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Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

No one gets promoted for maintaining the timer widget on Google search.

One of the most successful engineers I know in big tech told me this once -

“thewarrior you need to understand. In these companies everything happens mainly for one reason - does it get someone promoted or not ?”

I’ll wait to see if this was an accident or not. But I suspect there are systems in place to prevent changes like these from being shipped by accident.

This is one of those tragedy of the commons situations that has bedeviled the industry.

Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit.

What this does to the companies in the long term remains to be seen.

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Why don't just work on current position? I'm working as a programmer for 15 years and I'm trying my best to evade any kinds of promotions because my salary suits me and additional responsibilities will detract me from writing code.

Those people who don't get promoted are fired?

It’s a very cultural thing. If you’re very experienced and still “only” a senior engineer you can almost sense people wondering

“Why are you still here ?”

Rachel Kroll explains it well here https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/12/29/age/

“ This particular example was about older folks in tech.

As I remember it, the story goes like this: you're supposed to get into this business, get your money, and get out, meaning retire. You sell all your stuff and travel the world and write posts on Medium. You know, the whole pyramid thing, right?

Therefore, if you are still here, and are visibly old, something must be going on. They seem to boil it down to two things.

The first possibility is that the person is a badass. They are one of those people who already made their fortune and only hangs around at the job because they feel like it. They don't have to be there.

The other possibility is that the person is the exact opposite of a badass, and has managed to not cash out despite being in the biz for a very long time. They've made no money, may be living paycheck to paycheck, and really need the job. Basically, the fact they're not "at the top" despite their age means they are crap.”

I think this must be a relatively “new-ish” thing. When I got into this industry, in the middle 2000s, there was still the image of the “old beard” inside the company that was getting things actually done, and that was fine, one needn’t be a “director of” or a VP, just “programmer” was enough.

I now realize that worldview was on its last days, soon enough (I’d say 2007-2008) we started talking about “ninja” and “rockstar” programmers, first in the context of RoR but then it extended, gradually but surely, to almost all of the industry. And then lots and lots of money started becoming available via FAANG-like companies (I’d say starting around 2013-2014, something like that) and all this worldview was dialed up to one thousand.

There is still an “old beard”, it’s just expectation that if you are an old beard getting stuff done you’re an L6+ instead of just senior. No one would look down on a wisen old senior principle.

It is possible to do that past a certain level, and some people do. But I think the reason this isn't the predominant strategy is that there's a selection bias at play. The kinds of people who are ambitious enough to get a job at Google are also likely to always want the next job up, or if that isn't going smoothly, to move up by moving out.

If you're at a lower level, companies like this have an up or out policy -- if you don't get promoted in a certain timespan, they let you go.

If you're at a higher level, even if you're content with your position, your manager is rated on how many people earn promotions.

A lot of large companies have an Up or Out policy. If you haven't reached a 'terminal level', your position has an expiration date, if it expires before you've been promoted, you get put on a path to being fired. If you've reached a terminal level, then you're ok, but it's hard to be stable in a position in a company of chaos and churn.

The way you get promoted for maintaining the timer widget is to create some platform which drastically minimizes search features maintenance costs and tooling that largely automigrates legacy features onto it. Easy path to Google fellow if you can do it.

Sometimes I feel there are more platforms than products.

The best platforms are those that build a single product. Then we can argue for days about whether it's the platform teams responsibility to do X or the product engineering teams responsibility.

In close second are the platforms that are used for a fraction of a product and will never be wholely migrated onto because they are not fit for purpose.

Third place goes to the platforms that never actually have any product built on top of them - a theme so exciting people love recreating it at there own workplace.

We're all just temporarily embarrassed Linus Torvalds that want the world to build on our apis.

"Every org , team , project and task is a pawn in an elaborate multiplayer game of promo chess. Career success is defined not only by technical excellence but also in how well you can align and deliver your projects within the chess game that is currently in play. Fail to learn this and you will burn out or be forced to quit."

I guess so. I can relate to this 100%. So I guess so. Hate that it is like this, but it is 100% correct.

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