Former Googler here. This person has correctly identified that a key reason why google sucks is that people very often...<p>> choose between doing what’s best for users or what’s best for their career<p>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.<p>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.<p>Y'all value the wrong things. That's why your culture is broken.
I spent over 9 years at Google. Got promoted 3 times. Was a manager.<p>Google is absolutely <i>bonkers</i> when it comes to promotions. At every opportunity to provide feedback towards upper management, I had one consistent refrain:<p>Everyone needs to chill the f### out.<p>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 <i>everyone</i> is about it. It's off the charts how much company time was <i>blown</i> 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 <i>de-escalated</i>; like it needs to not be such a huge f'ing deal.<p>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 <i>less</i> 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.
It gets worse than promo-driven development.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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".
The author did a really good job of pointing out problem of promo culture, but the solutions suggested are more inspirational than actionable.<p>All founders/execs/early employees are easily aligned on compabt success. But how do you align incentive of later hires?<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>As a result we ended up doing two things a lot:<p>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)<p>2) de-prioritizing important things that were small in order to ensure everyone had a big project every quarter.<p>We ended up having to hire contractors to work on the small stuff because it was piling up and causing problems.
YES!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
This all sounds nice but it's missing the concrete details and that's the most important part.<p>"Build into core values wanting to create a culture where the end-user is the priority, not individual advancement up the ladder"<p>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?
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.<p>Does anyone remember this thread?
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.<p>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.
I've been at Google for 12 years, and this has not been my experience. While it is a popular narrative, it is by no means dominant, and is fairly specific to individual teams. I got my second promotion leading the Google Maps Desktop Latency team. We demonstrated impact solely by reducing load latency and increasing performance while advocating for latency consciousness across the product space and implementing latency regression tests and monitoring. Google has some of the most complex infrastructure in existence, and there are thousands of engineers that are getting promoted and finding gratification in maintaining and improving this infrastructure.<p>My experience at Google has been characterized by collaborating with the smartest and most driven people I've ever worked with. And I worked at several companies before Google. I think a side-effect of this personality type is that the engineers themselves want to make a difference, whether through maintaining Google's complex infrastructure or launching new products. And while it may be easier to show impact by launching a new product, it is by no means a problem unique to Google. Startups find it much easier to show impact by launching and buying users, rather than measuring how useful the product actually is.<p>I have come to believe that, lean-startup style, a good engineer should be able to demonstrate how the work they are doing is important to a company, a product or a product's users. With a little bit of thought around how to show that the work you are doing actually <i>is</i> valuable to your organization's OKRs, you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most.
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 <i>forced</i> 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.<p>There is one extremely bad aspect of promo-culture not discussed in the article: Many promos in higher level have <i>requirement</i> 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.
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.
> 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.<p>Welcome to Amazon! Just about everything in this article rings true at Amazon. In fact, I’d say Amazon is even worse.<p>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.<p>What I saw in Amazon retail and Alexa was a culture of:<p>1) refusing to work on valuable projects unless you could actively claim to be the lead<p>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)<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
In my experience most of the perf-review is a show.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So it's better to not partake in this type of time wasting activity.
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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>as the top responses says; everyone needs to chill out and I'd add "try to be nice and do no harm".<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>A good signal for identifying these types of companies where this approach can work IMO is<p>- Smaller companies<p>- Ask and look into engineers seeing if there are lots of internal promotions<p>- Learn what the promotion process is at a company before joining.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The book "Staff Engineer" by Will Larson has some good bits on this topic.
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.<p>Basically, turn it into a marathon not a sprint.
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
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.<p>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.
An interesting way of looking at this is that it's the Iron Law of Bureaucracy at work.<p>The Iron Law of Bureaucracy:<p>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."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle</a><p>Also called the tragedy of the commons.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And of course the promo committees were filled with people who got promoted under these regimes.<p>Corporate culture gets set and maintained in strange and interesting ways.
When I was at Google this was a huge problem.<p>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.<p>Because you can’t usually reach L6 by maintaining a project, no matter how impactful.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>That said, there were lots of people who obsessed over the process, looking for shortcuts or ways to game the system.
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.<p>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 ...<p>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 ...<p>Life is not fair I know ...
> and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well.<p>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.
The Netflix model is worth considering as an antidote. In short:<p>1. Don't hire junior engineers.<p>2. All ICs have the same title: Senior ____ Engineer.
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."
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.
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.
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."<p>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.
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.
Couldn’t agree more. I took a level cut when I went to Google from Microsoft after being assured by the recruiter that, as a tech lead, getting promoted would be easy. Unfortunately due to two teams using the same code names I was put in Ads, last place I wanted to be, and took a non-lead role in another team instead. It quickly became apparent that the game at Google was very dysfunctional, and the “manager-bias” problem they were trying to avoid, while sometimes a real problem, was still a much better system that Google had cooked up. I lost interest in trying to get promoted and tried to focus on interesting work for the next four years. Meanwhile, I saw crappy engineers around me get promoted (and sometimes immediately use their new level to jump to Facebook) while hard-working engineers who cared about glue work, quality and meeting customer needs get overlooked (and sometimes leave too in frustration). Combined with having line managers with 16-25 reports (rendering them effectively useless), it was a pretty broken culture.<p>(This was 6-10 years ago; I know some things have changed, but I hear from people there it’s still crazy).
It seam that the fix should be the promotion criteria and process.<p>- use continuous promotion screening instead of well defined annual periods<p>- use indirect measurement instead of candidate self selling (involve manager's and colleague's feedback, but not only because introverted people merit promotions too)<p>- measure things to be aligned with the success of the project and the company objectives<p>- increase impression of progress and success by increasing the number of promotions (gamification)<p>- reduce frustration and demoralizing effect by reducing the gains of promotions<p>- make the criteria clear and objective to reduce frustration and demoralization (clear goals, clear push directions)<p>It seam that a system based on points (or karma) might be interesting to explore. People would earn these points by different actions or indirect objective evaluations.<p>People may loose points if efficiency or contribution quality degrades, but smooth out to absorb "life accidents" (e.g. transient health or personal social issues), to give a second chance, etc.<p>That's what I would explore. It's not easy to align this promotion system with the benefits of the company. Not every company earn billions like google.
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.
A fantastic blog post that dives into the same problem: <a href="https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google" rel="nofollow">https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google</a><p>It inspired me to quit years later and write my own version: <a href="https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google" rel="nofollow">https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google</a>
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.
> <i>Alternatives to promo-cultures</i><p>What would a co-op look like?<p>aka Worker Self-Directed Enterprise. <a href="https://www.democracyatwork.info/democratizing_the_workplace" rel="nofollow">https://www.democracyatwork.info/democratizing_the_workplace</a><p>Could a co-op technology startup raise capital? I have zero clue about such things. My guess is that VCs want to control the board and exec roles, so wouldn't fund an efforts where they can't replace the leaders.<p>What about the co-ops and FOSS? I've been casually poking around, trying to see how misc projects are organized, governed. eg ZeroMQ, SQLite, Zig.<p>What about the maturity of an industry? Sure, emerging markets and hyper growth are probably hostile to co-ops. BDFL vs democracy. But search is now mature. Take away the advertising biz model and it's just a bog standard IT project. Surely something like DDG could be a co-op.
One thing that could make this less problematic - make levels hidden.<p>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.
I've seen one case at Google where a Manager was going for promotion, in part based on some metrics claiming the product usage increased a lot. Someone found that the metric was broken and was overcounting, but the report chain was explicitly told NOT to fix the bug until the manager gets promoted. This was kept broken for months. He did get promoted to L7 (senior staff), since the metrics were very positive, even though it was not deserved and the product was worsened in the process.<p>Make a huge incentive of promotion, behind well defined rules, and smart competitive engineers will tlgame the system. Even if it's an actual negative value for the product and company. You can always change teams after promo and start fresh with your increased total compensation.
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.<p>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).
> you’re likely focused on one career question: when am I going to make it to the next level?<p>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.<p>Related, this article reminds me of comments on an earlier article:<p>"Do Not Change Your Job": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30437733" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30437733</a>
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
"If you have other ideas on how to avoid the slip into promo-culture, I’d love to hear your thoughts"<p>Proper bonuses (proper = multiple of base salary). If promotion is the only way to get comp then obviously it matters a great deal. However, if you can get good comp based on your performance (and not your rank), then promotion matter much less. At most investment banks/hedge funds the highest paid employee is NOT the CEO; it is somebody that made the the firm $248m last year and that got to keep a fraction of it as a bonus.
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.<p>What would be problem with such a system?
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.<p>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.
I wonder how much newer trends of transparent career ladders are at play here.<p>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.<p>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.
> Post-hoc design documents written specifically to explain work to a promo-committee after the feature has been built<p>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.
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.
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.
It is an eternal quandary - make money and promotions not the central theme of your life. Move jobs, when it becomes a soul-sucking promotion oriented culture.
I chose this path - am probably poorer than FAANG folk, but I did not trade my soul and find joy in the work that I do.
So what this man is saying is:<p>"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"<p>As a manager of a company promoting the right things is your job.<p>Of course people want to earn half a million dollars if they can.
Is Google an up or out company?<p>That is, if you don't get a promotion in a certain number of years, you will be encouraged to leave?<p>That would encourage making projects more complex than they need to be, to get that promotion.
serious question here - how does Apple deal with this problem ?<p>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.<p>so how does Apple manage this dichotomy ? or is the company level yearly release completely wipe out the need for individual "hard problem" solving ?