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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic for this thread, but one of the most poignant quips I remember about Google culture was that the performance-review process was really good at rewarding hard, challenging work that didn't produce much value and not very good at recognizing work that produced lots of value but was not astoundingly difficult. I think you were the one who first noted this.

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I recently explained Google's perf process to an employee of the US federal government, and was told that the performance review and promotion processes in the government were simpler and less wasteful.

Is the government getting good results out of their process? Remember when a bunch of ex-Google engineers had to step in and save healthcare.gov? If their simple promotion process works, why didn't they curate that talent in-house.

People at L4 might not really like Google's process, but if some Distinguished Engineer shows up at your design review you're pretty much guaranteed to get some sort of valuable feedback. That is not a given in other organizations.

Good people don't work for the government because it pays poorly, not because its promotion process is wonky. The usual strategy in any high-paying field for government-track people is to work there for a few years to build credibility, then transition to being a consultant for a 100+% raise (or move to private industry completely).

Wasn't healthcare.gov outsourced to contractors in the first place? I'm not sure that government actively maintains much in the way of dedicated employees or teams to build stuff like this.

The problem lay with picking the cheapest contractor bids. If anything, the FAANGs should establish consulting arms for this kind of work.

The performance review process has a small impact on salary.

The promo process is not based on value or difficulty, but on the size of the organization that one is running. This is also true for higher level ICs, except they do not manage people, but rather manage/lead projects (which then have a certain amount of people involved).

Here's a rough breakdown:

  - L4 -> 1 person
  - L5 -> 1-3 people
  - L6 -> ~7 people
  - L7 -> ~25 people
  - L8 -> ~70 people

The approximate 3x difference between the levels is also found in other organizations, for example in armies: division ~= 3 brigades, brigade ~= 3 battalions, battalion ~= 3 companies, company ~= 3 platoons.

Misunderstanding this is the source of almost all frustration with the promo process. This process is designed to build and expand the organization, not reward awesomeness. There are of course deviations from the simple schema I listed here, but this is the hard reference point.

Perf feeds into promotions, which are the real way to raise your long-term salary (both inside and outside of Google).

This is a terrible process unfortunatelly. Raising the salary should be related to the usefulness of the person to the company, and not the breadth/impact of their work. This leads to terrible things like gaming the system to get high impact/leadership projects to get raises which comes with huge side effects, like projects getting abandonned fast, being deprecated in favor of new shiny promo-bringing things.

But this is not just a Google specific issue, and it is quite widespread in the industry. Google however suffered from this especially due to its obsessive culture of pay-for-perf and by ignoring simple facts:

- inflation means that your salaries should raise regardless of performance. if you only tail the market by adjusting salaries only if the market changes, then you are 1 year late(at least). This isn't a problem in an economy with low inflation, but is a huge problem in one with much higher inflation.

- there is a significant number of people needed to maintain projects that won't show large impact. Those people need to be at the very least recognized and compensated.

- making new products is great, but it requires huge amounts of ressources to do at Google scale from the get-go. A wider strategy is much needed, which Google obviously lacked for almost a decade.

Perf is almost irrelevant for promotions beyond level 5.

That was not my experience. A long run of good perf scores is clearly not sufficient for a promotion at that level, but it is necessary.

There's a lot of external complaining about perf at Google. My experience is that most of these complaints are wrong. I've personally had two reports fail to get promoted to L6 off of projects that were very difficult and executed well but for various reasons did not have the impact that we expected.

The problem is at the VP level, not the L6 level. It's not that impact isn't considered, it's that impact is relative to the current org goals of the moment, because it's evaluated by your peers that have presumably all bought into the current org goals of the moment (if they haven't, they will probably be fired or sidelined soon). However, there's very little feedback between things users care a lot about and things executives care about. You're rewarded for doing things that your VP deems important. Your VP is almost certainly not going to sweat the small stuff (although I do know a couple that try). It's impractical for someone with 2000 reports to keep up with every little bug in their product area, and they would be a terrible micromanager if they did. So what usually happens is that they call out the few annoyances they happen to see when using the product, everybody in their org jumps on fixing those because that will get them promoted, and everything not noticed or not specifically called out by a VP languishes.

How would I fix it? Not get to the point where the shots are being called by people with 2000 direct reports, for one. Software has distinct diseconomies of scale, where you have a much smaller loop between "Notice a problem. Identify who can solve the problem. Solve the problem" in a small organization than a big one. But that ship has sailed.

Failing that, I think orgs need to adopt quantitative measures of impact (eg. X tickets closed, X customers helped, X new sales generated) along with backpressure mechanisms to ensure that those metrics are legitimate (eg. you can't just create new bugs to solve them; you can't just help customers only for them to need to return tomorrow; you can't generate new sales that are unprofitable).

I do agree with this criticism. There are impactful things that go unrewarded because of org mismatch and that's dumb. My team has been affected by this very problem and it is very frustrating to look at a list of things that I know to be very valuable and be told "don't do that, it is misaligned with org priorities."

But this is "some impactful stuff is unrewarded" rather that "hard stuff that isn't impactful is rewarded", which was the complaint in the post above mine.

The "hard stuff that isn't impactful is rewarded" is relative to the overall marketplace, including conditions outside of Google. Starting a new chat client that replaces Google's other half dozen chat clients may be challenging, but it has little benefit to either users or Google.

Good entrepreneurs go into markets where the existing alternatives suck, and make them radically better. Most Google executives and PMs (most executives, period) go into markets that their company and all of their competitors already have pretty decent alternatives for, so the true impact is pretty limited.

I miss you too, raldi.

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