How did 'a senior executive' become the CEO? Obviously absurd and clearly not what I wrote.

It's not about 'overriding' the committee, it's about having a champion on the inside.

You seem to believe there's no human element to this process. It's all number crunching -- like they're picking stocks with a good P/E ratio.

But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions.

If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was unfair.

I didn't say the committee was numerical, though their reputation is such. OP's challenge is that Google's promotion committee isn't an executive panel, or subject to appeals except from perhaps the highest executives. It's a random panel of experts who you'll likely never have met, because the company is 100k engineers, and working on your small corner of Maps or whatever makes it unlikely you'll have ample opportunity to meet people from Security, or Search or Adwords or Adsense or Golang or Youtube or Nest or any of the myriad of other products besides yours from which the promotion panel is randomly pulled. You're essentially suggesting that to go from say Software Development Engineer 2 to Senior Software Development Engineer, you need to simply schmooze a few thousand coworkers.

> But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions.

Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level engineer, not into management. I don't know panels discuss, but given the odds are that nobody on the panel knows anything about you other than whats in the committee packet, it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered.

> If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was unfair.

I'm not sure about that. My reading is that the OP left because the committee was saw themselves as numerical, but ended up being pathologically and myopically so. The metrics they see are the ones that can be calculated, often easily. Getting dinged for finding more bugs than you fixed in legacy software, when they mistake known bug counts for actual bug counts. Treating unquantifiable results like unreleased software as invalid. Ignoring necessary but difficult results to quantify like interviewing candidates, documenting code, and writing test suites.

Such a pathology can't be solved by knowing the right people, especially not when the system is designed to prevent this exact technique. The senior executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee, it was the one(s) reassigning his team projects every quarter. Or barring that, one at another company.

> Google's promotion committee isn't an executive panel, or subject to appeals except from perhaps the highest executives. It's a random panel of experts

At most of the companies I've worked, if a VP or senior exec likes you they make it known to the committee or a key person on it.

This just comes from my personal experience working at large companies. It's also true of just getting something done: usually the most efficient way is contacting a VP (or relevant executive) who can move things. I've wasted years of my life trying to wade through bureaucracy.

> Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level engineer, not into management.

You don't need to be in management for your people skills to matter. If you're a senior engineer / team lead / whatever, you're seen as authority, an expert, someone consulted for wisdom. If you're hostile or rude it reflects badly on the company, hence these committees look at your people skills.

> it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered.

I can't speak for Google explicitly but I can say your soft skills are always considered. Always. They consider them when they hire you and most places absolutely place a premium on them when promoting.

It's one of the reasons the requirements for promotions are so ill-defined everywhere. It's not just a concrete list of achievements, it's how your coworkers and manager view your personality.

> but ended up being pathologically and myopically

Yep -- politics. That's unfortunately how it works. You can assume it was an aberrant anomaly, in my experience politics rules the roost when promotions are being doled out.

> The senior executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee

The senior executive wouldn't be on the committee, he or she would put in a good word for you.

Look, you don't have to take my word for it. If you know any senior HR people at your company or other companies, ask them how promotions are handled. It won't be uniform but I'm guessing politics, reputation and soft skills are most of the time (unfortunately) going to outweigh programming metrics.

/my two cents

> At most of the companies I've worked, if a VP or senior exec likes you they make it known to the committee or a key person on it.

Like, half of OP's blog post is about how Google specifically is not most of the companies you've worked for. Your advice would be useful virtually anywhere else, and were the subject anywhere else I would likely agree. However, in this specific case, "Look kids, this is just how the business world works" is poor advice and treats industry as homogeneous, despite your statement to the contrary.

Google's insanely profitable market position allows them to be wronger for longer on many things, ranging from server design to management practices. There was a time in which Larry Page fired all project managers, and I've seen no accounts saying 'This was a triumph -- huge success.' So if the rest of society has converged on a solution where management should be in charge of level promotions, this doesn't mean Google has adopted this (likely efficient) method.

Which is the point of this article: a warning to those that would fill his empty seat, that social norms, rules and processes are vastly different than you expect, and may persist despite not working in anyone's favor.

It's certainly possible politics and soft skills don't play prominent roles in promotions at Google -- I've never worked there.

But no matter how much of unicorn they are I'm guessing human nature still applies. I think the OP will see that Google, despite its attempts at meritocracy, is probably a lot like other places in that you have to market yourself upwards, and probably to someone who can help.