Google announced compensation changes focused on rewarding top performers, as Big Tech shifts toward driving higher employee productivity.

They’re cutting most people’s comp and dressing it up like they’re doing them a favor. The message is basically: “good news, we’re now rewarding top performers even more… by taking from everyone else.” It’s not about recognizing excellence; it’s about squeezing more out of people with less. And naturally, it all rides on their annual review system, which is subjective at best and arbitrary at worst. So now, their raise depends even more on whether their manager feels like fighting for them in a broken system. This sets people up to compete instead of work together. And the timing is pleb-crushingly tone-deaf. After myriad industry layoffs and burnout, they roll this out like it’s some kind of gift. It’s not. It’s just another way to try to do “more” with less, while pretending they’re “investing in talent.”

    • hades@lemm.eeEnglish
      18·
      2 days ago

      For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.

    • criss_cross@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Amazon is doing the same thing.

      It’s phrased as giving top tier employees ability to penetrate bands.

      In practice you have to be rated Top Tier (which is assigned on a curve and only 5-10 percent of employees will hit) 3 years in a row. So if you have an off year or a new manager then you’re screwed. I’d wager that’s less than 1% of the company that’ll hit that.

      For everyone else it was a 10% pay cut. Woo?

      • jungle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        11 hours ago

        the ability to penetrate bands

        That’s traditionally called “promotion”. So they’re not promoting employees anymore?

        • criss_cross@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 hours ago

          For engineers at least it’s always been a pain.

          L4 (the starting point) -> L5 is expected within a few years. After that it’s a fucking crapshoot. You can be stuck in L5 the rest of your career.

          • jungle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 hours ago

            I should know, I’ve been a software engineer for over 20 years and an engineering manager for over 10. I’ve promoted many engineers.

            I don’t know what L4 and L5 map to in your company, but usually the gap between levels widens the higher the level. It’s much easier to go from entry-level (recent graduate) to mid-level, than from senior to staff. The skills required to make that jump are much harder to acquire, there’s less opportunities to put them in practice and a lot more dependencies on external factors you don’t have control over.