> What the process _does_ reward is whitepapers, tech talks, daily updates, and delegation. It sometimes felt like the goal was to make every little change as noisy as possible: if you just fix something yourself, you get no points. If you plan it out, generate whitepapers, announce it, convince other people to work on it, send daily updates to every possible stakeholder and then a triumphant announcement, and then do a round of tech talks on every piece of it, you're a shoo-in for promo--whether on not the 'it' was actually important or valuable to the company.

This is absolutely my experience at Google. If you want to move up quickly you have to write docs to convince people to work on your ideas.

> Forcing _everybody_ to follow the one path to progress means a lot of noise. A lot of tech talks from people who have no real interest or talent for giving them, on topics that nobody is particularly interested in, just for the sake of a line on their promo packet.

This doesn't really align with my experience. Most people I interact with at Google do not try to do this. They are happy being ICs at L4 or L5 doing their own thing. There is plenty of room to be an L5 or even L6 IC without constantly self promoting, it will just take you much longer to get there and you will never move past L6.