Note that there’s an important distinction between “corporate management” and “corporate employment”—the thing where you say “yeesh, I’m glad I’m not a manager at Google” is substantially different from the thing where you say “yeesh, I’m glad I’m not a programmer at Google”, and the audience here has many more programmers than managers.
[And also Vanessa’s experience matches my impressions, tho I’ve spent less time in industry.]
[EDIT: I also thought it was clear that you meant this more as a “this is what MIRI was like” than “MIRI was unusually bad”, but I also think this means you’re open to nostalgebraist’s objection, that you’re ordering things pretty differently from how people might naively order them.]
My experience was that if you were T-5 (Senior), you had some overlap with PM and management games, and at T-6 (Staff), you were often in them. I could not handle the politics to get to T-7. Programmers below T-5 are expected to earn promotions or to leave.
Google’s a big company, so it might have been different elsewhere internally. My time at Google certainly traumatized me, but probably not to the point of anything in this or the Leverage thread.
Programmers below T-5 are expected to earn promotions or to leave.
This changed something like five years ago [edit: August 2017], to where people at level four (one level above new grad) no longer needed to get promoted to stay long term.
Note that there’s an important distinction between “corporate management” and “corporate employment”—the thing where you say “yeesh, I’m glad I’m not a manager at Google” is substantially different from the thing where you say “yeesh, I’m glad I’m not a programmer at Google”, and the audience here has many more programmers than managers.
[And also Vanessa’s experience matches my impressions, tho I’ve spent less time in industry.]
[EDIT: I also thought it was clear that you meant this more as a “this is what MIRI was like” than “MIRI was unusually bad”, but I also think this means you’re open to nostalgebraist’s objection, that you’re ordering things pretty differently from how people might naively order them.]
My experience was that if you were T-5 (Senior), you had some overlap with PM and management games, and at T-6 (Staff), you were often in them. I could not handle the politics to get to T-7. Programmers below T-5 are expected to earn promotions or to leave.
Google’s a big company, so it might have been different elsewhere internally. My time at Google certainly traumatized me, but probably not to the point of anything in this or the Leverage thread.
This changed something like five years ago [edit: August 2017], to where people at level four (one level above new grad) no longer needed to get promoted to stay long term.