[lliamander]

> Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.

Playing the devil's advocate here, but shouldn't one position in the technical career ladder be correlated with technical expertise? Furthermore, technical ability is something that the employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business has more external factors.

The incentive problem to align people with the needs of the users is difficult. I imagine the best way to handle that would be through bonuses/profit sharing for high impact work, whereas promotions focus on difficulty of work.

[bluGill]

> shouldn't one position in the technical career ladder be correlated with technical expertise? Furthermore, technical ability is something that the employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business has more external factors.

Partially. Your position should be your technical expertise in things important to the company. There are a lot of technical skills you can learn that are not useful and so the time to learn them would be wasted at that company.

[lliamander]

> Partially. Your position should be your technical expertise in things important to the company. There are a lot of technical skills you can learn that are not useful and so the time to learn them would be wasted at that company.

I think that's a fair point, but I'm not sure it changes things a lot for companies like Google.

The more a company relies on technical innovation to provide business value, the harder it is to predict what sort of things actually align with business value.

To put it simply - we don't know what hard problems need to be solved. Having a place where really smart people have the autonomy to work on whatever they want is the best way to find out. This is the classic argument for funding basic research in the sciences.

[cbsmith]

> To put it simply - we don't know what hard problems need to be solved. Having a place where really smart people have the autonomy to work on whatever they want is the best way to find out. This is the classic argument for funding basic research in the sciences.

This really isn't the classic argument for funding basic research.

All you're saying is that it's hard to know what will prove to be a useful tool, and that's really beside the point for figuring out what should be rewarded. Absolutely having a commanding understanding of a broad set of technical tools should be a career asset, but it should be a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

You don't need to know what hard problems need to be solved to address the original criticism here. You need to understand what problems the organization is currently focused on, and solve those problems with simplicity and efficiency, even if that doesn't allow someone to show off that they can solve the harder technical problems than anyone else. The reward systems in the company should reflect that, and if it does, I would expect that people who could solve the harder technical problems would be more likely to be rewarded than others, but their skills would be much more likely to be directed towards simplifying and improving the efficiency of the company's execution rather than having a bias towards the reverse.

Now, another important skill at more senior levels is being able to identify new problems deserve focus (i.e. figuring out what problems are useful to solve), so that should also be reflected in the company's reward systems as well, but that is still an orthogonal skill to "demonstrates they can solve the hardest problems".

Think of it like product managers: if you primarily reward your product managers for launching new features, pretty soon your company will be weighed down in operational overhead from trying to support a cornucopia of features, many of which aren't particularly well done, rather than having a streamlined operation that delivered products that excelled at delivering on the solution they most wanted.

[majormajor]

Going off the description of "bugs being too easy" vs "building new things" - is "shipping a product without bugs" a worthwhile technical ability to cultivate?

I would argue that attention to detail and polish are important technical abilities, and that focusing your technical advancement path solely on less tangible-to-the-user abilities will cause you, as a company, to make less compelling products.

[ALittleLight]

If you are a developer who just implements what the PMs tell you to (more or less) then I agree that you shouldn't get extra credit when the project is a massive success. If the product earns a billion or loses millions you didn't have anything to do with that - you just implemented the designs of other people.

If you significantly contribute to the design of a successful project - that's different. But then, you should be making the case that you solved the hard problem of improving the design, not just that you were a good developer on a successful project.

[lliamander]

> If you are a developer who just implements what the PMs tell you to (more or less) then I agree that you shouldn't get extra credit when the project is a massive success. If the product earns a billion or loses millions you didn't have anything to do with that - you just implemented the designs of other people.

Actually I think you should be rewarded, just with money rather than a title.

[ALittleLight]

Why? Should you be penalized if the project fails?

[lliamander]

No need to penalize if the project fails. It's an incentive to encourage people to work on high impact projects. Especially important where people have some freedom over which teams they are on. Doing menial work that provides clear value to the company should be recognized and rewarded.

[ALittleLight]

If you aren't responsible for the project's failure, you're not responsible for the project's success, and rewarding, or punishing, someone for what they aren't responsible for is irrational.

[onpensionsterm]

That turns the incentive away from creating shareholder value and towards hazing and navel gazing.

There's also the issue of conflating the incentive/reward schemes with the need for roles to be performed. Being good at inverting binary trees won't make you a good manager but when the manager role carries money and prestige then it's the hammer you use to reward the shape rotators.

[lliamander]

> That turns the incentive away from creating shareholder value and towards hazing and navel gazing.

It's navel gazing until it turns into the next big money maker.

> Being good at inverting binary trees won't make you a good manager but when the manager role carries money and prestige then it's the hammer you use to reward the shape rotators.

Nitpick, but I was focusing on the non-manager track.

[ZephyrBlu]

Technical skills in isolation have no business impact. There's a reason that the higher up you go, the more business-y it gets even as an IC.

> Furthermore, technical ability is something that the employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business has more external factor

Rewarding someone for their skills in isolation makes no sense. The outcome is what matters.

[scarface74]

Having technical expertise doesn’t mean much of anything if it doesn’t positively impact the bottom line.

[lliamander]

If it doesn't impact the bottom line then business folks need to do a better job of capturing the value you could provide.

[scarface74]

Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused and not business focused. That’s why after 20+ years almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising. All of the other major tech companies have multiple billion dollar profitable revenue streams.

It even came out during the Oracle trial that Google only made about $26 billion in profit from the inception of Android to 2016. Apple makes more from Google in mobile by being paid for it to be the default search engine ($12-$18 billion a year) than Google makes from Android.

[lliamander]

> Unfortunately, Google is a very much technology focused and not business focused. That’s why after 20+ years almost all of its revenue still comes from advertising. All of the other major tech companies have multiple billion dollar profitable revenue streams.

Is that true of other ad-tech driven companies as well? Companies like Meta and Twitter.

Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are used to charging users directly for some good or service. It may be that they are just better positioned to establish those other revenue streams.

[scarface74]

Twitter is not exactly a shining light on the hill as far as being a good business.

Facebook is also starting to see the issue with being a one trick pony.

But as for as Google, how many failed “other bets” have they been throwing money at since they were founded?

Google was founded in 1998. About the same time that Apple was close to bankruptcy.

One year they introduced three messaging platforms. How many failed first party phone initiatives have they had including buying Motorola?

Not to mention Google Fiber that left city streets ruined with “micro trenching” (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...)

Since then, Apple has grown the Mac business, iPhone, iPad, “wearables”, and has a growing services business.

Microsoft built Azure, Xbox and pivoted with Office365.

Amazon (disclaimer I work at AWS), built AWS.

Google has a lot of smart people. But not a good business development strategy.

[deckard1]

> In Louisville, Google Fiber reportedly was burying cables in "nano-trenches" that were just two inches deep.

> "When you're walking around the neighborhood, [the lines are] popping up out of the road all over the place," resident Larry Coomes said at the time. "People are tripping over it."

This is the most obviously Google thing I've read ever. Half-ass a job and then saying "screw it" and leaving because it's too difficult? Name another company that would do this. Not even Spectrum is this incompetent. They have the attention span of a stoned teenager. Their Toronto Sidewalk Labs also comes to mind. Probably for the best they pulled the plug early on that one. Imagine parts of your city just stop functioning because some private company got bored one day and left.