@mtlynch posted a great article on the flaws of Google's recognition and promotion system.
Rather than stopping at the problems, maybe we can pool ideas of the system that works well for your company so that we all could learn of better alternatives.
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Rather than waiting for yearly promotion interview, managers or colleagues would quarterly recommend a Star review for someone based on earlier KPIs (e.g. I would recommend a star to John for his helpfulness, attaching my explanation and reasoning).
Google actually has something kind of similar to this. Anyone can give anyone else a "peer bonus." There's a nominal monetary reward, but it's mostly symbolic. You have I think 5 to give away each quarter and it can be for anything you think someone did that's above and beyond.
Managers can give their employees a "spot bonus" which is kind of similar, but it's a more substantial amount of money.
These things were good, but they weren't a replacement for promotions. Though maybe a system that emphasized these more than promotions would be better.
One of the advantages of promotions and title changes is that they increase your value not just at Google but anywhere. If you apply to a new job and say, "Well, I stayed at my level for 5 years, but man did I earn a ton of stars!" other employers would probably not be super impressed.
If the company is big enough (such a Google), it should employ scouts within the company whose main job is to go around the company to understand the challenges faced by each project... Employees should not know who the scouts are, else they would spend their time trying to impress the scouts.
This sort of sounds like "spies." I feel like the drawback is it would breed a huge amount of distrust among employees because they're worried that their peers are undercover spies waiting to report them for incompetence.
It's really hard to build a system that satisfies all the goals of a good promotion system and doesn't create perverse incentives. You want to avoid promoting any bad people, reward all the good people, and avoid all irrational biases that might affect the decision. Super hard to nail all those.
My preferred system would be a system where decisions come from your manager + your manager's peers, all of whom are presumably familiar with your work. They make their decisions and have them sanity checked by some external committee.
But even that system has flaws, like what if your manager is not very confrontational and can't advocate for you well? Managers are more important if they manage senior people, so how do you prevent managers from just promoting all their own people?
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To me these solutions make your career feel like a game. I understand some people are motivated by this but not everyone.
I tend to be motivated by the idea of making a vision or an idea a reality. What others are doing or how good I look doing it is irrelevant. I want to see that vision realized and I give my all until it is. Promotions never moved me but at the same time, after a certain point if I feel like I'm not being compensated fairly for my efforts I loose interest and move on.
I think one of the mistakes we keep making at the education and work level is applying the same environment and conditions for everyone. Each human being is like a different processor platform, with its own instruction set and we need tools that properly abstract that away without hurting performance.
Rather than employees maybe we need smaller companies that satisfy niche needs and employ only fewer more closely knit teams where there is less need for a hierarchy.
Larger companies could be formed by joining together the output of these niches to tackle bigger goals. Maybe that makes sense or maybe I've been writing too much code today.
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I think the decision maker for your promotion should be a committee + colleague + manager, at least all stakeholders get to emphasize on different quality of you which they appreciate.
What do you think of Awards vs Promotion as a alternative? Or promotion is still the main thing employees goes for because of its value. I remember in my university days there are best student award and best project award.
Maybe you should write another piece on what went right at Google.
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I feel like there may be a solution somewhere along the lines of outsourcing. Not necessarily to complete strangers but maybe encouraging employees to go out and setup companies that do the tasks they currently do.
Of course this probably has a ton of problems by itself.
1
You mean ex-employee setup company to be contractor of Google?
1
More like Google encourages whoever is responsible for things like food or administrative duties to take a few staff and form a small consultancy around it.
Google actually has something kind of similar to this. Anyone can give anyone else a "peer bonus." There's a nominal monetary reward, but it's mostly symbolic. You have I think 5 to give away each quarter and it can be for anything you think someone did that's above and beyond.
Managers can give their employees a "spot bonus" which is kind of similar, but it's a more substantial amount of money.
These things were good, but they weren't a replacement for promotions. Though maybe a system that emphasized these more than promotions would be better.
One of the advantages of promotions and title changes is that they increase your value not just at Google but anywhere. If you apply to a new job and say, "Well, I stayed at my level for 5 years, but man did I earn a ton of stars!" other employers would probably not be super impressed.
This sort of sounds like "spies." I feel like the drawback is it would breed a huge amount of distrust among employees because they're worried that their peers are undercover spies waiting to report them for incompetence.
It's really hard to build a system that satisfies all the goals of a good promotion system and doesn't create perverse incentives. You want to avoid promoting any bad people, reward all the good people, and avoid all irrational biases that might affect the decision. Super hard to nail all those.
My preferred system would be a system where decisions come from your manager + your manager's peers, all of whom are presumably familiar with your work. They make their decisions and have them sanity checked by some external committee.
But even that system has flaws, like what if your manager is not very confrontational and can't advocate for you well? Managers are more important if they manage senior people, so how do you prevent managers from just promoting all their own people?
To me these solutions make your career feel like a game. I understand some people are motivated by this but not everyone.
I tend to be motivated by the idea of making a vision or an idea a reality. What others are doing or how good I look doing it is irrelevant. I want to see that vision realized and I give my all until it is. Promotions never moved me but at the same time, after a certain point if I feel like I'm not being compensated fairly for my efforts I loose interest and move on.
I think one of the mistakes we keep making at the education and work level is applying the same environment and conditions for everyone. Each human being is like a different processor platform, with its own instruction set and we need tools that properly abstract that away without hurting performance.
Rather than employees maybe we need smaller companies that satisfy niche needs and employ only fewer more closely knit teams where there is less need for a hierarchy.
Larger companies could be formed by joining together the output of these niches to tackle bigger goals. Maybe that makes sense or maybe I've been writing too much code today.
I think the decision maker for your promotion should be a committee + colleague + manager, at least all stakeholders get to emphasize on different quality of you which they appreciate.
What do you think of Awards vs Promotion as a alternative? Or promotion is still the main thing employees goes for because of its value. I remember in my university days there are best student award and best project award.
Maybe you should write another piece on what went right at Google.
I feel like there may be a solution somewhere along the lines of outsourcing. Not necessarily to complete strangers but maybe encouraging employees to go out and setup companies that do the tasks they currently do.
Of course this probably has a ton of problems by itself.
You mean ex-employee setup company to be contractor of Google?
More like Google encourages whoever is responsible for things like food or administrative duties to take a few staff and form a small consultancy around it.
So many ideas in here... =)