[alarge]

No, your manager doesn't decide your promotion. The difference between before and now is that before, your manager was expected to make the case for your promotion. Now, the manager is expected not to be an advocate, but to provide their balanced input (ready now, ready soon, not yet ready).

The promotion still goes to a promo committee - although now they try to locate it close enough to your org that they have heard of you, and can have a high-context reviewer (not your manager) at the table.

The carryover from the previous system (and the thing that these sorts of posts seem to miss) is that every level has explicit expectations about the sort of activities that a person at that level can be trusted to independently conduct. A decision on promotion is a decision on whether or not a person has adequately demonstrated that they can do the work of the next level. It isn't some sort of award for doing their current job well. When someone languishes for a long time at a level, it is usually because they aren't demonstrating those next-level signals.

The system can feel unfair - like a team that lacks adequate opportunities for someone to demonstrate next-level signals, or the insistence that work doesn't count until its production impact can be assessed (which may take years for some projects). But it is rarely as capricious as may sound.

[indigoabstract]

Will Google turn into a university next?

Because this sounds to me a bit like how things work in academia. I think the push there is to publish, but the essence is that, for every decision, committees rule.

[ahoka]

Google works like academia because that’s all the founders knew.

[disgruntledphd2]

I mean, it's always seemed pretty academic to me, due to the founders.