I spent over 9 years at Google. Got promoted 3 times. Was a manager.
Google is absolutely bonkers when it comes to promotions. At every opportunity to provide feedback towards upper management, I had one consistent refrain:
Everyone needs to chill the f### out.
The stakes (seem) too high. The amount of time invested is too high. The amount of discussion, rehashing, tinkering, rejiggering, and calibration is just too high. It's off the charts how obsessed seemingly everyone is about it. It's off the charts how much company time was blown on it and psychological stress people were subjected to. IMHO, the process at Google doesn't need to be readjusted or tinkered with, but somehow de-escalated; like it needs to not be such a huge f'ing deal.
One positive development ~5 years ago is that promotion to levels L5 and below were mostly moved out of the IC's hands and into their manager's. Despite being a manager at the time (and creating more work for me), I thought this was great. It reduced the bias in the system from ICs writing up their own packets, which disadvantaged poor writers and poor self-promoters less. It got employees thinking less about promotion, since there was less they could control or do. There were other biases that crept up, but it helps the psychology of day-to-day life to not be stressing over the frantic ladder climb.
Google is absolutely bonkers when it comes to promotions. At every opportunity to provide feedback towards upper management, I had one consistent refrain:
Everyone needs to chill the f### out.
The stakes (seem) too high. The amount of time invested is too high. The amount of discussion, rehashing, tinkering, rejiggering, and calibration is just too high. It's off the charts how obsessed seemingly everyone is about it. It's off the charts how much company time was blown on it and psychological stress people were subjected to. IMHO, the process at Google doesn't need to be readjusted or tinkered with, but somehow de-escalated; like it needs to not be such a huge f'ing deal.
One positive development ~5 years ago is that promotion to levels L5 and below were mostly moved out of the IC's hands and into their manager's. Despite being a manager at the time (and creating more work for me), I thought this was great. It reduced the bias in the system from ICs writing up their own packets, which disadvantaged poor writers and poor self-promoters less. It got employees thinking less about promotion, since there was less they could control or do. There were other biases that crept up, but it helps the psychology of day-to-day life to not be stressing over the frantic ladder climb.