Re:Software Engineering at Google (2017)
by emperorcezar on Friday January 04, 2019 @09:26AM
(#18824221)
> Bug fixes and incremental features will generally not get you promoted for good reasons.
This is exceptionally bad, but sadly true.
If you have an engineer who can unblock teams and fix issues in an hour that others take a week or cannot fix at all, they are gonna jump ship if they can't be recognized.
At that point you've lost a valuable resource.
Recognition is stupidly cheap.
If I can do that without it being a fluke, they’d better bump my salary.
Would you settle for a certificate?
My landlord doesnt take certificates.
Or a "kudos"? (page 18 of the PDF)
Re:Software Engineering at Google (2017)
by closeparen on Friday January 04, 2019 @11:44AM
(#18825387)
The fundamental nature of a tech company is near-unlimited appetite for new stuff to build and new people to build it. If there are zero projects on your backlog, such that the only way to do interesting work is to retrace old projects, you’re in serious trouble.
Bug fixes and incremental features will generally not get you promoted for good reasons, we expect senior engineers to have system design skills and there is simply no way to demonstrate that without having your engineers design systems. If you only assign tasks based on the needs of your product and not on the needs of your workforce you could easily find yourself with a critical skill shortage.
There's a certain inefficiency to this, but only if you put your blinders on. If you have engineers churning out meaningless work then you certainly need to address that problem, but if you prioritize short-term product success over team health you are only trading one problem for another.