your manager can't vouch for you and it's basically up to how well you summarize and present your work to a faceless promotion committee (_i.e. how well you play politics_). (emphasis mine)
Googler here, speaking for myself.
Isn't what you describe literally the opposite of playing politics?
I'm an Xoogler and was promoted when I was there. (see sibling comment for details).
The way to get promoted at Google seems to be to play a game where you tick all the boxes for performance at the next level and have the right people write for you. In some ways, that helps the company (working across teams, for example). In other ways, it may hurt the company (launching potentially redundant products is seen by committees as being more valuable than incrementally improving existing products). I think that a lot depends on who writes recommendations for you in your promo packet (and that's pure politics)
In my case, I was basically gathering requirements and helping other teams integrate with an internal product. So I was perfectly positioned for promo. I was an L5, and talking to a lot of senior folks in other teams (sr. staff, director, vp) who were willing to write for me. I'm pretty sure having a VP who knew me and could write about me really made the difference.
> I think that a lot depends on who writes recommendations for you in your promo packet (and that's pure politics) ... I'm pretty sure having a VP who knew me and could write about me really made the difference.
It sounds like that VP knew you because of the work you were doing, not because you bought him dinner or something. In that case, it's not pure politics, your work was apparently important and impacted a lot of people.
In this thread it sounds like a lot of people think promotion (and work performance in general) should be measured by purely technical contributions only, which is not realistic. That kind of work is important and makes sense for entry level work, but that's not how big projects get done.
That's true, he knew me because of the work I was doing on my 20% project. This was a small stealth-mode thing which was a pet project of his. So I mainly just lucky. Meanwhile, the guy who sat behind me, worked much harder, came in earlier and left later, and turned out mountains of high quality code never got promoted (he retired).
But Google prides itself on being a meritocracy, when really it is just another case of "who you know" is as important as "what you know"
(my guesses from reading this thread) The work was important, but the GP was _the face_ of that work only. Many other people collaborated on shipping that work - the VP only knew GP. The issue people are pointing out is that this incentivizes people gravitating towards such roles which are high in. "visibility".
Don't know how it is now, but most of my promos at Microsoft (in 00s) were unexpected by me. I just kicked ass, and my managers delivered the goods. I liked that system. That's how it's supposed to work. :-)
Some other people have mentioned hiring people defensively so they can't compete. I don't know how true that is, but if it is... then making a redundant project means you need to be retained so you don't write clones for anyone else.
That's not a problem with the process, that's a problem with what the senior engineers value (making themselves feel smarter than their aspiring peers, not producing valuable products)
You know, I'd even believe you if I did not observe with my own eyes, at Google, how people get promoted despite not really doing much themselves other than gaming the visibility, and people who are literally one of a kind and who delivered world class, pivotal work get denied promotion repeatedly.
It's still a human-based system. It's still vulnerable to nearly the same political bullshit you see elsewhere: cliques, favoritism, backstabbing, etc. Heck even your boss still affects your promo (there's a "private" section in the feedback you don't see). If you don't see this, then you're probably not getting promoted either.
A good friend of mine from university is a Googler. He is a nice guy, but incredibly political and technically not very capable. A master of making himself look good, schmoozing and talking the talk. He has done rather well at Google.
Yet another friend, a brilliant, straight-talking techy, struggles at moving up the ranks Google.
Only one data point, but given the comments here, perhaps it is somewhat accurate.
The solution is to work for a smaller company where your output is directly tied to the market success of the entire organisation, and where its small enough that the CEO/Founder can directly appreciate your efforts. Just make sure that you have a solid bonus/promotion structure pre-agreed and you're good to go.
Bonus is that these kind of jobs are often located outside of Silicon Valley, so your living costs will be much lower.
No, from my experience what is meant is to join a small and medium-sized enterprise and become a part of their success. $200k is a lot in salary, but it isn't that much for a company as such if they sell or provide high value products or services.
This is false. I’ve been at 4 different startups and the ones I made myself key to market success were way better than working in these soul crushing meat grinders like Goog or FB. There’s more to life than TC.
Just for what it's worth, my experience is the opposite; I've found Google less of a meat grinder and less soul crushing than startups. But I think it's possible that a lot depends on where - both in the country and in the org chart - you're located.
I don't get this statement. Google doesn't force anyone to work overnight. It doesn't force you to work at all, to be honest. Some people can spend a workday skiing and then arrive at 6 pm for dinner. TC is 400K. And once you're bored or feel undercompensated, you just go to FB, Netflix or Snapchat and get a 30-50% pay rise.
But you're an inconsequential cog, and in order to get a decent bonus and _any_ RSU refresh at all (which is the majority of that 400K btw) you have to jump through insane hoops and shave yaks all day. At some point it feels like Dostoevsky's labor camp description: you dig a hole and then you fill it back up. Except this is a very comfy labor camp, with 3 meals a day, and you can leave if you want to.
But some of us like to actually make things, and have a sense of purpose, and other things higher up on the Maslow's pyramid of needs. For them Google of 2019 is mostly not a good place, unless they end up on teams (and in positions on those teams) where they can do work that's meaningful to them, rather than copy proto buffers in some soon-to-be deprecated backend. Meaningful work is scarce there, and has been for at least the last decade, and a lot of people are competing for it.
In the grand scheme of things everybody is an inconsequential cog. You, me and everybody you know are average people who will grind away at whatever thing we happen do. You aren't gonna change the world. I'm not gonna change the world. Accept this and move on.
> Meaningful work is scarce there
"Meaningful work" is in the eye of the beholder. Learning to find joy in whatever task you are working on is an important skill to learn.
Being a very highly paid "inconsequential cog" at a mega-corp and working below market at some dinky startup can be the difference between actually affording to buy a house. It can mean you get to retire years earlier than you would have otherwise. It can mean putting your kids through a top notch education program. It buys you a lot of things.
The entirety of one's world view is defined by their perception. If you can convince yourself you're not a cog at Google, hey, more power to you, enjoy those golden handcuffs. But if not, there are plenty of options out there which let you pay mortgage, put your kids through college, and "buy a lot of things". It doesn't have to be FANG.
The other option is to realize that in the world of people, your people skills can be even more valuable than your technical skills. I think that L5 is the tipping point where people skills start to dominate.
Technical skills are the skills to make machines do whatever you want, they get no say in the matter. People skills are the skills to make people do whatever you want. You can see why many are reluctant to get involved in that.
> Just make sure that you have a solid bonus/promotion structure pre-agreed and you're good to go.
That is a pretty big "just". Bonuses aren't common everywhere, and unfortunately it seems like management being directly involved in the company can also go the other way. Since they have a larger incentive to short change you on salary as it is their own bottom line.
That said I think looking at the promotion structure is something underappreciated and should really be part of these "how to be successful" post rather than maxing out you credit card (or whatever).
Specifically, there are two job ladders in this area, one for management and one for engineering. People are welcome to switch ladders, though there's some friction in the process because they actually are different jobs. The idea is that people shouldn't sacrifice talents to progress in their careers, as often happens when talented engineers are pushed into people management at other companies.
Like a lot of jobs in tech, there is overlap. Managers can write code, and senior engineers can manage people if they want. Everyone needs at least some technical skills, and everyone needs at least some people skills. But the intent is to provide a good long-term path for people who want to focus more on one or the other.
That is true, but what's also true is that it's _way_ easier to get promoted beyond L5 as a manager, and darn near impossible to get promoted beyond L6 as an IC. Google values managers more, just like any other company. That's why you see like 7 layers of management there by now and directors reporting to directors and VPs reporting to VPs: people want more money but can't get to the next level as ICs. Fun fact: when I left Google, I was 1 level deeper in the hierarchy than I've ever been at Microsoft, a company that at the time I left was twice the size of Google I left 7 years later.
I wouldn't say it's easier to get promoted in the sense that the work is easier. A company with 85,000 employees needs a lot of managers (who themselves need managers, and so on), so there's definitely demand. But that demand need not change the stringency of the job requirements.
... until you figure out that maybe comparing numbers of high level technical engineers to numbers of high level managers would be the correct way to gauge this. Your chances of becoming a high level manager are very slim, but your chances of becoming a high level engineer are much slimmer.
But if your message is "it's better than elsewhere", then yes, it probably is.
I guess i should clarify. Useless in a technical sense, not in a bureaucratic sense. You still need them of course.
And I'm sure even the worst at google are far from 'useless.' Figure of speech.
Edit: Possibly better than the alternative overall though. So frustrating to have competent people promoted as you're trying to put out a working product. Cancel those meetings and fix this code!
But just to be clear for when this comment gets mined by some future HR department. It is of course very important to have good people making the high level architectural decisions, and you should absolutely hire me for your senior technical positions to maximize the output of all those around me!
It's just the whole needing to give blunt assessments of underlings that may have consequences for their and their families livelihood that I'm not suited for.
I've seen it go both ways. Definitely agreed that it's a human process and it can be gamed a bit. There are (or had been in the past) some checks on that with secondary committees that re-reviewed primary committee results (not just appeals of negative cases). I think the removal of those checks and move to org based promos has allowed more of what you described to take place in unfortunately.
Is it? It might not be playing inter-personal politics, but it's like doing a campaign speech.
Instead of a long term assessment of your work (and the real interactions within your team etc), it's how you represent it in a pitch that is measured... The most charismatic presenter (e.g. bullshit artist) wins.
Well, I would call everything you have to do besides the work itself to 'play politics'. Since very few tasks in a company require to present your work afterward, it is hard for managers to find out who did best without extra presentations.
In the end, I think it is the manager's job to motivate their people to present their work, but ultimately it is in the employee's interest.
My advice is to get used to having to present your work. Otherwise, you might end up doing a fantastic job and being disappointed when nobody notices that it was you who did it (probably resulting in promotions for people who didn't do as good as you did).
Engineering is a social job. Coding is much less of one. Explaining, debating, and presenting the relevance, correctness, quality, and comparative advantage of one's engineering work is part of "the work itself."
You're right that it's kind of pointless to "present your work afterward," and indeed, promotion committees at Google actually pay little attention to after-the-fact summaries of technical work. Instead, they look for artifacts of in-the-moment design and implementation discussions. This is the evidence showing that a given solution wasn't just one person's moment of inspired genius that he or she deigned to bestow upon the codebase, but rather the best of many possible solutions that the team chose, as a team, drawing on all the resources available such as literature, other projects past and present, the informed opinions of others in the field, the experience of senior engineers and former engineers now in management, the PMs who agree this solution achieves business goals, etc.
All too many junior engineers think a design document is "what we actually did." It's not. It's "why we picked the path we did, and why we rejected the alternatives." And yeah, as you say, nobody's going to care about what you actually did. That's kind of like being forced to look at a long series of selfies on Instagram. But they definitely will care if you asked their opinion which way to go at the start of the project, and later on they'll respect the fact that you consulted them and others on their area of expertise, because what you built has a little bit of them in it.
That's the difference between coding and engineering. Code is something that works. Engineering is the selecting the best of the possible working solutions, and being able to explain why it was the best.
To be cynical, though, being successful with that kind of process requires knowing how to describe your accomplishments, what metrics to emphasize, and what projects are simply not worth spending time on because they won't scream "promote me!" during your review (even though they might be necessary & important).
You can call almost anything 'playing policits'. In other companies, getting along with your manager on purpose to get a promotion and taking credit for successes, can certainly be called 'playing politics. The difference in Google is that there's a standardized process, so maybe that avoids a manager promoting his friends.
Brilliant jerks lower the morale and output of everyone around them.
I agree that promotion processes suck if they don't create room for understated high achievers, people who are just a little more shy or awkward or humble.
But focusing exclusively on individual output and ignoring more pathologic behaviors can lead to massive problems. And some team projects absolutely require communication as a core skill that influences overall output.
But none of that is the same kind of “playing politics” that it sounds like is required by Google’s processes. Indeed, if you’re good at playing politics, you can be an absolute jerk on a regular basis, but still get promoted all the time by saying the right things to the promotion board.
Someone else’s comment had it almost right: playing politics is anything you choose to do at work primarily for the purpose of making yourself look good to those you think have the power to promote or fire you.
Something apparently missing from this is that what you say is only a small part of what the promo committee looks at. They also see peer reviews from coworkers and your manager.
So this idea of blindly sucking up to the promo committee doesn't happen. (And in practice I'd agree, everyone I've seen get promo deserved it).
The promotion board pays attention to what your co-workers say. More attention to that, then what you say, actually. If everyone says you're an asshole in your promotion packet, you're going to have a hard time getting promoted.
Who decides what "good code is"? There is no gold standard for such defenition. Guess how that gets decided? Politics.
> your design decisions
In order to "get credit", how does anybody know your design decisions were the best? Hell, how do you even know it was the right move. Just like the code, there is no 100% correct design decisions. It's all trade offs. Knowing you chose the best path and more important trying to get credit for it is.... politics.
I mean, you had to convince people your design decisions were correct to get them implemented. That was political....
> and the quality of your project output
What does "quality" mean? Wanna define it? That is politics.
What does "project output" mean? Wanna define it? That, too, is politics.
Engineers always think they can avoid "politics". But politics is everywhere and is an unescapable feature of life. It isn't even a bad thing. Any time you have limited resources and people are in contention for those resources, you are gonna get politics.
Stop trying to avoid it and embrace it. Politics are part of every job if you want to be successful.
Hell, even attempting to convince people that they should ignore politics is itself a political move.
>> your code
Who decides what "good code is"? There is no gold standard for such defenition. Guess how that gets decided? Politics.
There doesn't have to be a "gold standard", just sensible experienced programmers doing code reviews, instead of office-politics-players and executive drones.
>In order to "get credit", how does anybody know your design decisions were the best? Hell, how do you even know it was the right move.
How about people with actual domain knowledge judge that?
All the rest of the comment is the same, as if any judgement of a project/code/design is impossible outside of "who likes whom" and "who kisses whose ass".
If that's the case where one works, they should get out pronto.
Googler here, speaking for myself.
Isn't what you describe literally the opposite of playing politics?