No questions, but it was a good read. I'm sad to hear that the gaming of the promo system is still such a large concern. Unfortunately that was also the case way back in 2005, through 2010, and until I left.
What's new to me is the shuffling of projects back and forth to India. That's not something that seemed to be an issue when I was there, and it's sad to hear this new concern for keeping engineering talent.
I've been working on open source software for the last couple years (links in my profile).
The funny thing is that after more than one promo disappointment, I just started working on open source projects at work. I did that seriously for the last 6-7 years of my 11 year tenure (maybe 30-60% time instead of 20% time).
That ended up improving my skills a lot, and I never got the sense of my work being thrown away (which would have led to me leaving much earlier). Like you, I always had a lot of respect from my coworkers and manager, and they never questioned what I was doing. I was always maintaining some legacy system that everybody knew was important but nobody wanted to touch (or knew how to touch).
I did eventually get promoted, but somewhat to my chagrin it was for a committee-friendly project -- C++ that handles a lot of qps. In contrast, I think all the developer tools I wrote in Python had a lot more impact on the company. I got a lot more positive feedback on those (just not from the right people apparently, as non-engineer or junior engineer feedback isn't counted that strongly, as it was explained to me).
I guess my view was that the promo committees cared more about technical difficulty than impact on the company, which leads to the obvious situation where people invent difficult work to do.
In my mind, it's not a coincidence that most Google products are now slow and full of bugs -- at least the ones that make it past the all-too-common "just barely launched" state. I never worked on front end code, but I noticed that front end engineers also get the shaft. The products show it.
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I was disappointed in certain things at Google, and there was a certain amount of "believing your own PR", but overall it was fantastic for me. Otherwise I wouldn't have stayed for so long.
I don't have any illusion that other companies are better. They might not have these problems, but they have other problems that Google doesn't. (I know plenty of people who stayed at Google for 5 or more years, then went to another company and left that company after a year.)
I think you might feel the same way, since your choice was to start something on your own rather than take a job at a similar company.
Employees just hold Google to a very high standard, which is both fair and good for the company!
No questions, but it was a good read. I'm sad to hear that the gaming of the promo system is still such a large concern. Unfortunately that was also the case way back in 2005, through 2010, and until I left.
What's new to me is the shuffling of projects back and forth to India. That's not something that seemed to be an issue when I was there, and it's sad to hear this new concern for keeping engineering talent.