[mattzito]

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.

(Obligatory: opinion is my own)