| From what I gather, basically Googlers are only really rewarded (promoted) for delivering "new" things, and iterative improvements, bug fixes and even making different products cohesive are not recognized. There's lots of good examples of this [1], but from one particuarly recent example [2]: > I should have done the opposite: figure out what the promotion committee wants, and do that work exclusively. > I adopted a new strategy. Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it. > My quality bar for code dropped from, “Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?” I didn’t file or fix any bugs unless they risked my project’s launch. I wriggled out of all responsibilities for maintenance work. When you look at their products through this lens, it starts to make sense, such as continually launching "new" communication apps that might as well be from different companies. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16231658 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241 |