Fabulous Article About Promotion Structures
From an ex-Googler, a must read on promotions:
To a large extent, software engineering is a field full of ambiguity and complexity, and that makes compensation hard. So incentives tend to fail or backfire. Then I tried to invert the problem. What if I tried to design a promotion system to piss off as many employees as possible? What characteristics would it have?
- No pleasant surprises. In other words, you can only be disappointed if you didn’t get a promotion, you can’t be pleasantly surprised by a promotion.
- Create unhappiness by dependence on scarce resources. In other words, gate promotions based on scarce resources so that even people who would otherwise be qualified could become disgruntled through no fault of their own.
- Eliminate accountability from people who make the promotion decisions (e.g., through a committee). That way, promotion decisions can seem arbitrary.
- Ensure that promotions are competitive races between all qualified candidates. This ensures that people who manipulate that packet in such a way as to have the best looking packets will win over people who are trying to get feedback and improve, which is supposedly the point behind all these feedback systems.
When I looked at Google’s promotion system through this lens, I was very impressed. It seemed as though the system was designed to create disgruntled employees out of people who might otherwise be perfectly happy.
…
No matter what promotion system is in use, there’ll be flaws. Worse, these flaws are insidious. Since superstars are those who get promoted frequently, they see nothing wrong with the system. In fact, they’ll usually try to torpedo any changes that don’t benefit them, and since they’re the superstars, their opinions will carry more weight. Instead, it’s the misfits who see the flaws of the system most often. Talented misfits will stick around for as long as compensation is adequate, and leave once it’s not. And any manager will tell you that once compensation is the only thing holding employees to a company, you’re in a very tenuous and dangerous situation.
Really, just go read the whole thing right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. My thoughts after the jump.
At several of my prior companies, I have been involved in creating incentive structure and promotions ladders for the staff. It’s not easy; while money is something that everyone needs, not everyone wants cash on the barrel in return for their work (some want glory, others want to “make a difference” — whatever that happens to mean to them).
At one workplace, the promotion ladder was such that for a software developer to advance beyond a certain point, he or she had to demonstrate substantial and successful client interactions. We all know people who are technically brilliant but should never, ever be put in front of a client. In this model, those people will never advance beyond the middle of the pack. Another place made bringing in certain level of revenue a requirement for advancing beyond a certain point. While I somewhat understand the motivation, both of these structure are going to force people who are highly technically talented but socially inept (and I think it’s a fair statement that the IT industry is pretty rife with those types) to either be a frustrated middle level player or an employment gypsy, moving from firm to firm to firm. Unless, of course, they are lucky enough to find a home in a big enough company to have an advancement track suitable for their personality.
Yet another place I worked had a bonus plan set up to encourage publishing outside of the work place: there was a payout for publishing a scientific article, a different one for writing a book and yet another one for being a talking head on television — but only so long as the person was identified as being an employee of the company. Personally, I liked that approach; should I ever start my own business, I would roll that into the approach.
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