Hacker News Reader

Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

> You promote people not for being lucky and on a successful project,

At Google you are explicitly rewarded at L5 and up for picking the right project to work on. It's wisdom of the crowds. You pick what project you're working on and you should be picking a good high-impact one that actually brings value to the company, for which you might be promoted. This ensures that incentives are aligned.

Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it. You need to be proactive about ensuring that you're working on something valuable.

View on HN

>Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it.

It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful. If a project turns out to be a dead-end, that's either management's fault, or just the way the market worked out and no one's fault (you can't always predict what's going to be popular or successful). And if a project is clearly a dead-end, then why is management wasting money on it instead of canceling it and moving the talent to better places? Basically, Google's system just rewards people for being lucky.

Engineers: "We want an engineering-led organization!"

Google: "OK, here's some real responsibility over company direction."

Engineers: "No, not like that."

I mean, I work at a normal-ass medium-sized company and at our top level of IC technical staff even we're expected to help management choose between different strategic options and point out places we can improve the product based on technical synergies or easy wins they may not be aware of. If we do a bad job at this, we will also get laid off on way or another, at latest when the company runs out of money.

Especially at Google's size, you can just throw up your hands and say "oh well, the market is hard to guess." You are the market!

Except Google is everything but an engineering-led organisation.

Google: "Here's some real responsibility over company direction"

Engineers: "So we get to work on things we want to move the company forward with, yes?"

Google: "Yes"

Engineers: "And we get rewarded for making good products that work well, yes?"

Google: "Only if the MBA clowns decide that's what they want"

Google's behavior is even more insulting than being purely management-led.

> Engineers: "And we get rewarded for making good products that work well, yes?"

This is not what engineers say (nor what the company needs unless you take vapid definitions of "good" and "well"). The MBAs aren't the ones asking for a dozen messaging apps!

> It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful

If you just do what management tells you at Google you will never be promoted past L4. You need to come up with new ideas and projects to sell to management. The key is to align your project ideas with what management says they want.

sounds really exhausting... if that's the constant expectation and you're actually good at it, why work for Google at all and not fundraise for yourself? cuz you're doing all the same legwork but your ideas go to the man.

I think it is exciting actually. Google a bit of a mess internally so there are lots of problems to solve. Everyone knows that these problems exist but people either aren't brave enough to defy management spend to the time to solve the problems or don't know how to promote their proposals to whom

If you are happy being handed pre-scoped work, you can just stay at L4, which many people do.

It's not "really exhausting", it's just doing your job?? Personally I enjoy more coming up with my own stuff and fighting to launch it than just following orders (my favorite career accomplishments are making .app and .dev happen).

good for you, i can't imagine myself being under the gun to come up with a new funded project every year (or however often), would rather just work on some real product with revenue even if it's not very original

Based on this comment it seems like you have a highly distorted view of what it's actually like. You're arguing against a strawman.

It's not like that at all. Possibly it's like that for a high level PM, but for a SWE, it's more about putting yourself on the right project. You certainly don't have to constantly be coming up with new products on your own.

Also like, projects can last more than a year. There's something finishing up now that started work in like 2019 and planning in idk, 2016. And I know people who have gotten multiple promotions over growing their contributions to that particular endeavor.

Quite a lot of L9s did start companies, which were then acquired by Google. Others are working on things that already require a large amount of capital or influence, or just otherwise want to keep working on projects rather than administration.

If you can make 600k a year, a few years in a row (let's say three). How does 1.8M in hand stack up against starting your own business, with maybe a bigger potential number, but a lower statistical chance of making it there.

600k gross is 340k net in California if you are married.

Hopefully your spouse is earning a similar amount too!

Imagine paying someone 3-600k a year and saying Big Boy Boss Bob needs to decide what you do everyday.

Let the creative people you pay a lot make smart decisions and incentivize it.

> It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful.

That's simply not how it works at Google. Everyone has skin in the game. Who are you to say how it's "supposed" to work there? I'm telling you how it actually is.

So Google Feed, Chat, Hangouts, social networks are out because they're highly likely to get killed.

It's so obvious for Google.

And that's probably part of what's happening at Apple as well ? We've seen important, but not quite groundbreaking products get left for dead, and eventually killed when at Apple's size it probably wasn't that problematic to keep them alive. I'm thinking about their network router lineup for instance. Or how nobody cares enough to make a Calculator app for the iPad.

> Or how nobody cares enough to make a Calculator app for the iPad.

Supposedly Steve Jobs hated every iteration of the calculator on the first iPad, so they just didn't ship it at all. Might just be tradition at Apple to not touch that topic.

I think its the opposite actually.

Google pays over $300k a year for many of their engineers, and Apple pays quite well too. Regardless of how easy that calculator app is, it'll take a team of people to build, and that team is expensive, like millions of dollars expensive, and it'll never be worth it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com