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Comment by r0ze-at-hn | Hacker News Reader

> author seems like they were only there for a promotion

It is more the other way around. Internally google taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything liek that, but to ONLY do what a nameless committee might want to make that magical number go higher. So while they might not have joined Google for that reason eventually they learned what was wanted. There is a whole generation of software engineers that learned this lesson unfortunately.

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This is not true. Google is so large that I'm definitely willing to believe that there are parts where people are like this, but I found that people generally did not care about my level and while there are many docs/slides about how to get promoted it was largely oriented towards helping people advocate effectively for themselves and was not "thou shall be promoted".

There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.

> There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.

The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period, and going up levels involves a largely arbitrary process that is disconnected from your actual work performance seems pretty problematic to me. Seems like it'd be hard to focus on actually doing useful work in such an environment.

No, it really isn't.

The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1.

An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with some amount of cross-team coordination and get it done without much oversight. IMO every software engineer should be able to get to that point in their career eventually otherwise it indicates a pretty big problem.

> The amount of time is very long

It is now, it used to be a lot shorter. "Up or out" has effectively been sacrificed to cost savings, which is perhaps a good thing in some ways.

What did it used to be?

When I started in 2011 I was told "up or out" of L4 by 4 years.

That was dropped around 2015 or 2016.

I stayed for 10 years at L4 then left on my own. I had no interest in the perf game and never attempted promotion. L4 money was good enough.

I don't think it was a case of it "happening to" people, as in HR took them out back and put a bullet in their head... just social pressure. Internal elitism, perf comments, slowly chipping away at you, maybe even toss you on a PIP. Until you throw up your hands and leave. After all, other employers would be more than happy to have you.

But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10 years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got ... attitude.

Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on performance you're expected to stay or improve on that performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back to L4.

What happens once you hit L5? You just need to perform satisfactorily each year?

Yes. There are far fewer people at each higher level.

There's different kinds of customers for different kinds of bureaucracies though.

However, it looks like the people working at L4 for Google are being handled no differently by HR than assembly-line workers at other top Wall Street companies. Better pay for more people than most of the old guard, but why can't they do this part of it with some ingenuity.

>The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period

At least factory workers know this is not going to happen from the get-go. This is even more non-congruous for the kind of HR involved. Probably why factory workers have as much of their productivity leveraged as they do. Most of those companies are so far from bonanzaville, if they didn't do it right, they would have failed a long time ago.

You would think Google was built from a different foundation well enough to avoid this, or would have been able to migrate further away from useless bureaucracy than some of the hundred-year-old companies. It's almost like they didn't know any better.

Well, when you do the math it seems like for quite some time that everything truly worthwhile going on at Google has been, to a very large extent, the conserved portion of the output of people who never got promoted.

Financially, if you were going to invest in people, that would make them the better investment than those who did get promoted :\

It might be difficult to put some exact numbers on it, but you could probably tell how high-performance the unsung heroes are, by whether or not Google is making any money or not any more, and how much.

Now what about the people who could never get hired at Google or places like that to begin with?

If you could invest in somebody like that, woo hoo the sky's the limit !

You'd be raking in the bucks way more on a hard-working non-corporate scrapper than Google makes from a highly credentialed true genius who is the least bit decent at corporate climbing :)

I will second what the parent poster says, people definitely cared about levels in the teams I was on (2016-2021). Sometimes people would talk about other engineers using only their level. E.g. "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" or my manager introducing new teammates by saying "we have a new L5 joining the team". This seemed normal to a lot of people at Google, but since I have worked at other places where someone's level almost never comes up in any conversation I always found it a little concerning.

So like I said, I definitely believe that it happened, but I didn't see it and I have a hard time believing it was the norm. I was there 2016-2022. Also the "some L3 keeps sending me these crappy CLs" person sounds like a bit of a dick.

How long would you say Google has been like this? Around the time when they realized they had an unstoppable monopoly? IPO? Early years? Always?

In my humble experience some time between 2006-8 and 2013. Unless they hid it that well from us interns.

It's not the only thing that changed. Good thing, my manager joined Google back in these older years, so, for instance, he could say to me that I was "expected to rise to L5" in such a way that I knew it wasn't enforced in our org.

This is just not true, sorry, even now. Google is one of the tech companies known for deemphasizing level visibility and titles. Case in point: almost three years in, and I don't know the levels of many of my colleagues. Though sometimes one can guess.

Yes, the last few years there has been a big push to try to hide levels, don't celebrate promos as publicly, etc, but the overall you can't overnight change (if ever) a culture that has been built for two decades around this concept.

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