That's the appealingly-cynical view, but it's not really correct.

Of course keeping payroll down is important if the business is going to remain profitable, but the other piece of the profitability puzzle is productivity, and in this case that's the more important piece. Raises and promotions are limited because if they weren't there would be no financial motivation for good job performance, because why wouldn't you just give raises and promotions to everyone, or at least everyone you like? Creating that motivation is why raises and promotions exist. The best way to keep payroll as small as possible is not to give any raises or promotions. The best employees will leave and you'll be dealing with a continual treadmill of cheap replacements, of which only the worst would stay, and productivity would be in the toilet, but it would minimize payroll.

No, the reason for giving raises and promotions is the same reason that raises and promotions must be limited: to create an incentive for high performance, and to be very specific, an incentive for outperforming other employees.

In Google, and most large companies, peer feedback is the largest part of the evaluation, so helping everyone else is almost certain to generate lots of good feedback... though if you do it so much that you don't get your own work done and that causes problems for your peers, you will get that negative feed back, too.

As to your question about defending their reports... what alternative approach would you suggest? Let the manager just decide without anyone testing those decisions? Not only would that give managers way too much power, it would result in the corporate equivalent of grade inflation. Why wouldn't I just always rate all of my employees outstanding, except those I dislike and want to fire? There needs to be some pushback, to ensure that the standards are applied as fairly and as accurately as possible. Bonus, raise and promotion budgets are all finite, both because money is finite and because there needs to be some scope for rewarding performance.

A common (perhaps near-universal) strategy is to define a curve and require that curve to be applied at the level of a large-ish organization, say, several hundred employees. Among a large population, you'll have all levels of performers, ranging from those who need to improve or be let go to those who exceed all reasonable expectations. Experience shows what the percentages of each typically are, so, you define a "grading" curve and require that the ratings allocated roughly follow that curve, with any exceptions well-justified.

But, inevitably, because managers generally like their reports and want to reward them, you end up with too many people with top ratings, and this is where the manager has to be able to defend the rating they think their report deserves in a meeting with all the other managers who need to defend the ratings they think their reports deserve. So, the group talks through each case one by one, discussing the details of the individuals' work and the contents of their peer feedback, trying to achieve consensus. Ideally, you want to get consensus rather than decide by voting, because voting tends to produce horse trading (I'll vote for yours if you'll vote for mine, etc.). But either way, the group has to produce a set of decisions that align with the expected curve, or (more often), a set of decisions that mostly aligns with the curve plus documented rationale for the borderline cases.

Promotions require a similar process, except instead of a curve there's a promotion budget; only so many promotions are available.

If this all sounds tedious and time-consuming, it absolutely is. But it's necessary to achieve a semblance of fairness and accuracy in the application of the performance rubric for each job level.

I"m sure someone will get in there, however and bitch that this won't help promote EV adoption and keep ICE on the roads and somehow lead to the end of mankind......

Oops....I'm sure they'd term it "human-kind".....

So we've come full circle now. Are they doing business in France (or the EU)? I'll clarify this time... I mean financial transactions that France can actually block because the involve entities are within France (or the EU), as opposed to GP's view[^1]. If they have no such financial situation, and if this behavior is not against the law in the AU, then what's France got to do with it?

[^1] GP's view seems to be that advertisers paying a company in Australia that serves content that winds up being viewed by someone in the EU means said company is doing business in the EU.

" It isn't because men are always better at sports than women, "

Yes, it generally is, aside from some very edge cases.

Want facts?
https://boysvswomen.com/#/
High school boys routinely outperform Olympic-level women in nearly every field.

Oh and the vaunted US Women's Soccer Team? Gets beaten by under-15s boys teams.
Something more recent? Swiss women's team gets annihilated by under 15s boys just this year https://sports.yahoo.com/artic...

Neither, really. They didn't eliminate jobs so much as make new rules that mostly eliminated the "Tech Lead / Manager" (TLM) role.

There used to be a lot of software engineers (people on the software engineer job ladder, as opposed to the engineering manager job ladder) who had 2-3 people reporting to them and were considered TLMs. These people divided their time between engineering work and management. Google made a new rule that every manager has to have at least 5 direct reports. This rule has flattened the hierarchy by mostly eliminating TLMs, who all had to decide whether to lose the "TL" part and be a pure manager or lose the "M" part and be a pure SWE. Well, "pure" is too strong. Some SWE managers still keep their hands in the code but they generally don't have time for significant projects.

Is this an improvement? Dunno. There are pros and cons. The TLM role has some significant benefits to a company. It enables the existence of small, close-knit teams where the team's manager is also the pre-eminent expert in the area. Being managed by the expert has a lot of advantages for the reports, especially when it comes time for the manager to defend the team's performance ratings or promotions, because the manager deeply understands their work. It has advantages for the company, too, because in a small team led by the project expert it's impossible for low-performing employees to hide their low performance or blame it on others.

On the other hand, TLMs can end up overwhelmed by the administrative overhead. This can cause them to be less effective as managers because they don't navigate the system on behalf of their employees as effectively. Some of them may not be very good at defending their reports' ratings and promotions because they don't have the skills to do that, even though they deeply understand the team's contributions. It can also definitely make them less effective as SWEs, and these people were generally top-performing ICs (individual contributors) before taking a manager role. Some might argue that any time they spend on management rather than engineering is a waste of their talents.

Pure engineering managers can be and often are better managers. Better at helping their reports develop important non-technical skills and knowledge and better at working the system for their reports. And some top-performing SWEs are such excellent managers that even as good as they are at building stuff, their positive impact as managers is larger yet.

From the upper management perspective, there's another advantage: Fewer managers to train and manage. Managing managers is harder in many ways than managing engineers, because the output of managers is harder to measure and evaluate. Also, managers are officers of the company which attaches greater legal and PR risk to their actions. Having fewer of them to manage is beneficial.

(Saving money isn't really a benefit, at least not the way Google does it. SWEs who also manage people don't get paid any more than SWEs who don't, holding all else constant.)

On balance, I don't think either approach is ideal, and the best strategy is probably a dynamic balance between them that mostly favors managers being managers (though with the rule that all managers must have been highly competent SWEs) and SWEs being SWEs, but with plenty of scope for exceptions where a project needs a small team of 3-4 people and there's a clear leader with deep technical ability and good people skills.

Anyway, Google has pushed the pendulum away from TLMs and as a result there are many fewer managers, and each manager tends to have a larger team.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I used to be a TLM but opted to switch back to an IC role years ago, before the rule change.)

You are fucking insane. The three were merely examples. What I said in my original statement was "Yet in every metric I've ever seen" this was later shortened to "by all metrics" condensing the text in order to focus on the insanity of your statements.

I've said nothing about disproving racism. It is always this constant garbage with you just pulling shit out of your ass. My commentary was about casting shade on the notion racism is causing the effects enumerated in the study. My statement was "This seems to directly cut against your racism theory." It was not racism or anything else is disproven. I never said that or anything even remotely like it. You keep making this shit up which is why I think you are a nutcase.

What you said and what I responded to is the following statement:

"Even using them doesn't make you racist. But there is good evidence to show that using them does disproportionate harm to racial minorities that ended up living where they did because of the pressures of institutional racism."

My response was "In this particular study somehow native Americans were least exposed while Asians get the shortest end of the stick beating out Hispanics and Blacks in exposure. Yet in every metric I've ever seen Asians consistently come out ahead of every other ethnic group including whites in crime, median income and life expectancy. This seems to directly cut against your racism theory."

This statement is saying no actually those with the highest exposure are likely not getting the shortest
end of the stick cuz racism. They are getting the shortest end of the stick because they prefer living in an urban environment.

You are a nutjob. I'm sure there are people who are living in polluted areas because racist something or other. I never asserted otherwise.

What I did say is what seems to be controlling here given the admission that 96% of the pollution is *point of use* is the urban vs rural divide generally. This is evidenced by the complete inversion of Native Americans vs. Asians in the pollution data in this study. Native Americans tend to be amongst the poorest with lowest life expectancy while Asians are the opposite yet Native Americans have the least pollution exposure and Asians suffer the most in this study. This cuts against the story that pollution exposure is being driven by those living where they did because institutional racism.

The reason I believe you are a nutcase is you keep hearing shit that was never said and you keep making shit up. This is a persistent issue with you. Looking at your posting history here it is always the same shit with you over and over and over and over again.

And for good reason. For every Einstein out there there are a thousand crazy people out there with their own crackpot theories showing how everything we know about every single field of science is wrong, who will gleefully write a fifty-page Wikipedia article telling how wonderful they are, how they are geniuses, how their theories explain everything from how UFOs achieve time travel to how to cure your cancer with distilled water, and how the god Vishnu or YHWH or Amon-Ra has blessed their effort, and they will fill that article with citations to their own website and their own self-published books.

And for every one of those there are twenty teenagers who only want to write a one-page wikipedia article stating that they are the greatest sk8r in the world, and a god at Mario cart, too.

ChatGPT making up things and incorrectly following policy would merely be in line with the current editorial pool, who ignores policy when it suits them and fabricates material if an article has any kind of political content.

It isn't just buzzwords, it's jargon with specific meaning... but your comment highlights the problem, because you didn't understand it.

One part you didn't understand was "bandwidth", which in the management context means "available work capacity". This means it's a discussion about resource staffing and constraints. Also, "align" means there's going to be some two-way negotiation, in this case to figure out whose employees are going to take on what part of the work based on their availability. (Well, probably. "Align" could have been used out of politeness, implying a fictional intention to negotiate when in reality the speaker does plan to dictate.) In addition, the use of "workflow" implies that the plan to be developed isn't just for one project, but for an ongoing effort.

Try translating all of that nuance to standard English, and you'll convert a ten-word sentence into a paragraph or two. Like all jargon, its purpose is to increase communication by compressing a lot of detailed information into a few words that have context-specific meaning that goes beyond their normal English definitions.

Of course, the downside of the jargon is that it prevents those who don't understand the contextual definitions from understanding, causing them to come away with interpretations like "Let's meet after this and make sure you understand how I want that to work."

In fairness to you, I have to point out that often the users of business jargon don't know what it means either, and are just using it to make themselves sound "businessy". That's less a jargon problem than evidence that the company isn't hiring the best people.

A good thing, overall. Large language models (colloquially called "AI") have too many problems. They don't really "understand" anything in a real sense, they just are able to pattern match.

I can see, however, that Wikipedia (like almost everything else on the internet that isn't locked off) is undergoing a tidal wave of spam (likely much of it generated by these same Large Language Models), and it would indeed be useful to find an automated way to deal with it, and save the human time spent to actually writing articles.

https://www.dictionary.com/bro...
  https://www.merriam-webster.co... :

First definition is:
  1: the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group.
sports jargon

2nd and further definitions however, match the idea of gibberish.

I agree, this is not what I'd call jargon, I'd call it buzzwords: https://www.merriam-webster.co...
  an important-sounding usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen

Yeah, the article says "modern railway" which I take to mean a locomotive with an engine pulling cars.

It was simply funny to me since the person seemed to be saying modern railways were already 200 years old, and provided a link saying that comes in 30 days.

OK... so neither of us have that answer. You have a guess. You have mentioned nothing about where their servers are, where their people are, where their business is declared, registered marks, etc etc.. nothing indicating anything about their business at all, except a wild ass guess that they may profit from advertising in some form.

We're right back to where we started; Your comment of, "If they're doing business in Europe... (or if they're not) ..." I see no point to progressing this discussion without setting that fact straight first.

Pay-per-view TV is a form of directly profiting from the viewership - The viewer directly pays for the content.
Advertising supported content sites (and please note, I did not make that assumption about their business) are one of the most pure definitions of INDIRECT profiting. They do not get their money directly from those they appear to serve; They get money indirectly via associated advertisers.

If they're not profiting directly from anyone in France, and the money doesn't flow to France, does that change your opinion? You even stated, "If they don't want to follow them they can choose to just not do business there." So if they're not doing business there, then they don't have to follow that law, right?

OH! You're just off your rocker crazy wrong. Got it.
Look, even if you can reason this out, that position is untenable. It's not how things work today, and it would introduce enormous complexities.

On the plus side, at least this is a well defined position; Clearly wrong, but well defined :-P

....or the empty-head it signals?

I've found it rather useful over the years to measure from the first words out of a person's mouth whether they're worth listening to.