Comment by dmoy
1 day ago
> My immediate reaction in my head was: "This is impossible". But then, a teammate said: "But we're Google, we should be able to manage it!".
Google, where the impossible stuff is reduced to merely hard, and the easy stuff is raised to hard.
This is probably the most accurate statement possible.
“I just want to store 5TiB somewhere”
“Ha! Did you book multiple bigtable cells”
https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI?si=C5PJcrvLepABZsVF
What are peer-bonuses?
The idea is if someone helps you in a really big way that you’re able to reward that. So you can ask the company to give the person either credits for an internal store, or a direct addition to their salary for one month.
Obviously, there are limits to how many pay bonuses you can give out and if it’s direct money or store credits.
Directly asking for a peer bonus’ is not very “googly” (and yes, this is a term they use- in case you needed evidence of Google being a bit cultish).
There are companies who help do this “as a service”; https://bonusly.com/
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You can give someone a $175 bonus for being particularly helpful or going above and beyond. Everyone can give 20/year so it doesn't have to be that crazy of an effort to get one (although most people don't give out all 20 and the limit wasn't even enforced for a while).
It technically requires manager approval but it's kind of a faux pas for a manager to deny one unless it's a duplicate.
Basically a way to "tip" people for going out of their way to help you, except that the "tip" comes out of the company's pocket, not yours.
To prevent obvious abuse, you need to provide a rationale, the receiver's manager must approve and there's a limit to how many you can dish out per quarter.
I was in Kindergarten and watching my fellow classmates get gold star stickers on their work. They were excited when it happened to them. I saw it as being given nothing of real value and person could just go to the store and buy them for $1 or $2.
It is a social engineering technique to exploit more work without increasing wages. Just like "Employee of the Month" or a "Pizza Party."
Company I work for does this with gift cards as rewards. I was reprimanded because I sent an email to HR that this " gift" is as useful as a wet rage in the rain. I don't eat at restaurants that are franchises or have a ticker on Wall Street. Prefer local brick and mortar over Walmart and will never financial support Amazon.
If you want to truly honor my accomplishments, give me a raise or more PTO. Anything else is futile. That gift card to Walmart has 0 value towards a quality purchase like a RADAR or LiDAR development kit to learn more or such.
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Something designed to remove all intrinsic motivation from employees
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Or "How many MDB groups do I need to get approved to join over multiple days/weeks, before I can do the 30 second thing I need to do?"
Do not miss
“the difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer” WW2 US army engineer corp
>“the difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer”
This was posted in my front office when I started my company over 30 years ago.
It was a no-brainer, same thing I was doing for my employer beforehand. Experimentation.
By the author's distinction in the terminology, if you consider the complexity relative to the complications in something like Google technology, it is on a different scale compared to the absolute chaos relative to the mere remaining complexity when you apply it to natural science.
I learned how to do what I do directly from people who did it in World War II.
And that was when I was over 40 years younger, plus I'm not done yet. Still carrying the baton in the industrial environment where the institutions have a pseudo-military style hierarchy and bureaucracy. Which I'm very comfortable working around ;)
Well, the army is a massive mainstream corp.
There are always some things that corps don't handle very well, but generals don't always care, if they have overwhelming force to apply, lots of different kinds of objectives can be overcome.
Teamwork, planning, military-style discipline & chain-of-command/org-chart, strength in numbers, all elements which are hallmarks of effective armies over the centuries.
The engineers are an elite team among them. Traditionally like the technology arm, engaged to leverage the massive resources even more effectively.
The bigger the objective, the stronger these elements will be brought to bear.
Even in an unopposed maneuver, steam-rolling all easily recognized obstacles more and more effectively as they up the ante, at the same time bigger and bigger unscoped problems accumulate which are exactly the kind that can not be solved with teamwork and planning (since these are often completely forbidden). When there must be extreme individual ability far beyond that, and it must emanate from the top decision-maker or have "equivalent" access to the top individual decision-maker. IOW might as well not even be "in" the org chart since it's just a few individuals directly attached to the top square, nobody's working for further promotions or recognition beyond that point.
When military discipline in practice is simply not enough discipline, and not exactly the kind that's needed by a long shot.
That's why even in the military there are a few Navy Seals here and there, because sometimes there are serious problems that are the kind of impossible that a whole army cannot solve ;)
“and the easy... well, that’s not a good promo artifact, so never”