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It's not the dollar values so much as the incentive structure. I think most Americans have a core value of "work hard, get compensated for your work". There's a basic value of fairness and meritocracy, that you can take steps to control your destiny and will be rewarded proportionally. When you've been at Google for a few years these days, you realize that this isn't really true. Nobody knows or cares how good a programmer you are. Nobody really cares how hard you work either. Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system and then whether you listen to your manager. I'm an eng manager there; I am relatively good at working the system, having gotten my reports 4 promotions in the last 2 years. My tech lead does all the actual work, because he actually cares about product quality, knows the code well, mentors the team effectively, and is a nice guy to work with. My job is just to get him promoted (which I've done, twice) and ensure that he doesn't leave. The last promotion packet hinged on work that took him maybe a couple months to do, but that I managed to spin into a big complex project, because it was stuff that folks at the Director/VP level cared about deeply but had no idea how to do. All the rest of the two years, the time spent fixing bugs and improving code health and mentoring the team and delivering small usability improvements, was basically ignored (don't tell him or the rest of the team!) because it fell below the radar screens of the decision-makers who hold the purse strings. When it comes to the working class, I suspect that most of them would like to be able to take pride in their work and be rewarded for it. To make money because they did a particularly clean plumbing job, and not because they paid off Yelp to increase their rating to 4.5 stars or happened to run the right Google AdWords. But that's not the world we live in, salesmanship and paying the right taxes to the right overlords matters more than actually doing the job well, and people are pissed about it. |
not great
>and then whether you listen to your manager.
I mean that's part of the job, no?
I'm sure the system isn't perfect, but I was a wee programmer back in the day when it was way more common for MBA types to be managing programmers, the idea that solid technical skills might get you promoted to the compensation of what a director might make was almost unheared of.
G's sytem of promo isn't perfect, it emphasizes the wrong things, but it's forward progress in the long run.