Google Tells Employees That Fewer of Them Will Get Promotions To Senior Roles (cnbc.com) 61
Google is warning employees that fewer of them will receive promotions to more senior levels this year than in the past. From a report: "The process is manager-led and will be largely similar to last year -- though with our slower pace of hiring, we are planning for fewer promotions into L6 and above than when Google was growing quickly," the company said in an email that was viewed by CNBC. The L6 distinction refers to the first layer of staff that's considered senior and typically includes people with about a decade of experience. The changes come as Google implements a new performance review system called Google Reviews and Development (GRAD), which as CNBC reported in December, will result in more Google employees receiving low performance ratings and fewer receiving high marks.
Like many large tech companies, Google has a sprawling middle management. According to last year's internal survey results that affected the company's ability to ship products efficiently. Google also is in the midst of trying to cut costs as growth decelerates and recession concerns persist. The company has slowed hiring and announced in January that it's cutting 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of the workforce. In Monday's email, the tech giant said it's promoting fewer people to senior roles "to ensure that the number of Googlers in more senior and leadership roles grows in proportion to the growth of the company."
Like many large tech companies, Google has a sprawling middle management. According to last year's internal survey results that affected the company's ability to ship products efficiently. Google also is in the midst of trying to cut costs as growth decelerates and recession concerns persist. The company has slowed hiring and announced in January that it's cutting 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of the workforce. In Monday's email, the tech giant said it's promoting fewer people to senior roles "to ensure that the number of Googlers in more senior and leadership roles grows in proportion to the growth of the company."
are they an UP or OUT workplace? peter or dilbert? (Score:2)
are they an UP or OUT workplace? peter or dilbert system for putting people into management?
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You want an UP or OUT environment - go work for a major consulting company... Accenture*, Ernst & Young, McKinsey, Deloitte, etc. Been there, done that - escaped before I was Borg'ed.
* Scott Adams based much of Dilbert's mentality on his interaction with Anderson Consulting (pre-Enron).
UP and OUT is not necessarily bad if your goal is to force an ultra-competitive management environment. Unfortunately, not all the cream at the top is savory as a lot of dicks get involved.
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They should take the Musk approach. He culled...what, 90%+ of twitter and it's still up and running?
Give it an hour. Then tell us if Twit is still up. They are having multiple issues each week [downdetector.com], including service being not available.
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Oh the $100 million hornets nest he stepped on was so perfect. Insulting a disabled employee and then finding out he’s involved at the founder level. This employee has a contract saying he gets a $100 million paycheck if they fire him. Look for Elon’s apology tweets that his lawyers made him say.
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Oh the $100 million hornets nest he stepped on was so perfect. Insulting a disabled employee and then finding out he’s involved at the founder level. This employee has a contract saying he gets a $100 million paycheck if they fire him. Look for Elon’s apology tweets that his lawyers made him say.
As if on cue [imgur.com].
Re:The Musk approach (Score:5, Insightful)
They should take the Musk approach. He culled...what, 90%+ of twitter and it's still up and running?
How many @ google do you suppose are dead weight? ~90% feels about right.
Musk is an idiot, he basically took the slash and burn approach without bothering to figure out what's important first. It doesn't help that he's also saddled Twitter with some fairly large debts that he used to fund his acquisition. It's still up and running but that's pretty much inertia the platform is now pretty fragile. However, it's probably not that which is likely to ultimately bring the whole platform down. He cut all the regulatory stuff, and he's going to get screwed even though the wheels grind slow.
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Musk is an idiot, he basically took the slash and burn approach without bothering to figure out what's important first.
People who think Musk are an idiot, are a special kind of idiot.
Obviously someone who made an electric car company and a rocket company work. things many said were impossible, is vastly smarter than most people.
Also your statement ignores the very real fact that Musk bought Twitter with specific features sets in mind. He delivered on those - paid accounts, and an edit button, in short orde
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Re: The Musk approach (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The Musk approach (Score:4, Insightful)
Musk is an idiot in many areas, but not an idiot in others. What is particularly idiotic is thinking that you're a super genius in a new company that you know literally nothing about. In that sense Musk is a special idiot - at Twitter. Maybe he's not an idiot at Tesla.
Musk was never forced into that purchase, he set a trap for himself and stepped into it. He agreed to buy Twitter and then could not back out - no one forced Musk to make the original agreement, they only forced him to uphold his agreement.
I know this doesn't play well in your Elon Musk fan club meetings, but a bit of reality now and then wont' hurt.
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Musk is an idiot, he basically took the slash and burn approach without bothering to figure out what's important first.
People who think Musk are an idiot, are a special kind of idiot.
Obviously someone who made an electric car company and a rocket company work. things many said were impossible, is vastly smarter than most people.
Musk (and many hi-tech luminaries) benefit from the halo effect. Musk did indeed do something visionary with Tesla and SpaceX. The halo effect allows those successes to indicate a broad genius that extends to everything he does. Some people see the halo, and others don't.
I don't think Musk is an idiot. He did exactly what he intended with Twitter, which was to bend it to his will. Twitter was his toy. I don't think he cared about elevating Twitter's financial or technical success. So, in this sense,
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Musk is an idiot, he basically took the slash and burn approach without bothering to figure out what's important first.
People who think Musk are an idiot, are a special kind of idiot.
You've got some boot polish on your nose there.
Obviously someone who made an electric car company and a rocket company work. things many said were impossible, is vastly smarter than most people.
That wasn't a question of smarts as much as it was the combination of money, self belief and a bit of luck. For sure he's made some bloody good calls, but unfortunately he's also made some bad ones too (e.g. that cave submarine) you've just forgotten them because humans are cognitively biased that way. He's an above average businessman for sure, he had the money to invest, he thought something was possible that others thought impossible and he hired the people
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Musk is an idiot, he basically took the slash and burn approach without bothering to figure out what's important first.
People who think Musk are an idiot, are a special kind of idiot.
Obviously someone who made an electric car company and a rocket company work. things many said were impossible, is vastly smarter than most people.
You can be smart engineer and at the same time complete idiot in politics (his recent comments about Ukraine) or ethics (Twitter stuff).
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It's still up and running but that's pretty much inertia the platform is now pretty fragile.
It's obviously always been very fragile- which is why so many ex-employees were convinced the whole service would fail as soon as they were let go. Musk has repeatedly complained about the current architecture being awful.
I'd also point out that Twitter has added multiple new features since he took over, at a far greater pace than under the prior regime, so saying it's running on inertia sounds pretty oblivious.
Does that mean the whole thing won't ultimately crash and burn? No, there's certainly still a str
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Elon is a dumbass and can’t be bothered to even look at who he’s firing. Like this guy https://www.bosshunting.com.au... [bosshunting.com.au]
I mean selling the office plants for cash is something every company does, right?
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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The disabled employee is now owed $100 million, part of the contract with Twitter when his company was bought. He was getting a salary in order to pay taxes to Iceland, because he had enough money already he wanted to thank Iceland for their disability support. It does not matter if he did or not do useful work - his salary was going to be less than the $100 million payout. His reason for asking if he was fired or not was for these reasons, and he was being ignored by Twitter. So the tweet was the way to
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and it's still up and running?
Is it? No really is it? In the past I would have assumed so yeah, but since Musk has been in charge and fired everyone while forcing rapid changes without any QA/QC people, Twitter's status has been such a yo-yo of outages that I honestly would feel comfortable answering that question in any meaningful capacity right now without going and double checking.
HOLY SHIT. Just before hitting submit I Googled it and it seems like the number of outages they've had literally led to a news story of how things are not
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"We don't want all these losers working on reducing technical debt, they're not contributing to the income, so kick them out!"
Later that day...
"OMG, all this technical debt is killing us, quick, lay off more people!"
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Twitter is still up and running like an oil tanker is still moving forward with the engine off. Large masses tend to move by inertia for a long, long while.
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The jets of flame coming out of the back of the tanker actually provide a significant boost in speed.
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Musk got rid of key people. Musk does NOT know how twitter works, he brought over some Tesla engineers to quickly look at Twitter code and give some advice. These are engineers for automobiles and in-auto entertainement and control systems, their expertise in social media code, web sites, and masses of users hitting the code simultaneously is likely very small.
The Twitter outage this week was due to one overworked engineer who make a configuration mistake - the only engineer managing the API. Normally I
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As a part of GenX that was unfortunate enough to be born in the midwest, I'd be interested to know what the ladder even looks like.
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It's just like the feeder chute, but sideways.
Pigs poop in the chute.
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This is news?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate culture needs to quit telling people that they have promotion opportunities when they don't.
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Why? If people are still stupid enough to swallow it, why stop selling snake oil while people are still willing to buy?
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Corporate culture needs to quit telling people that they have promotion opportunities when they don't.
The opportunities are there for everyone...just no guarantee that YOU will be promoted.
So they'll be training up people... (Score:3)
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... for their competitors.
Show me 1 company that trains it's people to do more than exactly what they were hired for.
I worked the last 10 years of my working life at a MAJOR CORP that made no effort to train/improve it's staff...unlike a major corp that was merged into it decades before.
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Work harder, peons. For no reason. (Score:2)
I give odds on about 2 years before executives at tech companies just come right out and say, "Work harder, or we will be around to beat you."
I miss the good old days when they just flat out lied about opportunities for growth. At least we could pretend to have hope then.
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I said it before, I say it again, some managers are just still alive because they simply aren't worth a second of jail time.
funny (Score:1)
...it's almost like they suddenly realized that 'performance trophies for everyone' is ultimately expensive and motivates people in entirely the wrong direction.
The google hq should have been shaped like a giant snowflake.
Move if it mattersâ¦. (Score:5, Interesting)
If this matters to you, then look elsewhere. You are almost always more valuable to another company than your current employer. You will get more money and a new title if thatâ(TM)s what you want.
If these things donâ(TM)t matter, then forget about it.
Yes, I know there have been a lot of layoffs, so there might be slim pickinâ(TM)s out there for new work. But, itâ(TM)s a big economy. Iâ(TM)m sure you can find something decent. Just get started.
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This right there.
You want more money? Get another job. The only times my salary leaped forwards was when I jumped ship and signed up with another company.
I'm looking forward to the posts (Score:2)
I have this sense that everyone here is going to think that an organisation is nothing but an endless string of promotion to senior management and that all it takes is time to get there. If your own goal at work is to get promoted you're setting yourself up for an statistically incredibly likely failure.
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Conversely, in some places explicitly, others informally a given, if you *don't* get promoted, you will get let go.
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Can I have a show of hands who got promoted in the last, say, 2 years? Well?
Nobody gets promoted anymore. Nobody promotes from the inside. For a few simple reasons, it would require you to actually train someone and you would also have to justify why it's Bob and not Fred. Or worse, why it's not Jessica.
Instead, if there's a senior position or a supervisor position to be filled, you hire from the outside.
Forget the idea that you'll ever be promoted. You want to be promoted? Dust off your resume and apply to
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sprawling middle management (Score:2)
A 'sprawling middle management' is a bad sign, and kind of surprising for a company that's supposed to be slick and modern. Tech companies these days tend to have a pretty flat hierarchy. I realize that's harder to do if the organization is large, but a hefty layer of middle management is usually costly and counterproductive.
People want to be promoted and climb the corporate ladder, but in a lot of places there isn't much of a ladder.
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A 'sprawling middle management' is a bad sign, and kind of surprising for a company that's supposed to be slick and modern. Tech companies these days tend to have a pretty flat hierarchy. I realize that's harder to do if the organization is large, but a hefty layer of middle management is usually costly and counterproductive.
People want to be promoted and climb the corporate ladder, but in a lot of places there isn't much of a ladder.
^THIS^
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That open plan bullshit is one of the reasons employees are now fighting the return to office tooth and nail. That idea would have a lot more appeal if we still had normal offices.
If open plan was such a great idea, you'd see C-Levels work there. Well, where do they work? If they're at the office at all?
Can someone help me understand? (Score:2)
Can someone who understands this better explain it to me? One of the companies where I worked had a "tech ladder," where people were "promoted" to a higher title, but didn't actually manage anyone. That tech ladder was tied in to how much you were paid, what kinds of bonuses/RSUs you could possibly earn. There was an explicit target for the number of people at each job grade or rung on the "tech ladder" with the expectation that some people might never achieve beyond a certain point in their entire caree
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Then it's no promotion. It's bullshitting you into working more for the same pebbles. Quit and get something new.
Not Surprised. (Score:2)
He is pulling a GE.
Fewer Google searches have value to me... (Score:2)
Ponzi Scheme (Score:1)
The only ones who truly make it are the ones at the top and they do so by convincing the people at the bottom that they can all make it to the top as long as they "play the game". Which is clearly not possible. Every rung of the latter weeds out approximately 80% of the folks below it (assuming each manager has fiver reports).
The only time the worker bees have a chance is when a company is young and growing fast. And, let's face it, the tech industry ain't youn