Ryan Peterman

Basically, everyone agreed the thing we were working on was bad.

No one thought it would succeed.

But people were like, oh, but I have to ship it because that's my promo bar.

And you get into the state where it's sort of just impossible to even make good decisions about software anymore because the promotions were so important.

And then I think what happened as the market became less pro-employee is that people were like, oh, no, no, no.

You should be afraid of being laid off.

You should not be worried about the positive chance of a promotion.

But I don't think that was a good cultural fix.

But I do think it's been a bit of an attempt to undo some of the damage from before.

But I do think that sort of promotion mindset was incredibly intense everywhere.

And ironically, it led to this thing which I found really troubling, which was

The thing that would actually let you develop real skills that would do better in your career going forward increasingly got decoupled from the promotions.

And I've seen a lot of people on Twitter over the years say this, and I find it very compelling, which is people are like, the main thing that's wrong with the engineering cultures of the big tech companies is the promo culture.

And I really agree.

I actually think meta, ironically, my perception is seems to be doing better at this than many of the other companies that have even more formal processes and more anonymous parties involved.

but I do think they'll like,

oh, what really matters is that you like ran a rollout that affected 10 other systems.

This causes people to like not build clean systems.

It causes them to build systems that maximally are coupled to the other systems in order to be able to hit the promo bar.

And that they think actually, I met so many people who didn't even like the work they were doing because they're like, well, this is what will get me promoted.