That’s very inaccurate. Some of us use Ritalin instead.
The saddest part about the ladder is that it's not even fun. In academia, our ladder has fun names, and on each level you get to dress up in a different outfit that gets more elaborate the higher you climb on the ladder, which is basically the driving concept behind every MMO ever made, so that's cool. The whole promotion culminates in a parade and a blessing from the church elders, I mean University leadership.
At Google, they creatively dubbed the levels "L1-L10", and there's no outfit or parades. I assume they throw you a party or something at least? With cake?
jk
If you need to ask, promo parties were suspended with the lockdown, but I guess they are gonna come back in style
Upside was that many of us just said screw it and focused on the work. Downside was that many said screw it and went to other companies where they could at least grok the ladder.
Can you explain how this gets them promos? I feel like a promo-focused culture would result in 6 engineers creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless, but much more work.
We didn't create our own, but we did migrate our codebase to a new server-side rendering framework twice in my time there.
Also, nobody on our team ever got promoted.
at the scale of Google I'm not sure I would consider that useless. But it would definitely feel useless.
Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets.
6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.