[_j5l3]

> I guess you could switch the process to "promo after N years of not being fired at your current level" but that seems even worse.

Ex googler here, and when I was there 4 years ago this was true of L3 and L4. My entire team was L3's and L4's. We spent literally all of our time on projects with no meaningful impact on the company, but that made for promo packets.

6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years. Completely insane.

[hotpotamus]

Sometimes I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, and then I read stuff like this and I don't think I could make it at a FAANG, but for different reasons.

[qzx_pierri]

It seems like a soul sucking marathon run by relentless ladder climbers fueled on concentrated avarice and amphetamines.

[acchow]

> 6 engineers focused on rewriting the form to input credit cards on YouTube for 3 years.

Can you explain how this gets them promos? I feel like a promo-focused culture would result in 6 engineers creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless, but much more work.

[_j5l3]

> result in 6 engineers creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless, but much more work.

We didn't create our own, but we did migrate our codebase to a new server-side rendering framework twice in my time there.

Also, nobody on our team ever got promoted.

[bryanrasmussen]

>creating a new server-side rendering framework so that they can improve credit card input rendering speed - possibly equally useless

at the scale of Google I'm not sure I would consider that useless. But it would definitely feel useless.

[reindeerer]

Those rendering frameworks are being written as well, for no other reason than promo