Comment by azurezyq
4 years ago
I think the tweet is a bit too much. I worked for GCP for several years before. Impact in promo is defined within the same group and aligned with the goals of the group. If improving the stability of k8s is among the goals, then no problem at all.
OSS projects are not built on top of anyone's mercy. For infra projects like k8s, companies just contribute what they need and Google is no exception.
> I worked for GCP for several years before. Impact in promo is defined within the same group
Did you personally go through promo from L6 to 7 or L7 to 8 since that's what the OP thread is about?(or have seen the process from sufficiently close).
I can see how your description of impact & promo would work when there's enough people inside the group to compare from (i.e other L4s, L5s, L6s), but when going L7 & L8 there might not be enough people in the group. Plus the folks at that level would be the one defining the goals, so it seems logical that they can't get promoted on that criteria.
Up through 7 is defined within the same group for Cloud, afaik, which is almost certainly the relevant portion of the company.
> Plus the folks at that level would be the one defining the goals, so it seems logical that they can't get promoted on that criteria.
Fwiw you start defining goals and L6 (or even 5), that's one of the defining characteristic of 6 vs. 5, you can't get to 6 from execution alone, you need to be setting roadmaps that impact beyond your team. And at 7 and 8, the scope of both people and technology get's larger. A strong-L7/just promo'd L8 would probably be expected to exert direct influence over an organization of around 100 fulltime engineers (caveat: I'm saying this from below, but it fits what I've seen).
Which is to say that the positions in k8s that qualify for L7/L8 promo-worthy work are to a first approximation, just the steering committee. And that looks like it's working as intended: the steering committee is full of people who are Principal or Distinguished (or more in some cases) engineers and manager equivalents from a variety of companies.
> Which is to say that the positions in k8s that qualify for L7/L8 promo-worthy work are to a first approximation, just the steering committee.
So you are basically agreeing that an engineer who wants to advance to that level has to go and start a shiny new project (open source or not) so they are, by default, on the steering committee or the equivalent.
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