Every Google employee’s OKRs are supposedly readable by anyone in the company. I don’t know if the OKR scoring is also public, but regardless an enterprising individual could scrape other people’s OKRs every quarter and see which keywords are correlated with later promotions.

1. Promotions are not public (by which I mean accessible by anyone at the company).

2. OKRs are not automatically public (some teams choose to publish theirs; many don't).

It's amazing to watch even the lower level SWEs, who don't need to play politics, looking at a dumpster fire and telling their bosses it's great.

Telling your boss that their special project is a dumpster fire can have very bad career ramifications

That's why you tell their boss.

This is the fundamental reason large organizations struggle in the long run. If a cisco vp started a network generative ai initiative tomorrow, and in a year posted some results - do you think those results would ever be received badly? Or would they be massaged until they were good?

Externally - absolutely they could be received poorly. It’s a very common outcome for clueless executives forcing themselves into areas where they have no domain knowledge.

Internally, most execs will use their sociopathic tendencies to spin it into some kind of an ego boosting success story. Otherwise companies would drop so many current day tech executives.

A big factor in keeping it tight with investors is posturing. It’s definitely more important than performance or business results. I don’t think most tech executives sweat about their actual performance outside of small companies.

That would probably be 95% of KPIs across all big corporations anywhere.

It takes incredible and very rare leadership to be able to admit failures downstream.