Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company? • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by ChuckMcM » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:09 AM UTC

cbanek wrote: post #137

ChuckMcM wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's true that most of my managers have been terrible, which I think is honestly par for the course (statistically at least). I have had good managers, but for them, the performance review process actually tends to hamper them. A good manager who knows all the people under them are amazing and then has to stack rank them is going to make someone mad. Your manager only has so much power. Then it's their manager, and t…

I don't disagree, especially about "stack ranking" which is, I believe, ridiculous and I've pushed back hard on it whenever it was suggested.

That said, I think calling them "performance reviews" to be a disservice as well. (I prefer 'Focal Reviews'). I try to stress in reviews a write the ways in which I feel the person is making progress against their medium and long term goals, and where they are perhaps stuck.

In terms of promotion and pay however, we may disagree. I try to distinguish between someone improving as an engineer and someone doing a good job. It is a subtle difference but it is an important one to me.

Using the example of a fictional programmer, if they get their part of the projects done on time and their code is of high quality and reliable. Then I think they have done a great job and if I can I seek to give them a bonus of some sort to reward that.

If this same programmer gets their part of the project done, and helps others getting their stuff together, and perhaps refactors the project so that everyone has an easier time integrating and testing? Then they are a better engineer because they are acting as a force multiplier for the entire team. Those are the people I try to promote.

I'm not a big fan of raises for "time served" as one manager I knew put it, although I do believe you have to adjust to the market so if salaries are going up across the board you should reflect that in the pay of your engineers.

It is always my goal that annual focal reviews are not a 'surprise', rather they are a summary of the previous 12 months.

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

#142

Post by underwater » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 3:57 AM UTC

I'm surprised at the references to OKRs as a part of performance reviews. Yes, OKRs have elements of focusing and measuring progress, but they are also about encouraging people to be ambitious and communicating intent.

It's generally accepted that using them for performance reviews is a bad thing because it encourages people to be conservative and create hackable key results.

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

#143

Post by m0zg » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 4:06 AM UTC

srtjstjsj wrote: post #110

m0zg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop your manager in their tracks next 1:1 BAD idea with most managers. Your manager is likely to be vindictive and insecure if confronted like that. Even with peer reviews in place managers have disproportionate influence on your reviews, and promo/comp decisions (something you readily acknowledge). If the manager treats you with disdain, it's almost impossible to fully reverse that - it's just human nature, let a…

Yes. Suck up to the boss, then say you're interested in a new opportunity at Team X, or, sadly, you've accepted an offer to work somewhere else, or, you are quitting for personal reasons.

That's why I liked Google so much: you don't have to "suck up" to anybody. If things aren't working out, figure out what you'd like to do instead and 2 weeks later you're working on that, if they have spots on the team and would like your help. You may be asked to stay a bit longer, say 6 weeks, but the process is very non-confrontational. It's not like that for junior people, though - if you're junior you have to stay in your position for at least a year, which IMO is dumb - people who work there have no problems finding employment elsewhere. It should never be harder to move within the company than _outside_ the company.

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

#144

Post by statictype » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

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!)…

Are you the owner of the company?

I'm curious about how you effectively context-switch between sales and code reviews and marketing.

Do all of them report to you?

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

#145

Post by sriku » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 6:07 AM UTC

randycupertino wrote: post #131

jldugger wrote: post #129

Generally, it's a dumpster fire. In any rational world, execs would be basing their OKRs on something similar to https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundame... . Instead it's a trickle up process whereby people tell execs what they want to work on, then the execs group those into OKRs. Also the OKRs appear to only have one level, despite being an org with a thousand people. And finally, the system us…

> People fish for peer reviews that paint the rosiest picture. I found this happening when our firm used KPI metrics (key performance indicators). Whichever metric management emphasized, those would shoot way up via ... weird methods (all sorts of finagling, but not necessarily helping overall firm performance). Every time they optimized for some other lever it would have all sorts of unintended outcomes on other met…

Don't reward raw metrics. Goodhart's law is too real in this context.

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

#146

Post by funnybeam » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 6:46 AM UTC

egberts1 wrote: post #98

funnybeam wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good work. This is called management - performance reviews are a sop to try and make up for poor management but are utterly useless and often counter productive (there’s no better incentive to start job hunting than having to prepare for a performance review) Competent managers don’t need to do performance reviews and bad managers are not helped by them

Yet the corporate legal eagles will insist on documentation as to bolster their case of such dismissal, if any.

And that’s when you create a performance improvement plan.

If someone is underperforming then you take steps to try to understand why and help them to get to the level the company needs them to be at. Hopefully this works and everyone is happy but you need to be clear (to your employee and yourself) that ultimately this could end up in dismissal if it doesn’t work out. This is when you document everything and have regular meetings with the individual so everyone understands what is going on and if it ever becomes legal then you have everything you need to justify your decision.

Point is, you only need to do this if someone is underperforming so much that you’re thinking you need to dismiss them, and if someone’s performance is bad then you don’t wait for the annual (or quarterly or whatever) review before doing something about it - you deal with it straight away

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

#147

Post by funnybeam » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:16 AM UTC

jimnotgym wrote: post #94

HR people in the UK use 'performance management' as a euphemism for a kind of legal constructive dismissal. 1) Their attitude stinks but nothing specific that can be picked up in a disciplinary on its own 2) They have been in the job for a few years, and their old manager never recorded the behaviour problems 3) Their role is not redundant So to get them out you meet regularly, set short term goals, and be really pic…

As someone that has been in this position (manager in the UK) I have to agree and think you have summed it up perfectly.

However, it is occasionally successful and those (admittedly rare) occasions have been some of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

I also don’t think that what you have described is necessarily a bad thing. As long as the manager goes into it in good faith and genuinely tries to understand what the problems are and to help solve those problems then the process works well for everyone - either they improve and become a happy and productive employee or they leave (voluntarily or not) and can seek a position more suited to their skills or personality.

Most of the times I have been through this the person involved was perfectly capable of doing the job but they just didn’t want to for various reasons and putting them on an improvement plan helped them see this and they move on themselves before they were forced to

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

#148

Post by sharken » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:26 AM UTC

chris11 wrote: post #122

brtkdotse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, you’re in a company doing SAFe so you have plenty of opportunity to stare at a wall.

But companies doing SAFe can use developer velocity to help judge individual dev productivity. That can be surprising if you aren't aware of what story points are used for.

As someone who is again at a company doing SAFe, I am genuinely curious as to the relevance of story points.

For estimation, hours is a good measure, even more so when there are external consultants that get paid by the hour.

Developer velocity can be measured by tasks/features completed compared to the estimate.

Could you elaborate on why story points are useful or perhaps point to some resources on the topic ?

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

#149

Post by sharken » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:41 AM UTC

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…

Some excellent points on the challenges of a manager. I would think that managing the people side of things can be hard as well, unless its a matrix organization.

As an engineer I agree that "time spent in a role" does not say anything about the quality of an employee.

That combined with the mindset of someone who clocks in the hours, adds up to a person that can be hard to work with. At least if your own mindset is that you want to be good at what you are doing.

An example of that is a manual task that is holding the team back, but nobody is really pursuing how to get rid of that task or automating it.

Anyways, many good points and it definitely sounds like you are one of the great managers out there.

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

#150

Post by SergeAx » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:55 AM UTC

shajznnckfke wrote: post #135

nilkn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my slightly unusual take on performance management as a manager. If I'm doing my job well, reviews should mostly feel like a formality. They shouldn't take much time from me or from my reports. If I'm doing my job poorly, one signal of that is that a review takes a lot of effort. If a performance review takes a lot of my time or that of the report receiving the review, it suggests there's been some considerabl…

Some people just don’t like talking and/or writing about themselves. I find the process painful even if I know I’m doing great and I know that everyone else knows too.

And that is a clear direction sign towards being a better team member.