As the other respondent said, that's not my generalized experience at Google. I am aware of one situation where I heard that someone who was planning to go up for promo was recreating important documents with only their name on it and then soliciting feedback from people in leadership to beef up their packet. It was not great, but it was successful.
But that was the only one of those that I've seen - after 14 years, I would imagine I would have seen more. In general, the big weakness in Google's promo process is that projects that are visible to leadership get more attention than those who are grinding it out behind the scenes. There's been genuine attempts to address that, but it's hard from a practical standpoint.
It's very different between teams. My personal experience: everyone I've worked with is trying really hard to put me in a position where I can succeed. I've been put on very visible projects (from day one) and I'm getting constant help from my TL to keep me on a track to get promoted. Everyone I work with directly is amazing.
Google is a magical place but the standard deviation in experiences are large.
I've personally been very happy with my experience/team.
Agreed. I never got the sense Google knows how to train managers... It favors a very self-organizing approach, and the feedback loops seem structured to deal with under-performing management by freezing them out of promotion (and hoping they either fix the problem or quit), not replacing them.
The consequence is that teams are fiefdoms, and the experience varies wildly based on whether a manager knows what the hell they're doing.
This is more or less the norm at every FAANG. New hires are trained by their managers to pee and mark their territory.
This is how you pee
1. Don't verbally discuss project ideas with peers
2. Write up a nice beefy document even if the core idea can be expressed in 2 paragraphs
3. Do some vaguely relevant data analysis etc.
4. Circulate among leadership
Doing the above only protects you from theft within your team. Even if you do all of the above your ideas are liable to be stolen, by someone from other teams. Typically, some one else will prepare a document with a very different title that for the first 2 paragraphs might look like something different. The details will be virtually identical except for some subsections where some arbitrary changes will be made. They will be very eager to not discuss the timelines of when each document was prepared.
Why do they do this? Aren't they paid enough to do the decent thing? The problem is that most FAANG hires are career climber high GPA folks who can't accept the idea that they got into FAANG by grinding on leetcode, not because of any depth in CS knowledge and understanding. Their brain is programmed to ladder climb at all costs. For the untalented hacks that end up at a FAANG, eventually stealing becomes the only option.
One more way things get stolen. Someone quickly implements the key idea in your document and plays dumb about the plagiarization. To be "fair", the project might get split into 2 parts or be completely handed over to the one who "executed".
If the place looks like a Paranoia game, is it evidence that an AI has already took over the place?