Hi, I don't know you personally, but I joined Google a year or so ago and I disagree with many of your subjective judgements above. I have personally run into the problem of managers hired from outside (heck, I was one :)) and that's serious. But AFAIK, none of those other things you talk about were caused by incoming crappy managers; they were invented by good old fashioned Google culture.
People absolutely do not "literally drop everything for 1-2 weeks" for perf. That's just ridiculous. People complain about it, but it's more like a few hours of work, not a week. Moreover, the Google perf system is hands down the most amazingly great employee performance review system I've ever seen. Okay, my worldly experience only goes so far, but I sat in on calibration meetings and promotion committee meetings and so on, and I was absolutely shocked at how fair and objective people were. I'm sure there are cases of abuse or where it goes wrong - there are in any such system - but your examples of eg. using low performance scores to prevent transfers ought to be hard to achieve; the system gives such high weight to peer reviews that a crazy manager should be shown as crazy in fairly short order. At least in the group where I sat in these meetings (Commerce) this was absolutely the case.
I have mixed feelings about Google. But your accusations here are mostly misguided IMHO.
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Hi, I don't know you personally, but I joined Google a year or so ago and I disagree with many of your subjective judgements above. I have personally run into the problem of managers hired from outside (heck, I was one :)) and that's serious. But AFAIK, none of those other things you talk about were caused by incoming crappy managers; they were invented by good old fashioned Google culture.
People absolutely do not "literally drop everything for 1-2 weeks" for perf. That's just ridiculous. People complain about it, but it's more like a few hours of work, not a week. Moreover, the Google perf system is hands down the most amazingly great employee performance review system I've ever seen. Okay, my worldly experience only goes so far, but I sat in on calibration meetings and promotion committee meetings and so on, and I was absolutely shocked at how fair and objective people were. I'm sure there are cases of abuse or where it goes wrong - there are in any such system - but your examples of eg. using low performance scores to prevent transfers ought to be hard to achieve; the system gives such high weight to peer reviews that a crazy manager should be shown as crazy in fairly short order. At least in the group where I sat in these meetings (Commerce) this was absolutely the case.
I have mixed feelings about Google. But your accusations here are mostly misguided IMHO.