Yes but that is a cultural thing. And this is a big theme at Google, and I can say from my limited personal experience working there that it probably stems from the perf process.
Look at it this way: Let Π be $PERFCOIN, the currency that is evaluated at performance review time.
- Buying the company, got some folks some Π
- Rewriting the code, got some (other) folks some Π
- Maintaining the code, was not a reliable way to gain Π
- Listening to users, interacting with and surveying them, and implementing what they wanted, was not a reliable way to gain Π.
I worked on an internal tool at Google so I didn't have to deal with the huge warnings about accessing user information,[1] yet topic (4), there was just no great way to contact your users, no great way to shadow them as they were using the product, there was a way for them to request features but obviously that would be dominated by 5-10 voices trying to use the product in ways it was never meant to be used...
Point (3) I eventually figured out how to do at Google before I left, first off you have to call it “tech debt” and THEN you need to create metrics for your tech debt and THEN you need to set an ambitious goal for “reducing tech debt metrics by 80%” and THAT is worth some Π to some of the managers reviewing your perf.[2]
1. Well, I actually did, because I needed a signoff from a privacy team to confirm that our use didn't violate Google privacy standards, which the senior members on my team understandably didn't even want to do, “can't benefit us, can only hurt us if they say we do need to protect Googlers’ privacy from other Googlers”—thankfully the voice of reason mostly prevailed, with a long tail of making sure that we used opaque UUID identifiers to refer to our projects, and not, say, GCP project IDs...
2. Worth saying, they transitioned not just to a less frequent less painful perf review process at the end of last year, but it was also a more authoritarian one, Instead of your perf being evaluated by a faceless committee of your manager’s peers, it is now assessed by your manager directly. This is a huge win for transparency and resolving the problem where (3) and (4) don't give Π , because pleasing the faceless committee involves standards that are completely unknown to you, but making your manager happy is what people do at any normal job. So this was widely internally criticized, but to my view it's actually potentially able to resolve the systemic problem, not immediately, but as culture drifts to be slightly more normal.
Look at it this way: Let Π be $PERFCOIN, the currency that is evaluated at performance review time.
- Buying the company, got some folks some Π
- Rewriting the code, got some (other) folks some Π
- Maintaining the code, was not a reliable way to gain Π
- Listening to users, interacting with and surveying them, and implementing what they wanted, was not a reliable way to gain Π.
I worked on an internal tool at Google so I didn't have to deal with the huge warnings about accessing user information,[1] yet topic (4), there was just no great way to contact your users, no great way to shadow them as they were using the product, there was a way for them to request features but obviously that would be dominated by 5-10 voices trying to use the product in ways it was never meant to be used...
Point (3) I eventually figured out how to do at Google before I left, first off you have to call it “tech debt” and THEN you need to create metrics for your tech debt and THEN you need to set an ambitious goal for “reducing tech debt metrics by 80%” and THAT is worth some Π to some of the managers reviewing your perf.[2]
1. Well, I actually did, because I needed a signoff from a privacy team to confirm that our use didn't violate Google privacy standards, which the senior members on my team understandably didn't even want to do, “can't benefit us, can only hurt us if they say we do need to protect Googlers’ privacy from other Googlers”—thankfully the voice of reason mostly prevailed, with a long tail of making sure that we used opaque UUID identifiers to refer to our projects, and not, say, GCP project IDs...
2. Worth saying, they transitioned not just to a less frequent less painful perf review process at the end of last year, but it was also a more authoritarian one, Instead of your perf being evaluated by a faceless committee of your manager’s peers, it is now assessed by your manager directly. This is a huge win for transparency and resolving the problem where (3) and (4) don't give Π , because pleasing the faceless committee involves standards that are completely unknown to you, but making your manager happy is what people do at any normal job. So this was widely internally criticized, but to my view it's actually potentially able to resolve the systemic problem, not immediately, but as culture drifts to be slightly more normal.