Self Nomination: Fill & Download for Free

Will you accept self-nominations?In any given audience I seem to stand out as geekier than the rest.Geek cred:Started programming in 1975. C on a PDP-11/55 running Unix version 1 at Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA.Professional programmer since 1991Internet account since 1982 (before it was the Internet)Helped build out the InternetMidwife to Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)Former Cisco FellowEarly employee at Juniper Networks (company)Founder, Procket NetworksTop Writer, 2016, 2017B.S. Math, Harvey Mudd College, 1982Ph.D. C.S., University of Southern California, 1990

Above a certain level at Google, you don't self-nominate yourself for promotion. Management nominates you.

I didn't see anything specifically wrong with the self-nomination, itself. The actual process of self-nominating should involve conversations with management and others to establish your interest in promotion - just like other companies. Those conversations are more important than the actual self-nomination step.The promotion, peer review, and stack ranking systems, though, do have some problems - in my opinion.First, I've heard many horror stories of people not having a promotion for 8+ years. That's crazy. It's incumbent on Google to give all of it's employees a picture of how their career is going to progress at Google, and how they are going to grow and prosper at Google. That is not always happening, which is very, very broken and should be fixed.Similarly, stack ranking as a whole has the same effect. Namely, some engineers at the bottom of the stack have to accept they are not really going to make career progress at Google. If they feel like they are being well paid, they stay at Google for the money. Otherwise, they start looking for a company that can show them a career path.Third, I also felt the peer review system has its problems. Google likes to believe its a pure meritocracy, but I found there were also very strong political elements. If you do a good job, but annoy someone, it's likely going to show up negatively in your peer reviews. Some might say this is a good thing, because people go to greater lengths to cooperate and get along. However, it also meant some serious problems might be brushed aside to insure no one's feelings are hurt. (I could give examples of security holes, outages, and bugs which were brushed aside and ignored to avoid confrontations.)I'm most surprised, though, by the fact Google hasn't experimented more with other alternatives.Google is such an innovative company when it comes to technology. Always trying new technical solutions, keeping the ones that work, rejecting the ones that don't.However, from what I saw, Google just stuck with its HR processes. There seemed to be an institutionalized zeitgeist that, this is what we've always done, so we're going to keep doing it this way. Whatever it's problems.It really couldn't hurt if Google tinker with different ways of giving promotions and the other HR mechanics.Who knows? Google might find some new and innovative HR solutions.