Google tells employees that fewer of them will get promotions to senior roles
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
You'll make far more money and advance far quicker from job-hopping between companies than you will trying to seek internal promotion.
Google, and pretty much big tech as a whole, is completely aimless at this point and has no real plan to provide new value to customers. They just jump from shiny thing to shiny new thing. Big tech has only been able to maintain it's recent dominance through monopolistic practices, and now they've mismanaged themselves into decline. Good.
Half your compensation at FAANG is name recognition for your resume.
If you view your colleagues so disdainfully - why (other than comp) are you still working there?
The commenter wasn't saying that the L3s "may have less experience avoiding tech debt"; but that they are, by default, to be viewed as creators of technical debt.
Which I guess we all are, at the end of the day. Still there's a snarky edge to the wording in that comment that I find hard to get past.
That said, I guess my explanation for the phenomenon--as someone outside such systems--is that in fact these organizations want weaker people at the bottom doing the grunt work as they are easier to control: they are all about figuring out how to build systems out of interchangeable cogs, under the premise that if you do enough build engineering then you can take almost any competent coder and get at least some contribution out of them (even if you end up needing ten times as many employees as a tradeoff).
In fact these organizations want weaker people at the bottom doing the grunt work as they are easier to control: They are all about figuring out how to build systems out of interchangeable cogs, under the premise that if you do enough build engineering then you can take almost any competent coder and get at least some contribution out of them (even if you end up needing ten times as many employees as a tradeoff).
Corollary being: if the work itself is structured so that much of it is viewed as "grunt work" - then by definition, the people stuck doing it (L3s in this case) are viewed disdainfully.
For those unfamiliar, Google engineering levels generally go from L3 (new grad) to L9 IDistinguished SWE). There is an expectation of growth to L5 (Senior SWE). I'm not sure what the figures look like today but pre-layoffs the total comp for an L5 Google SWE was typically at least $350k and can be over $400k.
Everyone who has been in this sytem knows that the bar to get to the next level (L6; Staff SWE) is gotten increasingly difficult. You packet will go through multiple promo committees and has to pass all of them. What would've gotten you promoted 10 years ago certainly wouldn't today.
But here's how promo committees work: you'll basically get stack ranked. That committee might have 10-15 packets and they'll get ranked. A certain point (usually called the bubble) will differentiate between promote those above the bubble, don't below. Committee consist of higher level ICs so a L5->L6 committe will consist of L7 ICs.
There is and probably has been a target percentage for promotions. This number is opaque. One of the things that Ruth Porat did when she came in to reduce costs was simply to reduce the promotion target percentage. I'm having difficulty finding the original leak for this but it leaked several years ago.
What slots there are to get promoted at these companies are probably filled by a revolving door of external hires.
So this is just more attacks on labor costs while executive pay is astronomically high and Google made a profit of ~$60B last year.
Disclaimer: Xoogler.
+100 to the "revolving door of external hires". I was let go in the January action after almost 8 years of doing the same thing at Google. During that time, I saw 3 Cloud CEOs and I personally had 6 directors and 9 VPs. Change isn't always bad, but Google clearly does not value leadership & management as skills in the same way most large corporations do.
I have a theory about this: middle management likes churn because it makes you immune to the consequences of their actions. You can't fail if none of your decisions are permanent and you constantly shift responsibilities. That's not an accident. It's by design.
My experience at Google was this was a huge problem.
Sorry you were let go.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/quotes-from-moral-ma...
(It's a rhetorical question.)
This is out of date. "Up or out" from L4 was dropped around 2015 or 2016 or so. It was considered "fine" to stay at L4.
For example: I had known at that point people who had been L4 for years. I think 8 years was the longest I encountered. So you're right there wasn't a strict "up or out" culture but that was always the case.
The problem was if you were a long-term L4 one management change could suddenly put you in the hot seat. A new director may decide they like "up or out" so even though you had 8 years of EE+ ratings, you suddenly were vulnerable if you didn't get promoted.
Back when I worked at Google L4 and L5 promos were done by committee. These are now done in-org by leadership. This is both better and worse. It also makes long-term L4s less likely to happen. Interestingly these promotions still have target percentages. The first time it was tried they had to un-promote some people because too many got promoted.
FWIW, I was there 10 years, stayed L4 the whole time because I never wanted to go for promo because the whole process stunk. Left end of last year of my own accord (never liked the place). The only place where being "still" L4 caused me grief was from a higher up inside Access (Fiber), where they got pretend to play at being their own company for a while (with their own policies etc) after Ruth's Alphabetization -- and then they got the axe.
Ironically the new process they brought out a couple months after I left would have served me better and I would probably have ended up in L5 without having to politic for it. Though I hated the last project I was on, so.
In any case, agree about your other points. It's labour discipline coming to Google. Though I think it's less about cost and more about discipline/subservience.
There is a "quota" for each level, it's driven by the business need. That has no relationship with merit based promotion.
If promotion is also bound by availability of "slots" at a given level, than by definition you will exclude some folks that are otherwise at that level.
I fully sympathize that inflation of level is a thing. I also fully sympathize that resources to use people at a given level are finite. Such that you will have to do this for practical reasons. Still, the message for that is almost certainly tailored to the individual that you turned down and best left for the specifics. Blasting out this message as generically as it was done just feels wrong.
Now, I'm fully onboard with what I think I read as part of your main point here. Management is a skill and it can be funny how few folks in the non-management world will acknowledge that. You can see similar with coaches. And it seems to be human nature that we love building a hierarchy up to a single point. Even in very distributed organizations.
And you are trying to allude to inflation of role and expectations, I suspect? And that is a thing. But since you don't demote people that fall behind on the inflation, you are back to my first paragraph. That or you are pushing out the folks to make room, but you will regret pushing out some folks from the highest levels.
It's common that there are people who would be more qualified to a position than the person currently holding the position, as long as we view merits in isolation. But the real ability the organization cares about is the ability to advance the goals of the organization when working within the organization. If replacing a person with a "more qualified" one demoralizes other employees enough that the organization's ability to reach its goals is compromised, the replacement is actually less qualified than the original person.
They'll kill or promote entire products because a given product area's position shifted in position on an org chart, or because some set of people involved don't feel they can get promotions or corporate success anymore from it.
The drive is political success. The criterion is openly about ability to promote and politic one's work. ("Demonstrating impact", key emphasis on "demonstrating". Written PRDs and design docs, name prominently placed, recognition from peers. Esp if they're on other teams, etc.)
It's frankly what you get when you have a company founded by academics who never worked in industry (but know all about defending your thesis to a committee, or "publish or perish") combined with unbounded revenue and seemingly infinite growth.
It does not run contrary to the idea of meritocracy to assert that a firm has limit on the number of people that it can hire into a certain position - so long as the people who do fill those are selected are (more or less) the most qualified. Note that I am not saying anything about whether Google actually meets this ideal.
I thought I had just always heard pride from the Google sphere about how they were much closer to the ideal of a meritocracy than other places. This feels... not that. :D
I've got a high performing L5 who is critical to the success of my team. My discretion on their raise was largely undone by my director and nobody acted on my recommendation that they receive discretion on their equity refresh.
That's not true? Isn't "senior SWE" the title for L5 at Google?
But my understanding is that, across most job tracks, it's expected that everyone should get promoted to L5 eventually just by working hard.
While it's never expected to get to L6. You might get to L5 and just stay there forever. L6 requires a certain level of achievement that they don't expect everyone to be able to achieve. That's what sets it apart.
So it makes sense this is the level where they're closing the gate even more.
L5 is mostly about reaching greater depths with your skills as an L4, L6 is more about gaining breadth that isn't guaranteed just by being an L5 for a while
Not Google but I worked at a mid-size US based company briefly last year.
The team was junior but senior in titles and highly opinionated, that was why I ended up leaving as nothing was getting done. Not last week I got a bunch of LinkedIn updates saying “Congratulate X being promoted to Senior/Staff/Principal Engineer”.
The grads I worked with who were good and what you expect for a grad where getting promoted to senior’s and the seniors who were ok, maybe a little inexperienced were getting promoted to staff.
I think roles mean nothing these days. They’re devalued and only exist for people to move up in to the next pay band.
What I consider senior from 15-20 years ago is staff engineer now and principal today feels like someone at the top of senior 15-20 years ago.
So L6 was the first elective level. Anyone who reached it did so by opting in, rather than just going with the flow. That is why it carries a bit of weight.
All this was more true back in the 2000s. (Source: me, ex-Googler, 2003-22.)
That all? A decade? I have 2 decades. I'm an L4. Weeeee....
Clearly, it doesn't not make sense for everyone at a given firm to be in management. Facebook has recently come to this conclusion. That said, leveling and advancement at Google has always been about impact, and for the most part, employees have been able to vote with their feet (internally transfer) if they find themselves in roles that won't support "impact requirements" that justify promotion. It is utterly insane and short-sighted for Google to place such low value on things like KTLO work and optimization, and the result is the long list of deprecated and half-finished products we all know and love. The effects of these perverse incentives have been beaten to death so I won't belabor that here.
However, one thing I don't see discussed much is how this same impact-driven-promo behavior leads directly to both "rest & vest" and poor management.
It leads to rest & vest behavior by employees who no longer see a path upward so they cruise with minimal effort to maintain the status quo. Google as an organization does not reward Googleyness where the term is defined to mean "go outside your assigned tasks / projects to 'do the right thing'". In fact, it usually punishes people who are too Googley.
Similarly, it rewards poor management because these vast quantities of employees are typically peanut buttered in such a way that everything is broken all the time and new folks constantly need to be hired to keep things running. Empire building, further supported by Google's reliance on TVCs for literally every non-product-development business process (and many functions and processes that do directly support product). Nobody knows how anything works and (see punishment for Googleyness) nobody is willing to stick their neck out too far to try and fix/change anything. There are some absolutely terrific managers at Google, but management and leadership at Google is the worst I've ever come across in my 25 year working career.
This brings me to the final problem with this no-promo statement. Another common reason Googlers are dinged on perf or viewed negatively by their own leadership is when they repeatedly hit CME, maybe with a sprinkly of EE, ratings. Literally, if you are rated as "Meets Expectations" more than twice in a row you are flagged for extra review during perf calibration. If promos to L6+ are being reduced, then that logically indicates that there are fewer roles at Google scoped for L6+ impact. If that is true, then logically 1) top talent will leave (or not join), and 2) people currently in terminal roles (say an L5 SWE or an L6 TPM) have no real motivation to work harder than necessary to achieve CME since they know they can't get promoted and the bonus and equity multipliers between CME --> EE aren't really that great. Similarly, you end up with folks who, after a few years (max), are near the top end of the salary band for their level and will no longer be eligible for pay increases beyond a percent or two.
Tell me, who would want to work for a company that 1) doesn't value management as a skill, 2) doesn't have logical performance metrics in place that allow all employees to articulate why what they do is important, 3) doesn't offer opportunities for advancement, and 3b) will actually fall behind CoL pay increases within a few years as a result of #3?
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, all lost so many people because their systems weren't configured to be able to quickly keep up with the new market trends. But Big tech cos had 2 things could control:
1. Newhire offer bands could rise quicker than internal salaries. (Leading to resentment that newhires were getting insane offers that long-term employees could never get in a raise). Which led to a lowering of the bar across all levels in Big Tech to get those offers out.
2. Promotion bars could be lowered likewise.
Neither was nefarious. Noone ever said at a high level leadership level "Lower the bar" (for either). But what did happen is that when great coworkers all around you are constantly leaving, the people remaining start to panic. They start to realize that that "almost senior" engineer who's "not quite there" and wouldn't have been promoted 6 months ago, will absolutely leave for a Senior title and a 30-50% salary bump if you don't promote him. (And still might if you do cuz you'll only give him a 15-20% salary raise). And suddenly, everyone starts "leaning in" to promotions.
Likewise, on interview loops, when you've lost a bunch of folks and are desperate to replace your headcount to meet your goals, you start talking yourself into candidates that you wouldn't have taken risks on 6 months earlier.
This is all basic human nature, and even experienced data-driven leaders will find themselves optimizing for different criteria and justifying it to themselves as thinking outside the box. I'm genuinely not judging, it's a reasonable and logical (albeit shortsighted) way to act under the circumstances.
So now, that all of this is behind us, these companies are all sitting on hiring freeze, post-layoffs, and still with a bunch of folks that are overlevelled.
An overcorrection is the only step forward. Lose even more folks because you now have to recalibrate their inflated sense of accomplishment or worse an overly optimistic sense of their opportunity ("Jeff got promoted and I'm way better than Jeff! So I should get promoted too." Yeah, Jeff wouldn't have been promoted in 2020 or 2023. So alas, too bad for you)
I think to some degree this will happen across all Big Tech this year. But unlike during the great resignation, there's no more unicorns (Except Facebook) throwing insane offers at ex-Big Tech.
I think things will go back to normal in 2024, for a definition of normal that is closer to 2014.
This is just a cost cutting measure as we all know. (Former googler)
Even L4->L5 promo is more than just demonstrating technical impact or ability. It involved being basically the key contact and coordinator on some project(s), "owning" some area and doing a bunch of cross-team collaboration. Being the loudest guy in the room for some thing, really. The impact that needs to be demonstrated from L4->L5 is in large part organizational/political, not technical.
I understand that L4->L5 was "fixed" after I left to leave a lot more room for immediate manager opinion/involvement. That's probably a good thing, because L4 to L5 was bullshit, especially at a smaller site where impactful work was hard to get.
Anyways, it's all stupid perverse incentives. People shoving each out of the way to grab the impactful work rather than cooperating. All over the place.