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Comment by me551ah | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason to why google is doing this? From what I get from my friends Google has issues with employee growth and it's pretty easy to stagnate. If google keeps going outside for leadership roles then is it overlooking capable internal employees?

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It's because Google's culture is engineering focussed while pretending to be product focussed. As a result, Google breeds great engineers but not great product people. Also, their promotion process shamelessly promotes peer cannibalization. So, its easy for naive people to stagnate.

Source: Ex-googler.

> their promotion process shamelessly promotes peer cannibalization.

What does "peer cannibalization" mean?

It means that making your peers looks bad is as important as making yourself look good. There's only so many spots for promotion, so employees have to stab each other in the back in order to look impressive enough to be promoted.

Not sure that's a culture that only exists at Google... pretty much true at the higher levels of almost any big company that I've worked at.

i’ve only noticed at least teams/products in google that are more stagnant or don’t have as much work to do. therefore they compete and are territorial with the work. other products that are growing there is plenty for everyone

I think Google just can't find people internally who want to do it.

I know of two groups (one of maybe 10, and another maybe 30 engineers) that sat essentially leaderless for several months each before Google hired a manager from outside the company. Neither one of these, in my opinion, have a good handle on Google culture.

There is no real reward for becoming a manager (no more pay, no more level, no more nothing), but a lot of hassle, so very few engineers want to do it.

At least that is what I see from my limited vantage point.

It's also hard for those Googlers who want to do it to be given the chance, unless already senior enough on the technical ladder to correspond to the top 20% of technical people at Google (a far higher bar than the technical competence required of a manager).

Source: personal experience circa 2013-2015, when I was there and trying to transition from individual contributor and tech lead to first-time people manager. Of course I wasn't considering executive roles like this article is about.

Companies typically hire outside people for leadership roles when they want to change their culture or gain some new industry connections. Promoting someone from within will reinforce the existing culture, for better or worse.

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