Microoptimizing for what the cargo cult believes gets you promoted is strictly worse than microoptimizing for what actually gets you promoted.
Senior engineers will:
* Design a significant project which lands with measurable customer impact
* Demonstrate expertise in at least one core skill outside of coding (test infrastructure, SRE, security, accessibility, etc.)
* Demonstrate leadership by either being a TL, owning and leading team pillar efforts (security review, etc.), etc.
* etc.
Mid-level engineers will:
* Own either a small feature end to end or a significant piece of a larger design
* Contribute to at least one non-coding pillar
* etc.
These generally have more areas and can be further granular such as "low-performing midlevel is X, satisfactory is Y, exceeding is Z"
Just proves the point, this person just cargo culted what makes google so famous in recent years. If you only metric is to launch new projects, you’re only gonna launch new projects. Who’s gonna get promoted for maintenance.
Again, not trying to debate what the specific bar should be, just giving examples of the kind of metrics you can use. What's your preferred alternative? Lines of code? Whenever your boss feels like it? Stuff like that is why no one believes a "senior staff superstar" from the hot startup of the week is any good and requires them to do whiteboarding.
Thus, there are rules, and they are written down. If they're not visible to normal employees, they guess the rules based on who they see get promoted (cargo cult) while the committee uses the true metrics.
It's not like becoming a manager is a secret cult where you're dropped in and you suddenly have carte blanche to do anything. At established companies there are rules and procedures, and while you will likely have access to more information than individual contributors, you won't just be promoting whoever you feel like without having to go through others.
If you want a team that lands stable customer-loved products, make THAT your performance review. Turns out that's hard to do objectively and consistently.
For example:
* Require features to be launched for a period of time rather than in development or shoved out the door a week before perf
* Have metrics for customer satisfaction and oncall pages be incorporated
Etc.
Have excited engineers, pay them well, have them work on something that is aligned with their career & deliver value to their customers, they don't really need much more than that. All the rest is simply trying to "processi-ze" what is a human
Never said that. I don’t have a solution. Well I have a partial solution, but not complete:
Reward all team members equally for the performance of the team, or even the company. For instance: the pie is divided into 3 pieces: company, team, and individual performance. Candy is given out based on performance of both.
It doesn’t fix the hackable metrics issue, but when people collaborate the side effects are better than when they think of their own promotions, and worse when they’re competing against their direct peers for a fixed bucket of candy per team. Such incentives are directly opposing collaboration between the very people that need to collaborate the most.