I swear, at some point google started only to promote or reward people who started new products. So now they only know how to launch stuff, maintain it or make money from it eehhhh whatever they have adsense making them billions.
started only to promote or reward people who started new products
I read this article by an ex-Google guy a while ago which seems to attest to this. It's specifically about him being rejected from promotion because his work of maintaining some legacy code wasn't really quantifiable by the metrics they use to judge employee effectiveness.
You apply for promotion by assembling a “promo packet”: a collection of written recommendations from your teammates, design documents you’ve created, and mini-essays you write to explain why your work merits a promotion.
My main responsibility until that point was a legacy data pipeline . . . I proudly and lovingly nursed the pipeline back to health. I fixed dozens of bugs and wrote automated tests to make sure they wouldn’t reappear . . . The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was quantifiable. I couldn’t prove that anything I did had a positive impact on Google
. . . My other work didn’t look so good on paper either. On several occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at a time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a promo packet.
I submitted my first promo packet, and the results were what I feared: the promotion committee said that I hadn’t proven I could handle technical complexity, and they couldn’t see the impact I had on Google. . . . My first denied promotion taught me the wrong lesson. I thought I could keep doing the same work but package it to look good for the promotion committee. I should have done the opposite: figure out what the promotion committee wants, and do that work exclusively. ... My quality bar for code dropped from, “Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?”
Even if I got the promotion, what then? Popular wisdom said that each promotion was exponentially harder than the last. To continue advancing my career, I’d need projects that were even larger in scope and involved collaboration with more partner teams.
So yeah, they do essentially only reward people who start new products, since that looks better on these ridiculous "promo packets" people have to prepare to get promoted. The more cool new stuff you're doing, the more impressive looking bits you can add to your packet, while actually doing the hard work of maintaining existing products and wrestling with their legacy code and technical debt doesn't really get you anywhere.
HR departments really shouldn’t be trusted with technology. New rule, companies can’t have any data on what their employees are doing. Apparently they can’t be trusted to make good decisions with it.
This is typical of corporations since making a splash brings new customers but also development on new products can be capitalized, in the accounting sense, which allows deferral of expenses over several years whereas maintenance and minor updates are all expensed. The former pumps up paper income and smoothes it out.
I swear, at some point google started only to promote or reward people who started new products. So now they only know how to launch stuff, maintain it or make money from it eehhhh whatever they have adsense making them billions.
I read this article by an ex-Google guy a while ago which seems to attest to this. It's specifically about him being rejected from promotion because his work of maintaining some legacy code wasn't really quantifiable by the metrics they use to judge employee effectiveness.
So yeah, they do essentially only reward people who start new products, since that looks better on these ridiculous "promo packets" people have to prepare to get promoted. The more cool new stuff you're doing, the more impressive looking bits you can add to your packet, while actually doing the hard work of maintaining existing products and wrestling with their legacy code and technical debt doesn't really get you anywhere.
HR departments really shouldn’t be trusted with technology. New rule, companies can’t have any data on what their employees are doing. Apparently they can’t be trusted to make good decisions with it.
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Ah, but they *launched* it over and over, which is apparently to google the most important part of a service
This is typical of corporations since making a splash brings new customers but also development on new products can be capitalized, in the accounting sense, which allows deferral of expenses over several years whereas maintenance and minor updates are all expensed. The former pumps up paper income and smoothes it out.