Comment by axg11
4 years ago
This thread is ridiculous. At FAANG, and everywhere really, promos are decided based on impact and influence. FAANG are just more likely to be working on open source projects than employees at other companies.
All impact is difficult to quantify, not just contributions to OSS. The only easily quantifiable achievements for an engineer are delivered projects that directly generate revenue. In the teams I’ve worked in, I’d say that covers perhaps a third of projects.
Let's pretend Linus Torvalds worked for Google, would he be able to get promoted for creating and maintaining Linux? As far as the bottom line goes it brings in zero dollars and costs the company his total compensation or more to maintain.
How would Linus quantify his revenue impact in his promotion packet and compete against another hypothetical engineer that improved ad targeting by 0.0X% and can directly measure an increase of revenue for the comapny in the millions of dollars?
I don't know why people here think you have to quantify your revenue impact in your promo packet. This is literally not a thing, and any number you put in there will be ignored. No one up the engineering chain cares about dollar figures when it comes to evaluating ICs.
As for the Linus question, plenty of engineers with similar profiles have worked for Google, and they don't do so as junior developers their entire career. Junio Hamano, who has been maintaining Git while at Google for the last 15 years, is the perfect example. Sundar Pichai started his career working on products that had zero or negligible revenue (Chrome, ChromeOS, Google Drive) and is now the CEO.
I chaired ->6/7 promo committee for years.
Revenue would come up as a kind of impact probably less then 1/2 the time. Mostly from ppl in ads.
This whole thing is nonsense. The most Sr and influential ppl tended to come from web search and core infra, with no link to revenue in sight.
The most Sr and influential ppl tended to come from web search and core infra, with no link to revenue in sight.
If people on engineering teams that don't have an attributable impact on revenue believe they'd be rejected because they can't show an individual impact on the bottom line then they won't submit a packet. That could be why you didn't see it - people who think this is necessary don't go for promotion. As the author of the Twitter thread states, they change team, or leave their role, instead. You'd need to look at why people move to revenue impacting teams, or why people leave the company, to understand this.
Looking at it from the perspective of the promo board obviously isn't going to work. "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"...
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He wouldn't quantify his direct revenue impact, much as engineers who work on Borg and other infra don't. Or, he might point to a systems performance working group he helped chair and show that that working group improved performance of some syscall by n% (or added a new one that was n% faster) which when applied across all compute at Google has a wide revenue impact. (Or really he'd be at a leadership level where he'd need to show that the working group he lead did that a dozen times, but you get the idea).
When you have difficulty quantifying, you start qualifying, and that leads to some options for quantification as a second order effect.
"Lead the development and maintenance of custom OS underpinning our entire enterprise's technical stack. Worked with stakeholders across every domain within engineering to improve stability, performance, and feature set that enabled every part of the engineering org to better deliver" - "Examples of revenue visible effect are the debugging and patching of (performance improvement to the underlying OS) that reduced CPU utilization across the org, enabling a 3% reduction in fleet costs, allowing the company to save an estimated (estimate 3% reduction in fleet cost from before it was introduced)"
I can't speak to Google, but a good manager can work with their team to really highlight their achievements in a way the promo committee can understand. Admittedly, it still means learning and playing the system, but that's true regardless of the system you use.
Remember, too, that any impact on engineer time -also- has a direct provable reduction in cost. "Took 10 seconds off (process people wait on, build, test, whatever), saving an estimated (###) of engineering hours per year based on the number of teams using (part of process you affected)" should still be evaluated equivalent to revenue. If it isn't, you call it out, "leading to a reduction of engineering operating costs and saving the company roughly (estimate number of man hours * average cost of man hours)". So something that starts "saves effort" can be translated to "saves time" which can be translated to "saves money".
Junio has been promoted over the years at Google for building and maintaining Git.
I do not believe he has had any problem doing so. (nor is it a competitive process)
Revenue is not the only way to quantify impact.
Plenty of infrastructure teams promote plenty of people at Google and other companies despite not directly selling products.
Guido got paid to work on python
Yes, very obviously. There are L8s and L9s who have built their careers on just working with the Linux community, let alone running the whole thing.
Also it's Google, so we should be looking to promote operating system authors who aren't white or male anyway.
Expecting hate for this, but I've been on the receiving end of company notifications (not at Google) where it was stated explicitly that the newly-opened distinguished engineer role was exclusively available to not-men.
(I'm generally-supportive of DEI efforts, but at sane companies those efforts wouldn't block qualified people from being promoted to their proper roles. Among the FAANGs, I have a lot more confidence in Facebook and Amazon's ability to operate sanely than I do Google. Prior evidence and all.)