Wow, that's clever. Also dangerous, of course. If I were at Google and had a direct report who was not up to snuff, I might point them at such a convenient option.

Very, very few Googlers are "not up to snuff." As controversial as their interview process is, it does tend to let only highly capable people through. If a Googler is not meeting expectations, the vast majority of the time it's effectively remedied with the proverbial "new manager and 6 more months" treatment.

Disagree. I have worked at Google, other startups and middle sized companies. By far the least productive place per employee was Google. Not that the average employee was stupid but the average output per engineer was comically low. A lot of Googlers take it very easy there and work 10 to 5.

And to be more on point, I met definitely more than a couple subpar employee that would be fired after a couple months in a startup.

Agree with you here. Some of the worst engineers I’ve worked with have been at Google, especially the younger newer ones. There’s a combination of impostor syndrome driving people to dogma (thus lack of thinking) as well as annoying arrogance towards anything that not orthodox.

There are of course many great engineers as well (especially the more OG ones) but the ability spread was way larger than any other company I’ve been at. I think it’s something about its cultural image and incentive structure...

Seems like your key metric is “hours spent at desk”. By that measure, you are probably correct.

No, my metric is output per engineer which losely correlates with hours spent at desk. The output quality and quantity was the lowest at Google

And yet if there is one thing these tech giants are famous for it's output per employee, measured in dollars.

This is something common in all really profitable companies and tech is merely the best example. Oil "tech" is another. Financial tech is yet another.

Europe, where engineers don't seem to be paid well is very much lacking in the sort of very profitable companies we see elsewhere. And even Baidu is known for paying very well (relatively for China, but even in absolute terms they're paying ... certainly Amazon level).

I see a few indications this may not be a coincidence. Big, huge, very profitable companies ... pay their employees well. Europe, clearly, would rather fade into non-importance. Currently Germany is a bit of an exception but if Tesla does take off, how long will that last?

Very loosely for example I was reviewing a well known uk job site just spending a couple of hours to check the site out

And I diagnosed a serious problem and got a fix actioned - the problem had cost them > 500,000 k in less than a week.

How are you measuring this other than the hours-spent-at-desk metric? Quality and quantity of what output?

When I was an engineering manager at Google, my group would look more closely at impact than we would at output. In fact, if the output ended up being more technical debt than durable improvement (the proverbial "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!" effect that Dilbert spelled out), we would count that against the engineer's evaluated performance. And it would usually take more than 2 months to determine when that was the case.

That's one way to look at it. The other is that it creates an internal market - as a manager, you have to make your team attractive or people will transfer away and people won't transfer to it.

In reality, market is not that liquid: interesting projects have no headcount, problematic projects are available. At the end of the day you need to know people and come with recommendations to actually transfer to something good. Ask me how I know.

You can do a 20% project for them even if they don't have headcount and managers can view your performance history so it is not hard to join an interesting project if you are good. Also if you are good enough they will add headcount to the team so you can join even if there weren't any before. Ask me how I know.

You are just advancing my point. I agree with what you say, but my point is that what is taunted as egalitarian fair system - “once you are in, it’s easy to transfer, just click the Transfer button” in reality doesn’t work like this at all.

Ah right, if your point is that you can't just transfer to a good team when you get in I agree, but it sounded as if being friends with the right people was required. It is all up to manager discretion, if they like you for any reason (beer or skills) you are good. Skills are usually easier to work with since it can be used to ask for more headcount while nobody would give you headcount so you can hire your beer buddy (I hope...).

How do you know?

Changed projects while at Google :)

Manager at the team you're transferring to gets to see your perf history before they accept.

And if I found out that a manager was shipping low performers to other people to deal with rather than doing their job and either helping that person or managing them out...

Internal transfers still get interviewed to a degree.

I believe the hiring manager has access to your perf history, which is far more valuable than interviews.

People who get bad ratings can't move as freely.