Couldn’t agree more. I took a level cut when I went to Google from Microsoft after being assured by the recruiter that, as a tech lead, getting promoted would be easy. Unfortunately due to two teams using the same code names I was put in Ads, last place I wanted to be, and took a non-lead role in another team instead. It quickly became apparent that the game at Google was very dysfunctional, and the “manager-bias” problem they were trying to avoid, while sometimes a real problem, was still a much better system that Google had cooked up. I lost interest in trying to get promoted and tried to focus on interesting work for the next four years. Meanwhile, I saw crappy engineers around me get promoted (and sometimes immediately use their new level to jump to Facebook) while hard-working engineers who cared about glue work, quality and meeting customer needs get overlooked (and sometimes leave too in frustration). Combined with having line managers with 16-25 reports (rendering them effectively useless), it was a pretty broken culture.

(This was 6-10 years ago; I know some things have changed, but I hear from people there it’s still crazy).