Micromanagement at Google?
My friend is an L3 at google and he’s been there for around a year now. A couple of weeks ago his manager said that they set his expectations too low and started a doc outlining increased expectations containing shit like “Submit atleast 5 CLs every week” and is making him document the work done on an hourly granularity every week. This borderline seems like micromanagement to me. Is this an indication that the performance is not meeting the bar and there’s a chance this doc will be used to PIP the engineer? Should they be worried?
What does CL mean?
CLStats and lines of code are very important metrics at Google perf reviews. Especially at L3 and L4.
How the fuck does CLstats measure anything? What if the engineer spent most time coordinating and figuring out problems with another dependency?
Spending all of your time meeting and planning is an anti-pattern. It suggests you're not getting things done. If you're getting blocked for too long, it's your responsibility to escalate early and escalate often to unblock yourself.
Yeah, this basically means PIP.
Managers have to pip someone, so turns micromanagey.
Seems like your friend is the chosen one for the SCI quota. It is not a pip but something like pre-pip. Google has SCI quota but it doesn't have pip quota. Most engineers come out of SCI without an issue.
But shouldn’t the manager explicitly mention that they are going through SCI or are they not required to inform the candidate?
If it's SCI or PIP, yes, they should. Here is something that may have happened is: Manager was busy with a lot of things and not paying enough attention or giving feedback to your friend, then manager finally realized your friend was not performing good enough, and also that the expectations were too low. Here is the thing, in theory not even an SCI should be a surprise, and you can't expect an L3 to have a great idea of how well they are doing, especially if they are meeting the expectations that they set with their manager and not getting any other feedback. So the manager may have felt that they couldn't blame your friend for not performing well at this point (it wouldn't be right to start an SCI, even if that's possible), so they are trying to correct things now, and if your friend does not get better than they will do an SCI.
Which team in Google ?
L3 is not a terminal level. The manager wants to make sure they're on the correct trajectory towards a promo. They had a year to ramp up and now that they have to hand in their noogler card it's time to deliver. The manager is likely trying to avert a problem.
I mean, not normal but a CL a day isn’t unreasonable for most teams
5 CL’s??? My man better write 10 lines and call that a CL
Yep, I was there for 5 years, and this is not normal. Your friend's progression is not good enough in their eyes, and they're either starting to document it, or, assuming good intent (haiyaaa), the manager might also be trying to avoid an official PIP by doing this and hoping it works. I'd definitely expect a NI this cycle if nothing changes.