From the blog post which provides some context to the presentation (http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/10/facebook-and-google.html),

"Many consider Google's #1 mistake to be having a tech ladder in the first place. I covered that topic in my post on Promotion Systems (http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html) , so did not feel the need to belabor the point."

A snippet from the promotion systems post

"What if I tried to design a promotion system to piss off as many employees as possible? What characteristics would it have?

- No pleasant surprises. In other words, you can only be disappointed if you didn't get a promotion, you can't be pleasantly surprised by a promotion.

- Create unhappiness by dependence on scarce resources. In other words, gate promotions based on scarce resources so that even people who would otherwise be qualified could become disgruntled through no fault of their own.

-Eliminate accountability from people who make the promotion decisions (e.g., through a committee). That way, promotion decisions can seem arbitrary.

-Ensure that promotions are competitive races between all qualified candidates. This ensures that people who manipulate that packet in such a way as to have the best looking packets will win over people who are trying to get feedback and improve, which is supposedly the point behind all these feedback systems.

When I looked at Google's promotion system through this lens, I was very impressed. It seemed as though the system was designed to create disgruntled employees out of people who might otherwise be perfectly happy. And note that the ex-Googlers I interviewed were people who benefited from the system, as in: they were very well respected and were hence ranked highly. They were people who couldn't care less what their ranking was, yet they disliked the system anyway, purely because they thought that having a ranking system actually had a deleterious effect on the exchange of ideas."

There is a follow up post (http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/promotion-systems-redux.htm...)

A snippet

"My spies at Google tell me that my essay on promotion systems drew a reaction on a Google mailing list that I didn't read even back when I was employed at Google.

I did get a few interesting responses. I won't post them here, but I'll address what a few points:

Someone.....pointed out that the real compensation at Google was much more dependent on raises, stock and bonuses, so the promotion system didn't matter. But that's not true at all! First of all, there was a level-based salary cap, and people did hit them. So at some point, you have to get promoted if you want your salary to keep going up. Bonuses were based on salaries, so those don't go up if your salary doesn't go up. Secondly, even if it was true that options and bonuses was all that mattered, then you just validated the claim that eliminating the engineering ladder wouldn't hurt productivity at all!"

I've found Piaw's posts to be very worth reading, even if you don't end up agreeing with him. Many gems on his blog.

Of course people started to get upset because the only way they could advance in the company was to go into management. A corporate VP can make $250k/year but a programmer never could. Maybe if you single handedly implemented Google you'd get a $50k bonus that year, but your base salary is still $80k/year. And maybe you get a 15% pay raise for your great contribution.

And when everyone is a "programmer" it is more apparent than even now that everyone is a replaceable cog.

It sounds like the Google promotion system is just bad. Since technical ladders don't have human resource bottlenecks (you can't make everyone the dev manager, but you can promote everyone to Level 4 SWE) you really should have very clear guidelines as to what constitutes a promotion.

When I've managed it looks like this: "This is where you're at today. To get to the next level, this is what you need to do. With your help we've put together this plan for your next 3-6 months. You'll finish up A, make sure B gets deployed. C gets checked-in with QA sign off. Do this w/o ticking anyone off or being a general jerk and that looks like Level XYZ".

Every week we talk about his/her progress against the plan. There's no pleasant surprises, but there's also no big disappointment. If you're not getting a promotion we've known about it for a while, and we're usually both not happy because I've made it clear that something is not going well.

Notice, there's no competition against other employees or any other such race. With that said, there are cases where there is little or no money associated with the promotion, but surprisingly this is often not a concern.

"Sorry, corporate priorities changed. A and B were cancelled and C was put on indefinite hold. Sure, you did great work on D and E, but those weren't part of your stated goals for this year. Oh, and by the way, there was a re-org and the manager who promised you a promotion isn't your manager any more."

Not saying you personally do that; it sounds like you're a pretty good manager. But I've seen this pattern many times, and know a lot of other people who have experienced it.

Presumably when A gets cancelled, he comes by and says, "A just got cancelled" (or you tell him, depending on how news flows). "This was part of my plan for this cycle, how can we adjust the plan?" And then you discuss giving him proper credit for work on A until it was canceled, and then break down what his new priorities look like.

Or, "I just started work on D, how does this fit in the plan?" "Currently it doesn't, but lets get it in there".

There should be very few things that happen that would be so important that they'd be worth discussion in a promotion that you don't communicate about within a day or two of it first appearing on the radar (if not hours).

The last issue of a reorg is the one that is toughest to deal with. I would talk to their new manager, layout their plans, etc..., but there's no guarantee that the new manager will have the same philosophy.

Being a manager is hard work. And frankly, I'm largely done with people management. It's the hardest job I've ever had, bar none. But its important, and I think some of the problems noted in this article are things good management training can deal with.

Basically if you have a formal appraisal process at all you're trapped in a machine.

Is it something specific to the individual, or something more general?

I've found it extremely challenging to write a light weight tech progression ladder, that is flexible enough to still be of use on a week by week basis for a specific individual and general enough to provide comparison across teams.

Any thoughts much appreciated (my initial stab can be found here http://fragile.org.uk/2010/09/how-to-appraise-a-developer-pa... it also explains why, despite this thread, I have a need for a tech ladder).

Neil

In a big company this will probably lead to discrepencies across orgs. But honestly that probably happens anyways.

Ideally, I think I'd prefer not to have to assign labels at all (for the very good reasons outlined in this thread), but in practice I've found this not to be practical.

there is. Limited promotion and salary increases pool.

This is as it should be, I think. Actually, I've noticed an almost direct correlation between the quality of a Tech Lead/Manager and his willingness to do the boring stuff and pass off the interesting, challenging tasks to his subordinates.

Who's worth more, Peter Norvig or Marissa Mayer? What about an overachieving SWE I vs an mailing-it-in SWE III?

Who's paid more? Who has the better title?

Who's worth more a very strong CTO of Google or an overachieving SWE I? Presumably with title comes responsibility befitting the title.