This is a nice article giving an insight into how it is working for one of the most successful engineering companies of our time.<p>However, the OP comes from a strong academic background and Google is quite hand-in-glove with premier universities and research institutes. Hence he already has credibility inside of Google.<p>I however am told that it is quite an uphill task to join Google without an already established credibility and get to work with their core set of products. It'll be nice if someone could shed more light on this. I have always been very curious about how it is working at Google. I mean except a few, using Google products are such an everyday (everyhour?) thing for the average software engineer.
> It no longer comes down to making three grumpy program committee members happy with the font spacing in your paper submissions.<p>As anyone who has submitted a paper written in Word to a technical conference knows: bad kerning over two columns will set your paper back at least one letter grade. Must use Latex instead. (I'm sure he is just joking, but it comes up...)
<i>Most importantly, my team's success is no longer defined through an arbitrary and often broken peer review process, which applies to pretty much everything that matters in the academic world.</i><p>Oh boy. Don't even get me started on broken processes. When managers can use secret calibration scores to blacklist reports and keep them captive for 5+ years on undesirable projects, what else should it be called exactly?<p>Matt Welsh was hired above the Real Googler Line, so he has a rosy-eyed view. He's also comparing it against the nightmare of post-PhD academic politics. He also seems, from his account, like a decent guy. He hasn't seen yet what Google turns into for young engineers who don't have external credibility yet, and who end up with managers who <i>aren't</i> decent people... It'd be interesting to read his opinion after he sees that.<p>If you're above the RGL (~10%) you have the credibility to represent your contribution to the company independently. Peer review gets you promotions, managers are a higher-ranking peer and can help you a little more, but you have enough independent credibility above the RGL that you can't be extorted. If you're below RGL, you have the extortive manager-as-SPOF nonsense of typical rank cultures, and you get none of the upsides of working at Google.<p>Also, I think the TLM concept is broken. The whole reason closed allocation is a fistful of fail is that, rather than resolving the conflict of interest between project leadership and people management (the best thing for a person might be to change projects) it tends to double down on that.<p>The only part of people management (aside from HR, at the company's interface) that has any value for 120+ IQers doing convex work is the mentoring aspect... which ought to be project-independent.
The real story with big tech workplaces is that everyone wants to be in charge, everyone wants to establish credibility, no one wants to do the coding. I see this all the time. "I'm a part time coder" to me gets categorized with non-coder.<p>The fact is that from day one it's mental and political combat. Everyone is telling everyone else they are a "lead" or building a team, or whatever. Titles are meaningless as anyone can get their title changed to Sr tech lead or some acronym. If you are a software engineer and want to call yourself a lead manager all you have to do is blog about it and hope someone believes you. All that matters is what you know, what you can do, and can you manipulate perceptions enough to get credit for your own work. Having "influence" just means you've found some people that don't understand these thing yet or you got some dirt.