Counterpoint: At a top company like Google, full of some of the most talented people in the world, there simply won't be enough promotions to go around.
And yet, an "average" performer who is happy to build, scale, maintain, and not re-launch a new chat product every 5 years should be rewarded and encouraged to stay and not leave to a competitor.
How do you do it? You have to create intrinsic motivation. Twist: You can't give someone intrinsic motivation. They have to choose it themselves. But you have to give them the space and the options to find it.
"Don't focus too much on promotion" is still bad advice - like "Don't be angry" to someone who is angry. But the sentiment is correct. If you're focusing too much on promotion it means you don't have intrinsic motivation and are focusing on the extrinsic.
If you are well paid, well respected, well supplemented with additional benefits, and well challenged with hard problems (and at Google all of these should all have been YES by all accounts), then it's true - you SHOULDN'T focus too much on promotion.
IIRC (don't work at Google myself, but friends do) - you start out of college as an L3 and are expected to make promo twice to L4 and then L5.
Once at L5 it's okay to just stay there and do good work, the pay is still really good and you're not expected to go beyond that unless you want to (and you're capable of it).
The main issue I've heard is that to go from L3 -> L5 there are incentives around 'impact' and launching products (or leaving for another company/startup and getting hired back).
This means people are incentivized to ship something to get promo, but working on an already shipped thing is bad for career progress.
An oversimplification, but seen through this lens Google's many chat apps make sense.
Some years ago, the official ladder descriptions changed to reflect what was already unofficially the case in (most of?) the company. Roughly: you can hang at L4 pretty much forever, as long as you're willing to keep learning new things as required for your role.
That leaves the pressure of getting from L3 to L4, which, admittedly, people do feel. But L3->L4 is also a much more straightforward promotion. It's not nearly as sensitive to finding the right project/right team/right boss, and the promo comes more from your impact on the project than your project's impact on the product/company.
I work with many brilliant engineers who have been in Google for 5-10 years and are at L4. The pay is good enough if you don't have a large family to support and they simply can't be arsed to play that game.
> People with 3 kids make do with jobs at Walmart and McD.
Very difficult in the Bay Area given the housing costs. I guess it's possible if you lucked into a below market rate apartment and qualify for government assistance like Medicaid and food stamps.
McD SF is paying you $35k[0]. For 2018 figures: «A $35,000 income in the United States has enough buying power to put you in the 82nd percentile globally for per-person income. Within the United States, your income falls around the 20th percentile.»[1]
If you look at age adjusted percentiles, 1% income is much lower than $750K/yr. 30 yr olds making $350k/ are 1%ers, and when they reach 40 or 50 they have substantial investment gains bolstering their compensation.
A promotion isn't always good. It comes with responsibilities and you might suddenly spend a lot more time at the company. And not all work is high reaching technical work, much of it is pure interpersonal shit, adhering to formal processes that drive you crazy and justifying yourself against your superiors.
If you like to face hard technical problems, don't rise too high...
>West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer, by By Frank Rose, page 85, Package Goods
>[...] Who knew what any of it meant? Certainly not Sculley; this stuff had about as much to do with the prehistoric electronics he'd dabbled in as a kid as it did with soft drinks and potato chips. But he was running a computer company, so he'd better know. He spent hour after hour with Steve going over the basics. By the end of April his speech was peppered with jargon. Convincing people he knew what he was saying took longer.
>On organizational issues, he was able to look more decisive, in part because Markkula had left him so much to do. He didn't say much -- he wasn't warm or friendly or outgoing -- but he did listen, silently, and when he made a move it was invariably a quick one. His first move was to fire John Vennard -- no great shock, since Steve had been demanding his head since February. Vennard was in Japan, working with Alps to fix a problem on a new disk drive for the Apple III, when Scully summoned him back to get the ax. Then he got rid of Wil Houde, who'd been running the Apple II division until the previous fall, when Markkula had decided to replace him and, unable to decide between the division's marketing director and its engineering director, had put them both in charge. Houde had been named to head a special task force to look into ways of streamlining the company. His task force was already streamlined: He was the only one on it. Everyone knew that heading a task force at Apple was like being named vice-president in charge of looking for a new job. Sculley was merely completing the process.
By breaking the bond between responsibility/authority, and remuneration.
Promotions could be increased autonomy (which intrinsically includes responsibility, but it is personal responsibility, not responsibility of others) and/or remuneration without the need for increased responsibility or even seniority.
In yesteryear payrises were to be given on a length of service basis. You got extra bonuses after X years, you were given an (extra, significantly above inflation) raise on your Nth jubilee, Etc.
I think this bond between promotion and "climbing the ladder(s)" is problematic and is a means of wage suppression.
> Counterpoint: At a top company like Google, full of some of the most talented people in the world, there simply won't be enough promotions to go around.
I don't know anything about google specifically, but generally it's not the size or the talent level of a company, but the growth rate. If you want to be promoted, the most important question is whether or not the company is growing. Else the only way to go up is if someone else leaves.
High turnover can also accomplish this effect but is limited to a very small number of industries.
As the other respondent said, that's not my generalized experience at Google. I am aware of one situation where I heard that someone who was planning to go up for promo was recreating important documents with only their name on it and then soliciting feedback from people in leadership to beef up their packet. It was not great, but it was successful.
But that was the only one of those that I've seen - after 14 years, I would imagine I would have seen more. In general, the big weakness in Google's promo process is that projects that are visible to leadership get more attention than those who are grinding it out behind the scenes. There's been genuine attempts to address that, but it's hard from a practical standpoint.
It's very different between teams. My personal experience: everyone I've worked with is trying really hard to put me in a position where I can succeed. I've been put on very visible projects (from day one) and I'm getting constant help from my TL to keep me on a track to get promoted. Everyone I work with directly is amazing.
Google is a magical place but the standard deviation in experiences are large.
I've personally been very happy with my experience/team.
Agreed. I never got the sense Google knows how to train managers... It favors a very self-organizing approach, and the feedback loops seem structured to deal with under-performing management by freezing them out of promotion (and hoping they either fix the problem or quit), not replacing them.
The consequence is that teams are fiefdoms, and the experience varies wildly based on whether a manager knows what the hell they're doing.
This is more or less the norm at every FAANG. New hires are trained by their managers to pee and mark their territory.
This is how you pee
1. Don't verbally discuss project ideas with peers
2. Write up a nice beefy document even if the core idea can be expressed in 2 paragraphs
3. Do some vaguely relevant data analysis etc.
4. Circulate among leadership
Doing the above only protects you from theft within your team. Even if you do all of the above your ideas are liable to be stolen, by someone from other teams. Typically, some one else will prepare a document with a very different title that for the first 2 paragraphs might look like something different. The details will be virtually identical except for some subsections where some arbitrary changes will be made. They will be very eager to not discuss the timelines of when each document was prepared.
Why do they do this? Aren't they paid enough to do the decent thing? The problem is that most FAANG hires are career climber high GPA folks who can't accept the idea that they got into FAANG by grinding on leetcode, not because of any depth in CS knowledge and understanding. Their brain is programmed to ladder climb at all costs. For the untalented hacks that end up at a FAANG, eventually stealing becomes the only option.
One more way things get stolen. Someone quickly implements the key idea in your document and plays dumb about the plagiarization. To be "fair", the project might get split into 2 parts or be completely handed over to the one who "executed".
I have no problem interpreting that as both humor/irony and also completely serious advice. It's potentially like saying "Make sure your priorities are in order. If you aren't actually adding value, you won't be a success. You can always be fired if you manage to get promoted and then can't actually deliver after tooting your own horn enough to get there."
It may be important to set a goal of getting promoted but you also need to qualify for the promotion and that's, at least in theory, about actually doing good work, not buttonholing the right people and having the perfect resume.
And yet, an "average" performer who is happy to build, scale, maintain, and not re-launch a new chat product every 5 years should be rewarded and encouraged to stay and not leave to a competitor.
How do you do it? You have to create intrinsic motivation. Twist: You can't give someone intrinsic motivation. They have to choose it themselves. But you have to give them the space and the options to find it.
"Don't focus too much on promotion" is still bad advice - like "Don't be angry" to someone who is angry. But the sentiment is correct. If you're focusing too much on promotion it means you don't have intrinsic motivation and are focusing on the extrinsic.
If you are well paid, well respected, well supplemented with additional benefits, and well challenged with hard problems (and at Google all of these should all have been YES by all accounts), then it's true - you SHOULDN'T focus too much on promotion.
I welcome counter-counterpoints.