What if I told you that perf has been abolished in the meantime?

It's even public: https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad

Yep but incentives haven't shifted, and the organizational inertia to fight in their fiefdoms is super strong

Actually incentives have shifted a lot. Personally I now skip a lot of work that was useful only for perf purposes.

This sounds like a re-brand...

From the point of view of an IC so far at least it's *significantly* different from how perf worked. I have yet to see the results though.

I guess that's interesting. Does the promotion process seem different? Ie different in the sense that you are finding yourself incentivized differently from before?

I never really cared much about promo and I haven't yet gone for promo with this new system so I can't really say. I think as far as incentives go in general nothing really has changed much, but what has changed is the amount of time we (ICs) waste on doing perf instead of doing actual work. From a manager's point of view it might be different, but for us it's more "forward" facing, we focus on what we'd like to achieve over the year and as we move forward we adjust our expectations and do regular check-ins to see if we're still on track or we need to adjust things. It feels more dynamic, but it's only been a few months so who knows.

Yup, both the mechanics and incentive structure have changed. Nobody knows the outcome yet, but the intentions were to align personal incentives with business goals. Seems promising thus far.