical career
| progression leads to feature creep, ball of mud codebases with
| high barriers to entry and silo thinking.
|
| Would be curious if/why this is controversial.
| sytelus wrote:
| You should reward only based on customer satiesfaction and
| adoption.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Agree - one feature that is missed w.r.t. long term
| customer satisfaction and adoption is long term support for
| previously delivered features. This is exacerbated when
| product managers/SW teams are mostly measured on new
| feature delivery metrics.
|
| The full feature lifecycle and reducing bus-factor across
| the entire existing product feature set is rarely
| considered as its not generally captured in OKR metrics.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I think both are important but it's not necessary for any one
| person to excel at both. Some will naturally be better at
| depth and others at breadth. As long as you acknowledge both
| types of contributions I think it will work out well.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Good point! I think you're right.
|
| So currently there are two narrowly defined options for
| career progression:
|
| * technical leadership on core project/domain
|
| * engineering management
|
| Perhaps instead of eliminating the depth option for the
| technical track and making the T shaped depth/breath
| mandatory, just make it an additional option to provide an
| additional track for people to take for career progression.
|
| * deep technical leadership on core project/domain
|
| * broad-based technical leadership on core project/domain
| and supporting role on multiple projects
|
| * engineering management
| mathattack wrote:
| What's more import for Senior leaders to do - solve hard
| problems or useful ones? If it's the former they're doing the
| right thing. If it's the latter that explains a lot of their
| deprecation issues.
| bigcat123 wrote:
| mochomocha wrote:
| A friend of mine didn't get a promotion at Google because he
| was told that though his work generated >1B of revenues for the
| company, it was not "hard enough". He left the company.
| xoofoog wrote:
| This also contributes to a culture of toxic masculinity at
| Google. Proving you're smart by solving hard problems is a
| gorilla-chest-thumping exercise. It's not enough to build
| things. You need to be better than those around you. But you
| have to be "googley" which means using logic and data to put
| down your coworkers and show why you're right and they're
| wrong.
| es7 wrote:
| Ex-Googler here. The comment above is wrong and sexist.
|
| Googleyness was always about bringing up the people around
| you and elevating your team's potential, something that
| both women and men can excel at.
|
| I have a lot of complaints about Google's perf process, but
| I never saw toxic masculinity, competitiveness or putting
| down co-workers. On the teams I was part of, if any of that
| happened it would have been dealt with harshly and stopped
| immediately.
| osipov wrote:
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >a culture of toxic masculinity
|
| Hyper competitiveness. There is nothing "male" in nature
| about pushing people to compete in a giant free for all.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Even every non physical competitive sport in the world is
| male dominated to an absurd degree. Chess, esports,
| poker, you name it. Hyper competitive environments are
| associated with masculinity for valid reasons.
| mcguire wrote:
| On the other hand, having spent many years at IBM, the
| Loudest Person In The Room is rarely a woman. And, having
| been part of a fair number of woman-led organizations,
| including those that were straight up empire building,
| hyper-competitiveness tends not to be a problem; they
| have other pathologies.
| uoaei wrote:
| But there is a masculine (in the sense of gender roles
| that a person assumes for themselves) way to do it, and
| that is what is typically expressed in these settings.
| And it is typically more harmful for more people on
| average than the feminine expressions of same.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Tell me, what do you consider "toxic masculinity"? You're
| not really presenting a frame for us to discuss this in.
|
| >And it is typically more harmful for more people on
| average than the feminine expressions of same.
|
| Yeah, no. This is borderline sexist. It's one thing to
| argue "the workplace only allows masculinity in its toxic
| form". It's another entirely to go "feminine better".
| dudeman13 wrote:
| >typically more harmful for more people on average than
| the feminine expressions of same
|
| The equivalent feminine expression of the same kind of
| dominance is a reputation war.
|
| Reputation wars can _destroy_ lives and relationships. If
| I have to choose one, I for one much prefer to deal with
| people winning at how awesome they are (and how lame I
| am) than a reputation war.
|
| Civilized places have cracked down on violence, so male
| dominance contests almost never end up with a face
| punched anymore. Toning down the violence made them much
| safer.
|
| Female dominance contests are still as deadly as they
| have always been.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Not in nature, no. But in socialization and culturally
| trained roles, yes.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Not google, but I was once given feedback that I wasn't
| promoted to a management position at a company because I
| was seen as being too "nice". This was despite 4 years of
| being a manager at past companies and being perfectly able
| to solve problems w/o pounding on the table and twisting
| arms. I left that company soon after. But I see that as an
| symptom of toxic competitiveness culture too.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I understand doing it accidentally or as a side-effect of
| hard-to-fix dysfunction, but it boggles my mind that they
| were fully explicit and self-aware and intentional about
| creating a process where you couldn't succeed without
| being an asshole. What a terrible place!
| klipt wrote:
| Seems pretty sexist to associate solving hard problems with
| masculinity. Women at Google also work on hard problems.
| delecti wrote:
| Solving hard problems isn't an inherently masculine
| thing, but basing a work culture's progression around
| being able to prove employees solved hard problems is a
| pretty good example of toxic masculinity. And the phrase
| "toxic masculinity" does not mean that all masculinity
| has problems, it's a separate (and pretty well-
| documented) concept.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity
| cvhashim wrote:
| Should have just said toxic humanistic traits
| ctvo wrote:
| Toxic masculinity accurately represents what the OP
| describes and is clear here. There's nothing to be
| offended about. It's revealing the angst that sprang up
| from this community of mostly men.
| lliamander wrote:
| Classic Bulverism on display. Don't defend your position,
| just assume you're right and offer an armchair pyscho-
| analysis for why people who disagree with you are wrong.
| ctvo wrote:
| Here's some more Bulverism: What's there to defend?
| Colloquially toxic masculinity means exactly what the OP
| was going for. It's to jockey for power, position, and
| status at the expense of others (and often detrimental to
| their own goals). Hey! Women sometimes also display these
| toxic masculine traits commonly found in male primates!
| You should be more inclusive and call it toxic humanity!
| has to be one of the least useful things you can bring to
| the overall discussion.
| lliamander wrote:
| I suspect, though I cannot prove, than than many of those
| comments are made at least somewhat ironically.
|
| We've been perpetually informed than men and women are
| the same from the neck up for decades, and a Google
| employee (James Damore) was even fired for pointing out
| that men and women differ in their preferences,
| attitudes, and social behaviors.
|
| That it is now OK to acknowledge those differences when
| it makes men look bad is quite the standard to set.
|
| I mean, which is it? Are men and women the same or are
| they different (on average)?
| lliamander wrote:
| Also, that is not what toxic masculinity means. If you
| have an all-woman organization that has a culture
| dominated by counter-productive competition, you don't
| call that "toxic masculinity". That just wouldn't make
| sense.
|
| At best, the competition is a symptom of the real
| (alleged) problem of toxic masculinity: too many men.
| Specifically an environment where men are systematically
| favored over women for sexist reasons.
|
| That Google is suffering under such a system _is_ a claim
| which needs defending.
| tonguez wrote:
| "Toxic masculinity accurately represents what the OP
| describes and is clear here."
|
| no
| bregma wrote:
| Should just have said toxic traits. Leave out the
| unnecessary elaboration because it contributes nothing
| and can detract from the point.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Assuming the worst possible interpretation of someone's
| comment is also toxic.
| xoofoog wrote:
| The sexist part is not the "hard problems" but the
| competitiveness. I don't think sexism is intrinsic to
| solving hard problems - certainly gender-inclusive
| companies work on hard problems successfully. But in my
| experience those companies tend to be more collaborative.
|
| Google needs to celebrate heroes. Like Jeff Dean. Or
| Sanjay Ghemawat. Those are Great Men. They are "Living
| Gods" because they solved Really Hard Problems. Getting
| into that class of people requires being a "lead" which
| necessarily means other people around you aren't leading.
| So you need to prove why you're worthy of being the
| "lead" which means proving the others around you aren't.
| This is toxic masculinity. Not solving hard problems.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| The whole usage of the phrase "Toxic masculinity" to
| describe "Competitiveness" is some throughly pointless
| gendering which only serves to confuse matters.
| [deleted]
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| People who joined early on will always have much much
| more opportunity to become heroes.
| sytelus wrote:
| Proving that you can lead _does not_ neccesarily mean
| that you must prove others cannot lead. This is the
| fundamental problem in your thinking when you make such
| generic and universal claims. If people are doing this
| (and I do believe it happens a lot), then it is certainly
| very toxic culture but calling it "toxic masculinity" is
| forcing the issues into your own sexist ideologies. Also,
| competitiveness is not by default "masculine". You are
| doing massive disservice to many brilliant competative
| and successful women by making such blanket claims. When
| resources are finite, competition are natural regardless
| of sex. For example, we all need to demonstrate good
| grades out of school to get in to programs with very
| limited seats. Being able to compete is neither exclusive
| or inherent male characteristic.
| usrn wrote:
| Women demand men that are better than their peers while
| men only demand women who are good on their own. The
| evolutionary pressure produces men who are competitive in
| this toxic way.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| This is pure evopsych fantasy land. Women do not, as a
| rule, demand men "better than their peers". We would see
| more little old ladies out there who held out for above
| average, never got it, and chose instead to remain
| single.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >We would see more little old ladies out there who held
| out for above average
|
| How in the world can you come to this conclusion when
| society hasn't been in the situation where old ladies as
| a whole were in a position to be close to equal
| financially compared to their male peers in at least the
| last century? If anything, you have to wait a few more
| decades to come to this conclusion _at minimum_.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| 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
| socioeconomic status matches that of women overall,
| whereas married 40-something men have higher SES than
| would be expected. Should be easy enough to test with
| publicly available data.
| usrn wrote:
| Every bit of both historical and contemporary data we
| have contradicts what you and GP say.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Great. Where can I find this data?
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >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 majority would've found their
| "better off financially" peer. Things only caught up in
| the last few decades or so. All those younger generation
| women still need to age into old ladies in the first
| place.
|
| >Is there even any evidence that modern women are more
| "choosy" than men?
|
| Financially? Yes. While I don't fully subscribe to the
| idea of "equal or better than", 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, to the point
| men can use their money to compensate for deficiencies
| elsewhere[0]. That alone would explain why women haven't
| been nearly as competitive in the workplace as men: men
| have a far bigger incentive to do so on top of all the
| other incentives both experience.
|
| [0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pi
| i/S10905...
| tfp137 wrote:
| Whether or not it's "toxic masculinity", the internal
| lingo around performance reviews at Google is lulzy.
|
| It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad,
| you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers
| frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room"
| although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a
| dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets
| Expectation) during the calibration process is called a
| "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that
| joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does
| Exec want us to have this cycle?"
|
| It's offensive and backward, but it's also hilarious that
| grown men (and women, if they ever get let in to
| executive circles) are using language that sounds like it
| was invented by teenagers.
| vkou wrote:
| > It's called "perfing" (as in, if you do something bad,
| you might get "perfed hard" next cycle) and managers
| frequently threaten to take people "into the Perf Room"
| although it's just an expression (there isn't actually a
| dedicated "Perf Room"). Anyone who gets below 3.0 (Meets
| Expectation) during the calibration process is called a
| "PB" It used to be "pillow biter" but you can't make that
| joke anymore so it's just "PB", as in "How many PBs does
| Exec want us to have this cycle?"
|
| 1. You must be in an incredibly toxic enclave if managers
| in your org are routinely threatening people that way.
| It's certainly possible, it's a big company, there's been
| a number of shitty directors/execs that have made the
| news. But given points #2 and #3, I have reservations
| about believing generalizations about this _particular_
| claim.
|
| 2. ME is not a '3.0' (Unless you're measuring on a
| 12-point scale, that starts at 0.) There are three
| ratings above, and only one rating below ME - Needs
| Improvement. Which is a pretty serious wake-up call for
| the person and their manager.
|
| 3. Very few people get NI, you seem to be confusing
| Google with either old Microsoft, or Amazon, whose bell
| curves, as I understand, require(d) ~1/5th of the company
| to be on the shit list at any particular point in time.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| I'm don't see the connection between what you wrote and
| masculinity.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| This take strikes me as a weird form of reverse-sexism,
| in the sense of Kinsley's famous piece about reverse-
| snobbery (https://slate.com/news-and-
| politics/2001/03/bill-o-reilly-am...).
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It seems that you missed their point: the toxicity is
| non-gendered. (I say you missed their point but they also
| kinda did a poor job of making it, FWIW.) There might be
| a point that Google's culture in practice is male-
| dominant but I think it's mistaken thinking that puts the
| toxicity on the male-dominance.
|
| Consider your words as if they were being said about a
| woman:
|
| > Proving you're smart by solving hard problems is a
| gorilla-chest-thumping exercise.
|
| Isn't it still true?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It's hard to claim a phrase like "toxic masculinity" is
| non-gendered.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I'm claiming that toxicity is non-gendered.
| skrbjc wrote:
| Women aren't competitive???
| lliamander wrote:
| I agree that competitiveness is masculine[1], but it's
| not obvious to me that this is a case where it is toxic.
|
| It may be a more competitive or masculine environment
| than you would prefer, and that's fine. But what benefit
| do you think comes from labeling the perceived problems
| of Google's culture as "toxic masculinity"?
|
| [1]Yes women are also competitive, but most of the
| extremely competitive people are men.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Google has a very smart workforce but lacks wisdom and
| emotional intelligence.
| sytelus wrote:
| Since when solving "hard problems" became toxic
| masculinity? Are you saying Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace
| suffered from toxic masculinity?
|
| PS: I am not endorsing promo-culture where impact of
| users/revenue don't matter but I do believe solving hard
| problems should be rewarded (for example, Nobel Prize or
| Field Model) and making it "sexist" issue is unproductive .
| mcguire wrote:
| Seeing your comment, I'm reminded of the Far Side comic
| where the dog only understands her name in the owner's
| speech: "blah blah blah Ginger blah blah".
|
| " _Proving you 're smart by solving hard problems is a
| gorilla-chest-thumping exercise. It's not enough to build
| things. You need to be better than those around you. But
| you have to be "googley" which means using logic and data
| to put down your coworkers and show why you're right and
| they're wrong._"
| blobbers wrote:
| Is that really masculinity? When women do it are they being
| masculine? It sounds like you're replacing "being a
| narcissist" with "toxic masculinity".
| awsrocks wrote:
| cvhashim wrote:
| Erm that's not true at all.
| xoofoog wrote:
| 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 and HTML titles in picking good
| search results.
|
| But consensus means, in a literal sense, that everybody
| needs to agree on the right thing to do. Problem is in
| reality people don't always agree. So what happens when
| the group needs to reach consensus but people disagree?
| Since Google doesn't have a respectful way to disagree,
| the holders of divergent opinions must be minimized -
| either pushed out of the group or proven to be not smart
| enough for their opinions to be valid.
|
| God I hate myself while I'm writing this. I left for a
| reason.
| josephg wrote:
| > But consensus means, in a literal sense, that everybody
| needs to agree on the right thing to do.
|
| I want to push back on this. I think there is absolutely
| such a thing as "rough consensus" where everyone gets to
| air their concerns, but the group still makes a decision
| where not everyone gets their way. Rough consensus
| processes are much harder to do over a mailing list
| because there's no sense of what "the room" wants - since
| all the air gets taken up by the people who have the most
| time & are the most argumentative. It's much easier to
| achieve rough consensus in person - especially amongst
| groups who have good working relationships with each
| other.
|
| In many ways this is a product failure of mailing lists
| and the like. I'd love more answers in this space to
| allow us to make better collective decisions, remotely.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Holy shit. Sounds like my company.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Because everything bad ties back to the irredeemable evil
| of males of course.
| [deleted]
| zeruch wrote:
| When it is prevalent (including in the irony of
| subsequent commentary), it shouldn't be surprising to see
| it called out, hyperbole notwithstanding.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Oh the irony
| kmeisthax wrote:
| If the parent poster thought males were irredeemably
| evil, they wouldn't have used the adjective "toxic".
| onpensionsterm wrote:
| If it was about masculinity itself being irredeemable,
| the adjective wouldn't be there. Surely a website of
| programming enthusiasts can figure out parsing?
| uoaei wrote:
| When is this straw man argument going to die?
| josephg wrote:
| When people stop feeling attacked when they hear the term
| "toxic masculinity".
|
| So, probably never. It's a bit of a loaded term for lots
| of folks. I can understand why, even if that's not how
| it's often meant.
| onesafari wrote:
| The current model of NPCs have a limited dialogue tree.
| Saving CPU cycles by sticking to the script helps
| maximize their ESG score.
| SystemOut wrote:
| This was one of the primary reasons I left. I had a project
| that enabled more than 100M+ increased revenue globally and
| the sales teams it impacted loved my work. But it wasn't
| considered hard enough or technically challenging work by
| engineering leadership so I got CME. That was it for me.
| ScoobleDoodle wrote:
| What does CME stand for?
|
| Thank you for sharing your experience.
| murderfs wrote:
| Consistently Meets Expectations, one step up from "you
| are probably going to get fired" (needs improvement)
| summerlight wrote:
| > the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard
| problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.
|
| This is the real problem, but people typically underestimate
| difficulty of correctly identifying "useful" problems at scale.
| Fixing a bug is nice, but correctly prioritizing bugs worth
| fixing is harder than said because most cases relevant
| engineers have limited contexts on UX and PM also has limited
| contexts on its difficulty. I don't deny that big techs have a
| bias toward solving "interesting" problems, but in many cases
| seemingly simple bugs are not that really easy to solve while
| not making any dent on business.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _but in many cases seemingly simple bugs are not that
| really easy to solve while not making any dent on business_
|
| I work at a big tech company and see this all the time. Bugs
| that clearly exist and are impacting users, but they're hard
| to solve and have no or very little business impact. It
| doesn't really make sense to work on them, but it's kind of
| sad they just get left :/.
| autokad wrote:
| Tech Management wants to -not- promote people, so they try to
| make promotion difficult which inadvertently creates promotion
| driven culture.
|
| For instance, if they promoted people for working hard, then
| everyone would work hard and we (high level management at tech
| companies) cant just promote everyone. so they make it
| arbitrarily hard, such as at Google "only promote people who
| solve hard problems". I think most tech companies will have
| some flavor of that, like at Amazon "work on projects that have
| cross team company impact".
|
| Its all about trying to -not- promote people fokes, which
| ironically creates this promotion driven culture. After all, we
| are mostly college grads, and a lot of us are from the top
| schools (not even the majority, just a lot).
| titzer wrote:
| > Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people
| for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.
|
| It's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this
| refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is
| better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects,
| but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things
| that can be measured.
|
| I saw a lot of successful promo cases that were based on
| pushing metrics. That just rewards quantifiable things, and
| disadvantages unquantifiable things. Worse, it makes people
| introduce bullshit measures and game them. It's pretty much
| impossible to measure long term impact, but nevertheless,
| impact[1] was one of the main three drivers.
|
| [1] Leadership, difficulty, impact are the three main
| components of a succesful packet, especially at L6 and above.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _It 's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this
| refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is
| better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects,
| but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things
| that can be measured._
|
| Being "data focused" is probably a Good Thing in a very
| general sense, but there are real dangers that come with
| that. For example, there's a form of "data myopia" you can
| develop, which is best expressed by the old saw "data and
| optimization can help you get better at doing $SOMETHING, but
| don't tell you if you're doing the right $SOMETHING in the
| first place."
|
| _I saw a lot of successful promo cases that were based on
| pushing metrics. That just rewards quantifiable things, and
| disadvantages unquantifiable things. Worse, it makes people
| introduce bullshit measures and game them._
|
| And of course there's Goodhart's Law[1] which leads to
| situations where trying to be "data driven" actually makes
| things worse when people start trying to "game" the metrics.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| BurningFrog wrote:
| And this can and will go on until the $$ Billions from
| search/ads stop raining from the sky.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| So what happens when you promote someone for maintaining the
| same system for years? When do you _stop_ promoting them? There
| 's a person on my team who is happy to maintain what he works
| on. He has worked on fundamentally the same project for over a
| decade. He's a senior level engineer, and as far as I know
| doesn't have aspirations beyond that, which is perfectly fine.
| Assuming he keeps doing that work, and no more, does he get
| promoted again? Once? Twice? Does he become a principal
| engineer, for adequately maintaining his corner of the world?
|
| The person who is really good and really effective at fixing
| user issues, first of all can't scale past a certain point, but
| second of all, likely doesn't have the the experience to design
| and shepherd the data storage system that also manages
| permissions across nested groups efficiently (one of these is
| what we'd expect of a solid L4, the other is
| https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/).
|
| You're asking for title inflation. Is that really what you
| want? What you really want is a different role, "maintenance
| eng" who can get paid more for doing the same work they were
| doing yesterday, and who needs to reinterview for SWE roles,
| because its very quickly obvious that a principal maintenance
| eng and a principal eng do very different things!
| Zhenya wrote:
| Maybe instead of promoting, which is a stand in for $ and
| peer respect, you give those things, and/or provide a track
| which values being a domain expert+maintenance e.g. professor
| emeritus.
|
| Building half working shiny things is bad for the company,
| and erodes user trust.
| dudeman13 wrote:
| >You're asking for title inflation
|
| You're asking for feature bloat. If the only way of winning
| is getting new stuff done, new stuff will be done regardless
| of the benefit or cost to the company.
|
| That does sound like Google alright, though.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Yes, it is in fact the case that getting new stuff done is
| the only way to benefit the company. But new stuff !=
| feature bloat. There's lots of new stuff that can be
| totally invisible to end users, and is deeply valuable.
|
| Treading water should not get you promoted. That doesn't
| make sense.
| dudeman13 wrote:
| >it is in fact the case that getting new stuff done is
| the only way to benefit the company
|
| I spent a few weeks just refactoring 6k lines of code
| into +- 300 lines on my current job.
|
| If my company was run by you, the best course for _me_
| woould have been leaving that mess around. Which would
| have led to either the same refactoring under far more
| stressful time constraints, or even more shit code by
| applying a band-aid into the old code (this code makes us
| some serious money, and an unexpected third party change
| would have broken it in such a way that would be
| seriously hard to fix with the old code).
|
| Also, there are loads of features that were far easier to
| implement after the refactoring.
|
| Maintenance job isn't coasting around. It has a
| multiplicative effect on anyone who works in the system.
| It needs to be done, if you want the org to not slow down
| to a snail pace - and when someone leaves a mess, it
| isn't even neccessarily easier than pumping new features
| since you have to figure out all observable behaviours
| from messy stuff.
|
| If there's no incentive to getting your hands dirty, no
| one will want to get their hands dirty. People will fight
| to not do neccessary jobs if the only way of advancing
| their career is avoiding those jobs.
| jedberg wrote:
| You wouldn't promote them. But if they picked up a new system
| and started maintaining that one too, then they could get a
| promotion for expanding their scope and for getting more
| efficient at maintaining the old system.
|
| Or, if they are both adding new features and maintaining
| them, then that could merit a promotion too. They are still
| doing innovative work, and they are maintaining it and fixing
| it.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| At some companies, this is broadly what "SRE" vs "SWE" is
| meant to capture. But the issue is that roles aren't very
| fluid, plenty of times SWE ends up transitioning to a role
| more resembling an SRE after building a system and
| reorienting towards maintaining it.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| God I hope not, SRE isn't a maintenance engineering role!
|
| Improving the reliability of a system (SRE's ultimate
| responsibility) is deeply technically challenging work of
| its own, and one can encounter deeply challenging problems.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The problem is that people think "maintenance" is a bad
| word. A company like Google is seeing growth from
| external customers, churn from their internal systems as
| internal best practices change, and changing threat
| landscapes on the internet.
|
| "Maintenance" often is actual hard feature work. But when
| your org or company has a culture of thinking of
| maintenance as some low-level job, you get a culture like
| Google's.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| I don't disagree. I don't think maintenance is a bad
| word. But I do think that there is a point beyond which
| "maintenance" cannot grow. If you're maintaining a system
| there is a breadth of experience you cannot get. Being a
| senior engineer at Google is not easy. But my point is
| that sre is still fully capable of supporting L7 and L8
| ic swes, while "maintenance" isn't.
| sytelus wrote:
| If a person is locked up in one feature/one product and
| unwilling to learn new things for the years then I do not
| think that person should be promoted. You can certainly give
| merit increases to keep up with inflation but that's about
| that. Ultimately, we all responding to market value of a
| person. That value remains unchanged for someone not learning
| anything new for years after the earned experience saturates.
| In many professions like doctors or pilots, experience never
| saturates and continues to increase person's market value
| however in other like cashier or barista that's not the case.
| So this opinion is job-dependent.
| lordnacho wrote:
| But the person might have the knowledge to build on
| whatever the system is, without having the mandate to do
| so. He'd still be the best person to modify the system, but
| for whatever reason the business doesn't need the edits.
| Should you keep him happy just in case or let him find
| another job and take the option to upgrade with him?
| hintymad wrote:
| Isn't this problem shared by pretty much every large company?
| Why is Google particularly bad?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I think Google has this worse than most because it has a
| relatively selective hiring process, large headcount, and is
| a mature company. The ratio of talent per scope is high,
| which mean there are less real problems left to solve per
| engineer.
| oofbey wrote:
| Another example of this is their OKR system. If you meet all
| your quarterly goals at Google, that's not a success. In fact,
| you're frowned upon for not setting your goals high enough.
|
| Their whole management process encourages people to chase after
| impossible goals, and literally discourages people from getting
| things done.
| jedberg wrote:
| Yeah from what I've heard you ideally want to hit 70-80% of
| your OKRs, and people game it to make sure they fail at one
| or two so they don't get accused of being "too easy".
| tuckerman wrote:
| I've never seen or even heard of anyone throwing their OKRs
| to avoid the appearance that they were too easy. In fact,
| you rarely hear about another team's grading of OKRs at
| all. Plenty of teams inside Google also set OKRs
| expecting/hoping to hit 1.0 so it wouldn't be at all
| surprising to see lots of 1's/near 1's on teams.
| benlivengood wrote:
| My team (under ads SRE umbrella) usually did aim for ~0.8
| with a 1.0 stretch goal of some sort. It was a fairly
| reasonable calibration to make sure we were scoping and
| planning OKRs accurately.
|
| If every OKR got 1.0 it meant we could comfortably take
| on more work next half, below 0.8 and we would plan to do
| a little less next half.
|
| In theory it would have been fine to score OKRs above 1.0
| for stretch goals for the same effect, but the software
| didn't work that way.
| jedberg wrote:
| Well this was told to me by xooglers who were now working
| for other companies, so either they were the ones doing
| it and that's why they left, or they made it up to make
| Google sound worse. So I guess take it with a grain of
| salt?
| vrc wrote:
| 12 years ago OKRs were huge. And yes, you graded them,
| managers and other teams viewed them, and you aimed for
| 0.7. Recently, it was a lot more lax. Many teams didn't
| do them, drifted away from them, or didn't bother grading
| them
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Here here! We don't have to believe everything internet
| strangers say. The presupposition that an unvetted
| internet comment will somehow become "vetted" by the
| probing of _another_ internet stranger doesn't make any
| sense.
| dekhn wrote:
| One of the most hilarious things I've ever seen was the
| head of Google Plus loudly sharing his "1.0 OKR" regarding
| social adoption at TGIF. It was about that time folks got
| suspicious and some long-termers found out Vic was lying
| about adoption rates.
| [deleted]
| xmprt wrote:
| Missing OKRs always seemed a little weird to me. It strikes
| me as a lack of vision and makes the numbers and goals chosen
| seem very arbitrary.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Missing OKRs means that the team cannot set achievable
| goals. It is a signal that the team has terrible foresight.
|
| I know the argument is that by being more ambitious and
| achieving 70%, you are setting ambitious goals. But then
| the goals are never met. The work doesn't finish. The
| projects falter. The users are unhappy. Engineers leave.
| xmprt wrote:
| In my experience, people make 10 goals during planning
| and then later decide on the 7 that they're going to hit.
| I wouldn't mind if the goals were ambitious but efforts
| were made to achieve 70% of them. However, in practice it
| seems like there's no vision during planning and instead
| they change course midway through the half. What's the
| point of planning if you can't stick to the plan.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Had to look it up. Objectives and key results (OKR,
| alternatively OKRs). More at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR.
|
| Hmm. If you are supposed to not meet all your OKRs, then that
| guarantees you will have a record of unmeet OKRs, which can
| be used as ammunition to deny promotion or even fire someone.
|
| So that encourages a sort of favoritism, where the people you
| want to promote anyway have their missed OKRs overlooked,
| while the rest of the pack aren't meeting their OKRs.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Never worked at Google but I have seen exactly this
| happening at other OKR-based companies. Ultimately whether
| missing your OKRs is framed as valiant struggle or
| disappointing failure does absolutely depend on external
| perception.
| svachalek wrote:
| Yup. I left a decade ago with this exact thought. There are
| people there who lift mountains to create real working systems,
| but you're actively discouraged from doing that if you want any
| sort of career there. And spending two weeks a year on
| performance reviews just serves as a constant reminder of those
| values.
|
| It's easily visible from the outside too. The constant stream
| of one half-baked video chat solution or social network
| replacing the last one, without any sense of progress or
| continuity, why would a company do that? Easy, no one gets
| promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken
| thing? That's vision.
| esprehn wrote:
| > why would a company do that?
|
| Or maybe it's because the company is always looking for the
| runaway 10X success story (like search, ads, etc).
| Incremental growth doesn't make a dent in the balance sheet.
| So they're always shutting down the products that didn't
| explode into a success and starting new ones to roll the
| dice.
| dogleash wrote:
| I don't think you're disagreeing with the parent poster,
| you just re-framed it terms that gloss over the downsides.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I work in academic libraries. At the point Google Books and
| Google Scholar (two things that were relevant to my work)
| were being developed or very new, maybe 10 years ago now, I
| could _actually talk to Google engineers_ about questions on
| how I could /should best integrate on my end, or problems or
| bugs (I did find some, that the google contacts agreed were).
| (It's true that cooperation from libraries/academic sector
| was something Google needed to succeed there too, to some
| extent).
|
| Two years later... forget it. There was no way to get
| anyone's attention or a response about anything. This
| includes actual bugs and problems.
|
| It was pretty clear to me then that there was nobody driving
| the bus on these projects anymore. There had been excited
| invested smart people around for the development, but once
| the thing seemed stable... there didn't seem to be anyone
| around at all anymore? I started to notice that this was how
| things worked at Google generally -- after a new product was
| deployed, there seemed to be simply nobody around anymore
| with the time and interest to act on bug reports, or talk to
| external partners, or just care at all. Without having at
| that time heard anything from inside the walls, that became
| my theory of how things worked at Google -- everything is
| abandonware.
|
| So, yeah it's visible.
| blobbers wrote:
| "Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating
| the next broken thing? That's vision." -- svachalek
|
| THIS IS A GREAT QUOTE! UPVOTE FOR REAL INSIGHT.
| lliamander wrote:
| > Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people
| for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.
|
| Playing the devil's advocate here, but shouldn't one position
| in the technical career ladder be correlated with technical
| expertise? Furthermore, technical ability is something that the
| employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business
| has more external factors.
|
| The incentive problem to align people with the needs of the
| users is difficult. I imagine the best way to handle that would
| be through bonuses/profit sharing for high impact work, whereas
| promotions focus on difficulty of work.
| majormajor wrote:
| Going off the description of "bugs being too easy" vs
| "building new things" - is "shipping a product without bugs"
| a worthwhile technical ability to cultivate?
|
| I would argue that attention to detail and polish are
| important technical abilities, and that focusing your
| technical advancement path solely on less tangible-to-the-
| user abilities will cause you, as a company, to make less
| compelling products.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Having technical expertise doesn't mean much of anything if
| it doesn't positively impact the bottom line.
| lliamander wrote:
| If it doesn't impact the bottom line then business folks
| need to do a better job of capturing the value you could
| provide.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused
| and not business focused. That's why after 20+ years
| almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising.
| All of the other major tech companies have multiple
| billion dollar _profitable_ revenue streams.
|
| It even came out during the Oracle trial that Google only
| made about $26 billion in profit from the inception of
| Android to 2016. Apple makes more from Google in mobile
| by being paid for it to be the default search engine
| ($12-$18 billion a year) than Google makes from Android.
| lliamander wrote:
| > Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused
| and not business focused. That's why after 20+ years
| almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising.
| All of the other major tech companies have multiple
| billion dollar profitable revenue streams.
|
| Is that true of other ad-tech driven companies as well?
| Companies like Meta and Twitter.
|
| Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are used to
| charging users directly for some good or service. It may
| be that they are just better positioned to establish
| those other revenue streams.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Twitter is not exactly a shining light on the hill as far
| as being a good business.
|
| Facebook is also starting to see the issue with being a
| one trick pony.
|
| But as for as Google, how many failed "other bets" have
| they been throwing money at since they were founded?
|
| Google was founded in 1998. About the same time that
| Apple was close to bankruptcy.
|
| One year they introduced _three_ messaging platforms. How
| many failed first party phone initiatives have they had
| including buying Motorola?
|
| Not to mention Google Fiber that left city streets ruined
| with "micro trenching"
| (https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2019/02/googl...)
|
| Since then, Apple has grown the Mac business, iPhone,
| iPad, "wearables", and has a growing services business.
|
| Microsoft built Azure, Xbox and pivoted with Office365.
|
| Amazon (disclaimer I work at AWS), built AWS.
|
| Google has a lot of smart people. But not a good business
| development strategy.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
|
| If you significantly contribute to the design of a successful
| project - that's different. But then, you should be making
| the case that you solved the hard problem of improving the
| design, not just that you were a good developer on a
| successful project.
| lliamander wrote:
| > 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.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Why? Should you be penalized if the project fails?
| lliamander wrote:
| No need to penalize if the project fails. It's an
| incentive to encourage people to work on high impact
| projects. Especially important where people have some
| freedom over which teams they are on. Doing menial work
| that provides clear value to the company should be
| recognized and rewarded.
| onpensionsterm wrote:
| That turns the incentive away from creating shareholder value
| and towards hazing and navel gazing.
|
| There's also the issue of conflating the incentive/reward
| schemes with the need for roles to be performed. Being good
| at inverting binary trees won't make you a good manager but
| when the manager role carries money and prestige then it's
| the hammer you use to reward the shape rotators.
| lliamander wrote:
| > That turns the incentive away from creating shareholder
| value and towards hazing and navel gazing.
|
| It's navel gazing until it turns into the next big money
| maker.
|
| > Being good at inverting binary trees won't make you a
| good manager but when the manager role carries money and
| prestige then it's the hammer you use to reward the shape
| rotators.
|
| Nitpick, but I was focusing on the non-manager track.
| bluGill wrote:
| > shouldn't one position in the technical career ladder be
| correlated with technical expertise? Furthermore, technical
| ability is something that the employee has some control over:
| whereas impact to the business has more external factors.
|
| Partially. Your position should be your technical expertise
| in things important to the company. There are a lot of
| technical skills you can learn that are not useful and so the
| time to learn them would be wasted at that company.
| lliamander wrote:
| > Partially. Your position should be your technical
| expertise in things important to the company. There are a
| lot of technical skills you can learn that are not useful
| and so the time to learn them would be wasted at that
| company.
|
| I think that's a fair point, but I'm not sure it changes
| things a lot for companies like Google.
|
| The more a company relies on technical innovation to
| provide business value, the harder it is to predict what
| sort of things actually align with business value.
|
| To put it simply - we don't know what hard problems need to
| be solved. Having a place where really smart people have
| the autonomy to work on whatever they want is the best way
| to find out. This is the classic argument for funding basic
| research in the sciences.
| cbsmith wrote:
| > To put it simply - we don't know what hard problems
| need to be solved. Having a place where really smart
| people have the autonomy to work on whatever they want is
| the best way to find out. This is the classic argument
| for funding basic research in the sciences.
|
| This really isn't the classic argument for funding basic
| research.
|
| All you're saying is that it's hard to know what will
| prove to be a useful tool, and that's really beside the
| point for figuring out what should be rewarded.
| Absolutely having a commanding understanding of a broad
| set of technical tools should be a career asset, but it
| should be a means to an end, not an end unto itself.
|
| You don't need to know what hard problems need to be
| solved to address the original criticism here. You need
| to understand what problems the organization is currently
| focused on, and solve those problems with simplicity and
| efficiency, even if that doesn't allow someone to show
| off that they can solve the harder technical problems
| than anyone else. The reward systems in the company
| should reflect that, and if it does, I would expect that
| people who could solve the harder technical problems
| would be more likely to be rewarded than others, but
| their skills would be much more likely to be directed
| towards simplifying and improving the efficiency of the
| company's execution rather than having a bias towards the
| reverse.
|
| Now, another important skill at more senior levels is
| being able to identify new problems deserve focus (i.e.
| figuring out what problems are useful to solve), so that
| should also be reflected in the company's reward systems
| as well, but that is still an orthogonal skill to
| "demonstrates they can solve the hardest problems".
|
| Think of it like product managers: if you primarily
| reward your product managers for launching new features,
| pretty soon your company will be weighed down in
| operational overhead from trying to support a cornucopia
| of features, many of which aren't particularly well done,
| rather than having a streamlined operation that delivered
| products that excelled at delivering on the solution they
| most wanted.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Technical skills in isolation have no business impact.
| There's a reason that the higher up you go, the more
| business-y it gets even as an IC.
|
| > _Furthermore, technical ability is something that the
| employee has some control over: whereas impact to the
| business has more external factor_
|
| Rewarding someone for their skills in isolation makes no
| sense. The outcome is what matters.
| llaolleh wrote:
| My take on these BigCos is that there is so much middle
| management and hierarchy that the frontline workers are blocked
| from the actual performance of the company.
|
| My proposed fix is entire product groups and their members should
| be held accountable and directly take profit of what they earn.
| If the product does well that quarter, engineers should be
| rewarded. Something to keep them working on a great product
| rather than catastrophically forgetting.
| stormbeard wrote:
| What about infrastructure teams? Not all work is product work.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| That works in sales, where one salesperson runs the whole
| engagement and can clearly claim responsibility for the revenue
| and thus be directly compensated with a proportion of it.
|
| But in engineering you need people to be thinking big picture,
| thinking collaboratively, taking risks, doing long term
| development, cleaning up technical debt. If you overly tie
| compensation to product revenue, you risk incentivizing your
| entire engineering staff toward short-term bolt-on-the-feature
| thinking.
| mattpratt wrote:
| A problem I've noticed working at larger companies is complexity
| simply for the sake of demonstrating complexity. In order to
| demonstrate technical prowess or importance, engineers will push
| a project in terms of headcount, solution, etc.
|
| Good engineering can look simple. The best engineers I've worked
| with will make things look easy. This can be at odds with promo
| driven culture.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| serious question here - how does Apple deal with this problem ?
|
| Apple also survives on big bang releases - the next iphone,
| macbook pro, etc etc. But also is famous for not abandoning old
| phones. iphone 6 was still receiving updates in Dec 2021.
|
| so how does Apple manage this dichotomy ? or is the company level
| yearly release completely wipe out the need for individual "hard
| problem" solving ?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Does Apple even promote on solving "hard" problems?
| astrange wrote:
| Traditionally they made it ungameable by making it completely
| opaque to the point where you have no input on promotions and
| they may not even tell you there is something called
| promotions.
| nharada wrote:
| > Post-hoc design documents written specifically to explain work
| to a promo-committee after the feature has been built
|
| I actually wish these would get written all the time. Not because
| of a promo-committee, but because post-hoc documentation
| explaining how the system works after it's already been built (as
| opposed to a design doc from the planning stages that may or may
| not reflect the actual state of the built system) is really
| valuable.
| cracrecry wrote:
| So what this man is saying is:
|
| "We at Google are promoting the wrong things. We have necessary
| work that our code monkeys do but nobody wants to do because
| those jobs are not promoted"
|
| As a manager of a company promoting the right things is your job.
|
| Of course people want to earn half a million dollars if they can.
| oneepic wrote:
| Thoughts on the following idea? I think Google's incentives have
| a problem similar to the incentives of any other company: It's
| open-ended, and possible to game everything. Whether promotions
| are based on the "hard problems" solved by your work, or the
| revenue it generates for the company -- or hell, even the
| software quality/performance -- this will always cause drama,
| people will get mad and leave. Any choice will lead to some
| positives and negatives for the whole company.
|
| You might hate Google's choice, maybe enough to leave, but you
| might end up joining Microsoft/MANA and hate their incentives
| too. Basically, you're back to square one.
| astrange wrote:
| I propose changing the promotion criteria every year so they
| can't be predicted.
| iffe_closure wrote:
| I work at Google and the who promotion culture is very toxic.
| People are incentivized to "Launch" things just in time to get
| promo and only to abandon it or switch teams in search of the
| next promo. It also gets hypercompetitive and harms teamwork
| sometimes. The promotions are usually B.S. anyway, they add
| stress and usually remove a good functioning engineer from doing
| good work into more "non technical leadership" work.
|
| The Truth is, people really want promos for the extra money and
| more stock. I say, just give them the extra money and stock
| privately, and only promote people when there's a job to be
| filled for that position.
| tfp137 wrote:
| The dual-ladder system exists to fix something that is broken
| but ends up breaking it more.
|
| In essence, there's the E9/O1 problem. An elite engineer with
| 25 years of experience simply knows more than an entry-level
| manager. Organizations try to solve this by dual-laddering and
| saying that there are "Director-equivalent" engineers (e.g.
| Staff or Principal) and so on, to rectify the obvious injustice
| of a scenario where a fresh MBA is seen to outrank the best
| engineers because he manages a team and they don't. The problem
| is that this dual-laddering makes it worse, because it's so
| much harder to move up the engineering ladder. If you're a
| Software Manager I at Google, you have to shit five or six
| different beds not to make Director within ~6 years and VP
| within ~12. On the other hand, making Principal+ Engineer is
| quite difficult, especially if you're not in MTV. So it
| perpetuates a false equivalency in which the managerial and
| product folk are gods (because of their swift, easy promotions)
| while most of the engineers are leftovers.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| In the military the E9/O1 issue is at least understood. Not
| so much in corporate life.
|
| The parity between the two ladders is something of a myth. At
| most companies, you can see that clearly if you count heads.
|
| A director might oversee 150 to 250 people. There will likely
| be five second level managers reporting to the director, and
| maybe twenty first level managers reporting to those second
| level managers. So 30 manager level people.
|
| And there will be maybe four or five Staff and one Principal
| engineer in the same organization. Sometimes even fewer.
|
| So the parity really isn't there.
| thewarrior wrote:
| How can every single manager become a director ? That seems
| impossible.
| ChrisCinelli wrote:
| Some HR rules are put in place to make the workplace appear more
| "equal" but it often ends up making advance people that are good
| a paper-pushing and BSing.
|
| After enough years are passed with this system in place, the
| company is full with people that rarely care much about the users
| and care a lot about their status and paycheck. In these kind of
| cultures what tend to flourish is ego-boosting shining objects
| that rarely impact the users for good.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| At my previous employer, every quarter we were supposed to update
| an elaborate spreadsheet describing how we measured up against
| the numerous criteria for the next level on the career ladder. I
| hated it.
|
| That said, there were lots of people who obsessed over the
| process, looking for shortcuts or ways to game the system.
| nomoreusernames wrote:
| google knows how to overengineer thing.
| darioush wrote:
| In my experience most of the perf-review is a show.
|
| Promos typically have a "pecking order", determined by how long
| you have been asking for one (or performing at the next level if
| you have some meritocracy), the amount of budget available for
| promos this time, your age (easier to promote "mature" people),
| D&I status, proximity of ethnicity to your managers biases (could
| be implicit, doesn't matter for the outcome), height (tall people
| promoted easier), introversion vs. extroversion, and just if your
| manager likes you.
|
| Also they ask you to give vague, subjective snippets that will be
| weaponized against your colleagues in form of "feedback" for the
| next 6-18 months.
|
| So it's better to not partake in this type of time wasting
| activity.
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