This would be the equivalent for a pro baseball team laying off their entire roster because nobody on the team showed the growth that those in the feeder teams showed. A bold bet, to be sure. Not one that is likely to keep a winning team.

That is to say, if you have people that you promoted up the ranks to high level contributor, and then find that you can't use them, that is on you. And shows a sad state of management.

You'd do reviews where they'd have top performance, but not 3x or 4x more than the guy right below them. And if their presence didn't push your team to be #1 in that season, you could have an argument to replace them for someone cheaper and 90% as good.

Of course, their sheer presence could be a booster for marketing for instance, and there's a lot more going on, so usually you'd keep them around even if on paper it doesn't make sense, but it would look like a complex balancing act.

At Google you are explicitly rewarded at L5 and up for picking the right project to work on. It's wisdom of the crowds. You pick what project you're working on and you should be picking a good high-impact one that actually brings value to the company, for which you might be promoted. This ensures that incentives are aligned.

Google doesn't want experienced, highly capable engineers sitting around wasting their talents on dead-end projects, and they certainly won't be rewarded for it. You need to be proactive about ensuring that you're working on something valuable.

And that's probably part of what's happening at Apple as well ? We've seen important, but not quite groundbreaking products get left for dead, and eventually killed when at Apple's size it probably wasn't that problematic to keep them alive. I'm thinking about their network router lineup for instance. Or how nobody cares enough to make a Calculator app for the iPad.

Supposedly Steve Jobs hated every iteration of the calculator on the first iPad, so they just didn't ship it at all. Might just be tradition at Apple to not touch that topic.

Google pays over $300k a year for many of their engineers, and Apple pays quite well too. Regardless of how easy that calculator app is, it'll take a team of people to build, and that team is expensive, like millions of dollars expensive, and it'll never be worth it.

It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful. If a project turns out to be a dead-end, that's either management's fault, or just the way the market worked out and no one's fault (you can't always predict what's going to be popular or successful). And if a project is clearly a dead-end, then why is management wasting money on it instead of canceling it and moving the talent to better places? Basically, Google's system just rewards people for being lucky.

Google: "OK, here's some real responsibility over company direction."

Engineers: "No, not like that."

I mean, I work at a normal-ass medium-sized company and at our top level of IC technical staff even we're expected to help management choose between different strategic options and point out places we can improve the product based on technical synergies or easy wins they may not be aware of. If we do a bad job at this, we will also get laid off on way or another, at latest when the company runs out of money.

Especially at Google's size, you can just throw up your hands and say "oh well, the market is hard to guess." You are the market!

Google: "Here's some real responsibility over company direction"

Engineers: "So we get to work on things we want to move the company forward with, yes?"

Google: "Yes"

Engineers: "And we get rewarded for making good products that work well, yes?"

Google: "Only if the MBA clowns decide that's what they want"

Google's behavior is even more insulting than being purely management-led.

This is not what engineers say (nor what the company needs unless you take vapid definitions of "good" and "well"). The MBAs aren't the ones asking for a dozen messaging apps!

Let the creative people you pay a lot make smart decisions and incentivize it.

If you just do what management tells you at Google you will never be promoted past L4. You need to come up with new ideas and projects to sell to management. The key is to align your project ideas with what management says they want.

It's not like that at all.

If you are happy being handed pre-scoped work, you can just stay at L4, which many people do.

That's simply not how it works at Google. Everyone has skin in the game. Who are you to say how it's "supposed" to work there? I'm telling you how it actually is.

This is one of the advantages of having reasonably wide pay bands at Google. Doing a great job within your level will earn you raises. You don't need promotion for that (to a limit). Why should promotion just be something earned after doing the same thing for a long time?

If that is what really what defines an L9 job at Google I think we'd all have been praising the typical L9 Google employees on HN long ago. And we'd all be justified in being angry Google decided to fire such a person.

Or maybe Google should pay their salary indefinitely because they were capable of disrupting a market at some point in the past? Or maybe yes, such a person needs to work at Google type company so all of us can benefit from the optimal situation from which to maximize their talent, even though such a company would let them go. Otherwise we'd all lose out on such a person being capable of contributing to the world if Google lays them off.

What else could they do then without a company who doesn't appreciate them keeping them on?

For instance there was researchers on voice recognition at Yahoo! way before the voice assistants became a product, and if I could imagine one of them bring up a well working model 6 months before the competition, and have a voice assistant hit the market.

It would disrupt an entire market.

But they’re not alone of course, and I don’t know how many other researchers are on the payroll trying to breakthrough other fields. All of them have a “disrupt the entire market” expectation I think, and of course their employer is also expected to give them enough time and leeway to make progress. They probably bring small improvement on existing things, and the number of papers published every year could be another measure as a temporizing strategy. But their actual stated goal is probably very ambitious and they’d be failing at it for a very long time.

As levels go up, each new level is a new job.

In the SWE track:

L3 is a new graduate

L4 is mid level (an engineer who you can generally trust to complete the tasks they're assigned)

L5 is Senior (who owns/shapes the direction of the team)

L6 is Staff (who has to see upcoming problems and shape efforts across the organization)

L7 shapes a product

L8 shapes a division

L9 shapes an industry

The expectations are sky high, but so are the comp. If you want to get millions, you'd better do something worth millions.

Well, I guess that explains both why they fire them and why golang.org became go.dev.

And to be honest I don't think google has these expectations. Most probably he was was fired for different reasons, not performance

This is not a job everyone wants or is capable of doing. There are a very limited number of such positions, and those who want them must justify the position's existence.

But a decent bunch of them are the types of folks to have wikipedia pages:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Roskind

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray (not anymore I guess)

The ones that don't probably would if it was public about how much of a significant contribution they've made to some foundational AWS services everyone knows. I think they don't mind.

maybe not in faangs, but I've seen CTOs and directors downshift to ICs in multiple startups and public tech companies. Honestly kicking them out instead sounds like a huge waste, if the person can make solid contributions in a different, maybe less intense, role, why not let them?

When I joined Google I was "demoting" myself from TL/M equivalent to mere L4 SWE. The much higher pay didn't make it feel like a demotion though.

Or a demotion. Is that ever an option in companies, or do they have to go straight to firing?

To the rest, certainly possible. My sports metaphor certainly implies a pipeline of workers that will replace each other in a somewhat predictable order. But that feels like a different thing than "they may be producing great code, but are not reinventing the world."

L9 is conservatively making $2 million / year so the price of getting perf wrong is high.

What would that process look like?

Perf reviews these days are basically, "Did you do some important/useful things? Did you tell other people at the company about those things so they'd benefit, too?"

And interviewing (other than the inane hoop-jumping of getting through the recruiters, and the subset of interview loops that focus on LeetCode) is largely, "Can you write a bit of decent-looking code? Can you design a globally distributed self-healing system without being a total buffoon? Can you demonstrate some semblance of introspection?"

There's some bureaucratic fluff surrounding it all at the larger FAANGs, but it does seem largely reasonable overall — especially if you (or your manager) are willing to cut through the red tape.

I could see a fair number of improvements and tweaks to be made, but... fundamentally different? You want to throw everything out and do it all differently?

Having different review processes adapted to different job roles that exist at different levels is the easiest thing to defend. Heck, given disparate impact considerations and the fact most systems will have incidental unequal impacts, failing to do so could have you fall out of the business necessity criteria into unlawful discrimination at the levels the process isn't adapted to.

Are the “obvious reasons” that, despite the practical and legal benefits, someone would have to expend effort designing the appropriate system?

It's been a while but as I recall this kinda thing is roughly the plot of "Moneyball". I don't think.they cut expensive players but they definitely didn't sign new ones who were expensive - instead they focused on players "who get on base".

This does happen in baseball, not literally the entire team, but Google also isn't laying off everyone. Teams regularly decide to let better performers leave just to replace them with worse players. The reason for this is that the worse players are always cheaper. Many teams are happy to pay a replacement player for half the production at a quarter of the cost. That L9 could have still been productive while not living up to the expectations for someone making that salary.

If the expectation are easy to miss, maybe the salary of higher ups should be more strongly tied to meeting them. You can keep that half L9 at half of the price, while still making that worse guy that might improve over time.

God, no. You're not even close to the limits of what money can buy. You may not even have enough money to be able to buy a private jet; it depends on the jet. You certainly haven't earned enough money that it would make any sense for you to buy a jet.

As an outsider to this all FAANG thing that feels wrong to me, it has always felt so.

What happens, or at least what I think happens because of this strategy, is that lots of institutional knowledge gets lots pretty fast and in an irremediable way, because many of those L4s and L5s that ended up not making it to L6, and so got the boot, knew of some parts of the "system" that no-one else did.

Unless a FAANG company only relies on L6s and higher to get a hold over that institutional knowledge over the long term, which I pretty much doubt it can happen.

the more realistic scenario is attrition, going to another place for L+1 comp

L4 is terminal. There is no requirement to ever be promoted to L5 (though there is some language about continued expansion of skills at L4). Most engineers will never make L6 in their entire career at Google and nobody is concerned about people chilling at lower levels.

Where we're at right now, it's more like cutting Tom Brady. Sure, he's the GOAT, but they went 8-9 this year.

I'm going to guess not often because... you don't get to that level without learning how to work well with managers/co-workers, right?

I think Sr Principal and Distinguished are achieved by excellence AND tenure. Too much context/tribal knowledge is required so hard for anyone to be effective at a high level otherwise.

To be clear, these people often times deal a lot with operational issues. And they're keeping track of a lot of initiatives and fires. So sometimes I see some lose patience in meetings against managers/leadership. But that's understandable I think given their stress. Happens pretty rarely.

L9s are usually having industry-wide impact and that involves a shit ton of just talking with people and convincing them that your path through the forest is the right one. You need the right ideas, but you also need the skills to convince a whole bunch of smart people, often at other companies entirely, that your ideas are right.

Not everyone is a perfect angel 24/7 (one of my favorite high-level engineer's hobby was to antagonize our Director, probably decreasing his manager's lifespan by about 10 years due to the stress), but I guess one social skill you can have is knowing what bridges you can set on fire for your own entertainment. (I was also entertained.)

The "eccentric" folks tend to find their own way, outside of corporate promotions. You don't have to be nice to anyone to win a chess tournament or make a popular open-source library. You just do those things, and your work speaks for itself. Those are kind of more narrow areas in which you can succeed and measure, where Big Tech promotions are a little bit more nuanced, requiring not only technical excellence, but some social skills and navigation of corporate politics.

p.s. the interesting thing to find out is how your friend's former coworkers, peers and juniors, who got to hear about his layoff are taking the news. Shocked? 'Shocked into what' line of queries could enlighten the forum as to the 'wisdom' of company X's payroll triage.

Working one's wage.

Is there anybody that's "redefined an industry" every year running for more than 3 years straight?

When a football team does not meet the expectations, it is the manager who gets blamed for the failure and who gets the sack and rarely the players. We, sadly, live in a different world.

infinite economic growth is possible, but not infinite constant 2%, and definitely not the US tech sector hiring frenzy that went on for years

Only of you count inflation as economic growth.

there are two kinds of growth, extensive and intensive. the first one is using more natural resources, expanding to mine the ocean and the moon, and so on.

the second one is where the intensity of the economic activity increases, so with the same input there are more outputs. technological change helps to reduce waste, increase efficiency. investing in infrastructure and other capital goods allows for increased productivity.

one big thing is simply investing in people to be more productive, eg. increasing "human capital".

of course eventually sustainable growth has to approach some asymptote, and eventually physical limits kick in. (free energy in the universe gets used up.) however our growth trajectory is very mild compared to those limits, so in practice we can continue increasing both the intensive and expansive growth asymptotically.

and even on Earth we are more limited by our own politics, culture and technology (logistics, organization, management, education included) than by physics.

and if we assume we practically can't run out of new ideas/technology, new ways to make the whole economy a tiny bit more efficient, then that simply translates to infinite growth. not exponential, but growth nonetheless.

of course the critique that "GDP go up" must not be viewed as an end goal is absolutely valid. however it's simply a contradiction to say that we want more basic infrastructure for everyone, but no growth at all (or degrowth), because every new brick will be accounted as capital, every new shelter provided will be accounted as GDP in the usual model. (and of course maybe there are better models that are easier to grasp for people, but ... currently this is how all economic theories account for things and think about growth, as far as I know).

However, I also wanted to point out that "Distinguished SWE" != "IC". There are plenty of L8/L9 Google employees who are on technical ladders but whose jobs are mainly -- or solely -- about people management. Those people have Principal/Distinguished X as their title.

This was very common in the olden days and remains true for long-tenured employees. Google's been moving away from this model by requiring that employees move onto a management ladder once their job is mainly about people management. However, I doubt anyone would want to piss off all those Principal and Distinguished SWEs/RSes by forcing them onto a different ladder and replacing their titles.

I know that you are not at Google, but I can't help reading this as: no surprise that Google has a graveyard of 'industry-redefining' products.

or they simply wrote great code

Well, that explains the quality of some of the stuff coming out of Apple and Google.

"Look, if you get a raise and no promotion, expectations will be the same next year as they are this year, so all good. If you get a promotion then expectations for next year, AND EVERY YEAR AFTER NEXT YEAR, are going to be higher. If you've got that in you, okay then but there isn't a 'ya know, I'd rather not be this senior' button, the only way to cut those expectation cords is to leave."

Scott McNealy would tell people on promotion, "One step up, one step closer to the door." which captured this same thought.

But all of that is peanuts compared to the next step, which is that now, assuming they still want to work at a company, they have to go out and interview and set their salary expectations to something that someone is willing to hire them at. This seems especially hard for the senior folks I've interviewed coming from Google because so much of their expertise is on systems that only exist inside of Google.

I think the larger challenge is finding roles with similar comp. In some markets an L5 could expect at 50-60% comp cut (more for more senior roles).

This captures it but there is nuance here. Many people, perhaps a majority of people, especially in the engineering professions, have a mental model where "how much I'm paid" is the "score" for "how good I am at my job."

So when someone with this mental model is offered a position at half, or even two thirds the compensation level for doing what they had been doing before, cannot get past thinking "This company clearly doesn't realize how good I am if they aren't willing to pay me what I'm 'worth.'" So they pass on the offer. And weeks, sometimes months, go by and they can see that eventually they are going to run out of money, so they take one of these offers but they resent it. And in resenting it they don't bring any sort of reasonable attitude to work and grumble about how "it could be so much better if you just did it the way I suggest" or something like that. And they spend a year, at most two, until either they are asked to leave or they quit in disgust.

If they have saved enough money to maintain an acceptable lifestyle without dedicated employment, they will often join the ranks of the 'self employed' where occasionally they consult but mostly they don't. If they haven't saved enough money they sometimes move to a new area, cut contact with friends where it is too embarrassing for them to say they are "unemployable"[1], and get by on smaller work in a reduced cost environment.

Bottom line is that it is a tough time for these folks. They are being thrust into a self examination situation that they may not have prepared themselves for. I have nothing but empathy for people in this conundrum. I walked through that fire and came out the other side stronger but not everyone does.

[1] They aren't, it really is just a disconnect between their self image and market rate for their skills.

How do you square having invisible impact ?

Performance ratings seemed to either be "Met" or "Greatly Exceeded" as the work of these folks often spanned multiple review cycles, so some stuff my be In Progress & On Track for one cycle, but has landed and achieved impact in a following one.

From the employee end, the contract is: you take my time and expertise and give me money/benefits/etc.

Yet performance review rating systems place, "did the job well and met all professional obligations," somewhere in the middle-to-low end of their, "scales."

So even if you, employee, come in as a highly experienced individual with plenty of skills and you perform all of your duties and fulfill your contractual obligations to the letter: it's not enough.

Just more capitalism at work.

The effect this has on human organization of labour is hilarious sometimes. It seems to me that when your performance review scale is based around these unrealistic expectations then workers have to readjust the way they see their roles. It's not enough to do a good job! One must exceed expectations to be treated with respect. And when we start dangling carrots like that people will find many clever ways to get it with as little effort as possible.

Hop around teams to find the lowest-performing team in order to stand out. Sounds great from the organization's perspective: you're spreading your experience around and lifting up all boats! Except that knowledge transfer almost never happens and team churn is highly disruptive on software projects. So things end up in constant state of technical debt.

Sabotage your co-workers and steal recognition for their work/ideas/etc! Hoard your domain knowledge and prevent others from getting in on your work so that you stand out come review season! Make sure you're good friends with the team lead so that you get all of the preferred projects!

All kinds of fun behaviours arise.