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?
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.