(throwaway account for obvious reasons)

I left Google a few years ago, and I did love working there, but unfortunately my experience was similar. I was on one of the non-software engineering ladders. The group I was part of grew very rapidly the first few years I was there. We were poaching the absolute best people from the best companies to come work on our team. It seemed like there was a new former principal engineer from MegaCo joining us weekly, and it was fantastic to be part of such a team.

But how people got promoted was sometimes a mystery, at least at first. Everyone knew who was the most productive, the most valuable. Yet the promotions too often appeared random. Because we were on a narrower, more specialized engineering ladder the promo committees consisted of the same handful of very senior engineers each time. After a while, it became clear to us that the people that worked with those engineers on the promo committee in their day-to-day ended up having their promotions approved. Those that didn't had far less chance.

This might not sound all that bad - if you're doing high-level work you should be engaged with high-level people. But it ended up becoming a patronage system: people would volunteer their support and time for the pet projects of those on the promo committee and in return they would get promoted. Engineers who weren't comfortable with such an arrangement ended up jaded and underpayed.

I saw one engineer who left a very, very senior position at a well-known company especially hurt by the realization that they would have to participate in this charade to move up. He/she had attempted to get promoted the right way a few times and failed. Under pressure from their significant other, they played the game and it visibly hurt their sense of pride. The promo committee members took turns jerking them around with various tasks for a year or so, but he/she got their promotion. The rest of us took notice.

I got the sense that this system was more comfortable to those who came to us from academia. I barely have a college degree myself so maybe I can't relate.