Comment by rsp1984 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsp1984 | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad you put in the work to write down your experiences, and I'm glad that HN is rewarding this.

Promotion at Google is a process filled with selfishness and dishonesty and I think hackers need to know about this. The promotion committees are a joke. They typically have no idea about your product, your team, your quality of contribution and whether what you're telling them in the promo package is true or a lie.

The way promotion works at Google is actually a direct consequence of their desire to "empower" the engineers and keep managers in a rather passive, supervisory role. The assumption behind it (completely misguided IMO) is that engineers will "figure it out" on their own and "handle things among themselves" just fine.

The big problem with this is that it strongly incentivizes the kind of anti-social behavior that's normally associated with Wall Street: dishonesty, short-term thinking, greed, narcissism.

To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities.

That's exactly right. Manipulating your coworkers to your own advantage is the fastest route to promotion at Google. Lying about your contribution to things would be the runner-up. This is simply because there's a lack of authorities who could see, recognize and penalize such behavior.

I never understood why Google favored this over a good old proven management model where your boss would handle things.

I know I may be the exception but I actually value having a boss who's got things under control and looks after the team, as opposed to a lord-of-the-flies type situation where the promotion goes to the biggest liars and manipulators.

Source: I worked at Google as a SWE

I used to believe that middle managers were useless shits who wasted my time and got in the way of work. I imagined that the flat organizational model made more sense: since this is what my day to day life is, anyway, at least we get rid of idiots who get paid more than me.

Then I worked in a place where I had actually good middle management. They were smart and capable. They supported our team and helped us succeed. They shielded us from most of the political BS. They advocated for us to other elements of the business. They invested, both time and money, in our professional development.

To make it concrete: in a company where the other engineering teams (five or six of them) were consistently experiencing churn, having morale problems, and shipping buggy code six months late, our team had zero turnover, a shrinking bug backlog, and consistently delivered things _ahead_ of schedule.

I'm 100% on board with the good old proven management model now. You just need to have an actually good manager.

The problem is that management is basically an art and no one knows how to create consistently good managers. Because it's the epitomy of soft, unmeasurable, skills.

So when people get frustrated with shitty management, they turn to whatever other idea,.

If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware (or any other classic SWE management book that's highly regarded) we'd all be better off. But instead we're stuck in this equilibrium where we constantly chase management trends (see: open offices which are consistently shown to be nefarious for productivity).

> If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware

Lol, I feel like that's too much to ask. I'd be happy with management that actually read Brooks instead of just pretending like they did.

The problem is it's very difficult to interview your management chain before you take the job.

Why do you think it should be difficult?

I almost always interview my immediate management chain (immediate manager and boss of my immediate manager) before taking a job.

Not at Google.

Exactly! I had the oppsoite tragectory - first worked in a company with decent mid-management, then no management startup then Google. The lack of oversight seemed liberating at first, but man was I not impressed with the outcome by the end of it (including my own performance). In Google's case it was additionally complicated by the fact that most senior people avoid as much as possible to take on leadership roles - lower levels will have no say on their promo packet.

> I never understood why Google favored this over a good old proven management model where your boss would handle things.

But then you're back to the initial problem they're trying to solve, which is that some person will get a manager who's way too friendly and promotes too many people, while some other poor soul gets stuck with a harsher manager than never promotes anyone. In short, it's hard to enforce consistency across a company that large.

But then you're back to the initial problem they're trying to solve, which is that some person will get a manager who's way too friendly and promotes too many people, while some other poor soul gets stuck with a harsher manager than never promotes anyone. In short, it's hard to enforce consistency across a company that large.

There's always the route of complaining to your boss' boss. But I guess then Google would actually have to start to give a s#!t about their managers actually performing proper managing tasks. I can imagine though that VPs and their C-level would consider such mundane affairs to be far below Google's aspirations...

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