The Google career path, Part 3: Performance reviews and promotions

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-google-career-path-part-3.html

by cpeterso • 12 years ago

127 78 12 years ago

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

Afforess• 12 years ago

No wonder Google lets many services languish. With a system of promotion based on launches of new products/services/features there is no personal incentive to make things work long term. It seems like the person who redesigns the gmail categories for the nth time would get a promotion, but someone who followed up on bug reports, maintenance and stability patches years later wouldn't.

Support is just as important as innovation. There's no point in having great ideas if they aren't maintained. Google doesn't seem to get this...

turing• 12 years ago

Speaking from experience, I see everyone from the team leader to the interns tackling bugs on my team at Google. Furthermore, the engineer with the highest level on my team has done a tremendous amount of refactoring and maintenance work over the course of the past year. Clearly this is just anecdotal, but from what I've seen an engineer who took the initiative to improve performance/stability or significantly refactor old code would have just as good a chance of promotion as an engineer churning out new features.

lumpypua• 12 years ago

Former employee here. I had a very opposite experience. New features were key for promotion. Performance/stability tweaks or bug fixes would only add to your promotion chances if they had a demonstrably large impact.

I wasn't at that level but this was super true for L5-L6ish engineers or above. Yes they had to tackle bugs, but they weren't getting to L6 unless they led an effort for a big feature within a project, or L7 unless they launched a project with a solid impact.

Management made efforts to give more weight to refactoring, but it seemed like a token effort. Refactoring was thankless unless it was a truly gargantuan change.

Working at google was great, but the engineering incentive structure is far from perfect.

codeonfire3• 12 years ago

This is why the supposed meritocracy, promotions, and market economy of effort is a sham at corporations. In the real marketplace, support makes income happen. If a person is the owner of the company and does the necessary support, they reap the profits. But employees are not owners and corporations are not fair. The idealized marketplace is where everyone is their own corporation and the real marketplace determines exactly how rewards are allocated. In the real marketplace seemingly dumb ideas and banal work are both rewarded greatly if they have true value. In the corporate environment that will get you stuck in a career-ending dead-end job.

amaks• 12 years ago

But no one holds you at that job though, right?

sid-3• 12 years ago

Totally agree with you Plus the game is further rigged in favor of the corporation >If you want to get promoted, just start acting like someone at the next level up. Imagine 5 people working their ass off to go to the next level only 1 gets promoted But company gets more throughput for free

typpo• 12 years ago

Is there any company where churning through a list of bugs and maintenance projects will get you further in the long term than launching new things? Hacker News generally praises "ship it" culture, where experimentation and measurement is prioritized as the way to succeed. This is considered a good thing in most places and the incentives are not unique to Google.

mendicantB• 12 years ago

Facebook. See http://www.quora.com/For-top-technology-companies-what-of-th...

jmspring• 12 years ago

Consulting. Not a longterm in the company thing, but there is money in coming in and cleaning up others messes and get them on a path that can be maintained.

For myself - I've got projects I've helped as above. I'm not a maintenance/sustaining kind of guy, but many companies gamble on a "make it work now" scenario and then need help after the fact to bring it back to reality for long term support.

It's not sexy, I don't do it often, but if someone has an interesting challenge to get from X to sustaining, I'm happy to hear and maybe work something out biz wise.

sheepmullet• 12 years ago

"Hacker News generally praises "ship it" culture, where experimentation and measurement is prioritized as the way to succeed."

HN has a VC/startup focus. Maintainable code means a lot less to a quickly growing (and possibly pivoting) startup because fast growth almost always outruns the maintenance burden.

On the other hand poorly written and maintained software can drown a normal business. These companies typically have 20-30% margins and so even doubling the cost of maintenance can remove any profit.

nostrademons8• 12 years ago

This was true and a very big problem for a while. I started seeing improvement around 2011/2012, when promo committees started valuing grungy maintenance & refactoring tasks more. It is still harder to get promoted doing maintenance work than high-profile launches, but the gap has narrowed significantly.

Possibly not coincidentally, this was also the beginning of Larry's "More wood behind fewer arrows" push.

dannypgh• 12 years ago

In my experience it helps if you can demonstrate the impact of your maintenance work. "Cleaned up the configuration" is worth something. "Improved the configuration to make a certain class of misconfiguration, which has caused several outages in the past, impossible" is worth much more.

IMHO impact is really what matters most. I think where some people go astray is they rewrite a block of code but fail to convince the committee that there was a real, tangible benefit to the company in doing so. I don't believe this is a problem with the promo process- I think you get better engineering outcomes when people can justify the impact of their work. (People like to rewrite things, even things that don't need to be rewritten!)

yen223• 12 years ago

This problem isn't limited to Google. Everyone remembers the creator, nobody cares about the maintainer. There's a reason why software developers in general earn more than QA.

easytiger2• 12 years ago

A lot of mgmt philosophies used in the corporate world attempt to recognize this structurally. But it rarely reflects in the pay packet

easytiger2• 12 years ago

A lot of mgmt philosophies used in the corporate world attempt to recognize this structurally. But it rarely reflects in the pay packet. Banks for instance are an exception and maintenance and BAU staff are generally paid the same as developers.

My current client see productisation and day to day running and ongoing maintenance as the hardest part of a project (as much to internal structural failings as anything else).

watwut• 12 years ago

It is general problem, many companies do the same mistake. Programmer willing to do those needed useful maintenance things is penalized by a.) having less exciting buzzwords on cv, b.) having lower salary, c.) having less interesting work.

Surprise surprise, everyone avoids maintenance.

buckbova• 12 years ago

If you want to get promoted, just start acting like someone at the next level up.

Not at Google, but this is how I've always treated my career. Kind of a step beyond "dress for the job you want."

eitally3• 12 years ago

The only problems are when your boss doesn't pay attention and recognize the step up, or when they actively ignore it because you've taken some of the stress of their job and they are averse to potential change/risk if they promote you.

potatolicious2• 12 years ago

Then you take the fact that you're outperforming your title to another company that will recognize it.

Job-hopping (done within reason) is entirely underrated. Your salary will rise at a dramatically faster rate than if you stuck around one place, your responsibilities too, and best of all you get to learn how things are done across the industry.

edandersen• 12 years ago

This is a very risky strategy if your boss is easily threatened by talent.

alphagenerator• 12 years ago

Does it work?

chetanahuja• 12 years ago

Oh boy. A google career thread on HN. I look forward to measured and thoughtful discussion. Definitely not going to be sidetracked by multi-paragraph rants from some familiar names. No, not this time.

JSno• 12 years ago

"If you want to get promoted, just start acting like someone at the next level up. Eventually they'll realize you're not being paid enough and will promote you."

--This sounds really bad. Like a slave trying to move more bricks to show slave-owner that he is not being paid enough.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Can you think of a better argument to give your boss for why you should be promoted than, "I am already doing the work of one grade above me"?

patio11• 12 years ago

"I am already doing the work of one grade above me... at Facebook."

I'm joking, but not by much.

kbenson• 12 years ago

When this was explained to me by a friend that works there recently, my immediate thought was "Oh. I guess that takes care of the Peter Principle." What incentive does a company have to move you from a position you are competent and useful in to a potion you are incompetent and useless in?

groby_b• 12 years ago

Given the pay rate at any established company in the valley, I don't think being an underpaid "slave" is a concern.

VLM• 12 years ago

Comes into social status and treatment. Open plan offices, micromanagement, pooled paid time off, things like that.

Google for the term velvet handcuffs or golden handcuffs.

kentonv2• 12 years ago

Google's system is promotion-by-committee. It ends up having the same pros and cons as any committee-based system. On one hand, it avoids the kind of egregious mistakes and crimes that occur when too much power (i.e. to promote others) is vested in individual people (e.g. managers). On the other hand, committees are risk-adverse and will shy away from controversial actions. People who do good work following expected patterns get promoted. People who do controversial work, or who don't fit into an obvious mold, will have a tougher time, as a committee that can't come to agreement will default to no action.

yid• 12 years ago

or who don't fit into an obvious mold,

Genuine question: is that why you went in a completely different direction with Capn'proto than protobufs?

kentonv2• 12 years ago

Hmm, not sure I exactly understand the question. But I think the answer is probably "no". Cap'n Proto's design came mostly out of someone asking me one day whether two processes could share a protobuf object via shared memory, without serializing and parsing. I found the question interesting enough that I kept thinking about it and that eventually evolved into a design. My reasons for leaving Google had nothing to do with any of this, but gave me a well-timed opportunity to work on it.

I actually primarily quit to do sandstorm.io, and did Cap'n Proto more on a lark, although it turns out to be really useful infrastructure on which to build Sandstorm.

MileyCyrax• 12 years ago

You guys seriously have levels? I've never heard of that before. It sounds awful.

mynameisvlad2• 12 years ago

Pretty much all companies have levels. Even if it's not something as set in stone as Google's 1-11, or Microsoft's 59+, there's almost always some sort of differentiator, from something as small as "Senior" or "Junior" to denote experience.

dsplatonov3• 12 years ago

But that can kill all innovations. Especially, when junior can't report or discuss ideas with the manager, who can make decisions

sid-3• 12 years ago

If you want to get promoted, just start acting like someone at the next level up. This is the most ridiculous thing companies make u do I start acting and working like a CEO will I become one ?

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

No I didn't down vote you, but in my experience that is exactly correct. If you start acting like the CEO you will eventually become the CEO. The tricky bit though is that often times people don't really know why the CEO acts as they do. And that is partly because there is information available to the CEO that isn't available to just anyone, and partly because the CEO is often balancing problems and opportunities that aren't necessarily visible to those outside their direct reports.

One of the first things I try to impress upon new managers is that their job is not about telling people what to do, rather their job is about getting the most done with the people they have on the most important parts of the problem. They have to take the whole set of possible things that could be worked on, and figure out the important ones to invest in. Sometimes the importance comes from being or staying competitive, sometimes the importance comes from keeping things alive long enough to get to the next milestone.

sid-3• 12 years ago

U live in a more idealistic world than I do There is no point climbing someone else"s organized corporate ladder with 10 levels when u can do ur own experiments :) Don't want to be an old man filled with regret on level 3 or 6

dsplatonov3• 12 years ago

I wonder if VC's apply the same metrics to the new start-up companies. If so, no venture capitals give funds to google.

xiaoma• 12 years ago

The most interesting part of this piece for me was that the peer feedback isn't anonymous. I can see this leading to some uncomfortable situations, but I can also seeing it be a net positive. Getting honest feedback (unrelated to performance review) from one of my senior peers at Groupon was a very beneficial for me.

e12e• 12 years ago

Am I the only one that finds it odd that (according to the article and comments) the compensation is tied tightly to levels, but the mean salary for each level is considered secret? So you get to know how you "compare" in terms of "performance", but not how much Google actually values you as an employee? Is this just an aspect of "if you generate revenue we pay you more"?

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

That is, nobody is going to say, "You're only an L4, therefore you can't work on this project."

Someone said exactly that to me when I was at Google. That's kinda how closed allocation works.

What I always tell people: If you want to get promoted, just start acting like someone at the next level up.

At any company, that's the quickest way to get fired. Getting into a turf war with someone with a much higher title? Not a good idea. To be honest, if I were to do Google again, I'd have kept my head down and said "Yes, sir". It can do a lot for your career to work there, but it's not a place where you can safely overperform.

However, there is a way to provide private feedback that can only be seen by your manager; in my experience this backchannel is rarely used.

"Yes, I realize that a murder count of 2,500 in a city of 1 million is horrifying. But look on the bright side. That means there were 997,500 people who were not murdered last year."

Managers take all of your reviews as input and determine a performance rating, which is a score in one of five buckets to indicate how well you're doing overall.

As of 2011, you actually get a score between 1.0 and 5.0. Almost everyone is between 3.0 and 4.0. The buckets are very large. "Meets Expectations" is everything from a 3.0 (acceptable for new hires, but damning if you've been there for a while) to 3.4 (slightly above average). If you're in this bucket, you don't know if you've been marked as a loser (and rendered unable to transfer) or are getting 65th-percentile ratings. You can literally waste 18 months on a loser project only to find you can't transfer because your boss gave you 3.0's.

These scores are also calibrated against other managers across the organization, to prevent managers from biasing their scores -- an individual manager can't game the system.

That's a nice way to present stack ranking. Each boss gets a finite number of calibration points and has to pick who does well and who doesn't. If he gets a crappy allotment and desperately needs to use all his points to promote the guy who'll do a startup unless bumped, you could get stuck with a (career-ending) 2.9.

----

The important thing to remember about Google's promotion process is that it's bicameral. Manager-assigned calibration scores are one component. Peer reviews are another. You need both to advance at Google. Google provides multiple paths to failure, not multiple paths to success. If your manager likes you and gives you 4.0+, you can still get dinged for lack of visibility. On the other hand, if your manager is giving you shit for calibration scores, all the peer review in the world won't get you out of the muck. I've known many Googlers to damage their careers by playing their manager but not the crowd, or vice versa. You need to play both games at the same time.

For a better analysis of Google's promotion/review system, read Piaw Na's essays, such as this one: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html

This is also worth reading: http://valleywag.gawker.com/eric-schmidt-personally-ruined-g...

jedc2• 12 years ago

The 1.0 to 5.0 system doesn't exist any more. What is in the OP's blog post is how it's done as of 2014. (Very recent Xoogler here).

potatolicious2• 12 years ago

As someone who has never worked for Google - how does The New Way address the problems he mentioned?

robrenaud• 12 years ago

(dead man's switch: Discussing perf with you on hackernews is going to be a waste of time, I'll personally pay you $10K USD [or EFF, if you refuse] if I respond).

An "occasionally misses" expectations is by no means career ending. It's just a warning sign. It's not by itself a fireable offense (as an aside, even being fired by Google won't ruin your career, a friend of mine with a bad manager at Google got fired. He ended up pre-IPO at Twitter, and he is definitely doing well). I had an occasionally misses as L4. For me, I took it as implicit permission to get more attention from my manager. I'd bring problems to him sooner and make sure to be less stuck, including burdening him with more mundane problems I was having, and giving him more status to make sure I was moving in the right direction. I quickly hit meets, and I eventually hit L5.

nostrademons8• 12 years ago

Someone (or actually 2 people) said things akin to "You're only an L4, therefore you need to be working on this part of the project." Both were newly L5.

I told them "That is not how we do things at Google. If you believe what I'm working on is not useful, communicate what the priorities are for the project and I will pick something that is both interesting to me and helpful for you. If there is nothing on this project that fits into that category, I will find a new project."

In both cases, they looked abashed and backpedaled.

This is what an L5 would do. Try to work directly with the people involved to figure out a compromise solution, and if that fails, exercise other options. And sure enough, I was promoted fairly soon thereafter.

Redoubts• 12 years ago

Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.

Aw.

Yimgo• 12 years ago

Wondering why the article is not available anymore but here's the cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9XGHjq...

http://pastebin.com/UyvbHcw2

van2077• 12 years ago

Hmm, it seems this page's been taken down now. It's still in google cache though...

jamesblonde• 12 years ago

This article has been pull by Google - how predictable! I can't find it anymore. Anybody got a copy they could put up here?

The Google career path, Part 3: Performance reviews and promotions

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