The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

I think Apple has done a fantastic job of incremental improvements on their products rather than chasing the next cool thing. Can you name a company that has actually been doing this better?

For instance, they often resist new technologies like high refresh rate or OLED screens, 5G, etc., until they feel the technology is developed sufficiently and won’t impact battery life. There are other brands that compete by making a list of features rather than a coherent product.

Of the examples you named, both the Touch Bar and the butterfly keyboard are gone now, and the latest Macs are the best Macs ever. That shows a willingness to try new things, while also showing that they have good judgement in the long term and a willingness to move away from what doesn’t work.

Also, the iPad and Apple Watch haven’t been as important to Apple as the iPhone, but they are still original and category-defining products that I would call innovative. Not every new product needs to double your company’s market cap to be a big success in the category.

That makes sense. Googlers keep dumping out technically interesting products with no go-to-market strategy because one time doing that, they made a perpetual money machine (search ads). The problem is it’s 20 years later, technology has changed and not all markets are like search.

Throwing something out there is fine when it’s a magic website that answers your questions. When it’s, say, a half-baked messaging app none of your friends use, not so much.

... the Lisa, the Apple III, firewire, calling wifi "Airport" for way too long, that home speaker boombox thing, the weird round mouse that came with the iMac, ...

But seriously, I remember reading on here a comment from a previous Apple employee that all of their products are designed with the primary goal of looking good in a keynote presentation, which makes sense for their image, but results in underdeveloped products that "disappear" after a few years.

I think Apple continues to innovate in new product categories.

Apple Watch

AirPods

M1 Chip

Services (Apple TV+, Apple Pay, Music, Fitness, iCloud etc).

I include iCloud for services likeHide My Email and Private Relay.

They do this all while maintaining a consistent release cycle of upgraded versions of their hardware (new iphones, macs etc).

Also, everything in the list above has been developed under Tim Cook which is also impressive. He's been able to maintain Apple's ability to expand into new products and services.

google should work on some really hard problems they've ignored - customer service, privacy, etc.

It's why the only business I do with google now is in places where they essentially don't have competition, and only when I absolutely have to.

seven times if you include AirPods and the Apple Watch

I work in academic libraries. At the point Google Books and Google Scholar (two things that were relevant to my work) were being developed or very new, maybe 10 years ago now, I could actually talk to Google engineers about questions on how I could/should best integrate on my end, or problems or bugs (I did find some, that the google contacts agreed were). (It's true that cooperation from libraries/academic sector was something Google needed to succeed there too, to some extent).

Two years later... forget it. There was no way to get anyone's attention or a response about anything. This includes actual bugs and problems.

It was pretty clear to me then that there was nobody driving the bus on these projects anymore. There had been excited invested smart people around for the development, but once the thing seemed stable... there didn't seem to be anyone around at all anymore? I started to notice that this was how things worked at Google generally -- after a new product was deployed, there seemed to be simply nobody around anymore with the time and interest to act on bug reports, or talk to external partners, or just care at all. Without having at that time heard anything from inside the walls, that became my theory of how things worked at Google -- everything is abandonware.

So, yeah it's visible.

> why would a company do that?

Or maybe it's because the company is always looking for the runaway 10X success story (like search, ads, etc). Incremental growth doesn't make a dent in the balance sheet. So they're always shutting down the products that didn't explode into a success and starting new ones to roll the dice.

"Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken thing? That's vision." -- svachalek

THIS IS A GREAT QUOTE! UPVOTE FOR REAL INSIGHT.

This was one of the primary reasons I left. I had a project that enabled more than 100M+ increased revenue globally and the sales teams it impacted loved my work. But it wasn't considered hard enough or technically challenging work by engineering leadership so I got CME. That was it for me.

Yeah from what I've heard you ideally want to hit 70-80% of your OKRs, and people game it to make sure they fail at one or two so they don't get accused of being "too easy".

Missing OKRs always seemed a little weird to me. It strikes me as a lack of vision and makes the numbers and goals chosen seem very arbitrary.

Had to look it up. Objectives and key results (OKR, alternatively OKRs). More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR.

Hmm. If you are supposed to not meet all your OKRs, then that guarantees you will have a record of unmeet OKRs, which can be used as ammunition to deny promotion or even fire someone.

So that encourages a sort of favoritism, where the people you want to promote anyway have their missed OKRs overlooked, while the rest of the pack aren't meeting their OKRs.

It's partly that, but Google's counter has always been this refrain of "we are a data-driven company". I guess that is better than completely subjective metrics, in some respects, but it introduces another bias, which is focusing on things that can be measured.

Being "data focused" is probably a Good Thing in a very general sense, but there are real dangers that come with that. For example, there's a form of "data myopia" you can develop, which is best expressed by the old saw "data and optimization can help you get better at doing $SOMETHING, but don't tell you if you're doing the right $SOMETHING in the first place."

I saw a lot of successful promo cases that were based on pushing metrics. That just rewards quantifiable things, and disadvantages unquantifiable things. Worse, it makes people introduce bullshit measures and game them.

And of course there's Goodhart's Law[1] which leads to situations where trying to be "data driven" actually makes things worse when people start trying to "game" the metrics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I think both are important but it’s not necessary for any one person to excel at both. Some will naturally be better at depth and others at breadth. As long as you acknowledge both types of contributions I think it will work out well.

You should reward only based on customer satiesfaction and adoption.

> Set the wrong incentives, get the wrong behaviors.

I don't mean this as a slight at your comment - rather at the shockingness of the reality that your comment (really) needed to be said - but isn't this blatantly implied by the meaning of the word 'incentive'?? I'm astonished that people keep not realising this. The whole culture of OKRs/KPIs at startups feels like it's tempting this problem - I don't see why any but a very small number of companies should need to optimise metrics which are non-obvious. Having an OKR/KPI which one needs to deliberately decide on feels like a very pungent 'bad smell' of an XY problem.

Your last sentence sums it all up for me. Having come into Google through acquisition (and product then killed off) maybe biased me, but still. That's how I see it.

I worked at Google for 10 years and didn't have more than a few minutes of job satisfaction and jumped from team to team hoping to eventually find a place where I could fit in and maybe get promotion. But I never went for promotion ever. The whole process looked meant to demoralize. I was clearly not a "culture fit" -- as they call it -- but somehow I soldiered on and nobody cared.

Until eventually, after 10 years of L4, it became clear me I had wasted 10 years of potential career progression because the money was (at least) twice as good as what I would have gotten in a smaller local company where I would have more impact and creative input. The rest of the industry was off doing other stuff, and my friends moving into lead and management jobs, while I putzed around moving protobufs (with just the right comments, indentation and stylistic flourishes) around Google's walled garden. Any interesting work was snatched up by others faster than you could get it.

Promotion level at Google is only loosely corelated with programming or engineering talent. It's a measure of political skill and motivation, and your ability or desire to thrive in a large organization.

Don't get me wrong, the money was excellent and my priority was feeding my family. But it wasn't "retire early" money, not without a lot of severe financial discipline and restraint anyways.

Google got lucky 15 years ago and managed to turn on an absolutely massive firehose of money in ads. Now Google hoovers up as much talent as they can in hopes that they'll strike it lucky and turn on a second or third revenue faucet. But spoiler alert: they never will. So they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.

This ^ Exactly this.

I worked at Google for a while. I started there at 50% more than my previous compensation, but two steps down in terms of responsibility. After a couple of years of my manager saying that I'd be ready to apply for promo when the current project finished and watching projects fly by, I started shopping my resume around.

> PhD with 4 years of experience

Google and other FAANGs pay very well, so it's not surprising they can hire PhDs but I sometimes wonder about the negative effects of vacuuming up so many research level people and having them do very mundane work.

Experience is not equal to ability.

> I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.

Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets.

6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.

Why exactly does it seem worse? Last year I switched from a FAANG to a Series B startup that does experience-based levels, and in my observation it's just better in every way.

Here's a blog post explaining their approach:

https://www.daily.co/blog/rethinking-levels-promotions-and-s...

Maybe it's not possible to switch from a cutthroat promotion-oriented environment to this, but it's worth thinking about for anyone building up a software engineering workplace.

This is why promo culture is impossible to remove at bigger companies. Perks of promotion (higher salary, title, status) far outweighs just trying to do right by customers.

Whereas at early-stage startups, the only way to really make a lot of money is to grow the pie, which usually involves serving customers better.

Now that there are so many well-funded startups (https://topstartups.io/) there are more paths to escape the promo BS and still make a great living

Any promo process with any randomness (especially a promo process that changes over time as upper management changes) is effectively a stochastic version of "promo after N years after not being fired." I don't worry much about promos, but still randomly get promos because the stuff I found important for a few years was also nicely slotted into the promo standards at the time. And the obsession on titles and such book-cover-like triva does seem to get worse the more they try to systematize the process. When it's clearly equivalent to rolling dice, people worry less about it. The more rigorous they make the process and the more they have panels and packets and so on, the more people start introducing each other with their title. My first ten years in software, no one cared about titles at all unless you met with a non-engineering org and met dumb people with an exalted titles (in which case you felt bad; titles only serve to harm morale, they never improve it). The last ten years, people act like becoming Senior Principal Staff Engineer is like becoming a different sort of human. It does correlate with more pay, so it's hard to say it's completely trivial, but honestly, once you can afford a house or whatever, it's less important to happiness than fulfilling work, good co-workers, flexibility to meet your family or parenting obligations, autonomy over your work, and so on. One imagines one gets more autonomy by having a grander title, but really you get autonomy by just exercising the autonomy you have by being in control of the scarce and valuable resource of being able to create and improve software systems. If what you find important is valued by the organization you work in, then it will work out that people trust you, no matter the levels.

Yes, and it doesn't stop there:

L3: $192,064

L4: $268,758

L5: $358,423

L6: $502,465 (!)

https://www.levels.fyi/

You are right. Till the time you have promotions tied with significant pay bump, you will have people working their a* off for promos and trying to do all it takes to satisfy criteria.

>I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.

Though, If you do this you will have a culture where people are scared all the time and don't feel any job security.

Have you seen how wide the bands can be (especially when factoring in appreciation)?

Some L4s can make more than L6s.

What is bonkers is that you can care about levels so much - but pay is wildly disconnected.

What's the point behind putting all this effort into it when at the end of the day it means almost nothing?

I did my own promo packet at a large tech company and it was the most depressing, demoralizing experience I ever had. The packet had 10's of things mentioned in it to provide evidence for and I felt I have done 2-3 big projects and I'm mentioning same thing for every line item but that was because we don't produce one line item worth of evidence in one project. Eng promotions at large tech companies are the most de-humanizing, de-moralizing things ever. I got promoted but I felt my morale took a huge dip after starting promo process as compared to before.

As stated in TFA and throughout this thread, moving the burden to the ICs means they will be incentivized to focus on Promo Packet instead of real work.

No offense intended, but in your comment it comes off a bit selfish and bears the hallmarks of a classic archetype of terrible manager. I'd never willingly work for you. Being in management isn't for everyone, it's a people-focused domain. The whole job is about supporting the team and setting things up for successful outcomes.

There is nothing wrong with being an individual contributor. If your organization limits how far ICs can go, take this as a sign of toxicity and consider finding a higher quality organization to join.

Definitely much more to this story, but they basically wanted you to do a part of their job for them. It's common and mostly understandable, as they might not remember everything that you did. They'll have to re-word everything anyhow.

I have been using git logs and cvs logs to see who does what, across hundreds of developers, since 1997. I don't understand how people, managers, claim to not be able to figure it out.

And if people are doing work in an engineering organization that isn't backed by commits to some durable and versioned system, that is a huge red flag. They should probably not get promotions till they automate and make their work flow use version control. Even in the 90s this was true (the "install the OS on the new hardware" team would have things more automated than many "application dev" teams). Now in 2020s, the whole AZ should be in git and the change implementation procedure should be a variation on a big button that does "push master to n% of live; wait for monitor/validate scripts roll back or push more; repeat"

Part of this is due to companies shooting themselves in the foot over and over, recruiting developers looking for challenges rather than grunt developers okay doing largely maintenance for a solid income. If they advocate themselves as providing the challenges for the former and filter out the latter, yes, obviously your employees are going to leave after they have to move that one div by 5 pixels for the umpteenth time and get no mental stimulation for months.

Experienced something similar, but it was not an outage. Had several knowledgeable people leave the company, and they all happened to be experts in a particular service. Positions weren’t backfilled even though the people gave advance notice. About two months later we ended up getting out butts kicked when nobody knew the details of the service implementation and the service was expected to be updated to support some new features.. couldn’t get it updated for about 3-4 weeks because we couldn’t afford an outage.

Yeah and this problem is exacerbated at Google by the relatively easy process of moving between teams. Other companies I was at made this hard. Google encourages it.

When friends complain to me about Google killing projects, they act as if it's upper management making a decision to kill. And that is sometimes the case. But often it's just: nobody wanted to work on it anymore. And Google isn't the kind of "command and control" culture where you crack the whip and tell all your engineers that they're doing X and assign them. At Google they'll just leave your org and move to some other team, and you won't have the power to stop them.

Not saying that's a bad thing, but it has some bad outcomes occasionally.

You can find maintenance experts too. When someone tells me that they have this important, dangerous, buggy system wthat has trouble handling its ever growing load, and they need someone to come in and fix it, I cannot be any happier. But I know the system has to be really important, and that the fire has to be so bad that upper management is willing to spend the money to let some specialists come in, few questions asked, knowing that they will be rewarded as if they were building a new shiny, high visibility doodad. What is difficult is to have management that will keep that level of attention, instead of realizing that the reason that nobody has heard a bad thing from the system in months, if not years, is because there's a lot of work being done trying to make the system invisible.

What usually happens is that after a year or two they forget, and the maintenance programmer jumps to a different fire, typically in a different company, because there is far less reward to keep improving the system than to stop it from being a raging fire.

There are plenty of people who like fixing the occasional bug and adding a touch more polish. The problem is that this is actively disincentivized on every level. On top of that, a lot of people have internalized this.

If the world weren't so obsessed with differentiating pay, you would have people who are enthusiastic about a wider variety of things.

I think you nailed the crux of the problem.

The challenge for engineering management is how to provide metrics to measure your bus factor reduction efforts and the strength of your insurance prior to the emergency.

It is highly possible though that the new support team members are actually coasting up until the disaster so you didn't really have the insurance you thought you were paying for.

There is that too, but you could solve that by having engineers/teams working in new, cool, and useful products. I feel my company doesn't have a good mechanism to maintain services that aren't actively developed.

We experience it first hand when one of our services got deprecated and we moved to a new org. The solution was literally to hire a new team in a low CoL country and hand over the service to them. Needless to say it was difficult to hire for those positions.

Isn't the 20% time to work on whatever cool shit you want enough ? (like how googlers created that garbage angular1 because they were border, have no clue about GUIs and had some fun scewing around ) ? I know people that are fine with getting paid to maintain shit so maybe the problem is Google only hires cool developers and the cool developers only want to work on cool stuff and in 2 years the newest cool stuff of-course.

It's a whole "growth" thing.

Like, it's not good enough to have a quality product that generates a sustainable revenue stream year after year. You have to "grow" because companies don't really do dividends anymore, they want a constant increase in stock prices, product be damned.

They have to show on investor calls the line went up.

We’re propping up the wealth of a generation that has no idea how anything works, but they got there first so of course they are now the de facto deciders of our agency.

> and that's because those get moved to MTV and fast tracked to the executive suite.

"The Goon" is the analyst from an investment firm who tells your directors and CEO how many of you are going to be fired to make him happy.

It would be a smart business decision. A Google mid-tier employee or two just isn't a large cost to keep a project running. It's not cheap, sure, but to have a product running at scale?

The rationale for developing Go is that Googlers are fresh out of school and only barely smart enough to program Java, so I think they’ve eased off on the notion they only hire super-geniuses.

I worked at a place that did perf reviews every 6 months. 360 degree style, where you got manager feedback and a bunch of peers that you nominated. None of the feedback I received was ever actionable or useful. None of the feedback I gave was ever really useful, either! People rated you on a bunch of silly, vaguely described sliding scales from 1 to 5, then answered a couple of equally vague questions. It probably distracted people for 3 or 4 days, every 6 months.

All I ever got was stuff like "Joe writes excellent design documents! His code is always well tested. I always want Joe on my projects!" I'd write stuff like "Amy is extremely effective at solving problems with <blah> API's, and is a great communicator. She should do a brown bag session about her experience with <blah>." The reviews were all fluff. Some people wouldn't put in any effort at all, and write one liners. Seriously, one of my reviews was "Just keep on being Joe!" Thanks, but why bother?

The review process at most companies is a big waste of time and money.

Oh. I think I understand my work culture now. Thank you.

I’d say this goes with letters of recommendation, too.

I do think more democratic, less hierarchical systems can work well if they're implemented in the right way. I saw a shift from that, where it was functioning well, to something more hierarchical and everything play out as this blog post is criticizing. It became really clear very quickly how aims shifted from more institutional mission-statement-type goals to promotion criteria and personal power agendas.

There's a limit I guess, but sometimes having multiple people to report to can lead to checks and balances.

I once had a similar situation and seriously contemplated building an application to manage my status updates so I could enter the raw data once and have all N people who needed to be updated sent the right information in the right way at the right time....

At least for performance reviews it's so much easier. If your boss hates you for some reason, that sucks, but you can just move on. It's a lot simpler than trying to please a dozen different people simultaneously though.

I have a scrum master, a product owner, a tech lead, and a team manager. All four of those are management relationships, but only 1.5 are hierarchal (the manager and sort of the tech lead). The most effective and efficient relationships we have, IMO, are with the scrum master and product owner, who aren't above us in a hierarchy.

There's no inherent reason for management to be hierarchically superior. If you want productive relationships, you have to level the power dynamic more.

Seems like if your boss is a receptacle for status updates, the company is doing management wrong. Sure, it works less bad with one, but that doesn't mean it's good.

> the focus on your raising your peers detracts from more important business goals?

It's this. Actually doing work is seen as simple and unworthy of a higher-level engineer.

Good engineers focused on problems (fixing complex bugs in distributed systems, adding fallbacks and failovers, improving the UI or performance of internal tools, etc) can add significant value to the company...but they won't be rewarded for it, because the perf process considers those to be simple, the domain of lower-level employees.

What the process _does_ reward is whitepapers, tech talks, daily updates, and delegation. It sometimes felt like the goal was to make every little change as noisy as possible: if you just fix something yourself, you get no points. If you plan it out, generate whitepapers, announce it, convince other people to work on it, send daily updates to every possible stakeholder and then a triumphant announcement, and then do a round of tech talks on every piece of it, you're a shoo-in for promo--whether on not the 'it' was actually important or valuable to the company.

Of course, people with those planning and communication skills are really valuable to a company. But somebody also has to do the work. Forcing _everybody_ to follow the one path to progress means a lot of noise. A lot of tech talks from people who have no real interest or talent for giving them, on topics that nobody is particularly interested in, just for the sake of a line on their promo packet. And a lot of effective engineers getting frustrated and quitting because they don't want to spend their days working on slide shows.

It feels to me like the people in charge of the perf process just tend to overemphasize their own strengths and skills. Kinda by definition, the people designing the system are going to be senior people who are interested in communication and process, so that's what they look for in others. If they were the kinds of people who were interested in identifying and solving particularly devious or consequential issues on their own (or as part of one of their peer's projects), they wouldn't be working on the promo process in the first place.

Your peers are rewarded for accomplishing their goals. In the best-case scenario, the incentive is to find ways to synergize your goals so you are all benefitting.

In the common-case scenario, you figure out how to bribe / cajole / coerce them into putting time in on your project and don't really care about how things are going on their project, because we're all responsible engineers who can time-manage ourselves, right? So you get your promotion and they get screwed because the work they did to deliver on something valuable to the company isn't reflected in their OKRs.

It degenerates what should be a collective goal of accomplishing the company's objectives the best way possible into a slotting game of making sure you're always listed on paper as being on the right project, because your work won't have value if you applied it outside your bullpen.

It's a problem for people who value working on things that actually get used for more than a few years and aren't duplicate efforts to make some line on some graph go up somewhere.

These are of course people, after all. Not robots.

Experience points. Every you complete a task, you gain experience points. Gain enough, you go up a level. Flavor them for different job tracks, tweak the rewards to incentivize the behaviors you want and not the ones you don't. If someone isn't gaining experience at a good rate, take a closer look to see whether they are doing things that should be worth XP, or whether you need to have a different conversation.

Give people some choices on leveling up -- maybe most people just want a bump to salary, maybe other people would like to gain more vacation, stock, half days Friday, a private office, a good parking spot, etc etc.

I worked at companies where managers are little tsars of their turf, and Google.

The difference with Google is that: 1) you can give feedback to your manager, both anonymously and explicitly, and they'll affect their perf; and 2) your success, in terms of impact and promo are part of your managers success; 3) perf committee will challenge and can override your manager if the rating given seems too low/high given the evidence.

These forces while do not take power away from manager completely, they provide some checks and incentivize managers to respect and support their reports.

Of course, all these nice things come at a cost, that is perf becoming a somewhat transparent and heavy process that eats everyone's time and mental energy.

I've been on promotion committees where it was clear that the manager didn't support it, but we promoted the candidate. I feel like most of the memorable discussions in those committees were figuring out how to give the manager feedback on how bad of a job they were doing.

I agree that you're basically screwed, especially L3->L4, if your manager isn't actively counselling you on how to grow your career. You obviously don't have enough experience to do it on your own at that point, so you are at their whim. Even when you do have the experience, if you don't have a good working relationship with your manager, you're in trouble anywhere. It is ultimately going to be them or you, and you are easier to get rid of ("he took another offer" versus "everyone thinks your manager is a jerk, so we fired him, oh by the way in the meantime your career is on hold while we figure out what the fuck to do please keep showing up").

Maybe just don't go above that. Whatsapp was at that level when acquired fwiw.

Should avoid hiring people from big companies that are used to promotions every year.

It's a retention issue. If people don't level up fast enough and get raises they'll leave for another company.

At Google at least, if you stay low level for too long, you get fired. If your team is full of low level people maintaining a project that's stable, you need to invent work to justify your existence.

It's all about how you twist it. If you say "I built 2 new services that could have just been a feature in an existing service" then you'll probably get a bad review.

However, if you give a reason for building the 2 new services (eg. more extensibility, enables a new flow, easier to use for other teams) then all of a sudden the complexity is justified and you'll appear to have solved a hard problem. No one is going to look super deeply and ask if those reasons are valid and if you even need the extra extensibility or if other teams will use the service.

Do they consider fixing easy bugs are hard problem? Should someone ignore a bug report "The is not spelled teh?" until it has bounced around unsolved for months on end, then spend 2 weeks "investigating" to show that it is a hard bug?

I've seen real bugs that bounce around for months, each time to someone who looks decides it isn't in their code and points to someone else: eventually we tell one engineer to solve it an a few weeks latter she traces it down through many different layers to figure it out. I've seen other cases where a great engineer spent weeks fixing bugs only slightly more complex a misspelling. In the end what counts it the quality of the product not the effort put into it.

I think there just aren’t enough reasonably solvable hard problems. All the low hanging fruit is taken, and the result is artificially complex solutions as a way for engineers to demonstrate craftsmanship.

Meanwhile at Apple, there aren't product managers and the business doesn't create an expanding stream of new products.

Only true for E3/4. After that you can stay forever. I know someone that’s been E5 for 12 years

Problem with that is due to inflation, you're making less and less compensation every year. Standard "you're doing a good job" raises often do not meet inflation, and certainly are not right now where inflation is higher than the recent historical mean. This is not a problem for some people, maybe including you, but I think most people have a general vague career expectation of making more when they're 60 than they make when they're 50, than they make when they're 40, and so on--even if they don't plan to be an overachieving "ladder climber".

Can confirm, it’s a great choice. Step one, convince a FAANG/MAGMA to let you work remote at the same salary level you already have. Step two, move to an extremely cheap cost-of-living area. Step three, avoid promotion at all costs, and just fix bugs.

Provide value, but _never_ get promoted. Every year come review season, talk about how your goals for the next year are to improve latency/perf/whatever. It doesn’t have to be specific, just something that’s important enough to be useful, but don’t be ambitious. Just keep your head down and make enough improvements that people consider you to be a good “grunt” worker.

Yeah yeah, inflation sucks and technically I’m making less because my RSU’s have mostly vested and my yearly grants haven’t made up for it, but I don’t care. I’ve saved up enough that I could retire now if I really wanted to.

Every day for me, I work 9-5, fix a few bugs, provide some value, then work’s over and I get to play with my son and completely forget about my job. Then once he’s in bed I smoke some weed, watch shows with the wife, talk about the good old days. It’s heaven.

(By the way, I say all this, but I kinda failed at it because I got promoted last year anyway. I got hella worried because I thought they’d start expecting more out of me, so I actually slowed down my pace even more. I just got a mid-cycle bonus last month. Maybe I’m not so great at keeping my head down after all…)

I hope I can down level myself after I go over 65 or 70 (depending on my health of course, hopefully I have that option). I think it is an option at some companies (older talent getting ready to retire but still have a lot to contribute).

i want to retire as an engineer. If I went management I'd be much more likely to get to this high paying jobs in the executive suite. What I don't want is to be doing the same thing again and again with no recognition of how useful I am. If I'm not useful, then I need to get into a different position.

The other posts in this thread make it sound like internal promotion has higher barriers than an external apply/interview/offer process. Bizarre when you think about it, but it does seem to be the norm. The person you're replying to is suggesting that employees should be encouraged to apply to other positions within their current company as if they were an external hire.

I've worked at a company that did both (internal promotion and internal re-hire) and IME people that actively applied to new positions had faster "career progression".

codified caste system? Have no idea what you mean.

You're hired for a position, when you feel you're ready for the next level you apply, if not, just continue where you are. This doesnt mean you dont get paid more the better you perform. Why do you need someone above you to say you're ready for the next level?

That’s the problem the GP is describing though: it’s easier to get a promotion externally than internally. Their proposed solution wouldn’t really improve things but companies have got themselves into a really weird position when boomeranging is an efficient promotion path.

not at all - i think it's the opposite. Why apply externally, when you know the ins and outs of the current company and have to go through an interview process anyway

A culture where I'm supposed to be working for "the user" rather than for my own benefit is inherently exploitative. Employment is a contract. If I stop delivering value, the company will fire me.

As they say, the reward for being good at your job is more work. Expecting me to put in top effort for "the users" without compensating me doesn't work.

The idea that you can fix this with culture is wrong. It's been tried many times at many companies and it doesn't work for anyone but the owners. Unless you own a significant (let's say >5%) piece of the company, those late nights you work for "the user" will never be worth it to you.

This is great. I am going to borrow it.

For anyone else who didn’t know that one:

https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/

> 4. Bigger title -> more control in picking interesting problems to work on. People trust you to say "this should be a priority"

This is probably one of the most dominant non-financial factor for engineers. Because if you want to make a visible, critical design decisions for billion-user products you usually want to be at least L6~L7, the level where you're now an owner of a non-trivial product/system spanning across teams.

Do you worry about being hit by a bus before you have FU money? Personally I'd rather work half time for twice as many years than try to race to retire.

A lot of responses seem to be focused on high cost-of-living areas, which is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. If you want to be a moderately checked out person, living in a smaller city and stretching your giant bay area salary is the way to go. If you want to be aggressively careerist, you have to be face-to-face in the bay networking.

More input and more interesting problems both feel like more responsibility for the same comp, imo, which might be appealing for some people but is anathema to me. The people higher up got there by being more argumentative, or backstabbing, or ingratiating themselves, and instead of going along with them now you get to fight them. No thanks.

In general I agree. It's just that I don't know if salaried job lead to FU money. The only person I had or will be able to say FU is to myself sitting alone in living room.

I don't know because the change was decided way above my pay grade, but I always assumed that the reason was HR legal.

It is hard to look at people who are objectively doing as well as each other, and rate some lower only because they have been at that job grade "too long".

The fig leaf was always that the ladders encourages keeping up with technology and the company, which meant people couldn't tread water at the lower grades.

But if the "new technology" isn't necessary for the job duties, labor lawyers can have a field day.

As of 2022, it's now difficult anywhere in most US metropolitan areas.

Is this a joke? What is median household income for families in both of these cities? Fairly sure it's below 100k.