<super tiny>I must be stupid, but... what's a promo packet? I never worked for any of the FAANGs (other than once, at Lab126 and accidentally inventing the worst thing ever) so I don't know all the lingo</>
Even though I'm simply trying to guess from context without actually knowing, everything you just said sounds both accurate and hilariously well put.
Edit: WOW. I had no idea that's how things (even used to) work within those companies. A packet of materials you submit to get promoted. I'm almost bowled over with laughter.
That explains everything.
Here in the normal world, I get promoted by... being good at my job. Asking for it as part of a performance review, typically one I negotiate for as part of my employment, also helps.
Promo packets were an attempt at a way to figure out how to promote people when you had thousands of good engineers and they couldn't figure out how to decide who had most earned it. You didn't trust their manager, they had a limited resource of 'money' to give. Maybe it was a bureaucratic approach, a little like the army?
I think this is an inevitable thing that happens when you have huge orgs with a limit on who can be promoted, there's not enough reward for everyone. I don't know how to do it. Trust managers doesn't scale, people reward their friends or whatever. Microsoft faced this too, but they didn't have a packet approach, it seemed like the senior managers decided, without having a paper trail like that.
To be clear, it's just you making a list of things you accomplished, because otherwise your boss is going to have to dig through their email to figure it out, and they may miss something / get something wrong which will hurt you. The lingo might be specific to FAANG but the practice isn't, including the part where you do "unnecessary" work to try to pad the packet.
> at Lab126 and accidentally inventing the worst thing ever)
Lab126 created some of the first e-ink technology, right? Is the Kindle, or e-ink screens, or e-ink patents, the worst thing ever... or is there something else I should know about in this space?
> Lab126 created some of the first e-ink technology, right? Is the Kindle, or e-ink screens, or e-ink patents, the worst thing ever... or is there something else I should know about in this space?
There's a lot to unpack in that sentence. Care to elaborate?
In my defense, I said it was a horrible idea at the time, we'd have to stream everyone's audio to the cloud to get the keyword spotting to work...
Also, Lab126 did not create e-ink! E-ink came out of the Media Lab long before the first kindle.
I'm glad that they're finally making one with a stylus, when I was there (more then a decade ago) there was a prototype tablet you could write on that had a brilliant new sort of user interface.
"collection of material you submit to support your case for promotion", it's actually not even a thing anymore which adds another layer of irony here, and he is dead wrong (see my other reply).
It's easy to bamboozle yourself from the obvious "maybe people are incentivized to do things to get promoted and perhaps even unnecessary things" to wild unrelated fantasies of how this could explain decisions you don't agree with
Even though I'm simply trying to guess from context without actually knowing, everything you just said sounds both accurate and hilariously well put.
Edit: WOW. I had no idea that's how things (even used to) work within those companies. A packet of materials you submit to get promoted. I'm almost bowled over with laughter.
That explains everything.
Here in the normal world, I get promoted by... being good at my job. Asking for it as part of a performance review, typically one I negotiate for as part of my employment, also helps.