[_j5l3]

> I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.

Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets.

6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.

[hotpotamus]

Sometimes I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, and then I read stuff like this and I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, but for different reasons.

[qzx_pierri]

It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

[alasdair_]

> it seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

That’s very inaccurate. Some of us use Ritalin instead.

[ModernMech]

> soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers

The saddest part about the ladder is that it's not even fun. In academia, our ladder has fun names, and on each level you get to dress up in a different outfit that gets more elaborate the higher you climb on the ladder, which is basically the driving concept behind every MMO ever made, so that's cool. The whole promotion culminates in a parade and a blessing from the church elders, I mean University leadership.

At Google, they creatively dubbed the levels "L1-L10", and there's no outfit or parades. I assume they throw you a party or something at least? With cake?

[GalahiSimtam]

Sure, the art faculties have the best costumes, but where I come from there was making vows in LATIN how cool is that (you needn't have to understand latin, just recite the vows is all fine)

jk

If you need to ask, promo parties were suspended with the lockdown, but I guess they are gonna come back in style

[mattbrewsbytes]

It’s not much different at large corporations, just far less money.

[austhrow743]

Large corporations?

[mattbrewsbytes]

Pick any company on the Fortune 500 and you’ll see the same behavior to climb the “ladder”. A small corporation could be less than 1000 or so people and might not have that culture as much.

[biztos]

I worked at a Fortune 500 and the ladder was floating in a mist of opaque fog, with inexplicably shifting rungs.

Upside was that many of us just said screw it and focused on the work. Downside was that many said screw it and went to other companies where they could at least grok the ladder.

[hansvm]

Google only has a couple 100k employees at most. Other organizations dwarf that.

[andi999]

Infinite marathon

[acchow]

> 6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years.

Can you explain how this gets them promos? I feel like a promo-focused culture would result in 6 engineers creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless, but much more work.

[_j5l3]

> result in 6 engineers creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless, but much more work.

We didn't create our own, but we did migrate our codebase to a new server-side rendering framework twice in my time there.

Also, nobody on our team ever got promoted.

[bryanrasmussen]

>creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless

at the scale of Google I'm not sure I would consider that useless. But it would definitely feel useless.

[reindeerer]

Those rendering frameworks are being written as well, for no other reason than promo