That is, nobody is going to say, "You're only an L4, therefore you can't work on this project."
Someone said exactly that to me when I was at Google. That's kinda how closed allocation works.
What I always tell people: If you want to get promoted, just start acting like someone at the next level up.
At any company, that's the quickest way to get fired. Getting into a turf war with someone with a much higher title? Not a good idea. To be honest, if I were to do Google again, I'd have kept my head down and said "Yes, sir". It can do a lot for your career to work there, but it's not a place where you can safely overperform.
However, there is a way to provide private feedback that can only be seen by your manager; in my experience this backchannel is rarely used.
"Yes, I realize that a murder count of 2,500 in a city of 1 million is horrifying. But look on the bright side. That means there were 997,500 people who were not murdered last year."
Managers take all of your reviews as input and determine a performance rating, which is a score in one of five buckets to indicate how well you're doing overall.
As of 2011, you actually get a score between 1.0 and 5.0. Almost everyone is between 3.0 and 4.0. The buckets are very large. "Meets Expectations" is everything from a 3.0 (acceptable for new hires, but damning if you've been there for a while) to 3.4 (slightly above average). If you're in this bucket, you don't know if you've been marked as a loser (and rendered unable to transfer) or are getting 65th-percentile ratings. You can literally waste 18 months on a loser project only to find you can't transfer because your boss gave you 3.0's.
These scores are also calibrated against other managers across the organization, to prevent managers from biasing their scores -- an individual manager can't game the system.
That's a nice way to present stack ranking. Each boss gets a finite number of calibration points and has to pick who does well and who doesn't. If he gets a crappy allotment and desperately needs to use all his points to promote the guy who'll do a startup unless bumped, you could get stuck with a (career-ending) 2.9.
----
The important thing to remember about Google's promotion process is that it's bicameral. Manager-assigned calibration scores are one component. Peer reviews are another. You need both to advance at Google. Google provides multiple paths to failure, not multiple paths to success. If your manager likes you and gives you 4.0+, you can still get dinged for lack of visibility. On the other hand, if your manager is giving you shit for calibration scores, all the peer review in the world won't get you out of the muck. I've known many Googlers to damage their careers by playing their manager but not the crowd, or vice versa. You need to play both games at the same time.
(dead man's switch: Discussing perf with you on hackernews is going to be a waste of time, I'll personally pay you $10K USD [or EFF, if you refuse] if I respond).
An "occasionally misses" expectations is by no means career ending. It's just a warning sign. It's not by itself a fireable offense (as an aside, even being fired by Google won't ruin your career, a friend of mine with a bad manager at Google got fired. He ended up pre-IPO at Twitter, and he is definitely doing well). I had an occasionally misses as L4. For me, I took it as implicit permission to get more attention from my manager. I'd bring problems to him sooner and make sure to be less stuck, including burdening him with more mundane problems I was having, and giving him more status to make sure I was moving in the right direction. I quickly hit meets, and I eventually hit L5.
Someone (or actually 2 people) said things akin to "You're only an L4, therefore you need to be working on this part of the project." Both were newly L5.
I told them "That is not how we do things at Google. If you believe what I'm working on is not useful, communicate what the priorities are for the project and I will pick something that is both interesting to me and helpful for you. If there is nothing on this project that fits into that category, I will find a new project."
In both cases, they looked abashed and backpedaled.
This is what an L5 would do. Try to work directly with the people involved to figure out a compromise solution, and if that fails, exercise other options. And sure enough, I was promoted fairly soon thereafter.
Anyone who has a particularly strong opinion (coupled with strong evidence) is likely full of crap, since it just recently rolled out across the company. By the end of the year it'll be more clear what the long-term effects are.
Someone said exactly that to me when I was at Google. That's kinda how closed allocation works.
What I always tell people: If you want to get promoted, just start acting like someone at the next level up.
At any company, that's the quickest way to get fired. Getting into a turf war with someone with a much higher title? Not a good idea. To be honest, if I were to do Google again, I'd have kept my head down and said "Yes, sir". It can do a lot for your career to work there, but it's not a place where you can safely overperform.
However, there is a way to provide private feedback that can only be seen by your manager; in my experience this backchannel is rarely used.
"Yes, I realize that a murder count of 2,500 in a city of 1 million is horrifying. But look on the bright side. That means there were 997,500 people who were not murdered last year."
Managers take all of your reviews as input and determine a performance rating, which is a score in one of five buckets to indicate how well you're doing overall.
As of 2011, you actually get a score between 1.0 and 5.0. Almost everyone is between 3.0 and 4.0. The buckets are very large. "Meets Expectations" is everything from a 3.0 (acceptable for new hires, but damning if you've been there for a while) to 3.4 (slightly above average). If you're in this bucket, you don't know if you've been marked as a loser (and rendered unable to transfer) or are getting 65th-percentile ratings. You can literally waste 18 months on a loser project only to find you can't transfer because your boss gave you 3.0's.
These scores are also calibrated against other managers across the organization, to prevent managers from biasing their scores -- an individual manager can't game the system.
That's a nice way to present stack ranking. Each boss gets a finite number of calibration points and has to pick who does well and who doesn't. If he gets a crappy allotment and desperately needs to use all his points to promote the guy who'll do a startup unless bumped, you could get stuck with a (career-ending) 2.9.
----
The important thing to remember about Google's promotion process is that it's bicameral. Manager-assigned calibration scores are one component. Peer reviews are another. You need both to advance at Google. Google provides multiple paths to failure, not multiple paths to success. If your manager likes you and gives you 4.0+, you can still get dinged for lack of visibility. On the other hand, if your manager is giving you shit for calibration scores, all the peer review in the world won't get you out of the muck. I've known many Googlers to damage their careers by playing their manager but not the crowd, or vice versa. You need to play both games at the same time.
For a better analysis of Google's promotion/review system, read Piaw Na's essays, such as this one: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html
This is also worth reading: http://valleywag.gawker.com/eric-schmidt-personally-ruined-g...