In my experience it is the same at Google but not at all at Microsoft.
I think the specifics of each company’s performance review system have a lot to do with it. At google the level definitions are so prescriptive that it is like a checklist to get good ratings and promotions, and doesn’t leave much room for people to do good work in ways that are unique to them. At Microsoft you do not receive a formal rating, and the level definitions are very vague and mostly come down to just doing well at whatever your team needs at least at lower levels.
Every time I think about leaving Microsoft for a higher paying FAANG job, I think about our teams general chill work schedule and lax time off. Really hard to give that stuff up, even for tons of money.
Having worked at both, 20% time is the only part of the article that is somewhat off-base.
In particular the following string of paragraphs match exactly what I’ve seen at both:
> With all that up-front planning, the actual product decisions and working code were reviewed much less. Only the other PMs on my team reviewed my specs, and only me and the tester (also new grads usually) reviewed the working changes before they were added to the branch. For what it’s worth, I think this is why the quality of the details on Microsoft products is often lacking—a random PM made a decision and no one bothered to push back on it.
> Contrast that with Google.
> At Google, I never saw a strategy document. I went to every Friday all-hands, but I didn’t hear the leaders talk about a broad vision of what we needed to build. The people above me didn’t set direction and ask me to follow it.
> Instead, leaders encouraged teams to generate their own ideas. The founders had ideas of their top priorities and worked with the relevant teams on those, but the list of the top company OKRs was a subset of all the OKRs, not a roll-up. Some people were not working on anything the company cared about strategically!
Again, I can only speak for Cloud. I find product changes are reviewed by a dozen people at least and take months to finalize. It can be slow, but usually we're sure why we're making the decisions, and where risks lie. A large weight is given to customers asking for features, so they're in the loop.
It's absurd that there's no Google strategy documents. There's company-wide and division-wide OKRs that get major events to publicize them, with large Q&As and all. It's easy to learn what the priorities are and why. But, usually you just pay attention to what your local group is working on. At a smaller level, every feature has a business rationale backed by customers requesting them or hard dollar figures.
I really don't know what's going on here. Do people think Google runs the same way as it did in its early years? It's a fairly mature company with a good track record of revenue growth, especially for such a massive company. These things don't happen haphazardly.
We seem to be looking at the same text and drawing wildly different conclusions from it.
When the blog post says "the actual product decisions and working code were reviewed much less. Only the other PMs on my team reviewed my specs" referring to Microsoft, to me that lines up with you saying "I find product changes are reviewed by a dozen people at least and take months to finalize." referring to Google. The distinction the author is drawing is that Microsoft doesn't review day-to-day engineering work like this, because fundamental product decisions are made at a higher level, while smaller design decisions might be made by individual PMs or engineers and make it into the product without ever being reviewed.
When the author says "The founders had ideas of their top priorities and worked with the relevant teams on those, but the list of the top company OKRs was a subset of all the OKRs, not a roll-up. Some people were not working on anything the company cared about strategically!" referring to Google, that sounds very aligned with you saying "There's company-wide and division-wide OKRs that get major events to publicize them, with large Q&As and all. It's easy to learn what the priorities are and why. But, usually you just pay attention to what your local group is working on."
Why does there have to be some conspiracy or hidden agenda? Uncontrolled Covid spread would result in an extremely large number of deaths and overwhelm the healthcare system.
That doesn’t mean that zero-Covid is sustainable forever as time goes on, as lockdowns and other frustrations take more and more of a toll. New Zealand and Singapore already had to give up on it. Even putting protests aside, this wave could easily be the one that can no longer be controlled.
I think its because, from my perspective anyway, people who get to high positions tend to:
1) be competent at understanding the tradeoffs inherent in controlling a system
2) be competent at understanding how to maintain or advance their position of power
Almost every other country in the world has now opened up suggesting that the vast majority of leaders now consider a zero covid strategy to mean one or both of the following postulates is true:
a) the damage inflicted on the system by a zero covid strategy outweighs the damage caused in loss of life and the (temporary) health care system collapse
b) a zero covid strategy poses a serious risk to their position of power
It could well be that Xi/CCP have become hubristic about their positions of power and the extent with which they can control reality (arrogance). Or they could have simply misweighed the tradeoffs or underestimated the threat of a zero covid strategy (incompetence). If either of these aren't true then there must be an unknown at play which leads me to wonder if they have extra information regarding the tradeoffs that everyone else does not possess. If, for example, you knew or suspected that 25% of those infected would be dead within 10 years, it might be prudent to keep that information to yourself, particularly if you were a dictator who believed he would still be in power in ten years time and had military expansionist plans.
I do believe in Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity) so arrogance or incompetence are vastly more likely to be the real cause but, given the murky origins of covid, I'm not sure that we can entirely rule out the hidden agenda either.
An interesting project, but one that seems to suffer from a (presumably unintended and unknown) conservative bias itself, as evidenced by opening the page and seeing conservative opinion outlets like Breitbart and Drudge displayed literally next to reputable sources like the New York Times and Politico
FWIW I don't think the point is to compare reputable v non-reputable -- after all, perception is truth in politics. I think the goal of the tool is to highlight the perceptions but not to sort through the realities. There are great tools that do that (i.e.: Snopes/Politifact) but people 'in a camp' aren't generally interested in a truth that doesn't fulfill their prophecy.
You nailed it. I dont agree with most of the stuff on the conservative side but I think it is a bad idea to shut ourselves off and not listen to ANYTHING they say. This site simply shows you what the other side is listening to and hopefully it will soften everyone's views in the long run.
Not really discussing it. I just got fed up yesterday and I made this in a few hours out of disgust. The idea was born out of softening my own views I guess
If you want to soften everyone's views (and for this to be mainstream), then choose a different domain name. It can't be stated on radio or television in the US, for better or worse.
I think it depends on one's definition of "mainstream news". Traditionally and I think most commonly understood, it means news that is published in widely circulated newspapers, and on accessible television.
The times are, of course, a changing. Almost all newspapers in the UK at least have, today a really low circulation number. They are widely available, but hardly anyone buys them anymore. The Guardian, for example only sells 156 thousand copies.
I think the specifics of each company’s performance review system have a lot to do with it. At google the level definitions are so prescriptive that it is like a checklist to get good ratings and promotions, and doesn’t leave much room for people to do good work in ways that are unique to them. At Microsoft you do not receive a formal rating, and the level definitions are very vague and mostly come down to just doing well at whatever your team needs at least at lower levels.