Comment by cletus

Not sure why this says FAANG because it's talking about Google.

Calibration, promo committees, feedback and the like are intended to create equivalent expectations on impact across different orgs. The dirty little secret however is that at best it has limited success.

The best advice I can give anyone in such an organization is to be liked by your manager and their manager. If that's true, good things will tend to happen. If it's not, good things will be a lot less frequent.

Put another way: you can take the exact same set of objective facts and use them to say a person did a good job or a bad job. There's a popular meme about feedback at Google that goes something like:

> This project would've failed without this person. It failed anyway but it definitely would've failed without them.

The difference ultimately boils down to whether or not they like you.

Here are a few Google-specific tidbits worth knowing:

1. Ratings are fit to a curve across a sufficiently large pool, typically at the director level and usually over 100-150+ people. This means there will be a percentage range of people who get Meets All, Exceeds Expectations, Greatly Exceeds, etc. This is intended to stop ratings inflation;

2. A consequenc eof (1) is that ultimately you are competing with people in your org for those better ratings. This can create some perverse incentives and a toxic environment;

3. It is almost always better to let something blow up and come and fix it rather than preventing that from ever happening. The first will get you a lot of recognition. The latter will get you almost none;

4. Promos at Google are stack-ranked. Each committee gets 10-15 packets that will be for a particular level. The committee will rank those packets. After that the promotion target will come into play. This is set by management and was allegedly cut as a cost-saving measure when Ruth Porat came on board. If it's 20% then the top 20% from that ranking process be promoted.

You will find people who serve on those committees who say this isn't how it works and they'll argue they're evaluating if someone is operating at the next level or not. This is partially true. Thes packets will be divided between promote, don't promote and on-the-bubble. The on-the-bubble group will be sufficiently large to allow for the promotion target to be met;

5. For SWEs. L5 is the "terminal" level, meaning there is an expectation of growth to that level. L3->L4 and L4->L5 once went through promo committee but now don't. Management within orgs decide this. These too have target percentages and there have been cases where the promot rate has been too "high" and orgs have been told to cut back on promotions to meet the targets;

6. There is a massive backup at L5->L6. Because of the low target percentages the impact required keeps going up and really you need your management to really push for this to happen. There are limited slots so you may be waiting eyars and again this is why them liking you matters so much. Google is full of L6s who got promoted 5-10+ years ago that would never make the grade by today's standard. For really old cases you can find archives of why there were promoted and you'll find cases like "promoted unit testing".

I say all this because the author of this thread seems to fundamentally misunderstand how this process works.