[KerrAvon]

Why would I ever want to work at Google if the management setup tolerates this sort of organizational flotsam? What a poorly managed place it must be if there’s no chain of accountability for senior employees.

[googlryas]

It doesn't, in my experience. In the previous incarnation of the perf review system(which just slightly changed recently), there were effectively 3 buckets:

Needs improvement, meets expectations, and exceeds expectations.

The first one is "I'm going to get fired ASAP if I don't improve".

The second one is still viewed as a failure even though you're meeting every aspect of your current role.

The third one is "okay good, maybe i can go for promo if I string together 4 of these performance reviews as exceeds expectations"

[marssaxman]

Why do people at Google seemingly care so much about promotions?

[googlryas]

+25% total comp I imagine. Also a lot of them are in the sf/sv housing market and think they'll never be able to buy a house even making 250k/yr

[klipklop]

This is exactly it. After they hit whatever promo level that let’s them buy a home they usually stop trying to climb so hard unless they are really ambitious.

If you want your partner to stay home and help raise the kids you probably have to make L6 at a minimum.

You can make $250k and have zero chance of buying a single family home in the South Bay now. Prob need a household income around $300-350k before it starts to become reasonable. The recent interest rate hikes really jumped up the monthly payments. Dumpy houses can go for $2m, USD but that is slowly trending down.

[dmitrygr]

Pay bands are relatively narrow. The only way to a serious raise is promotion.

[xyzzy_plugh]

That sounds fucking horrifically stressful.

[jfim]

There's a value to having slack. Most novel ideas come from having one's mind wander, not by being constantly busy with coding.

Obviously, there needs to be a balance between being constantly busy and just slacking all the time.

[qdog]

Conversely, a business needs to generate the most profit per worker, not the most work. This might work out well for Google, or it might not. All the work metric systems I've seen essentially become a random number generator that hit all teams, rather than pushing up the top performers.

Although Google's cash cow is ad revenue, and it may be that they have decided to stop funding most other endeavors. I would expect some of the actual 'rest and vest' people were on some of the many projects Google cancelled and weren't successfully moved to a new project (or ended up being part of something they just don't care about, but can't quit).