When you have that meeting, let them know that there is an anonymous suggestion box in some public location and that you really, genuinely want to know what can be improved. They may not tell you to your face, but maybe if there was some anonymous way to handle suggestions, that might be more effective?
Ask HN: Critique my company
41–50 of 74 posts
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#42Just giving them a few weeks at the company before asking seems like a problem. After only a few weeks, they probably don't have enough experience to answer with anything other than their own biases.
For example: you call out your Google Docs tracking system as something that should be obvious. But that's probably not obvious after only a few weeks. Some companies (especially smaller companies) can get by totally fine with that, and if you've only been at a company for a few weeks, you don't know what kind of company you're at. If they tell you that your Google Docs tracking system is bad, they're probably just reacting to it being different than what they had before.
Anyone who responds with a long list of grievances after only a few weeks is probably the type of engineer that you _don't_ want on your team: it probably means that they're unwilling to evaluate problems and solutions within the current context.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#43One thing to note why you'd always have all these ideas and others don't is because you're a founder and they are programmers. It takes a certain level of conviction to voice your ideas. Not every programmer has that conviction.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestion_box
Yeah a large company I worked for used to have one of those apparently. They said they got rid of it because they got too many suggestions.
Anonymity is a double-edged sword, as anyone who's used the internet should know.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#45How much time are you giving them to prepare an answer? If a senior member of the company scheduled a meeting and then asked me on the spot what I would improve about the company I wouldn't be able to give any good ideas. If instead they sent me a note saying that in three days they would like to meet with me for twenty minutes, and that during this time they would like to hear my thoughts so far about working for th…
Agreed. Almost any meeting is more productive if an agenda goes out ahead of time giving participants a chance to prepare in advance of sitting down.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#46"There are even some pretty obvious flaws..."
List those on a piece of paper and have the new developer add one item.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#47How senior are your hires in terms of experience? And, if your hires range from new grads to developers with 10+ years of experience, do you notice any difference between the two cohorts in terms of how much feedback they'll give?
I'm a sample of one, but when I was 25, I would have tons of feedback after my first couple of weeks in a company. Much of it was bad as I hadn't been there long enough to know why things were as they were.
Now that I'm 40, it takes more time before I have any meaningful feedback. I'm more comfortable with what I don't know, so consequently, I'm more comfortable reserving judgement until I know a little more of why things are.
That said, I have a couple of ideas:
1.) Schedule the 'feedback' session more than a few weeks into their job.
2.) Give your new hires some time to prepare. I think it's best to assume that individual contributors feel uncomfortable with spontaneous, candid conversations until they prove otherwise.
3.) Have you considered trying an anonymous feedback system and comparing the results?
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#48Work on making people feel safe with the situation before asking for direct feedback.
A few examples of how this could be done:
Give them more than a few weeks to get comfortable with you and the company culture.
Give concrete examples of things that have improved due to employee feedback.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#49It's great that you set time aside to have a 1-to-1 with new hires but I personally think a few weeks is too soon to be asking new hires that particular question. Not to mention it also depends on personaility types; you may have an employee who is fairly comfortable answering that sort of question with complete honesty. But more often that not, you will find that they probably haven't had chance to get up-to-speed with their work environment or gain a thorough understanding of how the dev team operates.
You would probably get more benefit by asking questions that are more related to company culture, such as, how they're settling into the team, how they find the team morale/company culture, who in the team has provided them the most value so far. Those type of questions would hopefully help the new hire understand that you care about the culture at the company and also helps build a more personal relationship, which consequently will build trust between you and your employees to allow them to truthfully answer your initial question a few months later when they are more embedded into the team.
Definitely keep up the regular engagements with new hires though, despite not necessarily receiving the answers you're looking for.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my company
#50Your developers are smart - they don't want to shake the tree. They know that even though you say you want constructive criticism, there's a good chance you'll resent them for giving it to you, so they take the safe road. Ask the ones who leave, but wait 5 months until they're comfortably settled into new employment. You can bet they'll give it to you straight, but you might not like that either.
Yeah, one of the most important things to learn is that people do not mean what they say. Frequently, they don't realize they don't mean what they say. It takes a lot of work and a good grounding in psychology to start to get some useful introspection on even our own motives, let alone the motives of others.
It's easy to say "Yes, I want harsh criticism!" Indulge this a few times and see what happens. I have been fortunate to meet one or two people who mean it and roll with it. However, most people who say this will end up reacting violently anyway, thinking of some reason why that specific thing you said was out of bounds. Never trust someone to act reasonably based on their promise to do so.
The issue of "leadership blindness", where you get tuned out because everyone you around is so interested in pleasing you and never wants to give you adverse information, is serious and real. It's one of the most important things for a company's leader to circumvent, and sadly, not very many corporate leaders have the humility to do so.
I experienced this even when I was just barely up the ladder. As soon as one starts climbing up (that is, gets any subordinates), the dynamic instantly changes.
To OP: give up on asking directly. It's not going to help. Any information you get in direct reply will be useless or worse. Do not expect to get it straight. Assume that there's a bug in your employees' log function that is causing only INFO level messages to get logged even though you asked for DEBUG. You need to think of other ways to get the data you need to run and evaluate your company objectively, knowing that `log()` is never going to work.