[pillowkusis]

> The person entrusted with this decision (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others.

This happens anyway in Google's "objective" promo system. Your manager assigns your projects, gives you your non-promo performance ratings, sets direction for your team, they sit in the room with the promo committee, and their feedback is critical to the promo committee's decision. You need their help and support to get promoted. If they didn't have significant impact on your work, they're not a manager.

Ostensibly you can go try for promo even if your manager disagrees. I never had any evidence this worked for anyone and I have no idea how it would work. Sometimes borderline promo cases would go up for promo when their manager thought it was unlikely, and it would succeed. But if your manager doesn't think you should get promoted, they're going to tell the committee that, and I don't know what the promo committee would see that would cause them to overrule the manager.

[analyst74]

I worked at companies where managers are little tsars of their turf, and Google.

The difference with Google is that: 1) you can give feedback to your manager, both anonymously and explicitly, and they'll affect their perf; and 2) your success, in terms of impact and promo are part of your managers success; 3) perf committee will challenge and can override your manager if the rating given seems too low/high given the evidence.

These forces while do not take power away from manager completely, they provide some checks and incentivize managers to respect and support their reports.

Of course, all these nice things come at a cost, that is perf becoming a somewhat transparent and heavy process that eats everyone's time and mental energy.

[jrockway]

I've been on promotion committees where it was clear that the manager didn't support it, but we promoted the candidate. I feel like most of the memorable discussions in those committees were figuring out how to give the manager feedback on how bad of a job they were doing.

I agree that you're basically screwed, especially L3->L4, if your manager isn't actively counselling you on how to grow your career. You obviously don't have enough experience to do it on your own at that point, so you are at their whim. Even when you do have the experience, if you don't have a good working relationship with your manager, you're in trouble anywhere. It is ultimately going to be them or you, and you are easier to get rid of ("he took another offer" versus "everyone thinks your manager is a jerk, so we fired him, oh by the way in the meantime your career is on hold while we figure out what the fuck to do please keep showing up").