> Your manager doesn’t promote you?
> No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports.
They don’t even get a vote.
> Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion.
AIUI, nowadays in 2022+ the manager gets the only vote.
It used to be that you would put together your promo packet, which was sent to the promo committee. These days it is your manager who puts together your promo packet. But it is still the promo committee (which doesn't include your manager) that decides whether or not you get promoted.
Technically yes, but "promo committee" has also changed to be your immediate org instead of being independent. Which makes your promo more dependent on your manager's influence.
No, your manager doesn't decide your promotion. The difference between before and now is that before, your manager was expected to make the case for your promotion. Now, the manager is expected not to be an advocate, but to provide their balanced input (ready now, ready soon, not yet ready).
The promotion still goes to a promo committee - although now they try to locate it close enough to your org that they have heard of you, and can have a high-context reviewer (not your manager) at the table.
The carryover from the previous system (and the thing that these sorts of posts seem to miss) is that every level has explicit expectations about the sort of activities that a person at that level can be trusted to independently conduct. A decision on promotion is a decision on whether or not a person has adequately demonstrated that they can do the work of the next level. It isn't some sort of award for doing their current job well. When someone languishes for a long time at a level, it is usually because they aren't demonstrating those next-level signals.
The system can feel unfair - like a team that lacks adequate opportunities for someone to demonstrate next-level signals, or the insistence that work doesn't count until its production impact can be assessed (which may take years for some projects). But it is rarely as capricious as may sound.
Because this sounds to me a bit like how things work in academia. I think the push there is to publish, but the essence is that, for every decision, committees rule.
I know it changes every year so I don't let my own personal experience color my perception of Google 2024, but some years when I was there my manager barely even knew where my desk was. My promo packets for L5 and L6 were judged by peer committees and I am not sure they even saw my manager evaluations. When I sat on an L5 promo committee we did not weigh manager assessments. This made sense at that time because of how hands-off managers were in the realm of the reasons a person could get promoted to L5.
These days it's the manager who writes the next-level assessment (NLA) and it's the NLA that forms the main body of the packet that the promo committee looks at. They're also the one soliciting and summarizing peer feedback etc.
That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the previous decade. I hope the current managers are up to the job! Most of my managers didn't have even the slightest inkling of how to evaluate what I was doing on the job. One of them was mainly occupied with running the "mindfulness" office.
> That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the previous decade
Yes, there have been some very signficant changes over the last few years. Promos are decided in-org. Managers play a much more important role. There are promo quotas along with associated pressures (felt more acutely in some orgs compared to others).
But, putting that asides, a manager who doesn't have any idea of what or how their reports are doing is clearly failing at their job under any of those systems.
Most large tech companies require the manager to write some sort of a promo packet to be reviewed by a relevant committee. But it's not a mystery and ultimately it falls on the manager to put together a strong packet that makes it clear why the candidate should be promoted. The promotion attempt itself is the manager's vote. Beyond that it comes down to how strongly they champion for the candidate's promotion. It's the only way to ensure some consistency between promotions, IMO.
What I found neat (when I heard about it) was that one could nominate yourself for promo, without your manager's assent. This is quite rare and a neat feature.
In theory, yes. In practice, it would take some pretty extraordinary circumstances for one to get promoted without their manager's support.
For starters, even if it is the candidate themselves who self-nominate, it is still the manager who writes the promo readiness assessment that forms the main body of the packet. It is also the manager's job to solicit peer feedback and represent it to the committee.
One could imagine a scenario where the manager's opinion diverges sharply from the assessment of the session lead and other senior folks sitting on the committee (who decide collectively) but again, those would be some pretty exceptional circumstances...
Layered on top of this are promo quotas, which already mean that some folks who do tick all the boxes aren't getting promoted as soon as they would be otherwise (or at all). That is to say that there are lots of headwinds even if the manager is supportive, let alone when they aren't.
