Ask HN: What Have You Learned at Google as a Software Engineer?
Not Google, but another Big Tech company.Visibility is very important to getting a promotion at a large company. Selling your work is important.To move up, you must be playing the "choose a good project or team" game for at least 6 months before you try to get promoted. Preferably for a year or more to hit the right checkboxes for multiple cycles.If you fail to do so, you can do absolutely amazing work but rigid processes and evaluation criteria will conspire to defeat you in a promotion committee setting.At least, that's true in my company. From my ex-Google peers it seems to be true there as well.Being in a smaller office means you get fewer of the best projects available to you. Reorgs sometimes steal them. Cancelling projects makes the last half a waste of time from a promotion standpoint.As for what constitutes a good project. It will:* Let you lead it* Have peers at your level + one or two* Work with multiple other teams* Ideally work with multiple teams outside of your group, e.g. you're in, say, a chat app team and get to solve issues for some other app* Good product manager and designers with a well thought out product; it's not fair, but if the project is successful business-wise people will often incorrectly attribute that to your own skills* Have large engineering scope. Committees get confused and sometimes think simple designs to solve complex problems are bad. You want to solve problems that are complex even in terms of the solution (or can be made to sound complex) to check more boxes.* Allows you to solve problems for other teamsI haven't optimized for promotion and thats personally hurt me in the quest to get to L6. I very, very close but didn't quite make the leap.Don't ignore the flaws in this committee process. Exploit them.Don't be me.