I think good managers are more important than you suggest:
> you can request a transfer to any team that will take you
If you're trying to transfer because your manager is giving you crap, you'll find it harder than you think to get the transfer approved. In the meantime, your manager can sandbag your quarterly performance rating and taint your compensation and chances for promotion for a long time. A bad manager at Google is still a bad manager.
> Performance reviews are peer-driven.
This is partly true. Promotions are decided by committee with input from your peers. But without strong performance ratings from your manager and appropriate projects to work on, you won't get promoted no matter what your peers say. The committees are very reluctant to override the manager.
If you're trying to transfer because your manager is giving you crap, you'll find it harder than you think to get the transfer approved.
At Google, the not-so-nice managers are the ones who use low ratings to decrease their reports' mobility. You can actually see this on a Perf graph. 3.0, 3.0, 3.0, 3.0, 3.0, 3.5, 3.5. The step discontinuity is because the number itself isn't reported to employee. The bucket is. (3.0 to 3.4 is a huge range, from the 3rd to 65th percentile of the company, but any number in this stretch is reported as "Meets Expectations".) The 3.5 jump happens because the employee gets sick of "Meets Expectations" and the half-step semi-promotion is used to perk him up a little bit. But again, "Exceeds Expectations" is a huge range (3.5 to 3.9) and the numbers are still put in the low end of the range. 3.5 will very rarely get a person promoted.
What the numbers are supposed to represent is a probability that the employee would succeed in the next higher level. 3.x is an x out of 10 chance that a level-N employee would be successful at level N + 1. 2.9 and below is cause to start the PIP/termination process, with a recommendation of timeframe (2.9 = 60 days, 2.8 = 45, 2.7 = 30); 4.1 to 5.0 represents various degrees of consideration for various (sometimes very lucrative) special awards. At 5.0, you might see an EMG award that would impress even bankers.
The ones who overuse 3.0 and 3.5 are the not-so-nice managers, not the evil ones. The evil managers are the ones who use PIPs to block transfers. Those are the 4.1-to-PIP cases where the target has to get a VP override in order to make the move.
In the meantime, your manager can sandbag your quarterly performance rating and taint your compensation and chances for promotion for a long time. A bad manager at Google is still a bad manager.
Bingo, and Google has plenty of those.
Google is a pretty great place if you have a good manager, not because the executives know what they're doing, but because you're getting paid to hang out with some brilliant, creative, curious engineers. A lot of them are really good people as well. So if you have a good manager, you can do very well at Google, but like any company, it's bad if you have a bad manager.
Promotions are decided by committee with input from your peers. But without strong performance ratings from your manager and appropriate projects to work on, you won't get promoted no matter what your peers say. The committees are very reluctant to override the manager.
Exactly. It used to be an OR-gate between manager and peer feedback. Now it's an AND-gate.
> you can request a transfer to any team that will take you
If you're trying to transfer because your manager is giving you crap, you'll find it harder than you think to get the transfer approved. In the meantime, your manager can sandbag your quarterly performance rating and taint your compensation and chances for promotion for a long time. A bad manager at Google is still a bad manager.
> Performance reviews are peer-driven.
This is partly true. Promotions are decided by committee with input from your peers. But without strong performance ratings from your manager and appropriate projects to work on, you won't get promoted no matter what your peers say. The committees are very reluctant to override the manager.