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Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?

#31

Post by The_Colonel »

pawelduda wrote: post #16
The_Colonel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite easy to hide (provide plausible deniability for) low productivity if the person is smart about it. Complain about environment issues, broken CI builds, unexpected complexity etc., there was one meeting too, then put in the minimum amount of progress.

Complaining about all these is legit, I'd rather do it and get fired for "underperforming" than push through this shit and burn out. These sound like excuses but could be real issues that should be investigated because maybe it's rotten infrastructure that nobody cared about because it's "unproductive". Other devs can be affected too, apart from the person raising it because they lowered their expectations over time…

All of these are legit, and that's why they're great excuses. CI works most of the time, but sometimes has hiccups for whatever reason. Everybody gets hit by such issues from time to time, this particular dev is just reeeally unlucky and happens to catch those every other day. But nobody keeps the stats. People might get a hunch something is wrong, but what can you do with that?

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?

#32

Post by FirmwareBurner »

The_Colonel wrote: post #29
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how about subjective performance criteria? In a motivated and well performing team, everyone has a pretty good gut feeling on who's slacking off and pretending to work. Unless ... the whole team is full of slackers who want to collectively engage in theatrics and perpetuate that there's no such thing as objective performance metrics in order to not be exposed as slackers.

My experience in remote teams was that people have smaller awareness of other team members. There's less communication, which means you have less direct one-to-one communication, but you also learn less information indirectly about others from such conversations. > everyone has a pretty good gut feeling on who's slacking off and pretending to work I remember one such case where I had a gut feeling, but I didn't under…

Sure, but that's why you have scrum masters, product managers, product owners, etc. who routinely check up on progress, beyond the daily and push the buck down on items suffering delays. So at one point, the non technical people will ask the senior technical people "why wasn't task X been delivered, according to planning it should have been done by now".

So they have a senior dev look at the requirements of the task to check maybe the estimations was wrong or the way it was formulated was bad, and also have a look at what that developer in questioned has checked into Git and start asking questions on why the slow process.

You can bullshit the non technical people, but you can't really bullshit your peers/seniors for too long before they realize your underperforming, when they start looking into your work.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?

#33

Post by AlexITC »

notyourav wrote: post #12

Depends on your role. Assuming you are their direct supervisor, simply give more tasks. Slacking off is usually due to not enough to do. Follow the tasks at a high level, make sure he knows he’s being tracked. This has even the effect of increasing motivation, as most people value attention. If slack off means he’s not showing up at team meetings, constantly missing deadlines, low quality of work, etc.. just give fee…

My experience is the opposite, when people is unmotivated or not interested in the work, its unlikely for them to improve even if you give them enough chances.

I have the impression that people get in some kind of comfort zone when underperforming that's psychologically hard for them to improve until they move to another team/company.

So, you should catch these issues as soon as possible to let people know that this is not tolerated, in some way, this helps because people can take you more seriously.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?

#34

Post by toomuchtodo »

AlexITC wrote: post #33
notyourav wrote: post #12

Depends on your role. Assuming you are their direct supervisor, simply give more tasks. Slacking off is usually due to not enough to do. Follow the tasks at a high level, make sure he knows he’s being tracked. This has even the effect of increasing motivation, as most people value attention. If slack off means he’s not showing up at team meetings, constantly missing deadlines, low quality of work, etc.. just give fee…

My experience is the opposite, when people is unmotivated or not interested in the work, its unlikely for them to improve even if you give them enough chances. I have the impression that people get in some kind of comfort zone when underperforming that's psychologically hard for them to improve until they move to another team/company. So, you should catch these issues as soon as possible to let people know that this…

Could also be burnout.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?

#36

Post by tharkun__ »

The_Colonel wrote: post #30
tharkun__ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many of these there are fixes. I've had people try the env issue thing. I asked them to never try longer than 15 minutes to solve an env issue by themselves. Post on the public dev channel for help or ask me privately if they don't feel comfortable with it (it happens, that's OK). A lot of people just aren't good at troubleshooting env issues and I happen to be good at it even if I have never had that issue and I…

For sure, if you like to be a detective and expose the slacker, it is possible to do it. But more often I see people rather giving the benefit of the doubt.

As a peer that's totally OK.

As the manager/lead I have an obligation to figure out if someone is just having temporary trouble or if they're simply a slacker by nature or just not good at their job. If that is the case it is my duty to get them out. They can slack off somewhere else and drag other people down, not me and my team.

Both for the company (I couldn't really care less in most cases, since the company doesn't care about us either) and for the rest of the team (I could never stand managers that let obviously bad/slacking people continue working alongside the rest of us that do their job properly and the slackers still get the same raises and potentially even negotiated a better salary, as they're probably good talkers, but bad walkers). I care for actual walk. I do not care for cheap talk but it's the most common.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?

#37

Post by pawelduda »

The_Colonel wrote: post #31
pawelduda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining about all these is legit, I'd rather do it and get fired for "underperforming" than push through this shit and burn out. These sound like excuses but could be real issues that should be investigated because maybe it's rotten infrastructure that nobody cared about because it's "unproductive". Other devs can be affected too, apart from the person raising it because they lowered their expectations over time…

All of these are legit, and that's why they're great excuses. CI works most of the time, but sometimes has hiccups for whatever reason. Everybody gets hit by such issues from time to time, this particular dev is just reeeally unlucky and happens to catch those every other day. But nobody keeps the stats. People might get a hunch something is wrong, but what can you do with that?

Offer help with troubleshooting, hop on a call (maybe pair programming), ask what have they tried to solve the problem, etc, etc... If you assume someone is slacking because of common roadblocks, you're setting yourself up for trust issues. If you see they are indeed underperforming, you can take regular steps from there. If they straight up lie it'll be obvious at some point. No need to start with stance of distrust IMO

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?

#38

Post by pawelduda »

AlexITC wrote: post #33
notyourav wrote: post #12

Depends on your role. Assuming you are their direct supervisor, simply give more tasks. Slacking off is usually due to not enough to do. Follow the tasks at a high level, make sure he knows he’s being tracked. This has even the effect of increasing motivation, as most people value attention. If slack off means he’s not showing up at team meetings, constantly missing deadlines, low quality of work, etc.. just give fee…

My experience is the opposite, when people is unmotivated or not interested in the work, its unlikely for them to improve even if you give them enough chances. I have the impression that people get in some kind of comfort zone when underperforming that's psychologically hard for them to improve until they move to another team/company. So, you should catch these issues as soon as possible to let people know that this…

I think it could be just bad fit. Work looks good from outside but once someone is hired, they get disillusioned because it turns out they don't actually enjoy business domain or whatever else and find the job unfulfilling.
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