Piaw Na

"Curious, why does he end the presentation saying that a tech ladder is bad?"

From the blog post which provides some context to the presentation (http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/10/facebook-and-google.html),

"Many consider Google's #1 mistake to be having a tech ladder in the first place. I covered that topic in my post on Promotion Systems (http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html) , so did not feel the need to belabor the point."

A snippet from the promotion systems post

"What if I tried to design a promotion system to piss off as many employees as possible? What characteristics would it have?

- No pleasant surprises. In other words, you can only be disappointed if you didn't get a promotion, you can't be pleasantly surprised by a promotion.

- Create unhappiness by dependence on scarce resources. In other words, gate promotions based on scarce resources so that even people who would otherwise be qualified could become disgruntled through no fault of their own.

-Eliminate accountability from people who make the promotion decisions (e.g., through a committee). That way, promotion decisions can seem arbitrary.

-Ensure that promotions are competitive races between all qualified candidates. This ensures that people who manipulate that packet in such a way as to have the best looking packets will win over people who are trying to get feedback and improve, which is supposedly the point behind all these feedback systems.

When I looked at Google's promotion…

It's hard to tell on a group-by-group basis.

If you work at Google, keep your head down for 12-18 months. Don't pay attention to big-company politics and (unlike me) stay the fuck away from eng-misc. Work hard and (unless you're on a good project) figure out what transfer opportunities will be available, and which ones will be good. At the 18-month point, try for a promotion. It makes it easier to transfer. If you don't get the promo, you can still transfer; it's just somewhat harder. If your performance ratings are still at "Meets Expectations" you should have a good story as to why. In that case, you need to find that middle ground of (a) making it obvious that your manager's appraisal of you is boneheadedly wrong, (b) without throwing him under the bus.

The objective sign of a decent manager is whether his or her reports get promoted. Good managers (at Google) get their reports promoted and bad managers don't. It's that simple. Look into this when you're evaluating transfer opportunities. If you find that a group has a lot of really good people stuck at SWE 3, stay away from it, even if the work sounds interesting. The truth about Google is that no one will consider you qualified to do anything actually interesting (i.e. you won't be considered a Real Googler) until you climb that ladder a bit, so your first few years should be focused on making Staff SWE. (The Real Googler line is somewhere between Senior and Staff.)

Piaw Na wrote some excellent material on the…

Since Theodore brought this up: "(And those stories about Google paying $3.5 million and $7 million to keep an engineer from defecting to Facebook? As far as I know, total bull. I bet it’s something made up by some Facebook recruiter who needed to explain how she let a live prospect get away. :-)"

I'm pretty sure it's real. Someone who either posts on here or who is frequently submitted -- I think piaw, or something like that? -- is an early Google ops person. Anyway, on piaw's blog, he or she mentioned that he or she had personally spoken to a G employee who got a counteroffer within 20% of the 3.5MM. So perhaps Theodore should be a little less sure of himself. Sorry for being vague, my memory is a little hazy, but I've read this in the last 2 weeks.

Also, he's doing something much closer to pure infrastructure work, so of course fewer -- but not zero -- web startups will be interested. That being said, I think it highly unlikely there are no jobs in SF / valley for highly experienced linux kernel file system devs.

Edit: link I referred to above
http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/11/counter-offer-conundrum.html

"People asked me yesterday if the Techcrunch $3.5M story was true. I said it was believable, because while I wasn't involved in negotiating that particular counter-offer, I had some role in assisting someone land a counter-offer within 20% of that number some time back."

Those statements aren't "terrifying" in the least once you consider that your relationship with the employer is a _business_ relationship. If the employer didn't want career games, they wouldn't reward them. As simple as that. If your company's official party line diverges from its reward structure, the best thing you can do for yourself is to follow the reward structure and ignore the exhortations to be doing things the company obviously doesn't give a shit about (as measured in dollars, the only reliable measure).

Fundamentally your only rational goal in the situation is to maximize your expected return over the duration of your employment. At Google or FB you maximize it by launching stuff that looks good in a promo packet (with metrics and numbers, too; if you can't measure something it's worthless at promo time), and never, ever working on anything "legacy" related.

Those are, at a basic level, the rules of the game. Your _rational_ choices are: play the game well, or play some other variant of the game somewhere else. Not playing the game is not an option. Playing the game poorly is irrational.

Here's the authoritative guide for Google specifically: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers.html. It should serve you well at other, similar companies, with only minor tweaks.

From what I gather, Google deliberately uses silo management (or whatever it is called). An engineer's performance reviews are based almost entirely on tangible work (lines of code) on his assigned product. Work on intangibles (mentoring, marketing strategy), or on tangibles outside the project (cross-product integration, future proofing) count against him.

Ex-Googler Piaw Na has an interesting post about this: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers.html

Attitudes like this is why I had to write a book about startups. In 2003, people said the same thing about Google. It turned out that yes, joining Google in 2003 had a very good chance of making you a millionaire, even if you weren't a star hire.

Guess what? Facebook is in the same situation Google was in 2003 today.

2 links:
http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/compensation-thought-experiment.html
http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/facebook-google-redux.html