[turing]

Speaking from experience, I see everyone from the team leader to the interns tackling bugs on my team at Google. Furthermore, the engineer with the highest level on my team has done a tremendous amount of refactoring and maintenance work over the course of the past year. Clearly this is just anecdotal, but from what I've seen an engineer who took the initiative to improve performance/stability or significantly refactor old code would have just as good a chance of promotion as an engineer churning out new features.

[lumpypua]

Former employee here. I had a very opposite experience. New features were key for promotion. Performance/stability tweaks or bug fixes would only add to your promotion chances if they had a demonstrably large impact.

I wasn't at that level but this was super true for L5-L6ish engineers or above. Yes they had to tackle bugs, but they weren't getting to L6 unless they led an effort for a big feature within a project, or L7 unless they launched a project with a solid impact.

Management made efforts to give more weight to refactoring, but it seemed like a token effort. Refactoring was thankless unless it was a truly gargantuan change.

Working at google was great, but the engineering incentive structure is far from perfect.

[niketdesai]

I'm a PM and feel this is the case as well. I've seen massive migrations as one type of 'maintenance' wrapped as a launch that led to promotions, but generally the best way to go about it was join a rapidly growing project (G+) with user-facing impact.

The same issues you flag are similar for PMs.

[kbart]

That explains. I guess the key to the promotion this year is to integrate your project with G+ (bonus points if user face no choice).

[gwillen]

I see you're getting downvoted for this, but the only thing that's wrong with it is that you're a bit late on the schedule. If you go back to the 2011 era it was absolutely true.

[nostrademons]

I wanted to say "As someone who got promoted in 2011, I can concur", but technically I got promoted about 3 months before I integrated my project with G+.

[ProAm]

Honest question, did that integration benefit your project?

[walshemj]

The stack ranking element is also open to abuse and capture by outsiders i.e. only so many L3 to L4 slots available in any cycle as some hr been counter is getting a bonus for reducing the pay quanta.

It was even worse at British telecom where there might be only 20-25 MPG 4 (L4 or r 5 in google terms) slots every 18 months or so for all of Systems Engineering (a division with more employees that goggle has now) - competition to just get past the paper sift to an actual interview as brutal.

Its interesting my boss said well if you get an interview we think you can do the job its just deciding who gets a promotion or not

[skj]

Regarding the bean counters, keeping promos down doesn't help their budgets as much as you might think. The bonus you get for "exceeds expectations" brings you approximately to the "meets expectations" total compensation of the next level up.

Or so I've been told anecdotally ... personally I have yet to be promoted or experience a bonus cycle where I hit exceeds...

[walshemj]

Tell that to HR and bonuses can be taken away a lot easier than pay.

And reducing the pay increase quanta by 1% is a lot in a large company.