I'll admit, I don't really have a good solution. My strategy has been to just stick to early-stage startups where everyone is aligned on company success. Would love to hear some more meaningful discussion of alternative systems for managing career ladders.
Give people some choices on leveling up -- maybe most people just want a bump to salary, maybe other people would like to gain more vacation, stock, half days Friday, a private office, a good parking spot, etc etc.
This happens anyway in Google's "objective" promo system. Your manager assigns your projects, gives you your non-promo performance ratings, sets direction for your team, they sit in the room with the promo committee, and their feedback is critical to the promo committee's decision. You need their help and support to get promoted. If they didn't have significant impact on your work, they're not a manager.
Ostensibly you can go try for promo even if your manager disagrees. I never had any evidence this worked for anyone and I have no idea how it would work. Sometimes borderline promo cases would go up for promo when their manager thought it was unlikely, and it would succeed. But if your manager doesn't think you should get promoted, they're going to tell the committee that, and I don't know what the promo committee would see that would cause them to overrule the manager.
The difference with Google is that: 1) you can give feedback to your manager, both anonymously and explicitly, and they'll affect their perf; and 2) your success, in terms of impact and promo are part of your managers success; 3) perf committee will challenge and can override your manager if the rating given seems too low/high given the evidence.
These forces while do not take power away from manager completely, they provide some checks and incentivize managers to respect and support their reports.
Of course, all these nice things come at a cost, that is perf becoming a somewhat transparent and heavy process that eats everyone's time and mental energy.
I agree that you're basically screwed, especially L3->L4, if your manager isn't actively counselling you on how to grow your career. You obviously don't have enough experience to do it on your own at that point, so you are at their whim. Even when you do have the experience, if you don't have a good working relationship with your manager, you're in trouble anywhere. It is ultimately going to be them or you, and you are easier to get rid of ("he took another offer" versus "everyone thinks your manager is a jerk, so we fired him, oh by the way in the meantime your career is on hold while we figure out what the fuck to do please keep showing up").
Totally agreed.
One thing that killed my motivation in mega-corp(tm) is that your peers are, in reality, your competitors, despite the constant barrage of HR propaganda indoctrinating the opposite. Either directly or indirectly, you are incentivized to take high visibility projects for yourself, take credit for other people's work, and reinforce a narrative about yourself where you are better precisely than those around you.
I don't know what the solution is. I've been at amazon, and the number of abandoned promo projects are insane. Microsoft has like 7 billion levels, maybe they have it right, you can promo someone without it meaning a whole lot, but it still gives them greater pay and a sense of progression.
i don't know what the answers are to manage that shift and avoid it going into the wrong direction.
All founders/execs/early employees are easily aligned on compabt success. But how do you align incentive of later hires?
In order to reduce time spent on perf, you'd have to rely on a few people who knows an employee's work instead of a larger peer group and committee. The person entrusted with this decision (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others. This leads to a different set of problems, like "B player hires C player", yes-man culture, ICs spending effort brown nosing instead of creating value, etc.
Building a culture is all about incentives, it's easy to identify and reward user/company impact when the team is small. But as number grows, it becomes harder to do that, and the declared core values gets ignored as the reward system departs from that.