Ask HN: How to Hold Someone Accountable? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to Hold Someone Accountable?

#11

Post by lostdog » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 4:25 AM UTC

If someone does not meet your expectations then you can fire them.

However, in my experience throwing around the word "accountable" is a clear sign of a bad leader. It's a way of shirking responsibility for the situation, and implying that the other person is failing in some basic moral way.

So hold your own damn self accountable. Take a beat to decide if your expectations are reasonable. Then tell him your expectations are that estimates are better and tasks get finished more quickly. Give him some time to try to achieve this, and if he won't or can't then fire him.

Re: Ask HN: How to Hold Someone Accountable?

#12

Post by adoga » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 5:51 AM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #8

It sounds like the main issue with this person is a lack of transparency, and lack of collaboration. If something is supposed to happen in 1-2 days, then after 1 day, there should be some signs of progress, like some specific questions/clarifications about the task, evidence that something is being run in a local environment, etc., and then after 2 days, it there should be a working PR, evidence that the code has bee…

Thank you for the reply, I think that this hit the nail on the head for what I've observed in myself and the other devs on the team, and what I've been struggling with with this particular dev.

I understand that a 1-2 day task can end up taking weeks or months (and is really the culture I'm trying to create were we don't burn people out on the realities of software development), but I need more transparency and collaboration in the process (which the other developers have been doing without explicitly being told to do so).

I think that, along with making my expectations of speed explicit and giving him time to adjust is what I need to do to move forward.

Thank you

Re: Ask HN: How to Hold Someone Accountable?

#13

Post by adoga » Fri, Jul 08, 2022, 5:52 AM UTC

lostdog wrote: post #11

If someone does not meet your expectations then you can fire them. However, in my experience throwing around the word "accountable" is a clear sign of a bad leader. It's a way of shirking responsibility for the situation, and implying that the other person is failing in some basic moral way. So hold your own damn self accountable. Take a beat to decide if your expectations are reasonable. Then tell him your expectati…

Thank you, I think that this, along with the below comment of needing daily transparency and collaboration is what I needed to hear

Re: Ask HN: How to Hold Someone Accountable?

#14

Post by fpdavis » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 1:17 AM UTC

I have had similar employees and sometimes they just aren't a good fit. But first, are you following all of the Scrum/Agile methodologies? Are you doing DAILY STAND UPS so the TEAM can help hold individuals accountable? Are you performing RETROSPECTIVES at the end of each SPRINT... you are doing short sprints right :) Is the team making the assignments (as they should) or are you? Also, get away from estimating in days and go with generic units, the Fibonacci Sequence would be my suggestion. Make sure the team is defining the tasks and voting on the effort required for each task. I would do this for a couple of months to let the team get into a flow and begin to learn how to estimate things. Then observer how your problem employee votes to see if they are particularly high or low and see how many tasks they complete compared to the rest of the team.

If after all of that there is still a problem, setup an End-of-Day meeting each day with the individual to go over what they accomplished that day... actually having them show you code, interface, documentation, something that they had accomplished that day. In collaboration with the employee setup reasonable expectations and goals that you (hopefully) can both agree on. If the goals are not met, write them up, rinse and repeat. After a couple of write ups suggest that they are not a good fit and should think about moving on, after three or so you should let them go.