Comment by rinchik
8 years ago
I'm not particularly familiar with the system at Google, but at any somewhat decent tech company in order to get a promotion you have to already perform as you would in your "future" role for some time, with higher-level expectations and responsibilities.
For example, is someone with level I is up for level II promo, she/he has to match level II criteria long before actual promotion is due.
That's general HR pep talk.
In reality promotions mostly happen in organizations due to political lobbying with the powers.
Even in these 'decent' tech companies you will see some people getting rapidly promoted and moving up the hierarchy, while genuine performers are stuck in the process and minutiae. Its just what kind of leverage your manager has with the upper management.
This.
I think everyone should at least experience once to what length a company can go in order to keep someone they really need that threatens to leave. It happened once to me: in a 150k people company that had a well defined promotion model very similar to Google. I gave my resignation notice and suddenly all the HR pep talk was out of the roof. I gained two levels and was promoted to director level.I still left but felt stupid I didn't threaten to leave earlier.
It made me realize that there are two types of workers. The ones that will play fair game and believe the HR pep talk, as we just saw in the previous comments, and the ones that realize that the fastest way to go is to bypass this and play politics in order to fastrack it. It is another type of skill.
A big thing to note in these political systems. People tend to emphasize your interface to the systems as 'Company thinks X about you', 'Company values your work' etc.
Companies are not living systems and in general its just people making decisions.
I've been walked over many times now, but once, after all the work, I was nominated for an award the company's annual meet. My manager, his manager and all the way up assured me that based on what I had done the award was coming my way. I was even asked to prepare a small speech to give on the stage, they even asked for a photo to put up on slide deck with a small bio.
Two days before the meet, my manager and the director called me into a meeting room to tell me that I wouldn't be getting the award, and they didn't want it to be painful surprise to me during the meet. And they had tried everything they could.
Eventually my manager told me during lunch later that big time political lobbying had gone into this, and VP making decisions had no option as he would be cornered politically on other issues, if he didn't relent to demands of rewards from other corners.
Google or any other company. Performance has nothing to do with how you get paid/rewarded in any company.
Curious, do Google regularly give free stuff to their customers (advertisers) hoping that in a few months those customers will upgrade to a higher service?
Yes, they have free trials of many things.
Which is dumb, because it means that the company is getting a higher level of labor than they're paying for.