There's a lot of external complaining about perf at Google. My experience is that most of these complaints are wrong. I've personally had two reports fail to get promoted to L6 off of projects that were very difficult and executed well but for various reasons did not have the impact that we expected.
The problem is at the VP level, not the L6 level. It's not that impact isn't considered, it's that impact is relative to the current org goals of the moment, because it's evaluated by your peers that have presumably all bought into the current org goals of the moment (if they haven't, they will probably be fired or sidelined soon). However, there's very little feedback between things users care a lot about and things executives care about. You're rewarded for doing things that your VP deems important. Your VP is almost certainly not going to sweat the small stuff (although I do know a couple that try). It's impractical for someone with 2000 reports to keep up with every little bug in their product area, and they would be a terrible micromanager if they did. So what usually happens is that they call out the few annoyances they happen to see when using the product, everybody in their org jumps on fixing those because that will get them promoted, and everything not noticed or not specifically called out by a VP languishes.
How would I fix it? Not get to the point where the shots are being called by people with 2000 direct reports, for one. Software has distinct diseconomies of scale, where you have a much smaller loop between "Notice a problem. Identify who can solve the problem. Solve the problem" in a small organization than a big one. But that ship has sailed.
Failing that, I think orgs need to adopt quantitative measures of impact (eg. X tickets closed, X customers helped, X new sales generated) along with backpressure mechanisms to ensure that those metrics are legitimate (eg. you can't just create new bugs to solve them; you can't just help customers only for them to need to return tomorrow; you can't generate new sales that are unprofitable).
I do agree with this criticism. There are impactful things that go unrewarded because of org mismatch and that's dumb. My team has been affected by this very problem and it is very frustrating to look at a list of things that I know to be very valuable and be told "don't do that, it is misaligned with org priorities."
But this is "some impactful stuff is unrewarded" rather that "hard stuff that isn't impactful is rewarded", which was the complaint in the post above mine.
The "hard stuff that isn't impactful is rewarded" is relative to the overall marketplace, including conditions outside of Google. Starting a new chat client that replaces Google's other half dozen chat clients may be challenging, but it has little benefit to either users or Google.
Good entrepreneurs go into markets where the existing alternatives suck, and make them radically better. Most Google executives and PMs (most executives, period) go into markets that their company and all of their competitors already have pretty decent alternatives for, so the true impact is pretty limited.
