A friend of mine(not myself) who joined google as an L4 half year ago. He is a hardworking guy who pushed more than 60 CLs in half of year and did several designs. This week his manager told him he had some performance issue and will be support check in(similar to Devlist/Focus at Amazon), scold him for some bs issue like too many comments in his CL. I was shocked when I heard this since Google isn’t doing pip in my impression. Is this brought by recent GRAD and does it mark a culture shift in Google? Has anyone had similar experience? Edit: Half of the CLs are M size. #google #pip #supportcheckin #GRAD
60CLs in half a year isn't a lot....
CL count is meaningless when half of those could be flag flips and other 1 liners
Yeah, I blame ex-Amazon managers.
That mean your friend writes bad code and his reviewers need to hand hold in many case(too many comments)
Too many PR comments doesn’t mean bad code. That’s a poor way to measure this. In fact, too many PR comments can be a good thing because it means more discussion. It can also mean nitpicky code reviewers, talkative people, PR’s for big stories or those that change scope. Way too much variability.
60 cls in half a year with google’s small cl culture is very very bad… i did 24 this week alone and i am a noogler…
If you compare apple and orange, yes they are both fruit. But are they really the same? If you make 24 1-line cls a week, good for you. But how did you come to the conclusion that op only writes small cls like you?
Because everyone is supposed to write small and incremental changes in cls, do you even code? I rarely see l or xl cls without data fixture updates. Im a readability person so i have seen a lot.
Google definitely PIPs. Not at the same rate as Amazon, but they definitely do… They’re just more discrete about it because they have an image to uphold, unlike Amazon. Don’t believe what you read on Blind about Google’s “rest and vest” culture. It only applies to the top 10%.
First 6 months should be training what happened to the google culture? don’t think a L4 engineer can ramp up a mature codebase in 6 months unless he’s under leveled or something
Having gone through what your friend is going through (early in my career). I can tell you he needs to be practicing small CLs. Additionally he needs a frank conversation with his manager to determine if the "support check" (aka pip) is doable or just a mechanism to get rid of him. I had such a conversation with my manager and asked if he had put people through a similar process before and what the success/outcomes were. If this manager has a track record of all people being separated from the company it's a red flag and time to run. In my case my manager had a mostly good track record and I passed it and went on to career success. He needs to be engaging his reviewers earlier in the process (ideally offline from the review process, etc..) to ensure he has their alignment before sending his code for review. Does he have a mentor? Someone he can run his code by before it being sent for review? His goal should be to have zero comments on his CLs. Perfect readability. The small CLs help ensure that.
Thanks buddy for the suggestion, I will let him know! And good for you that you have passed that.
Is this language-dependent? I write C++ and adding a single test case could make my CL M-size+ already. And most of the CLs in my teams have significant amount of comments (>3 including replies).
Almost certainly a judgement call by the manager (and perhaps TL too). I would hope there are other signals that we don't know besides number of CLs and # of comments. CL count is so arbitrary. For high difficulty work the velocity of CLs might be much smaller. 60 seems very reasonable to me. I'm a TL at Google now. I work with an L4 trending towards PIP unfortunately. In 9 months this person has ~20 CLs and most are small changes or based on a codelab. In comparison your friend is a Rockstar 😜
Is his issue one of work ethic? Curious why he is committing less code?
Combination of work ethic and also drowning in the complexity of Google's software stack.
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Too many comments in his CL? What does that mean?
Like reviewers have too many comments in his code change.