Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 170 posts

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#111

Post by srtjstjsj »

edgefield0 wrote: post #99
vosper wrote: post #88

I've never worked anywhere that OKRs are actually taken seriously or followed through. They'll get rolled out with a big hype, people will fill them out with varying degrees of diligence and understanding of how OKRs are supposed to work. 3 months later they're already forgotten and out of date. Some managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because that's what they were told to do, but that'll peter out on…

I've had a similar experience with OKRs. The issue becomes how often to review and update? On the surface, OKRs seems like it would be a helpful tool but in practice it seems pretty cumbersome and only moderately useful to guide goal directed action.

OKRs are useful at the level of the company that has medium and long term goals, not merely keeping the lights on and reacting to short term emergencies.

An OKR is about a paragraph of text per quarter, hardly seems cumbersome.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#113

Post by srtjstjsj »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #56
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #39

It has been known for nearly 100 years that you can never criticize your staff. “I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of everybody.” ― Benjamin Franklin Last job, my last performance review. There was literally only 1 complaint against me. I was late >40 times. My boss told me he was disappointed in me. I was upset because I was never ever late to work; I was always early. I asked him to tell me w…

I hope you then worked out how much TOIL you where owned and pointed out to them the definition of salaried employment.

Salaried employment doesn't mean unscheduled.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#114

Post by Der_Einzige »

electricslpnsld wrote: post #44
cbanek wrote: post #24

It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues. Really I thi…

I wish I had that kind of insight into my ‘performance’ pre-review! I’m at a FAANG right now and given my interactions with my manager alone, I figured I was bombing performance-wise (constant complaints about my work, refuses to acknowledge any accomplishments, super angry at me during one on ones, assigns piles of work that ‘need’ to be done by Monday on Friday at 6pm and then doesn’t even acknowledge the completio…

Is this Amazon? It sounds like Amazon...

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#115

Post by stennie »

Merrill wrote: post #87
cbanek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As just a random internet person, please, let me agree that you need a new manager. Other than yourself, no person has more impact on your job, and if you're taking shit and dong well, you can do so much better. Also, never forget that your performance is 'capped' by your management chain. While others may see that you are amazing, the best they will be able to do is poach you to their team, but they can't override y…

I've heard that its your manager's manager that is important to your career. Your manager can't actually promote you, except by recommending you as their replacement if promoted or transferred. Your manager's manager can either promote you or work a deal with their peers to get you promoted. If your manager is keeping your performance results from being reflected upwards, you have a problem.

A promotion doesn't mean you have to take on the role of your manager, it generally means you have expanded (or new) responsibilities and expectations. For larger companies career progression broadly falls under either an individual contributor (IC) track or a leadership track. As an IC you can grow your career from Engineer to Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer without changing managers or teams, and there is a similar progression for leadership.

Becoming a manager because you think that is the only ladder to climb is definitely the wrong choice. I think a great manager is also a leader who takes an active interest in the motivation, growth, and outcomes of their team. If a management team worked the way you describe (manager's managers run the show and broker deals with their peers for micromanaged promotions), that would be an extremely dysfunctional environment.

In my experience it is always the direct manager who recommends someone for promotion rather than the next level up (although your manager's manager likely has final approval on budget). As a manager, I support and coach my team toward their career growth aspirations with regular performance & growth conversations. I also try to ensure my direct manager has visibility on the state of the team, but ultimately they are expected to be looking at a bigger picture and trust that I am taking care of my team.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#116

Post by Traubenfuchs »

At my previous company we had to pick goals that aligned with the goals of our role/level and the goals of the company. It was a shit show. Our partner in charge would reject goals until everyone was struck with goals that were very far putside everyones comfort zone. Everyone hated it.

As senior dev / senior consultant I had to pick goals like „prepare a pitch for a potential customer“, stretch goal „win a pitch“. I didn‘t want to do this. I don‘t care about sales. I want to design and develop systems for someone who wants me to do that, not convince someone to let me do it.

By now almost everyone quit.

Current company: I can work in peace. Bi-weekly 1:1 with my manager that is usually over rather quickly.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#117

Post by ggregoire »

vosper wrote: post #88

I've never worked anywhere that OKRs are actually taken seriously or followed through. They'll get rolled out with a big hype, people will fill them out with varying degrees of diligence and understanding of how OKRs are supposed to work. 3 months later they're already forgotten and out of date. Some managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because that's what they were told to do, but that'll peter out on…

> 3 months later they're already forgotten and out of date. Some managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because that's what they were told to do, but that'll peter out once they realise no-one else in the org is taking it seriously.

> 6 - 12 months later there'll be a half-hearted attempt to reset and resurrect the OKR process, but after the first time people take it even less seriously the second time around, and after a few more months OKRs are never mentioned again.

At GitLab (I don't work there but it's explained in their public handbook), OKRs are updated/redefined every quarter. Seems a good way to avoid the issues you are describing.

https://about.gitlab.com/company/okrs

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#118

Post by darcys22 »

sails wrote: post #45
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Slightly off center from your question, but: 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!)…

> Xero is hot garbage IMHO, but I've built some integrations Curious to understand more about these? I've been doing a bit of exploring in the analytics space here, and would love to know where you found the available apps falling short.

The financial cloud apps control your financial database and therefore your ability to perform analytics on them. Open source allows you to actually plug in and make dashboards.

It took me 20 mins to build a monthly revenue dashboard in metabase that updates live and you cant do that natively with Xero.

https://youtu.be/PeQR7GseFQI

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#119

Post by stennie »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #109
cbanek wrote: post #24

It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues. Really I thi…

This is sad, when I read it I think, "This person has never had an actual manager, just people faking it badly." That said, it isn't too unusual in my experience because people who are good engineers usually get told "you should go into management if you want to keep advancing" but they don't tell them "Oh, and this is a completely different job than you have been doing and none of your skills will apply, kthxbye!" F…

Great comment! My corollary would be that "Many managers have never had a great role model". In my first role as an engineering manager I thought it was the logical career progression and promotion from lead, but my preparation was more along the lines of "I've had managers, I can do what I think they do". I was very fortunate that my company at the time was supportive with follow-up training and building a peer group of newly minted managers, but it would have been more ideal to have some prior leadership & management training so I was more aware of the role and responsibilities I was signing up for. I think training provides helpful insight into intentional motions and being a competent manager, but it is hard to beat experience and learning from some great role models.

One secret I would tell any engineers considering management: "management is a career change, not a promotion". Charity Majors has some excellent blog posts on this, including the Engineer/Manager Pendulum: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum....

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#120

Post by user5994461 »

Merrill wrote: post #87
cbanek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As just a random internet person, please, let me agree that you need a new manager. Other than yourself, no person has more impact on your job, and if you're taking shit and dong well, you can do so much better. Also, never forget that your performance is 'capped' by your management chain. While others may see that you are amazing, the best they will be able to do is poach you to their team, but they can't override y…

I've heard that its your manager's manager that is important to your career. Your manager can't actually promote you, except by recommending you as their replacement if promoted or transferred. Your manager's manager can either promote you or work a deal with their peers to get you promoted. If your manager is keeping your performance results from being reflected upwards, you have a problem.

They're both important if you are in a large corp.

They both need to praise and recommend you in order for you to be promoted (your manager has more to do on that). A bad word from either will kill any prospect of promotion instantly.

They both need to carry their weight for the team and the department respectively. They put a ceiling on what your team and your department can do and can get (work, budget, opportunities). In a bad case there's simply no slot for promotion so you can't be promoted. In the worst case your team/department might get gutted.

Post reply on HN