{"id":35849,"date":"2022-05-11T14:50:32","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T18:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=35849"},"modified":"2022-05-19T16:36:58","modified_gmt":"2022-05-19T20:36:58","slug":"problems-with-promotion-oriented-cultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/11\/problems-with-promotion-oriented-cultures\/","title":{"rendered":"Problems With Promotion-Oriented Cultures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zach Lloyd<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

If you’re an engineer at Google or Facebook, you’re likely focused on one career question: when am I going to make it to the next level?<\/p>\n

Getting to the next level unlocks a lot – more money, more responsibility, more respect, a feeling of progress – and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The main problem with promotion-oriented culture is that it’s very hard to align promotion-criteria with business objectives, and so engineers end up doing a lot of work that doesn’t necessarily most benefit the product, users, or business – or even potentially their own growth.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Our [Google Sheets] engineers cared about the product and wanted to polish it. But they also wanted to be promoted. And so we would deprioritize product polish for projects that looked better to a promotion committee.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

xoofoog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

But the root cause isn’t that people want to get promoted. It’s that Google promotes people for the wrong reasons. Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for “solving hard problems” not for solving USEFUL problems.<\/p>

Imagine if people did get promoted for fixing bugs instead of building a new product (to be abandoned)! Or if maintaining an existing system was somehow on par with building a new system (which is just a bigger more complicated version of something perfectly good). The googler would say “well those useful problems are too easy to merit a promotion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n