Arguably Google's system is fairer, because the committee doesn't know you, so their decision has to rely on the facts in the packet (and their cursory validation of such facts against other evidence). IOW, you don't get a promo just because you brownnose your boss or skip, or butter up some bosses that you know will be present when the decision is made - they aren't on the committee, and they aren't the ones making the decision.
Even though this system is objectively fairer, it _feels_ shitty nevertheless, I suppose because it's much harder to game through the mechanisms outlined above. You have to game it in other, much more labor-intensive ways, such as "work with" people who are a level or two above you (of which there are very few in remote offices, so you better be in Mountain View for that), sit in important meetings, "show leadership", virtue signal, etc. In fact if you do all of these things really well, you could skip the actual productive work by switching to the management track. If you're not super good at this, you have to do them in addition to your day job, and your promo prospects become tenuous at best beyond level 5.
Regarding metrics, there's a universal law at Google: you can't improve what you don't measure. This is part of the reason why Google sucks at UX for example, and rocks pretty hard at ads and search. The former is not measurable. The latter is.
Even though this system is objectively fairer, it _feels_ shitty nevertheless, I suppose because it's much harder to game through the mechanisms outlined above. You have to game it in other, much more labor-intensive ways, such as "work with" people who are a level or two above you (of which there are very few in remote offices, so you better be in Mountain View for that), sit in important meetings, "show leadership", virtue signal, etc. In fact if you do all of these things really well, you could skip the actual productive work by switching to the management track. If you're not super good at this, you have to do them in addition to your day job, and your promo prospects become tenuous at best beyond level 5.
Regarding metrics, there's a universal law at Google: you can't improve what you don't measure. This is part of the reason why Google sucks at UX for example, and rocks pretty hard at ads and search. The former is not measurable. The latter is.