
Ask HN: Google Salary/Promotion Tips - AvgNoogler
I&#x27;m an incoming Noogler (coming in as L3) who&#x27;s lurked on HN for a while. What are some important tips for playing the salary&#x2F;promotion game, especially with respect to choice of team? Want to have some info on hand when making my choice of team.
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nostrademons
Your basic principle is that you want to get on a team that is going to launch
something demonstrably important to Google within the next 6-12 months (if
they launch more frequently, even better). Google normalizes salaries by
level; if you negotiate a higher salary at hiring, you'll get smaller raises
over time so that you eventually reach parity with others at your level. For
that reason, it's more important to put yourself in a position where you can
quickly demonstrate ability & contribution and get promoted than to get the
best deal going in.

Some more specific tips:

#1: Go for a core product - something under the "Google" umbrella rather than
the "Alphabet" umbrella.

#2: Ideally, go for a moneymaker: Ads, Search, Cloud, Android/Play, or
YouTube. They get a lot more attention then divisions that make productized
versions of Google's internal tools (GMail, Inbox, Calendar, Docs, Drive,
etc.) or those that are part of Google's moat (Chrome, Toolbar, Fiber/Access).

#3: Be wary of anything experimental, unless you _really_ believe in what
they're trying to build (at which point, you're doing it for its own sake and
not playing the salary/promotion game). The vast majority of these never
launch, and so they count for nothing at promotion time. There's a bit of a
tradition at Google where really senior engineers who have generated more
money for the company than they will ever cost basically get one freebie
project to do whatever they want - that's how we got Google Wave, Hello.com,
Google Scholar, and a number of projects that never launched. These projects
can be very personally rewarding & educational to be on, but they're unlikely
to lead to promotions or higher compensation.

#4: Try and gauge the political clout of the manager (often very hard to do
unless you've been there for a while). The managers that are best at getting
their people promoted are usually not the best technically; don't necessarily
be wowed by someone with a great track record (see #3) or who seems like a
real coding genius. Instead, look for someone who you feel really has your
back and wants you on the team. Also, good managers like this will have really
good _other_ individual contributors on their team; they may not be great
technical folks themselves, but they will attract great technical folks to
work for them.

