The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures

Re:The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-or... by tuckerman on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @01:48PM (#31263630)

I've never seen or even heard of anyone throwing their OKRs to avoid the appearance that they were too easy. In fact, you rarely hear about another team's grading of OKRs at all. Plenty of teams inside Google also set OKRs expecting/hoping to hit 1.0 so it wouldn't be at all surprising to see lots of 1's/near 1's on teams.

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Re:The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-or... by benlivengood on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @02:54PM (#31264398)

My team (under ads SRE umbrella) usually did aim for ~0.8 with a 1.0 stretch goal of some sort. It was a fairly reasonable calibration to make sure we were scoping and planning OKRs accurately.

If every OKR got 1.0 it meant we could comfortably take on more work next half, below 0.8 and we would plan to do a little less next half.

In theory it would have been fine to score OKRs above 1.0 for stretch goals for the same effect, but the software didn't work that way.

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Re:The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-or... by jedberg on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @01:52PM (#31263674)

Well this was told to me by xooglers who were now working for other companies, so either they were the ones doing it and that's why they left, or they made it up to make Google sound worse. So I guess take it with a grain of salt?

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Re:The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-or... by vrc on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @03:57PM (#31265036)

12 years ago OKRs were huge. And yes, you graded them, managers and other teams viewed them, and you aimed for 0.7. Recently, it was a lot more lax. Many teams didn’t do them, drifted away from them, or didn’t bother grading them

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Re:The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-or... by ShamelessC on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @02:09PM (#31263861)

Here here! We don't have to believe everything internet strangers say. The presupposition that an unvetted internet comment will somehow become "vetted" by the probing of _another_ internet stranger doesn't make any sense.

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Re:The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-or... by native_samples on Thursday May 05, 2022 @05:28AM (#31271285)

That culture came straight from Larry and Sergey. When I was there they would say at TGIF explicitly that if you score 1.0 they'd get suspicious because maybe you were setting goals that were too easy. Guess what, nobody ever got 1.0

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