[TheMagicHorsey]

How did Google change its promotion policies based on the data? From my time working with Google it felt like there were a lot of bullshit artists in management. To be clear, there were also a lot of bullshit artists among the engineers too. Very few people were engaged in using their time productively.

It's very fortunate for shareholders that Google has a cash-cow business, but to the article's point, once bullshit starts to expand within an organization the only true long term control on it is outside the organization ... competition and forced reform, or competition followed by death.

[dxf]

Changing perf/promo processes can be challenging. You can't always roll out minor changes (because the problems may be systematic), nor do them quickly; at Google's scale you need documentation and tooling to support your processes. You can try to fix some parts, but that can make other parts worse. But maybe that's OK. You can't optimize for everything, so you try to achieve the things you believe are most important and accept the remaining flaws.

Promotion policies continue to evolve at Google based on internally-sourced data. They changed most recently a few months ago. It's a constant that people don't like the current process, but they also don't like it when it changes :-). But I do appreciate that Google recognizes that the perf/promo processes could be better, and then they try to make them better.