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How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

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Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#61

Post by devonkim »

chrisseaton wrote: post #37
dreamsofdragons wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you set up the culture right, this isn't as big of a problem as you might think. On our team, it doesn't matter if you're the manager or not, the decisions for the product are made by consensus of the team. Sure management will still do approvals for time off and deal with the skinned knees and runny noses. But for day to day operations, it's peers working for a common cause.

Do you really work for a genuine co-operative where all decisions are made by consensus of the workers? I'd be surprised and interested to learn more if that's the case.

There's a Brazillian company (Semco) that's like this supposedly, but I have to wonder how they're doing today with so much of the company involved with energy.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#63

Post by zippergz »

wskinner wrote: post #8

"At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. " This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.

This is true, but not everyone wants decision making power. Some people want to be promoted simply for more money, or to feel a sense of progression. While there are flaws to this approach, it's nice to let people continue to get more compensation and recognition without forcing them into managing people and making broader decisions if that's not something they want to do or have a talent for.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#64

Post by lr4444lr »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #9
gmarx wrote: post #2

"Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order"...right there you are creating a selection bias for exactly the kind of people you claim not to want. No-fucking-body in his right mind orders things that way. You are filtering for liars who know which lies to tell. I consider myself very not into office politics and I'm confident a would fail massive…

We're not talking about life and limb stuff. Your professional responsibility should be in that order. You're being paid after all.

Yeah, but it gets into murky waters in jobs with no clear definition of work hours.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#65

Post by alexgartrell »

tibbe wrote: post #36

> "Managers focus on ..., creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals" Confusing management with leadership is one of the main reasons for politics and empire building. Once managers think they're in charge of figuring out the vision, instead of that being the whole team's responsibility, you're lost in top-down management land.

One thing we do is have ICs interview leadership/management candidates. This is a piece of signal we're always looking for.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#66

Post by Retra »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #9
gmarx wrote: post #2

"Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order"...right there you are creating a selection bias for exactly the kind of people you claim not to want. No-fucking-body in his right mind orders things that way. You are filtering for liars who know which lies to tell. I consider myself very not into office politics and I'm confident a would fail massive…

We're not talking about life and limb stuff. Your professional responsibility should be in that order. You're being paid after all.

Professional responsibility doesn't supersede social responsibility and personal responsibility.

I already have to make decisions and produce value. If a company is paying me, I will choose to be more tolerant of making such decisions as part of that company's processes and with consideration to that company's needs. However, payment does not obligate me to serve those things. At least, not morally.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#67

Post by bbcbasic »

yarou wrote: post #34

I wonder how useful an ELO system would be for evaluating performance. If one were in place, I don't think we'd really need managers at all. The system would supersede and replace managers. Your rating would be hidden as well.

That would be intensely political. Rally your mates to give you a good rating.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#68

Post by r00fus »

serge2k wrote: post #35

I generally like HBR articles, but it's very annoying to end up deleting HTML nodes because of their stupid menu bars and x articles left notice. Poor web design. anyway... > Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order. This just sounds so obnoxious to me. > At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel tr…

> I generally like HBR articles, but it's very annoying to end up deleting HTML nodes because of their stupid menu bars and x articles left notice.

Safari reader or Readability is your friend.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#69

Post by bbcbasic »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #51
m82labs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I need more detail to understand your position on this one. An employee that is working for their own personal benefit and gain only is not going to work well in most team settings and will likely not care to work on projects that move the company forward. I don't think they are saying you need to die for the company, simply that your work should be focused on the goals of the company. It's kind of what you g…

> An employee that is working for their own personal benefit and gain only is not going to work well in most team settings Well, that wasn't what GP said (specifically your "only"). What was stated was that company > team > self is not a natural ordering. And I agree. In particular, people will generally rank team > company. This is well-known to anyone who's studied small unit leadership, and has been well-known sin…

> The relationship between self, unit and company is much too complex for a linear ranking of their priorities to be useful in anything but vacuous statements.

Nicely put.

Re: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

#70

Post by trbvm2 »

qq66 wrote: post #39
dreamsofdragons wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you set up the culture right, this isn't as big of a problem as you might think. On our team, it doesn't matter if you're the manager or not, the decisions for the product are made by consensus of the team. Sure management will still do approvals for time off and deal with the skinned knees and runny noses. But for day to day operations, it's peers working for a common cause.

Product decisions can never be solely by consensus. At some point, barring massive groupthink, there will be a disagreement on some product decision (what color should this icon be?) but the icon will ultimately be assigned a color. There is some process by which that decision is made.

Usually A/B testing one would think
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