[HN Gopher] When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
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When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
Author : asicsp
Score : 728 points
Date : 2020-07-16 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
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| barnyfried wrote:
| most coworkers will never do great work.
| AceyMan wrote:
| I worked for the airlines (first career) and for public-facing
| employees it was a big deal if you got a 'good letter' from a
| customer. (It was equally suck if you happened to get a bad
| one...).
|
| We also could file 'thank you / attaboy' paperwork for our
| colleagues, both in our own department or ones we interacted
| with. Those were just as valuable (if not more) than ones from
| the customers.
|
| Over the years (11) during my employment there I received a
| couple of good letters, and they were recognized by the
| management in a very sincere way.
|
| To this day of & when I have an extraordinary collaboration with
| someone in the corporation I'll take the time to write a thank
| you letter to their manager.
|
| It's just a great practice that harkens back to the old adage,
| "there's nothing better than a nice handwritten thank you card."
| Since I'm in management, it serves as a nice means to to move the
| needle for a colleague in the eyes of the company.
| mdorazio wrote:
| This works for airlines because compliments for employees are
| unsolicited and customers mostly have to go out of their way to
| give them. As a result, if one is given you can be pretty sure
| it's both genuine and meaningful. As soon as you apply a metric
| to feedback, though, the effectiveness goes out the window. For
| example, I spent some time in the automotive customer
| experience world and car dealers routinely abuse the hell out
| of feedback systems by pressuring customers into providing
| positive scores and comments.
|
| Similar things happen when you try to use feedback systems like
| this as a component of internal review processes - they tend to
| get gamed extremely quickly.
| AceyMan wrote:
| [errata] "since I'm _not_ in management... " That goof did not
| change anything about my retold experience but I couldn't let
| that sit there and be so wrong <bulging_eyes>.
| mech4bg wrote:
| I'm so glad to hear this! While it's common to give feedback on
| bad experiences, I've always felt it's important to give
| feedback when things go really well. Especially if someone has
| fixed a really difficult situation or made it manageable - I
| will always send feedback to the company about that individual
| and thank them for their help. I've been surprised about the
| lack of feedback sometimes though, whereas a negative response
| will always get feedback from the company.
| manacit wrote:
| Delta (at least) gives their elite members "Job Well Done"
| certificates every year they qualify for this reason - in a
| service oriented company, having a default currency for
| recognizing people going above and beyond is a great tool.
|
| I'm not sure what benefit one of the certificates (they have
| serial numbers!) actually confers, but I imagine it's more
| about the emotional uplift than it is monetary value.
|
| I've long wanted a way to bring this to more workplaces. In
| previous companies, we had shout-outs at our company all-hands,
| which were low-effort to write and a fantastic way to recognize
| a coworker. It didn't involve any $$ compensation, which made
| it all the more meaningful to me.
| ponker wrote:
| I saw a flight attendant being yelled at by a horrid passenger
| and knew that she might get a "bad letter" from them so I sent
| in a good letter for her about how she handled the abuse with
| aplomb. Glad to hear it was worth the effort
| duxup wrote:
| Ages ago when I did basic PC support we had a "attaboy" system.
|
| The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were
| random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or
| anything, they showed up randomly.
|
| Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute
| most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every
| day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll
| of the dice you helped a nice person, that's it.
|
| In the meantime if you went the extra mile for someone, never
| would any sort of attaboy would show up. In fact you might even
| get complaints from those folks.
|
| For the support team watching some manager trot out an
| "attaboy" for no apparent reason as if it was a merit type
| thing was kinda demoralizing.
| vidarh wrote:
| It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds
| of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given
| to someone who they feel don't deserve it.
|
| Personally I think it's risky to acknowledge these kind of
| things in front of a team for that reason unless it's better
| quantified. I've personally as well been in situations where
|
| I've been outright resentful because the recognition of
| someone I knew was doing a bad job made it clear we could not
| expect recognition based on merits, and so what was the point
| of putting in the effort?
| duxup wrote:
| A while back I thought I had read something that indicated
| that merit based recognition was often a point of
| contention.
|
| But random rewards, that were acknowledged to be random
| actually raised morale across the board, even among those
| who didn't get it.
|
| The 'reasons' and so forth are often a big deal to people.
| vidarh wrote:
| That wouldn't surprise me. A a merit based reward that
| feels like it wasn't justified and given for "political
| reasons" or what have you gives those who feel overlooked
| every reason to assume they don't stand a chance at all,
| and a reason to be angry. It's hard to be get angry or
| annoyed at random chance.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all
| kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being
| given to someone who they feel don 't deserve it._
|
| This is why wages are secret. Everyone is convinced they
| deserve to be in the top half of earners.
| maps7 wrote:
| Source? or is this a personal theory?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Personal theory!
| meej wrote:
| Businesses want wages to be secret and may even adopt
| policies that ban employees from discussing it, but in
| the U.S. employees' rights to discuss pay amongst
| themselves are protected under the NLRA.
|
| https://www.insperity.com/blog/when-employees-discuss-
| wages/
| thomasahle wrote:
| In Norway all wages are viewable on a public website
| https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 It's pretty
| interesting.
| mwfunk wrote:
| Since this is like an inverse Karen move, perhaps anti-Karens
| should formally be known as Julies.
| pgnas wrote:
| I completely agree with the idea of paying a compliment to
| someones supervisor or manager, I find it rare when people
| recognize great work. While I agree also with why you may want to
| ask the manager and the issues makes some sense , I think it goes
| a long way! Just to call them out on the great work!
|
| I genuinely believe that this attitude promotes positive
| environments. Great work _always_ deserves to be recognized. Good
| article
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I can relate. I've received many slack DMs from my peers telling
| me how great I'm doing on such-and-such project, and I'm grateful
| for their compliments, but at the end of the day, it does nothing
| for me, they're just empty words. My manager is left in the dark
| about what I'm doing.
| cosmie wrote:
| > My manager is left in the dark about what I'm doing.
|
| Then loop your manager in. I work for a marketing agency
| primarily doing consulting work, and operate semi-autonomously
| from my manager. For the clients and accounts I support, I am
| the face of my group. A client may not even know my manager's
| name, unless there's been cause for someone with a fancier
| title than mine to make an appearance. And account teams may
| have found their way to me directly rather than routing through
| my boss, so have no working relationship with him.
|
| If I get a kudos via email, I either BCC him on my reply, or
| forward it to him as an fyi. If it's given verbally, I thank
| the person giving it, and let them know how much I'd appreciate
| if they could jot that down in writing and send it over. If it
| came through something like a Slack DM, I'd either screenshot
| it for something minor and pass that along or again express my
| appreciation and call out how much it'd mean if they could
| throw that into an email.
|
| I've never had anyone balk at or refuse to do the above. If
| someone has taken the time to give you kudos for your work,
| they're usually appreciative enough with what you're doing that
| they are perfectly happy to put it in an email for you if
| prompted. And more often than not, the writeup that comes
| through talks you up far more than the informal shout out they
| originally made, as they're well aware of why you're asking for
| it.
| luckydata wrote:
| Whenever someone says something nice about my work I ask them
| "can I have that in writing?". Then I go onto explaining that if
| they liked what I've done, by supporting me they can get more.
| It's annoying that we have to do that in the workplace but it
| works.
| jkubrynski wrote:
| From my experience, especially in big companies (but not only)
| most of the feedback is negative. People are not sharing positive
| feedback, and when they contact your manager it's usually an
| escalation process. That's why it's so important to reach to
| people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog
| posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value
| here".
| gavinray wrote:
| I made a habit out of emailing complete strangers from the
| internet who wrote content or technology I really appreciated
| with a short "thank you" or "this is really cool".
|
| To my surprise when I first started doing this, the majority of
| them reply back with a genuine thanks.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > That's why it's so important to reach to people who support
| you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars,
| etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here".
|
| I've been trying to start up a blog this year (three posts in 7
| months, woo!) and someone recently contacted me to tell me that
| my RSS feed was down and they didn't want to miss the next
| post. It carried me into the next week it meant so much.
| teachrdan wrote:
| I had a radio show in college (low power station, small
| college town) and a friend of a friend told me that, when he
| listened to the show while delivering pizza, he'd sprint to
| and from the customer's door so he could get as much of the
| show as possible. This was about the highest praise I could
| think of.
| modernerd wrote:
| The company I work at uses https://www.15five.com/ for reviews
| and 1-on-1s. It has a "High Five" feature to recognise big or
| small things anyone in the company has done to help.
|
| It's low friction and it works well. They hook it up to a Slack
| channel for a steady stream of positivity, and its read by senior
| execs and mentioned during reviews.
|
| More companies should make this part of their company culture via
| tools that make it easy and common.
| ping_pong wrote:
| This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software
| engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known
| software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I
| have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make
| sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really
| sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even
| though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster the type
| of environment I wanted to work at, which is collaborative.
|
| I heard from my friends at Facebook that the environment there is
| equally crazy. Everyone knows that the performance reviews are
| based on lazy stats, so they game the stats. Every time someone
| requests a meeting, they are expected to give a "thank you" which
| is one of the measures for performance. Also, things like the
| number of reviews commented on could be easily gamed by adding a
| "+1!" as a comment which sounds like another undesirable place to
| work at. Maybe current Facebook employees can comment, however.
| ar_lan wrote:
| Humans have proven time and time again that we are very good at
| optimizing for specific metrics, and apparently generally very
| poor at choosing the right metrics to target.
|
| School is a prime example, in my opinion - there is so much I
| "learned" in school that I'll never remember, because I didn't
| take a proper approach to learning - I just optimized for
| grades. I had a 4.7 GPA and could hardly tell you a thing about
| US history or recite a lick of Spanish, because I simply did
| not care about anything but getting the A so I could get into
| the college I cared about.
|
| In the work environment, I can see a lot of parallels to this.
| If I'm competing with my coworkers, my incentive is to outwork
| and outshine them. A common thing I see is when a coworker does
| a bit of innovative work - it's almost guaranteed some other
| coworker will intercede before a chance at applause is given to
| discuss its obvious flaws, the plethora of alternatives out
| there, etc., leading the developer to feel like their
| implementation was not good. (For the record, I'm not talking
| about general criticism - I'm talking about the general pattern
| of not celebrating someone's achievements and then discussing
| how to continue improving, but rather a "why did you even do
| this" mentality).
| ausjke wrote:
| no better alternatives, if you do not do grading etc at
| school then what we have is a small group of kids learned a
| lot on their own(1% of them I guess), the rest 99% will just
| waste their youth totally and learned nothing at all.
| biswaroop wrote:
| > Humans have proven time and time again that we are very
| good at optimizing for specific metrics, and apparently
| generally very poor at choosing the right metrics to target.
|
| Maybe it's Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target,
| it ceases to be a good measure."
| shellum wrote:
| I agree that it is easy for a metric to loose it's original
| meaning. I've had luck with OKRs; Having a non quantitative
| goal, and possibly changing quantitative based targets
| aimed at making the goal happen.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| As another example: Agile dev team measuring velocity
| (story points per sprint) to predict how much work they can
| do in the future.
|
| If velocity gets turned into a target, corners will be cut
| (less testing, poor code quality) in order to get those
| story points for that sprint. Code quality suffers and tech
| debt accumulates, reducing output down the road.
|
| On the flip side, as time goes on teams could just
| progressively estimate a greater number of points to
| stories of similar difficulty during the planning process.
| So velocity goes up but actual deliverable features goes
| down or stays the same.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| One cannot overstate this and human capability to optimize
| for metrics ( and what is apparently rewarded ). Anecdote
| time. My former manager had an idea to measure the amount of
| average alerts per hour and tore into people, whose values
| fell below a certain treshold. What did people do? They
| stopped doing harder alerts whenever they could and did 'easy
| ones' to pump up their stats. I have seen it since and
| whenever I do, I have a quick talk about people not being
| idiots and importance of metrics not being used for
| evaluation ( or if you do, to be ready for its consequences
| ). In case you are wondering, former's managers response was
| to double down and hide the stats so that people don't know
| where they stand.. eh.
| amatecha wrote:
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure".. I think this phrase all too often... haha
| yreg wrote:
| Planet Money had an episode on such metrics[0]
|
| The host shares a personal story from time when he was a
| cashier. The grocery chain measured performance as items
| scanned per minute and shared internal leaderboard.
|
| Some items are hard to scan so the cashiers ended up skipping
| scanning them - so the store gave them away for free. But the
| managers were happy about their KPIs. (Look how many items
| are we suddenly selling per minute!)
|
| [0] - https://www.npr.org/transcripts/669396192 (both podcast
| and transcript)
|
| I love this podcast.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The supermarket I worked at in high school did this, but
| you usually didn't get incentive pay if you worked less
| than 15 hours a week.
|
| The supervisors were pretty swift and always looking for
| shrink. If you were letting dog food or whatever walk out
| the door, they would figure it out quickly and you would be
| gone.
|
| The GMs were well paid and profitability and shrink were
| their metrics.
| Cerium wrote:
| Costco has such leader boards and keeps a separate board
| for part timers vs full time cashiers. I asked my friend
| who works there why the part time cashiers have a much
| higher (upwards of 2x) items per minute rate than the full
| time employees. Costco only schedules part time cashiers
| during busy hours where the lines are long and there are
| assistants getting the carts ready.
| cpeterso wrote:
| I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service
| agents for short calls, so workers started immediately
| hanging up on some calls to bring their average call
| duration down.
| bombledmonk wrote:
| I can verify this does happen in some call centers.
| throwaway987978 wrote:
| I swear this happened to me with Grubhub. I had a problem
| with my order and used their chat. After I wrote my
| problem the agent replied with a standard answer and then
| immediately:
|
| "Is there anything else I can help you with?"
|
| And then immediately after that:
|
| "No, ok I will close this chat."
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| If we don't have metrics, how are we to fairly and
| objectively compare one worker's performance to another?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Metrics don't mean it's fair it just means you're judging
| someone on a handful of numeric values rather than them as
| an individual. If you judged me on the metric of turning up
| on time I'd be doing appalling [0], yet I'm still one of
| the first people to be brought in on every critical project
| in the company.
|
| Obviously metrics vs just manager instinct/observation will
| benefit and harm different people in different ways.
|
| A combination would be better. But life isn't really fair
| or objective, end of the day I'd rather work with someone I
| like and can socialise with and know working with them is
| stress free (which means my work is better) and can be
| trusted to just do their thing even if their performance is
| lower than someone who's a pain to work with but maybe puts
| in more hours.
|
| Making software is a combination of engineering + artistry,
| it's not flipping X burgers an hour, objective performance
| isn't important it's the contribution of the whole
| individual.
|
| [0] : I did have a manager judge me on this before, all it
| meant was I'd stay up all night, go into work, sit there
| like a zombie doing close to nothing, go home then sleep.
| Doesn't matter if I was barely doing anything, by their bum
| on seat metric I was doing great.
| TheSoftwareGuy wrote:
| I've been thinking about this recently, what if we're doing
| it all wrong? what if, instead of your manager giving their
| reports a review, and then also giving raises based on that
| we go with a more market-based approach. Hear me out:
|
| Every year, and once a year, all the managers in the
| company submit bids to the employees that they want to work
| under them. Employees then select their favorite bid, and
| that becomes their new manager. Employees are free to
| accept/reject bids based on any criteria: Salary/PTO/On-
| call requirements, etc.
| treis wrote:
| There's a company that does this and more:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252759
| TheSoftwareGuy wrote:
| Hah, I think I heard of that company on a podcast, it may
| have inspired the idea
| btowngar wrote:
| It's not that metrics in general are bad, it's that bad
| metrics are bad.
| shredprez wrote:
| What's the best metric for metric quality?
| jonpurdy wrote:
| It's metrics all the way down...
| pfortuny wrote:
| You are conflating justice with "objectivity". They are not
| the same thing.
| amznthrowaway5 wrote:
| How is obsessive focus on metrics making anything more
| fair? Even if you have metrics, choosing which ones are
| important still ends up being subjective, and the metrics
| are usually incomparable between projects. So the metrics
| alone don't tell anything useful and can still be easily
| gamed to make the manager's preferred employees look good
| and disliked employees look bad.
| andreilys wrote:
| Metrics are CYA insurance for managers to promote or PIP
| employees without getting into trouble with HR
| milesvp wrote:
| Let me ask you another question. How do you identify the
| additive employees from the multiplicative employees? You
| probably don't want all multiplicative employees on a team,
| but you surely want some of them. How do you create metrics
| that don't encourage too much of one or the other? How much
| is too much of one or the other?
| toast0 wrote:
| The performance evaluations I've been through claim to be
| evaluating how an employee does vs expectations. That
| doesn't demand comparing workers to each other.
|
| In theory, you have a list of things to check for each
| category of performance. If you tick enough boxes, you get
| a certain category. In reality, it seems managers stack
| rank, and then apply the required curve to the stack rank.
| If everybody on your team does their job as expected (or
| better), too bad, X% need to be flagged as poor performers
| as declared by the performance curve.
| [deleted]
| leetcrew wrote:
| I mean, what if you just don't?
|
| at my company, raises have more to do with the financial
| situation of the company than subjective reviews (although
| we do have these, they just don't factor into compensation
| that much). if the company is doing well, everyone gets a
| nice raise. everyone gets the same percentage bonus every
| year which is calculated based on the entire company's
| performance. maybe this makes us unattractive for very
| competitive people, but it leads to a very cooperative
| environment. senior devs don't really have anything to lose
| by spending a few hours helping newer people, so they just
| do it.
| jpadkins wrote:
| the theory is that high productivity people will not want
| to work there, as everyone else benefits from their
| excellence. If companies that retain these high
| productivity people perform better than companies that
| don't, evolutionary pressure will force these egalitarian
| companies out.
|
| I think this theory may be true in some fields like hedge
| funds or heavy sales performance based businesses.
|
| In software, I am not sure high productivity people care
| about this issue, as long as their compensation is high
| enough.
| wolco wrote:
| Being productive and not blocked is all some people want.
| Some might want to do less. And some might want to feel
| like they are the mvp. Michael Jordan didn't mail it in
| because Scotty was sitting at home.
| jlokier wrote:
| I think high productivity people _by definition_ cause
| everyone* else to benefit from their excellence.
|
| So high productivity people who don't want everyone else
| to benefit are a bit of an oxymoron.
|
| (* or at least most others)
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| LeBron James wants his whole team to succeed, but he
| still expects to be paid the most.
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| If you can afford LeBron, great!
|
| If you can find a dev who can do for your company what
| LeBron can do for the Cavs/Heat/Lakers, great!
|
| The reality is that you should be shooting for Shane
| Battier.
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| > high productivity people care about this issue, as long
| as their compensation is high enough.
|
| That circles back to the original problem of how do you
| identify the high productivity people to give them high
| compensation. It works when the person spending the money
| is close enough to evaluate employee performance. But
| when it's some middle manager spending Zuckerburg's money
| you run into the agent/principle problem. The managers
| will do what's best for them (raises for everyone!) and
| not the enterprise.
| lutorm wrote:
| Well, one reason is that without metrics, prejudice and
| bias is much more likely to win the day. "I just don't
| feel like they're doing a good job" is affected by all
| kinds of things unrelated to actual performance. At least
| having some metrics require you to think about whether
| that feeling is backed up by reality.
| opportune wrote:
| After experiencing this myself I'm beginning to think the best
| performance management system is one that is as "holistic" and
| loosely defined as possible. Probably doesn't work at scale
| (since every director will be happy to spend as much of the
| company's money as possible to retain employees) but seems to
| be better than OKR/tenure/stack ranked bullshit, even with the
| potential confounding variables like nepotism
| toast0 wrote:
| You need to set the directors' budgets somehow. But hopefully
| there's not so many directors, and company leadership can
| figure that out. Then let the directors do whatever within
| that, with light supervision (company CYA of course, but also
| to make sure things are fair enough within the overall
| company, etc).
| oblio wrote:
| > well known software company
|
| named...? :-)
| [deleted]
| sushid wrote:
| Uber used stack ranking as recently as 2017 and routinely
| laid off the "worst performer."
| mark-wagner wrote:
| Until November 2013 Microsoft used stack ranking.
| opportune wrote:
| Doesn't Microsoft, as well as almost all other large
| software companies, still do almost the same thing by
| having a fixed distribution of ratings that needs to be met
| under some organizational unit? IE under each director of
| 100 people you have 5 A+, 25 A, 30 B, 30 C, 5 D, 5F?
| amznthrowaway5 wrote:
| When people talk about stack ranking they are often
| referring to the most toxic part of the classic system,
| forced firing of the bottom ranked X% (usually around 10%
| per year)
| skytrue wrote:
| Not to mention that there is a fixed budget, and so they
| can only promote so many people in a given period, as
| rewards are tied to promotions. That means that even if
| there are many top performers, they _have_ to determine
| which ones aren 't as "top" as others. This inherently
| creates a stack. Whoops.
| skapadia wrote:
| There is always a fixed budget, so at some level stacking
| has to occur. Whether that's at the individual level, or
| team, project, department, business unit, etc.
| Unfortunately at some level politics / perception / who
| speaks the loudest always comes into play.
| dllthomas wrote:
| > All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive
| to compliment anyone else.
|
| I think that's not quite right. You have incentive to
| compliment those who you would rather be working with, which
| hopefully correlates pretty well with those who deserve
| compliment. Of course, this is weighed against your other
| incentives, some of which are probably more important.
|
| This comment should not be taken as any meaningful endorsement
| of stack ranking.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| It doesn't have to even be the stats game. Just the fact that
| employees know there's mandatory 10% cuts every year/quarter
| whatever produces a hostile work environment. Amazon is a
| fantastic example of this. The PIP culture has produced an
| environment where everyone is backstabbing each other for
| promotions and to keep their job. If solid product gets built,
| it's incidental. People are too concerned about their jobs and
| employment.
| grecy wrote:
| > _All it does is create a zero-sum game_
|
| Which is exactly what the employer wants.
|
| It's also why they don't want people talking to each other
| about their salaries, which is a practice that needs to die.
| kache_ wrote:
| The only thing that really matters is your reputation among
| others. If you want a promotion, start looking for another job
| or start your own company. The only incentive companies have to
| give you raises is the changes in the going rate for software
| engineers. Everyone ends up moving in ~5 years; and if you make
| a good impression that becomes an opportunity for you.
|
| I do a good job because I'm a professional, and care about what
| my peers think about me. I'm not competing with them, I'm
| living up to the high standards that they have to me and vice
| versa. I don't do a good job because of some carrot on a stick
| tier "promotion" or "raise". Those are easy enough to get by
| job hopping or having the option of job hopping.
| afterburner wrote:
| One of the least well understood things is that people can
| have different motivations to do a good job. But most people
| assume everyone's motivation is the same as theirs.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm stupid. I give people the praise they deserve, even when it
| hurts me.
| sjtindell wrote:
| How can giving praise hurt you?
| giantg2 wrote:
| If the company's unofficial policy is that if someone gets
| a high rating on the team, then someone else must be given
| a low rating to balance that out, even if they don't
| deserve it.
| sjtindell wrote:
| Thanks, I haven't experienced that. How painful. I agree
| with other posters here when I read about your problem in
| these comments. Personally I think of my manager and
| performance review more as symptoms or results of a
| process, rather than the source of anything. Promoting
| myself - Github, LinkedIn, trainings and brown bag
| sessions for my coworkers, program completion emails,
| those are part of my job just as much as personal
| learning, architectural planning, and writing code. In
| fact because I don't want to fear for my job, they are
| almost more important. Perhaps it's not the ideal. But
| it's the job description. There are so many pluses to
| what is essentially a god-level nine to five grind:
| freedom, intellectual work, lots of money and benefits,
| etc. I just accept that some of these non-ideal extras
| are part of my deal. Hope I'm not preaching, trying to
| help.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!
|
| I loved giving a brown bag on Raspberry Pi project to my
| teammates. I know it's not a great work related topic,
| but installing and using linux and tips on securing it
| was at least tangentially related.
|
| I have to say, I wish I made lots of money.
| natalyarostova wrote:
| You'll always have people across the industry who want you to
| go work with them :)
| giantg2 wrote:
| Thanks, but I'm turning into a miserable, no skills,
| scrooge so I don't think that will be the case much longer.
| driverdan wrote:
| If praising others hurts your position you should find a new
| employer.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If only it were that easy for me...
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| I'm stupid in this way, too.
| giantg2 wrote:
| How's your career? Did this have an impact?
|
| Mine is ruined and this might have contributed a little.
| I'll never be more than an intermediate developer and I'm
| worried about being fired/laid off.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| >I'll never be more than an intermediate developer
|
| Do you mean this at your specific company? I felt the
| same way in my last company because there was definitely
| nowhere to go up, but I've since moved on and am in a
| more senior role.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm in my 30 with a family and find that I am much slower
| at learning new stacks now. I was a FileNet developer and
| then a Neoxam developer. There aren't many opportunities
| for me.
|
| I'm also just tired of the bullshit and and mind games
| that management plays. My current plan is to gamble in
| the stock market and 'retire' whenever I can't take it
| anymore or get fired. I would love to retire to run a
| small farm and/or work a retail job like Lowes.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| Wanna go 50%/50% on a farm? We can be nerd neighbors.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Haha sure. I'll need to at least triple my money before I
| can even think about this as more than a dream.
| gowld wrote:
| Why are you worried about being fired? If you are
| underpaid for your work, your manager is happy to have
| you.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I recently switched stacks and I'm not coming up to speed
| as fast as they would like.
|
| I'm also becoming demoralized after being looked over or
| screwed over for about 4 years.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Don't believe that about yourself for a second. I
| regularly scored low marks at a previous company of mine;
| and, even during one review, I got a 'you improved a lot!
| But your coworkers improved even more, so you're getting
| a [low rank] again.'
|
| I've since moved on to different positions at different
| companies and am doing plenty fine. I'm even the senior
| member on a new team I'm joining now.
|
| A few bad years or even many bad years don't end your
| career :)
| giantg2 wrote:
| I once had a manager give me an FDN rating and when I
| asked what I can do to improve she told me "just keep
| doing what you're doing".
| opportune wrote:
| I've been told this several times when I've asked what I
| could do to get a higher rating or promotion. It always
| meant that there was some tenure element to the rankings.
| I think from the manager's perspective they are being
| both honest and reassuring, but from the report's
| perspective, it's very frustrating knowing your progress
| is being limited, and hard work wasted, due to some
| bureaucratic limitation. And knowing that in practice
| it's possible for exceptions to be made and it's possible
| your manager isn't advocating strongly enough for you.
| giantg2 wrote:
| At my company it wasn't a tenure thing, although I think
| that played an informal role as to why I was picked vs
| someone else. When a manager picks someone for the
| highest rating some departments require the manager to
| also pick someone as an FDN to "balance it out".
|
| In this case I know the guy that got the high rating. As
| weird as it is to say, and even when the wound was fresh,
| I was/am happy for him and he deserved it. He's a nice
| guy and he had nothing to do with the rating I recieved.
| He's now a manager several levels up.
| PopeDotNinja wrote:
| What's an FDN rating?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Further development needed, aka you're not successfully
| meeting expectations for your role.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Not that poster, but in my personal experience praising
| others is good to match with humble by noisy comments
| about the work you are doing.
|
| Whether this works or not depends if you have any
| psychopathic coworkers, which isn't something you can
| really know very easily.
|
| I also don't think the actions of others really define
| whether or not you are "intermediate," unless you're only
| talking about some corporate ladder bullshit.
| shahbaby wrote:
| I used to be this stupid too but then I learned that it's
| better to just play their game, win and then move on, no
| point in fighting it, just think of it as another part of
| the job.
| allenu wrote:
| This is what I do now after trying and failing at "doing
| my best work and hoping to get recognized".
|
| I'm bad at communicating when I've worked on something
| challenging, so now I realize I should never give more
| effort than can be noticed. You may think that's cynical,
| but this is a business and I'm paid not on what I
| actually do but what the business perceives me of doing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Thanks! I might look into trying that mindset.
| jupyternonuser wrote:
| In another comment you say you find the lying and
| mindgames to be morally offensive. How do you not find
| this morally offensive as well?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I read this as not giving any extra effort, which I think
| would help reduce the reliance of my self image on my
| work success. I wouldn't be lying and I wouldn't be
| playing head games.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I want to, but I find the lying and mind games to be
| morally offensive, especially when they can have such a
| large impact on a person's wellbeing.
| amznthrowaway5 wrote:
| This is my problem as well, and seeing all of the unfair
| behavior -- with average performers who are easy targets
| getting PIPed while the lowest performers who are the
| managers favorites get top ranks or promotions -- is
| really annihilating my morale.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| How is communicating what you're working on lying or
| using mind games?
| giantg2 wrote:
| This comment was in response to "...it's better just to
| play their game...".
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Yes, and the game is to promote your work and have it
| noticed.
|
| You do that by communicating. Where is lying and mind
| games involved?
| humanlion87 wrote:
| Same here. I am also stupid in another way - I can't boast of
| my "incredible" accomplishments by sending out huge and
| beautiful emails to prove my "impact". With that kind of
| combination, I am looking forward to stagnation at my current
| level.
| gowld wrote:
| "stagnation" mens "avoiding the rat race" and it has mental
| health benefits that masy be worth more than the raise.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm stressed because they will find a way to get rid of
| me if I stagnate too long. They begin to think there is
| something wrong with you if you haven't moved up. I'm 8
| years into my career and this company, I'm a midlevel
| developer, and have an MSIS.
| walleeee wrote:
| Sounds like you might consider your quality of life
| improved with an employer that doesn't expect you to
| climb arbitrary ladders?
|
| There are a lot of medium-small employers in lesser-known
| or unsexy domains that under normal circumstances
| struggle to compete with FAANG/similar to find people.
| How many are hiring right now I don't know, but it might
| be an option.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I have a family to support and we basically just make
| with this income, with the possibility to retire someday.
| My experience is in Neoxam and FileNet, so my options are
| limited. My wife won't consider moving, so that brings my
| options to zero.
| fbanon9876 wrote:
| I felt similarly, earlier in my career. Until a manager
| explained it this way: "Suppose you make the greatest thing
| in the world, but nobody knows about it. Wouldn't it be
| better to have spent 95% of the effort on making a slightly
| inferior product, and 5% to actually get people to use it?
| Isn't it more impactful to make something people use? Well,
| in order to get people to use anything, you have to talk
| about it."
| giantg2 wrote:
| Thats a cop out by a lazy or self-centered manager. The
| difference is that it's the manager's job to evaluate you
| vs marketing a product to an unknown buyer. A good
| manager would actively work with their employees to know
| what is going on. Most managers I've seen care about
| their own performance and hitting target metrica.
|
| If you're not good a marketing a product, you should
| still spend 100% of your effort on making it great, and
| hire a marketing person to do the other part.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| This only works for external products. People make
| internal tools all the time that can be used by many
| teams. You're not going to get a marketing person to
| market the tool internally, that's wasted money.
|
| At that point, it's really your and your manager's (and
| so forth) responsibility to ensure your product or tool
| is in the right hands and helps people.
|
| My manager was great at taking on some of the burdens and
| shielding me from above, while still giving me the
| flexibility and incentive to work with other teams and
| people to make sure I was the one everyone recognized for
| the work done, as opposed to the team or him.
| fbanon9876 wrote:
| I think you jumped to assume that it's an external
| product. You have no idea whether the person in question
| is lazy or self-centered. The person who taught me this
| was neither.
|
| In either case, at some point you have to convince
| someone else that it's worth investing their time.
| External, this can be dollars (although is that really
| the best way?). Internally (and optimally), you still
| need to self-market your product to marketers.
|
| Either way, it's better to spend at least a little time
| doing marketing. Boiled down from all the hype and
| jargon, marketing is highlighting the benefits to another
| person. If an IC is working on a project where they don't
| know the benefits, there is a larger issue.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > If you're not good a marketing a product, you should
| still spend 100% of your effort on making it great, and
| hire a marketing person to do the other part
|
| You can't hire a marketing person for yourself. Marketing
| yourself and your work is important because things don't
| magically get discovered or recognized.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| It depends. Over time, I've seen a lot of cases where
| other teams were duplicating effort, or product owners or
| project managers were making bad guesses about what was
| difficult, or impossible, or already done - and the
| reason was that they either didn't know what was being
| worked on or didn't understand the impact.
|
| When your head is down in an interesting, thorny problem,
| it is easy to forget how those other folks are affected
| by your work, and it's easy to lose appreciation for the
| fact that their head is filled with a completely
| different information set. So it can be very useful to
| spend 5% of your time on this.
|
| Or heck, just try 2.5% - one hour out of a standard work
| week. Personal anecdote: I wrote up a little thing about
| why customers would pick one video encoder over another,
| and marketing just did backflips and started asking my
| manager if I could write more things.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's me. I don't like visibility. I like to do a good job
| for the sake of the job without bragging.
| cookienapper wrote:
| The dilemma is this... "Ignorance is bliss" - You can't
| be worried/stressed about problems you don't know...
|
| What if you're consistently doing good work but have zero
| visibility? Then years down the road, you notice a trend
| of people around you getting promotions/raises/bounses
| more often than you? The same people that slack off &
| lack integrity; to name a few. As a human being with
| emotions... can you honestly say you won't feel resentful
| in your moment of realization?
|
| I am asking as someone who's been in that situation more
| times than I care to admit... I do good work for myself
| and for the sake of doing good work; I take pride in the
| work I do... but as most of it was never communicated, no
| one knew about it and just took it's results for granted;
| I was bypassed for raises, promotions, etc... Was it
| worth it? I can't give you a answer... it's a very
| conflicting place to be.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm definitely resentful and demoralized.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Is there a particular reason you never communicated your
| work?
|
| I think people have an obligation to share the work they
| do, especially if it's interesting or impactful. Because
| if you don't, then generally no one else will.
| thinnerlizzy wrote:
| I have this problem myself. I've gotten around it in the
| past by taking roles where the visibility is already
| baked into it, but I've never really solved the root
| problem. Now I'm a mostly anonymous, invisible contractor
| at a FAANG, and I don't know that there's a way break
| through that even for those most determined.
| velp wrote:
| I feel this, and it's challenging because visibility is
| important for advancement. My manager advised me to think
| of the broadcast emails/posts as ways to boost the people
| I collaborated with, and that's helped a lot. It doesn't
| feel like I'm tooting my own horn, people still see the
| impact of projects I contributed to, and my colleagues
| are always enthusiastic to work on projects with me
| because they know they will get good visibility and be
| "given" they credit they deserve for their contributions.
|
| Granted my role is very crossfunctional, but I think it's
| pretty unusual to be consistently impactful working in
| your own silo. So boosting my collaborators gets me the
| visibility benefits, without feeling insincere, and
| contributes to a work culture that is collaborative and
| supportive.
|
| For context, I lead an analytics team at a FAANG company.
| indymike wrote:
| That's why having a culture where people share their
| gratitude for your being helpful, competent and otherwise
| awesome really matters. The self-promoters always look
| good, but the best people - and those that make the best
| leaders - often don't self-promote.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Stack ranking intuitively makes sense. Rank people by
| performance, fire the bottom 10% or so, promote the top 10%.
|
| The first iteration can work very well. But what about the next
| iterations? People will adapt to the process and change their
| behavior.
|
| Under stacked ranking, if you are interviewing someone
| brilliant that can potentially be the strongest member on your
| team, is it in your best personal interest to hire that person?
|
| The answer is: no. Because if you add high performance members
| to your team, with each iteration of stacked ranking not only
| it will be harder for you to be promoted, but you will be
| closer to being terminated.
|
| So what ends up happening is that people hire the worst
| possible candidates, which defeats the purpose of stacked
| ranking. With stacked ranking, instead of iterating towards
| stronger people, you iterate towards mediocre, political
| people.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| In my experience the biggest problem with stack ranking is
| that it's not easy to update. I mentored a developer and he
| skyrocketed from the bottom of the stack to near the top in
| real terms over the course of two years. But he could never
| escape his "reputation" as a lower tier person. He left, over
| two years quadrupled his income, and now I work for him. I
| doubled my income.
| oblio wrote:
| > He left, over two years quadrupled his income, and now I
| work for him. I doubled my income.
|
| This is such an American story :-)
|
| I don't think there's any other developed country where you
| can remain an individual contributor, a developer, and
| quadruple your income in 2 years. Heck, in most other
| developed countries the whole salary range for a profession
| is about 2x, from the lowliest junior developer to the
| highest senior developer. To make more you'd have to become
| a consultant, so basically start your own company, which is
| an entirely different kettle of fish.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| >To make more you'd have to become a consultant
|
| My name checks out :)
| strulovich wrote:
| I've been working at Facebook for a while now, and I think the
| environment is competitive, and you do need to shine in front
| of endless talent, but doing so doesn't mean numbers.
|
| Sadly, many people who don't do well take their feedback to
| mean that they need more code commits or comments. Some of them
| might even succeed at gaming the system for a short while due
| to a bad manager. The truth from my experience is that as long
| as you drive meaningful impact, and are able to convince you
| manager and others of it, you will be doing well. Falling back
| to silly stat numbers is the toolset of people who don't have
| enough achievements. In a way, good numbers don't mean good
| performance. But bad performance really does correlate with bad
| numbers. So people who are unhappy with their ratings will
| deduce that is the problem. It's aggravated by the fact people
| with good ratings don't boast about it (which is considered
| rude). I've noticed similar effects in college with grades.
| Judging by the vocal people one could assume the majority of
| the class failed at the exam, since whoever succeed will do
| well to not rub in their friends' faces)
|
| * Personally I do use numbers in reviews, but only as a
| secondary way to backup my claims for what I did, or why it was
| important
|
| * * If you are convinced that your manager and team only cares
| about stats, I recommend switching to another team or company
| when you have the opportunity.
| duxup wrote:
| It's something that on a casual basis no big deal.
|
| But once you ask folks to do it and there's any positive
| outcome ... it becomes a thing.
|
| I've been a part of similar systems and as soon as it is sort
| of institutionalized, it is a nightmare.
|
| It became office politics and groups of mutual admiration
| clubs, and frankly a lot of folks who maybe needed to up their
| game in the view of their bosses got in on these sort of mutual
| admiration clubs. More so than those who didn't, and that
| really skewed things.
|
| The underlying fact is a complement from a coworker might have
| jack squat to do with ... actually doing anything good, it
| could even be because of a bad thing, who knows, you just never
| know.
|
| As soon as it isn't 'organic' it becomes kinda horrible.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It became office politics and groups of mutual admiration
| clubs
|
| Right, the incentive problem is especially hard here, because
| "compliments" and "praise" by definition involve unverified
| info, so it's really easy for the whole thing to devolve into
| a popularity contest, and you can only avoid this by
| _discouraging_ it. OTOH it might still be possible to reward
| employees for praise of coworkers that involves some amount
| of verifiability. It 's not that everything is going to be
| verified after-the-fact, but the possibility has to be real
| so that everyone's behavior is kept in line.
| jedberg wrote:
| This is what I loved about working at Netflix. We didn't have
| performance reviews. It was assumed that your performance was
| good to excellent, otherwise you wouldn't be working there
| anymore. You had a constant feedback loop with your manager on
| performance, but nothing was ever formal.
|
| Raises were completely divorced from any performance
| assessment. You were paid whatever they thought the max was for
| your skillset, based on a bunch of data they had on what people
| at other companies got paid for similar work.
|
| What we did have was 360 reviews once a year. It was basically
| a small survey you could fill out about anyone in the company,
| which they and their manager would see. You could evaluate your
| boss, your VP, or people who worked for you, or anyone else you
| worked with anywhere in the company. It was expected that
| managers do a 360 review for all of their reports, but beyond
| that you could do as few or as many as you wanted to. It was
| basically a start/stop/continue kind of thing.
|
| It was such a refreshing change from the stack ranking at eBay,
| which forced good people to get shitty reviews just so they
| could "fit the bell curve". And as you said, it incentivized
| you to not praise coworkers and some people even actively
| sabotaged their coworkers to get a better rank.
| WWLink wrote:
| Geez that sounds exactly like how the place I work at works.
| Interesting!
| Traster wrote:
| I think this culture is often the difference between a
| company that's in exponential growth mode - where you care
| more about velocity than costs. When a company becomes a
| stable giant, the engineering department is no longer
| necessarily creating value in the same way it was before and
| often slowly becomes bloated.
| sleepydog wrote:
| I agree, but in the specific case of Netflix, people are
| let go _all the time_ , and managers have a lot of
| authority to make the decision to fire someone. Tenure
| doesn't matter, either -- you could work there for 6 years
| and end up getting fired when you get a new manager or the
| existing one decides you're phoning it in.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| Even a first line manager can fire? are there no hr
| processes
| jedberg wrote:
| There is no HR process. In reality you've already had
| multiple discussions with HR and your manager if you're
| going to get fired, but it isn't required.
| xvector wrote:
| That's a massive amount of trust placed in managers. I've
| had asshole managers before that didn't have this much
| power thanks to company structure.
|
| Honestly I would never work at a place like this. Maybe
| it's lean and efficient for the company, but it
| definitely doesn't sound fun for the employee.
| derefr wrote:
| In this sort of setup, you'd expect there to be a chance
| of asshole managers; but you'd also expect that those
| asshole managers would be quickly fired by _their_ non-
| asshole managers. Being stuck under an asshole would only
| happen if you were in reality stuck under a whole _chain_
| of assholes, leading all the way to the top. And if that
| was true, the company would be in the middle of imploding
| anyway.
| traskjd wrote:
| I feel like it has to be this way. You can't both want to
| be trusted and enjoy the benefits of that autonomy and
| then expect others to not have that trust an autonomy. In
| many ways it shows it's properly baked into the culture
| and not just some nice sound bite to attract engineering
| talent.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's not as bad as it sounds. Yes, it certainly happens
| and it sucks for the good person that it happens to. But
| managers like that don't last very long.
|
| When you get let go, they ask in the exit interview if
| you were warned, if your manager gave you any feedback
| leading up to it, etc. And then they follow up if the
| person says, "it was a total shock". I've definitely seen
| managers make some bad firing decisions, but they were
| let go soon afterwards. Word gets around quickly to their
| manager that they let go someone who was a strong
| contributor.
| shanemhansen wrote:
| > When you get let go, they ask in the exit interview if
| you were warned, if your manager gave you any feedback
| leading up to it, etc. And then they follow up if the
| person says, "it was a total shock". I've definitely seen
| managers make some bad firing decisions, but they were
| let go soon afterwards.
|
| I guess "the firings will continue until morale
| improves?"
| normalnorm wrote:
| > When you get let go
|
| I'm sorry for going a bit offtopic, but I have noticed
| this weird linguistic contortion "get let go" often. Why
| the euphemisms? You get fired. It doesn't hurt to speak
| plainly. This "let go" expression seems weirdly childish,
| like how people say that someone "passed on" to avoid
| confronting the hard reality of death.
|
| And I'm not picking on you, I know that almost everyone
| talks like this now.
| jedberg wrote:
| Well at Netflix in particular, there is no real
| difference between being fired and being laid off, since
| both come with the same severance and benefits.
|
| So it makes sense to use a generic term.
|
| In most cases you use the generic term to avoid
| liability. Saying someone was fired could be
| libelous/slanderous.
| normalnorm wrote:
| Interesting point, but in most cases people say it when
| talking about themselves (I was let go) or in the
| hypothetical, as was the case here with OP: "When you get
| let go". So no risk of liability, there must be some
| other explanation.
| jedberg wrote:
| There is still a liability when talking about oneself.
| Sometimes when someone is fired they have to sign a non-
| disparagement agreement to get their severance.
|
| Saying you were fired could be considered disparaging.
| kingbirdy wrote:
| That still sounds pretty bad. The person who fired you
| getting fired doesn't get you your job back.
| jedberg wrote:
| No it doesn't, but do you think at other companies people
| don't get fired for bad reasons?
| kingbirdy wrote:
| Of course people get fired at other companies, but that's
| whataboutism - it's bad no matter where it happens.
| [deleted]
| johnm wrote:
| So then what was the behavior after the bad manager was
| let go? Did they actually reach out to those who were let
| go? The toxic effects of bad managers is way larger than
| ICs.
| jedberg wrote:
| In some cases the fired people were invited back, but
| usually if they were good they already had another job.
| johnm wrote:
| Is there mobility so people can leave bad managers and
| move to other teams easily (i.e., vote with their feet)
| rather than being stuck under bad managers and getting
| screwed this way?
| jedberg wrote:
| Yes, it's easy to change teams. You just find a new
| manager and ask if they have openings. You don't want to
| leave your old team high and dry, but the only
| requirement was the new manager saying yes.
|
| Obviously in reality there were most likely some
| negotiations amongst the managers, as the new manager
| wouldn't want to get a reputation for stealing people.
|
| But I saw people change teams pretty regularly. Not just
| because of bad managers, but because they just wanted a
| new challenge.
| wolco wrote:
| Exit interviewers are for those who quit. Never seen a
| firing exit interview.
| jedberg wrote:
| At Netflix everyone gets an exit interview, no matter the
| reason for leaving.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| _When you get let go, they ask in the exit interview if
| you were warned_
|
| Why would anyone give any kind of useful information in
| the exit interview? The only one who benefits is the
| company, they need to cover their back in case a suit
| over harassment comes up. If anyone wants revenge over
| poor management, keep silent, let the fellow continue to
| lose the company money and set them up for a lawsuit.
|
| HR is not on your side. The company is not on your side.
| The union would be, but in software we can't have that.
| jedberg wrote:
| That's a very cynical view. While the company may not be
| on your side, helping your coworkers by proving feedback
| about bad management is a good thing.
|
| Also, why would you want the company to fail? Just
| because they have one bad manager? My friends still work
| there, and if you have stock options, you even have a
| financial interest in the continued success of the
| company.
|
| I see no downside in providing truthful feedback during
| an exit interview. Sure, it won't help you, but it helps
| everyone else that's still there.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The company only looks out for itself and will support
| you only when it benefits. It will never benefit from
| supporting an ex-employee that left on bad terms, and the
| ex-employee will never benefit either from supporting it.
| So why bother, there is no rational reason.
|
| The bond to co-workers at a former workplace is strange
| and tenuous - actually it goes the other way around,
| _they_ reach out to _you_ when they want to improve their
| situation. Let them ask you when they want out, then
| offer a hand.
| jedberg wrote:
| > and the ex-employee will never benefit either from
| supporting it.
|
| Like I said, even when you get fired, you still have
| stock options. So you do in fact benefit by helping the
| company when you're leaving.
|
| > The bond to co-workers at a former workplace is strange
| and tenuous - actually it goes the other way around, they
| reach out to you when they want to improve their
| situation. Let them ask you when they want out, then
| offer a hand.
|
| Why not offer them help when they don't ask, in the form
| of giving feedback to HR? Why do they need to ask? Why
| can't I be altruistic and help just because?
|
| I'll say this -- you're entitled to your opinion, but I
| really hope I never work with or for someone who shares
| your outlook. And I especially hope I never manage
| someone with your outlook.
|
| Whatever happened to "we're all in this together"?
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I'm sorry, but you're j"I worked at Reddit and
| Netflix"edberg. I am a schmoe who works in a small town
| where there are fewer than 10 good companies that I would
| want to work for, and you haven't heard of any of them.
|
| From the _average_ perspective, I have found the parent
| 's commenter's advice to be far more accurate. I don't
| think you have a good idea of how terrible and vindictive
| the average mid-level paper pusher in management or HR is
| outside Silicon Valley (I suspect there are quite a few
| in SV as well, but maybe you all are a little more
| skeptical about their utility). I don't want some maniac
| manager talking crap about me to everyone they know and
| consequently blowing up my meager job prospects just
| because I complained to HR about their shitty management
| style. Oh, and unlike your Netflix example, tens of
| people complained about terrible management style at a
| former employer, and not a single manager got fired or
| even cautioned as a result. So I'm going to smile, nod,
| and leave a company - nothing more.
|
| So, in summary - hopefully this doesn't sound like
| flattery, but consider that you might be in the position
| of a Lakers player giving advice to a local pickup
| basketball group. The advice doesn't always translate
| well to a different context :)
| jedberg wrote:
| That is a completely fair and relevant assessment. I
| don't know what it is like to work in small town with few
| job prospects.
|
| I would hope I would act the same in that situation,
| trying to make things better for everyone, but honestly I
| don't know.
|
| Hopefully the rise of remote work will fix some of this,
| giving you more prospects outside of your small town, and
| more flexibility.
|
| > So, in summary - hopefully this doesn't sound like
| flattery, but consider that you might be in the position
| of a Lakers player giving advice to a local pickup
| basketball group.
|
| Aw man, thanks for that ego boost today. I'll try not to
| let it go to my head. :)
|
| But seriously, I always try to give advice that is
| generally relevant, because I am self-aware enough to
| know that just about every situation I've been in is not
| the norm. But thank you for calling me out, because
| sometimes I still make poor assumptions.
| stuxnet79 wrote:
| > Whatever happened to "we're all in this together"?
|
| Because we are not in this together. I like working in
| collaborative environments but after switching jobs more
| times than I can count I've become more cynical.
|
| - Co-workers are not your friends.
|
| - HR is not your friend.
|
| - Management is not your friend.
|
| It's a business relationship and in the eyes of the
| corporate structure you are just a fungible resource
| being consumed to produce shareholder value. Some
| companies do a great job of creating a "culture" but even
| in these companies it's only a thin veneer over the
| machiavellian tactics that keep the corporate machine
| chugging along.
| ehmish wrote:
| I'd disagree with that, management and HR, sure, but
| friendship with co-workers is important. Personal
| relationships are the main way people find jobs, and
| unlike with management and HR with co-workers at least
| nominally you're on the same team
| iainmerrick wrote:
| The context being described is one in which you were just
| sacked at the whim of a manager. Doesn't it seem a little
| funny to wait until the exit interview to ask if it came
| as a surprise? Maybe they're going to act in that
| information somehow, perhaps sacking that manager if it's
| part of a pattern of poor decisions, but they're not
| planning on doing anything to help _you personally,_ like
| overturning the dismissal.
|
| Maybe you're inclined to help them out just to be a good
| person, and that's fine; but I don't blame anyone who
| doesn't want to do that.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Doesn't it seem a little funny to wait until the exit
| interview to ask if it came as a surprise?
|
| When else would they ask? The exit interview is when you
| are being informed of the decision.
|
| The process is you get a meeting invite for a 1 on 1 with
| your manager. They come in, tell you that you're getting
| let go and why, and then invite HR to come in. They then
| leave and HR goes over the paperwork and asks you about
| if you expected it. If you were a poor performer, then
| it's most likely not your first meeting with HR.
|
| I'm not sure when else they would ask.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| I have given useful information in exits when i felt the
| company was open to it and would take it seriously.
| Because while i knew my tenure was done and it was time
| to move on, me providing my reasons may help the rest f
| their retention. And from what i have heard, that advice
| was taken seriously and it did work.
|
| I have also just run through the paces in ones where i
| know its not gonna change a thing.
|
| I also work in a small enough community where its wise
| not to burn bridges because you very well may run across
| other again down the line.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| On the other hand, I'm sure those bad managers get the
| natural result of their management much quicker and more
| visibly when there is no bureaucractic structure
| protecting them from themselves.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think the number of people that are let go is
| overexaggerated. But yes, it is easy to fire _and hire_.
| The two go hand in hand.
| remote_phone wrote:
| My coworker was a product manager at Netflix and she said
| in a 2 year period she saw at least 20 engineers get
| fired. That seems pretty high to me.
| yibg wrote:
| Probably depends on team and circumstances. In my ~3
| years there I've only seen a handful of engineers I
| interact with (which was a lot) get fired.
| user5994461 wrote:
| That's a huge amount.
|
| I remember working in a large company with easily a
| hundred people over the years. I'd say there were only 2
| employees that were fireable materials.
| jedberg wrote:
| Yeah but how hard was it to hire new people? There is a
| direct correlation. It's super easy to hire people at
| Netflix. It is literally just up to the hiring manager.
|
| The flip side is that it is also easy to fire, so you can
| quickly correct any mistakes you may have made in hiring.
|
| This of course means more churn. But to someone working
| there, this felt like a good thing. It means you didn't
| have people just biding their time like you see in most
| big companies.
|
| Never once did I think, "how does that person still have
| a job?" Unlike the other big companies I've worked for,
| where there is always at least one person who you know is
| just floating as long as they can and getting away with
| it.
| user5994461 wrote:
| Well, there can be some challenges to get people to apply
| to the archaic job board and they often don't recognize
| the brand. It's certainly easier to hire at Netflix being
| a well known consumer brand.
|
| How's the interview process though? Do managers get to
| hand pick candidates, without them being subjected to a
| grueling full day onsite with 6-8 employees?
|
| I'd say that's the biggest issue to hire. Even if
| referred and highly recommended, it's trivial to be
| rejected due to any one interviewer having a bad day or
| an impossible bar.
| jedberg wrote:
| The process in general worked like this:
|
| The candidate is found, either by the hiring manager
| themself, through an internal referral, or via the
| internal sourcers/recruiters (shout out to them for being
| amazing at their job!)
|
| The hiring manager sets up an interview panel, where they
| recruit relevant stakeholders (in the case of an
| engineer, this was usually peer engineers and sometimes
| other managers who that team worked with a lot).
|
| The panel is usually around four hours, with four or five
| people, including the manager, someone from HR, and some
| future peers.
|
| If that goes well, then a second panel is set up for
| round two, also about four hours, which usually involves
| a Director or VP or two, maybe another higher up peer or
| sibling team peer or manager, and a higher up manager
| from HR.
|
| Throughout the day, the hiring manager solicits feedback
| from the interviewers, usually within 15 minutes of them
| finishing.
|
| The final decision rests solely with the hiring manager,
| but usually most of the feedback needed to be positive to
| move forward. The manager could also stop the process at
| any time. So if all the feedback was "meh", they could
| save everyone some time and cut it short.
|
| Out of town candidates would have the both panels set for
| one long day, or sometimes the afternoon and following
| morning, so for out of town candidates who got all the
| way through, it could be pretty grueling.
|
| After all that, if the hiring manager decides to hire
| you, you could get an offer before you even leave, or
| within a day or two usually, unless there were multiple
| people for one position, and then you had to wait for
| them all (although if you were amazing you'd get an offer
| anyway and then if someone else was good they would get
| an offer too).
|
| For me personally, the entire process from first contact
| to signing offer papers was less than a week, and that
| was pretty typical at the time.
| sleepydog wrote:
| I'm sorry, I'm afraid my comment was too negative. I
| agree everything is exaggerated on the internet, and I
| think Netflix's way of doing things is refreshing and has
| benefits over previous approaches. For example if,
| instead of getting fired, I was put on a dead-end project
| for 2 years, I would feel like I wasted time that could
| have been used improving my career prospects. The
| engineers who work at Netflix are all desirable and
| should not have trouble finding work (although likely
| with less pay).
|
| My wife worked there for a year, and was used to seeing
| the emails to her dept. saying so-and-so was fired once
| or twice a week. Eventually she quit because of it, but
| she had an overall positive experience.
| jedberg wrote:
| That may very well be true. It also only seems to work at
| companies without junior engineers. Junior engineers need
| more guidance and more feedback and a more hands on
| approach from their managers to guide career growth.
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| I'm curious about the 360 reviews. Where I work, peer
| feedback is solicited by your manager. So your manager can
| choose the people writing your feedback based on whether the
| manager wants to reward you or to screw you over. As a
| byproduct, your peers do not fear any repercussions for bad
| behavior if they have confidence that their manager has their
| back. So, for example, people have no qualms about sabotaging
| the work of other teams. Do the 360 reviews help with this
| problem?
| jedberg wrote:
| I don't think they are related. I think what stops that
| from happening is open feedback across the company and
| hiring the right people. No one is really thinking, "man I
| would totally screw this person if not for the bad review
| they might give me!". Especially since the reviews only
| happen once a year.
|
| If you do something negative to someone, that person will
| either directly address it with you or your manager at the
| time. The reviews are more to address longer term behavior.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Sounds like you are no longer there - what was the dark side?
| jedberg wrote:
| Honestly there was no real dark side. I supposed you could
| say some mangers were a little trigger happy on firing, but
| in a sibling comment I addressed that.
|
| I left to start a startup. I would work there again in
| second if I ever go back to working for someone else (and
| they had a role for me).
| fbanon9876 wrote:
| I work at FB. Can't speak for other teams, but this does not
| match the culture I've seen in 3+ years. There is a tool to
| send thanks, but there are no expectations -- it's just a nice
| thing to see coworkers appreciate you. I've done reviews and
| never heard anyone mention the number of "thanks" their report
| has received.
|
| The PSC cycle (bi-annual review) is stressful, which I think is
| where the "craziness" stems. OTOH, there's not much day to day
| oversight - employees have an insane amount of freedom - so
| these 2x / year reviews are the tradeoff. ICs have tons of
| freedom, then twice a year, have to stand account for how they
| spent the last 6 months, compared to what other people in the
| same role and at the same level have done. (It's not stack
| ranking, it's more like grading on a curve across very
| different exam questions.)
|
| There are mechanisms to provide feedback more frequently than
| every 6 months. It's agreed that the manager failed at their
| job if an IC is surprised by how a review ends up.
|
| (FB also has 360 reviews every 6 months, offset from PSC by 3
| months. These are usually upward reviews, and they are taken
| _very_ seriously. Results from these determine manager career
| progression, so it 's a chance for ICs to have their voices
| really well heard.)
|
| Gaming the stats does exist, just as it exists everywhere. I
| think this is probably the only part that I don't strongly
| disagree with. It's also a hard problem to solve, with
| significant tradeoffs for different approaches. (And might be
| the most interesting piece)
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| It is easy to see zero-sum as noncooperative but in reality
| there is more than one winner. In fact, the number of losers is
| relatively small. One thing you can do to ensure your own
| position is to find some people you like and trade feedback
| with them. Everyone not included in the deal will have less
| feedback and you will be slightly advantaged over them.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The flip side of this is, if you want to sink someone's career,
| badmouth them to their manager.
|
| Having worked at many companies, I've observed how shockingly
| easy it is for a manager's assessment of their reports to be
| colored by "hearsay" whether good or bad.
|
| I once had several members of another team who deeply disgreed
| with a product decision I'd made complain to my manager that I
| was being uncooperative, not a team player, etc. To avoid getting
| fired, I had to ask a bunch of members of various other teams to
| (honestly) tell my manager what a good job I was doing. Which
| worked -- according to him I'd really "turned things around" in
| the space of just a couple weeks (!). In the end it was 100%
| political, a bad manager who had no idea how to actually assess
| my work for what it was and so relied entirely on what he was
| "hearing", and I quit as soon as I could for a better job.
|
| So yes, tell someone's manager when they're doing a great job.
| But it sucks that we have to rely on this stuff at all, rather
| than managers who can actually assess your work directly.
| jmchuster wrote:
| I would also add that it's important to always be communicating
| with your manager and building that trust. You need to make
| sure that their initial reaction to any negative hearsay should
| be that the other party is then in fact bad and uninformed.
|
| Maybe it helps people to think of their manager/work as being
| analogous to a startup product? You build an awesome product,
| but then spend zero budget on sales and marketing, and are then
| super-sad that you're not magically growing up and to the
| right.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| This depends on the manager more than anything else. Somebody
| who complains all the time is just as likely to come across as
| low-credibility and untrustworthy. If they're the only person
| complaining perhaps that's a signal to the manager that they're
| in fact a problem for the team they're working in, and perhaps
| they shouldn't be there anymore.
|
| Conversely somebody who readily gives credit to others might
| come off as high-integrity and trustworthy. Perhaps a person
| like that is an incredibly positive influence and valuable
| member of their team.
|
| Each approach can succeed or fail depending on what your
| manager values. I wouldn't say one is more likely to succeed
| than the other, but if you want to end up working for a boss
| that values integrity, then I'd suggest taking the integrity
| route.
| tehlike wrote:
| This does not always work. Not necessarily "hearsay", but there
| was a coworker of mine who would happily take credit for
| everyone elses work by sending emails in a timely manner
| (people tell them stuff they work on, then you'd see an email
| from them pretending they lead the effort and it was their
| idea). Many times this got escalated, the manager didn't care.
| Everytime someone talked to that problematic person, it was
| "the first time he heard about it".
| wittyreference wrote:
| In my medical training, I had precisely one patient reach out to
| hospital leadership to commend my care of them. It was really
| appreciated - I like to think that patients appreciate when
| they're treated kindly and well taken care of, but it seems
| that's taken for granted. I didn't so much care for the official
| recognition as just knowing that the patient was actually touched
| by the trouble and feeling I put into looking after them.
| tomca32 wrote:
| Makes sense it's taken for granted since health care is
| expensive as hell so people expect the service to be good if
| they pay for it.
| wittyreference wrote:
| Thing is, two points:
|
| 1) You can pay for plenty of shit, but you can't pay for
| human feeling.
|
| 2) A tiny fraction of that money ends up in the pockets of
| people actually providing care - most of it ends up with
| pharma, device manufacturers, PBMs, and other middle-men. You
| can expect whatever great service you want for your money,
| but it doesn't work when that money isn't going to the people
| providing the service.
| 6510 wrote:
| Also, don't do this unless you have some idea how others compare
| to him. There is nothing as silly as an uninformed person
| praising the least productive member of a group.
| yomly wrote:
| I think showing awareness of your peers is a positive signal to a
| good manager in any case so it positively impacts you beyond just
| good karma
|
| Anyone who really buys into "team" will value someone who is
| actually looking out for their team.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Google has a culture of internal peer bonuses and kudos, which in
| some ways is great and meant to help with this kind of thing...
| except that it also leads to an internal culture of "congrats!"
| and "thank you for your amazing work!" centi-threads which often
| overlook other contributors on a project, or are used
| strategically by overly political managers to boost their own
| reports and projects and gain corporate visibility for them.
|
| Lost in this is just the work ethic of doing incremental non-
| glamorous work and managers and people around you _doing their
| job_ by recognizing it. Many corporate perf processes, peer
| bonuses, and so on simply smudge this over, and they indirectly
| or directly encourage _fame seeking behaviour_ which is in my
| opinion the most corrosive thing to a company's long term
| performance and bottom line.
| jmchuster wrote:
| I definitely consider it part of my job as a manager to boost
| my own reports and their projects. If even your own manager
| isn't going to publicly congratulate you on your hard work,
| then who is going to?
| moab wrote:
| Not my experience of Google, at least having worked there as an
| intern multiple times. All of the peer bonuses on our teams and
| affiliated teams have been for people going out of their way to
| help out with some project even if it was not part of their
| day-to-day work. I can only speak for the research-y side of
| Google, which in my experience seems to avoid most of these
| problems probably due to having managers that also do research
| and write papers. Having a separate academic status system
| other than your internal work position probably helps in this
| regard.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's true peer bonuses in particular seem to be mainly
| reponsibly used. Probably because there's $$ and an
| accounting chain attached to them.
|
| But just last week I watched the hard work of a coworker get
| completely bowled over by another manager's "congrats on
| amazing work" email chain to someone else who used the work
| of my coworker without recognition.
| gowld wrote:
| Start a new "congrats on amazing work" email chain to thank
| your coworker, and cc: their manager
| moab wrote:
| That's really unfortunate. I agree that the $$$ and
| accounting help make sure the system is not abused in the
| usual case. Unfortunately jerks are unavoidable, and even
| if the manager knew the true story they could ignore it to
| emphasize the contributions of their own reports.
|
| It's hard to imagine a promo system that rewards hard work,
| where feedback comes from ones peers, and only promotes a
| fixed number of people where these kind of zero-sum issues
| don't appear.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't think it's a case of jerks vs not-
| jerks. Many years at a BigCorp has underlined to me now
| that the ethics and "professional economy" of working in
| one is entirely different than SmallCorp.
|
| SmallCorp you all work for the bottom line or company
| goes bust. That acts as a damper on empire builders who
| build for their own sake, though there is still that
| behavior.
|
| BigCorp it's unlikely your contributions are going to
| impact much of that kind of thing, even if you're up in
| senior management. So you're there for your Career(tm)
| first, company $$ success second. And in fact that is
| directly promoted through Perf, etc.
|
| So the aggregate behavior of individuals is not only to
| self-promote but to encourage the self-promotions of
| others, that's how we get ahead by the measures defined
| as "getting ahead" by the company: internal promotion,
| project glory, internal and external speaking engagements
| and publications about your project, etc.
|
| So a 100 person "congrats" and "that's amazing!" email
| (or its equivalent on LinkedIn) or whatever is just
| reasonable professional behavior. You're not a jerk for
| promoting yourself, you're just doing what is expected of
| you. The professional behavior of the modest but "plug
| along and do my job and help out and not self-promote"
| person is the one that's suspect in this scenario. The
| company _wants_ you to self-promote.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| This is so strange. I feel weird enough telling people to
| send me a gThanks when they _ask_ what the best way to
| recognize me for something is, doing it unsolicited is
| just crazy.
| [deleted]
| skapadia wrote:
| There should be a systematic way to collect and periodically
| highlight accomplishments and those who contributed to those
| (quarterly, monthly). A lead should be able to produce that
| information (with input from the team, all in one room face to
| face), and it should be published in a common place (where
| everyone else has read-only rights, or changes can be tracked)
| for managers and higher-ups to see.
| twodave wrote:
| I think I'm going to disagree with this. I've seen lots of
| these systems foisted upon employees and the general result is
| people either try to game the system or else people feel forced
| into participating when they don't wish to. Praise ought to be
| both spontaneous and merited or else it loses a bit of its
| appeal in my opinion.
|
| Thanks to this article (which I didn't even read), I was
| inspired to write something heartfelt to my own manager about
| another person on my team. No system would have pried that from
| me. I just needed a subtle reminder.
| m0zg wrote:
| And as a (former) manager: when your reports are doing great
| work, make sure to publicly praise them, as well as give people
| opportunity to beat their own chest and roar. Shipped a cool
| feature? Present a few slides at the weekly team meeting, explain
| why it's cool. This won't happen unless you encourage it and set
| aside the time. I don't see nearly enough of this, and I think
| it's a shame - it makes people feel good about what they do, feel
| that their work not a waste of time. It also engenders pride in
| good work and implicitly shines a light on poor performers.
|
| As far as telling people's managers about good work, that is
| helpful of course. But I feel like there's this misconception
| among non-managers that managers don't already know who's great
| and who's not. As a manager who pays any attention at all this is
| clear as a day most of the time.
| fblp wrote:
| I feel like the main point should be "if your coworker does great
| work, tell them". Be curious, see if they have feedback through
| you, see how they'd like to be recognized.
|
| That step is often missed. People are often resistant to
| providing direct feedback - yet that is also how the strongest
| bonds are made.
|
| The more a manager acts as an intermediary, the less direct
| emotional (and consequently professional) relationships are.
| price wrote:
| You may not have read the article. It says to tell the coworker
| first. There is no question of a manager acting as an
| intermediary.
|
| The point of telling the manager is to help the coworker get
| their next raise or promotion, not for the manager to be the
| one to tell them.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Whenever I help someone out and they say "how can I thank you" I
| just say "let my manager know I was helpful".
| ravenstine wrote:
| While I really like the sentiment, I think there's a reason why
| people naturally don't provide much positive feedback about
| individuals at workplaces.
|
| What do you really get by pointing out the good work of a
| coworker? A warm fuzzy feeling, to be sure. Maybe greater
| comradeship. But wait, who's the next person to get a promotion?
| Maybe it'll be the person you keep praising to management. So
| you'll probably have to work smarter/harder to get that same
| praise, hence the same chances at promotion. But you don't want
| to work that much harder; you're already working hard enough as
| it is. But that 5% raise and that "senior" title look pretty
| shiny. <one year later> Hey, how come nobody has been recognizing
| you for your good work? Meanwhile that coworker you've been
| praising is now _your boss_!
| vp8989 wrote:
| Positive feedback can be a good way to reinforce behaviors in
| your team mates that you want to see more of. For example, you
| wish that people on the team tested their changes thoroughly
| before opening a PR.
|
| If you mention that, you will be seen as whiny and a
| complainer. But if you praise someone who does it, well now
| you're being positive. Both things have the same effect, in
| that they communicate that you want people to do more of a
| certain behavior ... but they are perceived differently by
| others in the group.
|
| It has the same effect the other way. If you generally provide
| positive feedback for good work and someone does mediocre work.
| Your lack of feedback is noticed, without you actually sticking
| your neck out and saying anything negative.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Positive feedback is great in reinforcing good behavior, for
| sure. I think the difference is when positive feedback about
| a coworker is directed towards management which, since
| there's an adversarial nature underlying most workplaces, you
| are acting as someone else's public relations spokesperson
| for free. I'm not saying that people should never point out
| the excellence of their coworkers to management; what I'm
| saying is that the mechanics of the workplace make this
| behavior rare and simply not worth the effort in most cases.
| The safest thought pattern for one's sanity is to give
| praise, but never expect that praise to be reciprocated.
| twiddlydo wrote:
| You have to be so good that they can't ignore you. Or, so good,
| it doesn't matter that that group of folks who remain silent
| are around. There will always be another group of folks who are
| genuine and will praise you for doing great work.
|
| Now, the most difficult part, is when someone in position of
| power decides to keep silent -- like your manager or another
| high profile individual. In that case, it's better to bounce,
| you don't want to work in an org that promotes those kind of
| people.
|
| Peter Thiel said it best in Zero to One. I'm paraphrasing here,
| if a start up is not rewarding individuals based off of merit,
| but PR, then it's time to go.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| This is why I believe the best path to promotion is simply to
| quit and find a company that will give you the title you want.
|
| I'm not the kind of person that gets promoted, for whatever
| reasons, so I've been moving up by moving sideways. It sucks,
| but it is what it is.
| [deleted]
| gowld wrote:
| Why does a receiver on the football team let the other receiver
| catch a pass, when he could look better by blocking it?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yep, why do I want a 7% raise when I'm expected to work 15%
| more hours.
| jameshush wrote:
| My strategy is to pull everyone up around me all the time. If I
| want more money I find another job and professionally threaten
| to leave.
|
| This strategy has worked great for me in the long term so far,
| because I have so many random connections now from every job
| who like me because I'm friendly. I have a reputation of
| pulling everyone up around me and being easy to work with
| because... I am.
|
| Don't compete for a 5% raise for 25% more hours when you can
| get a 25% raise for 5% less hours somewhere else.
| madskdc wrote:
| Many people, when done a favor, want to repay it. So when you
| praise a person to their boss, they're more likely to be on the
| lookout for opportunities to praise you in return.
|
| Speaking from my own experience, I tend to be a quiet person
| who doesn't say much. However, since joining my current team,
| and having consistently received compliments from both managers
| and teammates (and seen the same getting passed around to
| others), it has lead me to make a point of looking for
| opportunities to do the same. It's become the norm to
| compliment others on their good work, and passing that up the
| chain and through official channels when the opportunity
| presents itself.
| tannerbrockwell wrote:
| I have refused to perform 360's in the past.
|
| They are usually semi-anonymous though and no one really noticed.
| I think that we should be careful of inculcating such a culture.
| It can support and enforce clique's at work. It also as a
| deliverable, leans fairly hard on your co-workers. Why should we
| build a system that essentially delivers pre-digested content for
| management?
|
| tl;dr: "Overall: a lot of people (for very good reasons!) want to
| have control over the kind of feedback their manager hears about
| them." exactly!
|
| It also could become a Vanity Metric, and this doesn't help
| anyone. [1]
|
| [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/
| Apofis wrote:
| Don't let them get the best of you!
| welcome_dragon wrote:
| We use TINYPulse (https://www.tinypulse.com/) for this very
| reason at my work; it takes about 10 seconds to send someone a
| shout out, and not only does their manager see it, but everyone
| in the company does (we're a small startup).
|
| If I notice that someone has really killed it in something but
| has no recognition at all for it, I will also/instead point out
| to that person's manager, especially if it is a junior engineer
| chris_wot wrote:
| Bugger. I think I messed up at least once by not asking. This is
| good advise!
| lkrubner wrote:
| This should be a monthly census: it needs to be automatic. If
| you're the manager of a company and you are relying on people to
| say something about their co-workers, then you will miss most of
| the information that you could be capturing, and you will get
| highly biased impression of your workforce, because only a
| certain type of person will come forward to praise their co-
| worker.
|
| There are various voting systems that work well, but the easiest
| is something like "Every month, list 3 of your co-workers who did
| something impressive."
|
| This avoids the many problems with something like the stack-rank
| system that Microsoft was committed to, for too many years. In
| that system, workers were forced to list their co-workers, not
| just as "good", but also a certain percentage had to belong to
| the "bad" group, the lowest 30%. Most workers do not want to
| attack their fellow workers this way.
|
| You can get all the information you need by simply letting your
| workers upvote each other. You should ration the upvotes so that
| they are meaningful. On a small team, perhaps people get 1 or 2
| votes, in a big company, perhaps they got 5 or 6 votes. If you
| make the votes a scarce resource, you get better accuracy: people
| think carefully about who they should upvote.
|
| There will be some workers who never get upvoted by anyone. These
| are bad workers. There will also be some workers who get very few
| votes, or who only get votes from "rings" they've formed with
| other workers, where they vote for each other. These are suspect
| workers.
|
| In all cases you'll want to apply something like the Google
| PageRank algorithm to the upvotes. That is, an upvote from
| someone who is themself highly upvoted should matter more than an
| upvote from someone who rarely gets upvoted.
|
| I would not ban people from the article's main idea "When your
| coworker does great work, tell their manager" however, keep in
| mind, if you are the manager or CTO or CEO, you need to ensure
| there is also a system in place that is more automatic than
| simply waiting for people to talk about their co-workers.
| T-hawk wrote:
| Wouldn't co-worker upvotes lead to workers prioritizing their
| output for what attracts upvotes rather than what the company
| needs to get done?
|
| You'd get a team constantly making tools for each other and no
| sellable product.
| lkrubner wrote:
| In terms of gaming the system, that is largely avoided by use
| of the Google PageRank algorithm, as I mentioned below. On a
| team of 100 you don't have to deal with the millions of
| spammers that exist on the Internet. On a team of 100, the
| Google PageRank algorithm works almost perfectly.
|
| But as I also mentioned, any 360 tool should be just one tool
| that a manager uses, it should not replace all other tools.
|
| I'm curious what you thought of the original article and its
| idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their
| manager". Are you opposed to that? If you are not opposed to
| that, then why would you be opposed to any other system of
| feedback, especially those that are formalized and
| structured?
| ping_pong wrote:
| Yes, this definitely happens. The incentive system should
| align with good behavior, otherwise you get massive gaming of
| the performance system. I've seen this in a few companies
| I've been at, moreso the large ones because no one can keep
| complete track of everyone's gaming of the system.
| csharptwdec19 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| It's almost a reflection of 'Golden Parachute CEO' behavior:
| There's an implicit benefit to making decisions that have
| 'good optics' at the moment even if it takes you down a road
| you'll regret.
|
| Seen this a LOT with 'buy/build' decisions almost everywhere
| I've worked. The cost savings look great up front, but by the
| time you've added all your custom bits, you're hitting things
| like API limits (either in surface or billing) and having to
| shell out, or building so much boilerplate to get around the
| limits you may as well have built it yourself.
|
| But hey, it saved X$ the first year, who cares if it costs
| more the next 5 to maintain?
| loopz wrote:
| Who are you to know who is doing good work or not? If managers
| are not involved, they should have no say.
| lkrubner wrote:
| People do reliably know which of their co-workers are good
| and which of their co-workers suck badly.
|
| But also, the rule of 150 applies here. At a startup with
| less than 100 people, each worker often has an idea of
| everyone's strength, throughout the company. However, if you
| are at a big company, with thousands of employees in multiple
| locations, then it is often best to restrict upvoting to some
| subset of the company. For instance, a company with 1,000
| workers might have 10 teams of 100 people each. At such a
| company, it might make sense to have the rule that you can
| only upvote people who are on your team. The assumption is
| that these would be the people you interact with and have a
| good idea about who is good and who is bad.
|
| Having said all this, I'm not suggesting that this should be
| the only way that managers evaluate their workers, but having
| a formal, structured, regular process is important.
|
| There are other techniques that a good manager should also
| follow. If you have time, you can listen to the interview I
| gave here:
|
| http://simpleleadership.io/why-group-meetings-can-be-time-
| wa...
|
| Too many managers waste too much time in big meetings, more
| time should be spent in one to one meetings.
|
| About this:
|
| "Who are you to know who is doing good work or not?"
|
| I can't tell if you mean that as a criticism of my suggestion
| or whether you are attacking the original article for the
| idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their
| manager." Because, if you believe people can not evaluate
| their co-workers, then you must disagree with the above
| article.
| loopz wrote:
| Every time this has been attempted, it devolves into toxic
| work culture. Also, how can you know what other people are
| working on? Most of the work is outside anyone's scope, and
| end up toxic when optimizing for arbitrary metrics.
|
| I speak for myself, mostly unrelated to articles put on
| www. I don't have to agree or disagree by anyone else's
| metrics and dominating rhetorics. Not meant to disrespect,
| but am not fully aboard naive beliefs. Experience and
| learning from others will in time tell, and moderate good
| intentions.
| lkrubner wrote:
| No, I think you are thinking of systems like the stacked
| rank system they used at Microsoft.
| loopz wrote:
| That too. Not saying your ideas have no merit, but such
| always need refinement. People who think they're the shit
| usually local-optimize, so don't regard anyone's
| evaluations as much since people generally don't know
| what work other people do, or are excluded from.
|
| This is regarded upside-down usually, since a good worker
| leaving should be unnoticed by the org. But some people
| play Hero, to detriment of every one around them, or
| expect others to do their work because all they see is
| their own little bubble. That's OK by itself, but doesn't
| merit enough opinion for policy and governance levers.
|
| It's kind of like gardeners optimizing for monoculture,
| and complaining about falling market prices and disease
| leading to lower; but predictable yields.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Because, if you believe people can not evaluate their
| co-workers, then you must disagree with the above article._
| "
|
| The article includes that there are times when you can't
| evaluate your coworkers and don't realise that you can't,
| when it says: " _giving someone the wrong "level" of
| compliment. For example, if they're a very senior engineer
| and you say something like "PERSON did SIMPLE_ROUTINE_TASK
| really well!" -- that doesn't reflect well on them and
| feels condescending. This can happen if you don't know the
| person's position or don't understand the expectations for
| their role._ ".
|
| You might think you know their role and expectations of it,
| but they might disagree - and their manager might disagree.
| Your position seems to be "vote on people you know, once
| per time period", and the article's position seems to be
| "feedback on anyone who does good work, any time, with
| their permission"
|
| Your system will lead to:
|
| 1. You know more about people you work closely with, than
| others.
|
| 2. From them, you will have opinions about who does good
| work.
|
| 3. When it comes to voting time, you are incentivised to
| put that aside and vote in a way that keeps you with people
| whose company you enjoy, not people who objectively
| contribute most to the company goals, as a manager would
| see it. Because you have a limited number of votes, and
| votes exist as a rating for promotions and firings.
|
| 4. Managers have no idea why some people were voted for, or
| whether the people voted on think it's a fair vote.
|
| The article's system will lead to:
|
| 1. You see any piece of good work which catches your eye.
|
| 2. You approach the coworker and talk to them, when you
| might not otherwise have done so, ask permission and
| explain why you think it's worth feedback, building
| connections between employees.
|
| 3. Managers get smaller, more frequent, feedback with
| explanations and know that the coworker agrees with this
| judgement of their work. Managers know who sent the
| feedback and whether they trust your judgment.
|
| 4. While the people you feedback on are affected by it,
| it's nowhere near as direct as 1 vote -> your only
| influence on the result, so you can afford to be more
| generous and less self-interested.
|
| Other differences between the article and your suggested
| approach: you are not limited to 3 votes when sending
| feedback, you can feedback on as many people as you like.
| If you send feedback as and when it happens, you're less
| affected by recency bias from the last few days before
| voting day. You aren't obligated to send any feedback, but
| you are obligated to vote for 3 people, even if you think
| you have only 1, or 5 good coworkers.
| loopz wrote:
| Pitching employee against employee, it's been tried since
| 2000 .com burst. Whatever edge that gave some owners,
| been hollowed out already.
| vernie wrote:
| Julia Evans is a font of good vibes.
| ape4 wrote:
| Tell her manager (after checking first)
| mementomori wrote:
| I am torn between the zero-sum and "abundance" concepts. It seems
| like some people like to promote the "abundance" concept (where
| one person's gain adds to everyone else) as an ideal but in
| reality I have only ever seen zero-sum results in terms of job
| acquisition and career advancement. There is a fixed number of
| slots and you need to eliminate others in order to obtain it.
| paulie_a wrote:
| This sort of thing when genuine don't makes you a good person. A
| person with character.
|
| The type of person you want and should be around.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| This is the biggest benefit of 15five. You can give a high five
| to anyone for exactly this - work that usually would go
| unrecognized but furthers the company's goals
| awillen wrote:
| I've always been a big believer that during review time, people
| should be able to choose others they've worked with to review. It
| need not be a full on performance review, but at least provide
| the opportunity to provide documented feedback to their boss.
|
| I've worked with people from other departments who were both
| awful and wonderful, and if their bosses didn't include me in
| their set of peer reviewers, I couldn't highlight that. I think
| my cross-departmental peer review would've been much more
| valuable than some of my reviews of some of my teammates, since
| my boss already had a pretty good idea of how we work together.
| qntty wrote:
| This is one of the advantages and disadvantages of
| democratically-run workplaces (worker cooperatives etc). On the
| one hand, sometimes the people who are best positioned to make
| decisions about a person aren't their managers but their
| coworkers. On the other hand, it would really change the work
| dynamic if everyone potentially had the power to be your
| manager.
| eythian wrote:
| That is how it works at my workplace, you choose who you get
| feedback from that is presented to your manager. Usually you
| choose your team and a couple of people you've worked closely
| with outside the team.
| giantg2 wrote:
| We have that choice too. It might make an impact, but I see
| the politics and the manager's opinion to be way more
| important.
| GEBBL wrote:
| I hate the fact that in my current role, I am expected to give my
| colleagues 'constructive feedback'.
|
| It seems like a minefield , when I am trying to focus on my own
| role, that I have to negotiate the feelings of a colleague as I
| leave feedback on them. I'd prefer to leave only positive
| feedback, but what my boss wants is that I need to find an
| improvement that my colleague has to make. I don't like it.
| muffinman26 wrote:
| Positive feedback is nice, but feedback on how to improve is
| incredibly useful. I really value constructive feedback and I
| spend a lot of time on providing helpful feedback when people
| ask for it. A short statement that a colleague did something
| badly is not very helpful, but taking the time to figure out
| how specifically they could improve and providing suggestions
| on how to do so usually hurts people's feelings less and helps
| them more. One coworker even specifically called out that they
| appreciated the time I put into providing feedback.
|
| What really infuriates me is that even though I take the time
| to provide good feedback on how to improve, other people don't
| return the favor. I'm young and lazy. I know that my work is
| terrible. Yet no one has bothered to call me out on it in years
| or given me meaningful suggestions on areas to work on.
|
| Constructive feedback might hurt someone's feelings for a few
| minutes, but if it is provides structure on how to improve in
| the future the recipient will come to appreciate it after a few
| minutes to calm down.
| parliament32 wrote:
| I've found PRP to be a godsend when you're expected to give
| "feedback". PRP is praise-reprimand-praise: so construct your
| comment where your negative feedback is sandwiched between two
| positive feedback items. People respond well to it.
| codazoda wrote:
| It's not exactly PRP but I also like to give negative and
| then positive feedback. I asked some of my employee's about
| this, however, and some of them mentioned that receiving
| positive feedback after negative makes the positive feedback
| seem superficial. Different people prefer to receive feedback
| in different ways. It's more difficult but we should try to
| understand how people like to receive feedback (positive or
| negative) and provide that feedback in the way they prefer to
| receive it.
| gfody wrote:
| ah the shit sandwich, I trust you're joking ;)
| parliament32 wrote:
| If you're having a bad time with PRP you're just trash at
| implementing it. PRP doesn't mean you should literally
| "Good job on X. You fucked up on Y. Also good job on Z." --
| you still need to have some human interaction skills. But
| in general, your feedback (whether it's a conversation or
| an email or a comment on a PR) should follow the general
| guidelines for what order to present things in.
| gowld wrote:
| You raise an interesting point.
|
| Your comment failed at PRP.
|
| You showed how difficult giving criticism is.
| oblio wrote:
| Kudos to you, my kind interlocutor.
|
| At first I found your haiku hard to parse.
|
| But in the end I was enlightened by it.
| jlokier wrote:
| Ah, wordplay. You're saying it works? I'm not convinced.
|
| My experience is that it sows distrust in praise.
|
| "You just said something unpleasant to me, so I don't trust
| the praise you added after is genuine, and now I don't trust
| the praise you said before is genuine either. I think you
| added them just to fit the form of a PRP. Maybe that's what
| you do all the time. So I think you're basically lying to me
| about the praise, insulting my intelligence and trying to
| manipulate me by crude emotional bullshit. This makes me
| angry".
|
| Which is not very useful if you have constructive critical
| feedback to give, as it is no longer constructive.
|
| In my view, dressing up a shit filling in a sandwich is a
| form of shallow manipulative wordplay, and for at least some
| people, it makes them upset and angry, even if they don't
| show it immediately. Because if it's done often it will make
| them distrustful. In some sense, they are right to become
| distrustful.
|
| Most people need to feel some amount of socially rewarding
| praise and recognition in their working lives.
|
| But if you're often using PRP... you lose the ability to
| convey praise to them in ways they will experience as _actual
| for real_ praise.
|
| So I advocate for separating these things out more, and
| making it known that is intentional.
|
| When there is shit filling to deliver compassionately, work
| on the meaning itself, not dissonantly trying to
| simultaneously convey it and hide it, which puts people who
| notice on permanent alert that your words do not mean what
| they initially sound like.
| opportune wrote:
| Constructive feedback and most other negative feedback is
| really aspirational at the company level. It sounds good for HR
| to try to say it's a company "value" and to encode it in
| reviews. In reality it's never ever worth it to give
| constructive feedback to peers or upward (downward is OK). It's
| bad for social dynamics, cohesion, and morale, especially when
| it's formalized as part of some review process. It's
| essentially a trap - the only way to win is to not participate
| or to give very mild feedback.
| beefield wrote:
| Is there a company that consists of people that actually are
| willing and interested in getting "constructive feedback"?
| Basically I think that it would mean that the people are so
| intereted in the quality of the work they are doing that
| anything that might make their work better is interesting
| even if it turns out they have done something "wrong"
| earlier.
|
| If there is , I might considering applying at some point. I
| assume that if there are, the companies must be relatively
| small, or in case of larger companies this might happen in
| selected departments like Skunk Works.
|
| It would just be so refreshing to be able to hear and say the
| occasional "Hey, you know, actually there is a much
| better/nicer/less stupid/more efficient way to do what you
| are doing" without needing to waste time to think _how_ to
| say that.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| I'm now a manager at my company and engineers often ask
| directly for constructive feedback. Either from me (I'm a
| former tech lead from the same team) or they'll ask who can
| help them learn about specific topics. Feedback on the form
| you wrote would generally be well received by folks on my
| team (with the exception of "less stupid"). Either in
| person or on a code review.
|
| I'm at Yelp, so we're considered a large tech company, but
| far smaller than FAANG. Also, this is how it is on my team.
| The culture can vary a bit team by team however most teams
| share similar cultures. If folks reading this are at Yelp
| and their team isn't like this and considering leaving
| because of it, you should look into a transfer.
| scaryclam wrote:
| The company I work at has this culture. Feedback is valued
| greatly, not just at review time, but regularly. I've had
| people who report to me tell me that they think I was wrong
| or that they would like me to do things differently, and
| vice versa. The trick is to build trust and understand that
| when something's negative, it's from a place of care, not
| malice. We all want each other to grow, to get better and
| to keep being great in areas that don't need any work. It
| sounds cheesy, but it's true.
|
| Hands down the best company I've worked for and I hope that
| other companies can do the same. It is indeed refreshing to
| be able to hear/say "Hey, you know, actually there is a
| much better/nicer/less stupid/more efficient way to do what
| you are doing" and be sure that it's not going to be taken
| badly.
| GEBBL wrote:
| I am the OP and the way this normally works is that we
| would speak out if someone did something in the wrong way,
| for example a step in a process was forgotten. It's better
| to step in (ha) and help out and make the suggestion of how
| to fix it.
|
| But to write out constructive feedback which goes against
| your colleagues record, so that they have to show how they
| received this feedback and the steps they did to remedy it,
| seems a bit much.
|
| For example, how do I know that a certain piece of feedback
| might be really difficult/impossible for you to fix and
| then you lose out on a %age salary increase or promotion
| because of it?
|
| I can't write 'mr x could really work on coming to work
| earlier', as that's not my job. What if I write 'mr x.
| would have been better to use x pattern in his development
| because ...', as that would mean I have oversight of how
| they are doing their work and I haven't spoken up in time.
| Which seems crazy.
|
| If you are doing something wrong or something that can be
| improved, I would prefer to tell you point in time, and
| when the context is right.
|
| To leave 'constructive feedback' against your personal
| record removes a lot of context, and has the potential to
| damage your career and our relationship.
|
| I don't like it!
| benlumen wrote:
| While we're at it - when someone you manage does great work -
| tell _your_ manager.
|
| I do this out of professional decency, not social justice (angle
| of the article).
| mkagenius wrote:
| And they should tell their manager, word should reach the ceo.
| jarvelov wrote:
| Depends on the size of the organization. It is important for
| management to be aware of the achievements, and sometimes a
| CEO also has that role. Knowing who knows what and who did
| what is important regardless of your position, but especially
| in a management position.
| KitDuncan wrote:
| Just in general say thank you more often. It helps a lot with
| team morale.
| Nelson69 wrote:
| It's more than morale, it's just being a good human.
|
| If a promotion is coming down to how someone got thanked by a
| peer, if that's the differentiator like some of these poster
| are suggesting, then it's probably not a great place.
|
| Be a good human, thank people and express gratitude whenever
| they help you. Our culture has become so jaded in some many
| ways that it actually sort of disarms some folks. they will
| help you more in the future. When someone asks for help, help
| them, stretch to do it, it can be hard to ask for help so
| make it worth their while to take that risk. Give praise, it
| costs you nothing. It will pay dividends in the long run, big
| ones that you probably can't imagine yet. Being someone that
| people like to work with is huge...
| khalilravanna wrote:
| 100% agree. I will build on this by saying that it's almost
| as important to not go overboard such that you're "thank you"
| is meaningless. I had a coworker once who did this
| _constantly_ and it at least to me ended up coming off as
| disingenuous and kind of smarmy.
|
| One way to fight this is to push yourself to give TSP:
| Truthful Specific Positive feedback. Instead of saying "nice
| job", say "You did a nice job on that project by making sure
| to keep stakeholders informed. Especially when the API that
| was originally scoped got scrapped you made sure to loop
| people in early." The former tells them they did a "Nice job"
| which feels nice but doesn't tell them what they did right or
| how to do it well again. Anyone could say "Nice job" without
| knowing any part of what they contributed.
|
| The latter specifically highlights why you're saying it's a
| nice job. Now they can 1) take that information knowing they
| can have good results by repeating it and 2) feel better
| about the thanks/compliment knowing it's based on something
| they actually did, instead of a just a general pat on the
| back.
|
| Looping this back to the original post, the more specific
| your positive feedback is to the manager, the more they can
| do with it. If I went to my manager and said one of my
| reports deserves a promotion because "People said they were
| doing a 'Nice job'", I'd likely be laughed at. But if I go in
| with "So-and-so did a bang up on job on project X by doing A,
| B, and C", that's going to be a much more fruitful
| conversation.
| freehunter wrote:
| This is something I've struggled with over the years, ever
| since I started as an engineer. I want the problem solved and
| when it's solved we move on to the next one. No chit chat, no
| feelings, just get the work done. It really helped that at
| the beginning of my career I was on a brand new team and we
| were defining how to solve these problems. There was no one
| more senior or more knowledgeable to ask.
|
| As I became more senior and had junior employees working
| alongside me, I could see how quickly they would get
| frustrated when they couldn't perform at my level. They'd be
| stuck for days until they ask me for help, and I'd solve the
| problem in 5 minutes and for a couple of our new guys, that
| crushed them. Absolutely destroyed their morale.
|
| So I read a few books on emotional intelligence and social
| interactions and started explicitly saying when someone was
| doing something right, or calling out where they did their
| job well while fixing the place where they made a mistake.
| When someone helps me, I now say "thank you, I appreciate
| your help".
|
| It's night and day. Junior employees wanted to work with me
| before I did that because they want to learn from me, but now
| they actually _like_ working with me. I don't heap on praise
| and I don't give praise when it's not deserved, but when
| someone legitimately does something right or helps me (no
| matter how small), I actively tell them with words that I
| appreciate their help and that they did good work.
|
| It's the absolute least I can do but it makes a world of
| difference for people just starting out when a senior staff
| member compliments their work.
| OliverJones wrote:
| This article's top line is really good advice. But, with respect,
| the author is overthinking it just a little.
|
| When somebody helps me out, I say to their manager, "when you get
| a chance please tell them I'm grateful for their good work."
|
| Was it their distinguished expertise that made it possible for
| them to help me? Was it a spirit of collegiality? From my
| perspective, I don't care when I thank them. They did me a favor,
| I'm happy, I'm grateful.
|
| Give and Take is a book by Adam Grant on this part of the
| workplace. https://www.worldcat.org/title/give-and-take-the-
| revolutiona...
| splatcollision wrote:
| You should do this in general public situations where possible
| too: Got great service at a restaurant or store? Ask to talk to
| their manager. When their manager comes over, complement the
| person who was awesome!
|
| My wife does this regularly and it's always amazing to see
| people's faces drop at the first manager request, then shine when
| they realize what's going on :)
| tehlike wrote:
| I have made a good habit of sending a person's manager "xyz did a
| great job, in such such such way, and this had the impact of
| abc". I try not to do it often, mostly if i think someone has
| gone above and beyond. Also mention it to my manager if it's
| appropriate as people should be recognized - they also make good
| allys for future work.
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