I've been at Google for 12 years, and this has not been my experience. While it is a popular narrative, it is by no means dominant, and is fairly specific to individual teams. I got my second promotion leading the Google Maps Desktop Latency team. We demonstrated impact solely by reducing load latency and increasing performance while advocating for latency consciousness across the product space and implementing latency regression tests and monitoring. Google has some of the most complex infrastructure in existence, and there are thousands of engineers that are getting promoted and finding gratification in maintaining and improving this infrastructure.
My experience at Google has been characterized by collaborating with the smartest and most driven people I've ever worked with. And I worked at several companies before Google. I think a side-effect of this personality type is that the engineers themselves want to make a difference, whether through maintaining Google's complex infrastructure or launching new products. And while it may be easier to show impact by launching a new product, it is by no means a problem unique to Google. Startups find it much easier to show impact by launching and buying users, rather than measuring how useful the product actually is.
I have come to believe that, lean-startup style, a good engineer should be able to demonstrate how the work they are doing is important to a company, a product or a product's users. With a little bit of thought around how to show that the work you are doing actually is valuable to your organization's OKRs, you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most.
> With a little bit of thought around how to show that the work you are doing actually is valuable to your organization's OKRs, you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most.
If you put yourself in the shoes of an L3 or L4, you know this is not exactly true. Who your manager is and what their priorities are, and how they view the promo process can greatly affect your ability to get a promo. I mean, before you can apply you need to get "strongly exceeds expectations" for two consecutive halves. If you do great work that you think benefits Google, but your manager doesn't think you've sufficiently demonstrated things on the rubric (e.g. "google-quality delivery" or "autonomy") you won't get a promo. Managers also have their own agenda and list of things they need to deliver, so you end up having to work on things they want you to work on, even if they don't help you tick the boxes in the rubric. If you're lucky and get a good manager who helps you play the game, these things aren't problems. If you're well-informed, you know how to bail when you encounter such folks. If you get unlucky or don't wise up to how it works, you can be set back many years in career progress.
I don't see how any of this is specific to Google. Everything you've said here is how companies function. If you want to work on things that are not important to your manager, why should you expect anything? And bad managers exist everywhere.
My point here is that my managers thought the latency of Google Maps was important, doing good work on it got me promoted, it was not a product launch, and things like this are happening all the time across the organization.
Sure. I was just pushing back on the idea that "you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most." The "dot dot dot" that is required in order to make that work is a lot of luck, because your manager and their incentives factor so heavily into that. You got lucky -- plenty of folks do similar work and don't find as much support.
Reducing latency is mostly easy to measure, has directly understandable implications, is likely (and understood to be likely) quite difficult to pull off on a product like maps. It's basically a perfect promo packet project.
The example given by the author - fixing lots of tiny features in sheets - is the opposite. Difficult to measure, lots of little and difficult to explain implications, sounds kinda easy - many individual items probably are just work.
I disagree. Add a couple of these features, put them behind an experiment flag, and inspect metrics that matter. What usage are they getting? Do users in the experiment use the product more frequently? And for longer periods? If not, perhaps feature parity with Excel is not the highest impact project, despite the feature requests. If you are finding it hard to come up with measures that show impact towards your orgs' OKRs, this is also a signal that your pet project may not be the best thing for you to spend time on in the eyes of your bosses.
At a high level, promo is an incentive that directors and VPs use to keep an org working towards strategic goals. You may disagree with those goals, but that doesn't necessarily mean promo is broken.
Think about how companies choose between office and google workspace, especially excel v sheets, and the buying process. And think about the industry/function where it matters most - finance. You aren't going to see sheets usage tick up next qtr because you added 5 features that ibankers use. Usage of those feature will slowly go up, and when mixed with 20 other things you'll slowly see more finance users. Hopefully. Maybe Goldman will switch, and others will follow. Whoever is running Sheets is in a long term game. Much of enterprise software is like this. It isn't Facebook where you often get instant feedback.
I guess this works for explicit features, but might not work for omissions, especially the tiny features and bugs.
Small annoyances might add up, and the GP's point is that this incentive system doesn't reward those who try to fix them. Unless... somebody's deranged enough to keep known and fixed bugs in a customer facing product behind an experiment flag to see how a small percentage of unlucky users would react...
I'm going through the Google interview process right now, second round. My interviewer has rescheduled three times in the past week, each with less than 24hrs notice and without a reason given.
Is there a 'safe' space I can give feedback regarding this that doesn't damage my chances of making it through the process?
You need to talk to your recruiter and let them know this is an issue. They are incentivized to hire you and are there to help you and give you a good impression of Google. The recruiter isn’t going to tank your chances of making it through unless you say something that is egregious and a red flag.
Just be straightforward and ask if there’s another interviewer available
Just roll with it. It's all upside from the interviews. It's largely a good place to work and worth the headaches during interviews. Smile and carry on.
During my interview process, my recruiter was very much my advocate. Have you talked to them honestly about this? It should not hurt you. I'm sorry you're going through this.
My experience at Google has been characterized by collaborating with the smartest and most driven people I've ever worked with. And I worked at several companies before Google. I think a side-effect of this personality type is that the engineers themselves want to make a difference, whether through maintaining Google's complex infrastructure or launching new products. And while it may be easier to show impact by launching a new product, it is by no means a problem unique to Google. Startups find it much easier to show impact by launching and buying users, rather than measuring how useful the product actually is.
I have come to believe that, lean-startup style, a good engineer should be able to demonstrate how the work they are doing is important to a company, a product or a product's users. With a little bit of thought around how to show that the work you are doing actually is valuable to your organization's OKRs, you can get promoted doing whatever work appeals to you the most.