People can absolutely get promoted for improving products, even if those products don't make the company money.
The problem is more likely a lack of prioritization at the leadership level.
The problem is more likely a lack of prioritization at the leadership level.
Great. If you're in leadership why would you prioritize a feature making it easier for people to leave your platform when you could instead prioritize a new feature that might generate value for the company?
There's no incentive to make Takeout any better than it is today.
Yeah, but there better be a high-up patron for these products because Google is notoriously stingy with promo.
Source: quit Google right after L3->L4 because another company was willing to offer me an extra $200k/yr and L5. I've since been promoted at THAT job, and am now looking again because they gave me a raise to the bottom of the next band and that's dumb.
Why is that dumb? By your own account they’re already paying you at least 200k/year.
There’s a limit to how many large raises you can give if you intend to give x% for the rest of time.
The tl;dr for this is that if the company makes getting paid a market rate and promoted internally more difficult than just interviewing, they should expect people to just leave.
I'm really not sure how the economics of this work out. Obviously Google has a much easier time swapping engineers in and out (it's responsible for basically everything that people hate about the company both internally and externally) but there are still specific teams where engineers leaving represents significant knowledge loss.
Hell, companies that DON'T follow the same engineering practices that let Google hotswap engineers still do this and there's no way it doesn't have significant hidden costs for them.
If you still expect 200k raises in such a position you are likely in for a bad time (nothing is guaranteed though, you might get lucky).
This is not even remotely close to true for high-paying SWE jobs in the Bay, and the part of me that grew up in the middle of nowhere still has a hard time believing it.
Staff engineers make between $500k to $1M a year. My first year at Google I was sat in a row of absurdly high-level engineers, many of whom made even more.
At Google is already not the norm is it?