[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.