It's not quite that, TL;DR: performance review system was 'de-complexified'. Googlers will say "GRAD", and people outside assume it has something to do with RTO because of timing (which is still ~fake at Google. No one knows the secret # to get a nasty email, but 3 times in 6 weeks doesn't get it).
- 80% get average grade. 2% get worst, 6-8% get between worst and average. That covers 90% of the distribution.
- The below-average grade is a death sentence to your career there.
- The rest, people recently found out, is half-eaten by people who get promoted.
- There's now _precious_ little incentive to put in an effort in a culture that was already known for it's rest-and-vest-ness.
- The quotas are enforced 3-4 levels up from bottom, and managers are expected to warn anyone who might get below average. In practice, that means 15-20% of people are being told they might get a scarlet letter.
- There is ~nowhere to transfer internally since late 2021. 100 applicants for every open role.
- The internal orgs all love to do whatever the opposite of "yes, and" is. And each were told to Focus™, so that leads to people having an easy excuse to turning down _any_ request. It's much more efficient to shit all over the other org and not do the work and tell your director it's their fault than it is to enable bottom-up action.
- The simplification of performance reviews also meant it shifted from being 80% peer feedback and 20% management to 95% management. And Google, like anywhere, is full of people at their worst, and their best. It's lead to a, frankly, gob-smacking amount of chicanery that I thought I left behind at immature companies. Even your average gossip-y early startup is better, because there's a certain sense of reality, instead of ad dollars that magically convert to paychecks.
- Constant, ever-beating drum of firings. There was the huge one last year, and then the sizable one recently in a couple orgs, but it's been near-constant.
- The firings are absurdly post-modern sterile. You wake up, locked out of your laptop, locked out of the office, and have an email in your personal inbox telling you they're cutting your team.
- They have to "cut teams" instead of do layoffs because of the legal / cost ramifications of just doing layoffs to drive up profits. But that opens up some of that chicanery I mentioned: have it on good authority from 2 sources that the political movers who came into the Assistant org. for Bard would ship people onto "classic" Assistant teams just to fire them.
It's really hard to explain concisely, but basically, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone come close to that place unless they're sub 100K in savings. Nothing makes sense, nothing is real, everyone knows it, and you have a bunch of the world's smartest people optimizing for how to do the least without being the least. A lot of that involves saying no and telling everyone it's someone else's fault, and like any hierarchical organization.........
That's really thorough and unfortunate. I hadn't heard about all of that.
I had a committee interview there maybe 8 years ago and already that was such an impersonal feeling that I really disliked my experience and didn't continue, not that they'd have hired me in the end.
I had 2 referrals for the team I wanted to join and I thought I'd be interviewing with that teams members who knew me from various foss projects or at least knew of the projects. When I heard it was by committee my anxiety went through the roof.
There's the not-quite-randomly-selected people who interview you, and write feedback. Then there's the completely separate set of people on the hiring committee who make a decision reading the feedback and other stuff (referrals, resume, etc). The latter group doesn't talk to the former group though, just the written feedback.
It's not clear that hiring people you know directly into your team is even a good idea. I liked the Google interview system, and since leaving I have only seen worse ones.
You like the possibility of someone being placed onto your team without anyone who is part of that team having interviewed them? Maybe that does happen at some point, I forget. Long time.
If it doesn't.. I think I would absolutely hate that.
I don't interview people I know personally or refer or know from projects but I absolutely want 2-3 from my team to be speak to them and us do the technical tests.
But I'm an SRE and not a SWE and there are a lot fewer operation/platform people compared to the 6-10 dev teams of 6-12 people doing various languages one sre team supports so there are usually plenty of SWE specific people to bring on committees. My team is 6 who support 80 SWEs so there are just a lot fewer proficient IAC writers on staff.
Yes, I do prefer choosing new team members from among people who got hired into level by a team-neutral process, because I have seen too many instances of a hiring manager throwing out all the standards to hire a person they want into a particular role, which can be detrimental to companies because hiring people who don't really meet your standards is one of the worst things you can do as a company.
The type of nepotism that you were hoping to get you in isn't actually a good thing. A distributed system of interviewers and decision makers is more consistent and less biased. It's one of the reasons why people are able to switch teams quickly and easily -- everyone is held to the same standard and can be relied on. This is a good thing. Sucks that you didn't get in though.
Doesn't that system of interviewers just bring different biases? Even if they use a standardized scoring method or something, the bias would be built into that. And everyone would indeed be held to the same, biased, standard.
A single interviewer is likely to be strongly biased. But the bias of a pool of thousands of people is much smaller - the individual biases partially cancel out.
In addition, the process adds some steps to keep a single person's irrational biases from propagating: formal rubrics, rating broken down into components each of which requires written justification, and the group of people making the decision to hire or not hire are explicitly ones who never see or hear the candidate and are deciding based on interviewers' written reports.
Maybe? What if the pool is being influenced with whatever is trendy at the time?
I would take my bias of working with a former colleague for years over what the current societal pressures are enforcing. Some may call it nepotism, I'd call it risk management.
Me and 3 other Principal/Staff levels have now worked at 3 companies in a row together over the last 12-15 years. One of us will move elsewhere and slowly bring on the rest of us as we leave if we hear great things about the place. If not we go elsewhere. We actually have a group chat of about 8 people we've all worked at various places together and love to bring others on board because we know their style and that we can work well with them.
They are amazing engineers and we've all grown together over the last decade and we know what each of us is great and at where they'd be fantastic in a company. They're SWEs and I'm an SRE so we actually aren't on the same team or anything but they know they can bring me on as a Staff/Princ SRE and we'll get things done well cross-team far beyond what most companies of disparate eng/teams gets done.
These are people super passionate about the technology. We give presentations/talks on various projects, etc. I know their skills are up to date and growing constantly. Finding someone passionate is difficult. Maybe not at google but in normal-not-faang world it is.
Bizarrely, harder at FAANG: so many people just graduated from a T30 uni or master's program in STEM and are kinda see it as "caring too much"/ it looks like you're obsessing about work
- 80% get average grade. 2% get worst, 6-8% get between worst and average. That covers 90% of the distribution.
- The below-average grade is a death sentence to your career there.
- The rest, people recently found out, is half-eaten by people who get promoted.
- There's now _precious_ little incentive to put in an effort in a culture that was already known for it's rest-and-vest-ness.
- The quotas are enforced 3-4 levels up from bottom, and managers are expected to warn anyone who might get below average. In practice, that means 15-20% of people are being told they might get a scarlet letter.
- There is ~nowhere to transfer internally since late 2021. 100 applicants for every open role.
- The internal orgs all love to do whatever the opposite of "yes, and" is. And each were told to Focus™, so that leads to people having an easy excuse to turning down _any_ request. It's much more efficient to shit all over the other org and not do the work and tell your director it's their fault than it is to enable bottom-up action.
- The simplification of performance reviews also meant it shifted from being 80% peer feedback and 20% management to 95% management. And Google, like anywhere, is full of people at their worst, and their best. It's lead to a, frankly, gob-smacking amount of chicanery that I thought I left behind at immature companies. Even your average gossip-y early startup is better, because there's a certain sense of reality, instead of ad dollars that magically convert to paychecks.
- Constant, ever-beating drum of firings. There was the huge one last year, and then the sizable one recently in a couple orgs, but it's been near-constant.
- The firings are absurdly post-modern sterile. You wake up, locked out of your laptop, locked out of the office, and have an email in your personal inbox telling you they're cutting your team.
- They have to "cut teams" instead of do layoffs because of the legal / cost ramifications of just doing layoffs to drive up profits. But that opens up some of that chicanery I mentioned: have it on good authority from 2 sources that the political movers who came into the Assistant org. for Bard would ship people onto "classic" Assistant teams just to fire them.
It's really hard to explain concisely, but basically, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone come close to that place unless they're sub 100K in savings. Nothing makes sense, nothing is real, everyone knows it, and you have a bunch of the world's smartest people optimizing for how to do the least without being the least. A lot of that involves saying no and telling everyone it's someone else's fault, and like any hierarchical organization.........