It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

> it seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

That’s very inaccurate. Some of us use Ritalin instead.

> soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers

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?

Sure, the art faculties have the best costumes, but where I come from there was making vows in LATIN how cool is that (you needn't have to understand latin, just recite the vows is all fine)

jk

If you need to ask, promo parties were suspended with the lockdown, but I guess they are gonna come back in style

It’s not much different at large corporations, just far less money.

Large corporations?

Pick any company on the Fortune 500 and you’ll see the same behavior to climb the “ladder”. A small corporation could be less than 1000 or so people and might not have that culture as much.

I worked at a Fortune 500 and the ladder was floating in a mist of opaque fog, with inexplicably shifting rungs.

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.

Google only has a couple 100k employees at most. Other organizations dwarf that.

Infinite marathon