91–100 of 100 posts
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We use Slack
How do you use Slack to document online status? Does someone maintain a record of status timestamps? That sounds terribly degrading not to mention a bureaucratic nightmare. And it's very easily gamed. But most importantly, you should challenge the notion that time online is a good performance metric.
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Why is time online big (assuming more means better)? I do remote too and I would never consider that to be important as long as the work gets done.
My pet hate is folks working from home who can't be contacted in a timely manner during the working day. I've personally no issue with remote working, but if my colleagues do it, I expect to be able to reach them as easily as I might if I could just walk to their desk in the office.
The media have been very critical of Amazon's review process, partially fairly, but mostly not. At the end of every year, I picked 5-10 people I wanted feedback from- teammates, people I've worked closely with, or people I genuinely wanted to get opinions from. They'd each receive an email that I'd requested their feedback and I'd receive around 10 requests for feedback from everyone who asked for mine. The only mand…
Ctl-V from above: I know someone who works at Amazon just out of college.... out of 50 that started in June 17, they have 7 left... every week, people get rated and given a score out of 100%....every so often people are let go
Like, I want to believe you but if you're talking about normal everyday developers it would be more reasonable for me to believe you are making this up or misunderstanding something. It just sounds that weird to me.
I highly recommend checking out Bryan Cantrill's talk from Surge 2013 - Leadership Without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI
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There is a process, driven by actual reality rather than the (in my experience) highly artificial formal performance review process. fwiw when I worked as a manager in big companies, HR always told us that raises didn't depend on performance reviews...
So what is the process? That's the crux of this question.
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Ctl-V from above: I know someone who works at Amazon just out of college.... out of 50 that started in June 17, they have 7 left... every week, people get rated and given a score out of 100%....every so often people are let go
That's the craziest thing I have ever heard of. What role are they in? Is this some kind of paid interview process? Like, I want to believe you but if you're talking about normal everyday developers it would be more reasonable for me to believe you are making this up or misunderstanding something. It just sounds that weird to me.
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"one of my colleagues and friend was "forced" to quit the company because he scored really low on the jira burn rate metric" This sounds totally insane. I Cannot believe this happens in real world.
"[manager] didn't want to assume any blame for this" This happens depressingly often. "6 monts working on the equivalent of 2 weeks of estimation points" It's really the fault of the manager for not changing something after the first 3 weeks of this.
Sometimes it's tough to be that ass and say "hey, these weren't estimated properly PM!"...but if it's your job or theirs...
If you've performance reviews, then you also most likely have some kind of metric, and if you've a metric people will start to game it. A colleague of mine always said: you get what you measure.
Management at my company really likes to use jira estimation points as a metric, which is why I always argue for more points and occasionally snatch low hanging fruits (overestimated simple tasks). I'm aware it's stupid, which is why I always point it out, but nobody seems to care. I was the "most productive employee of the year" last year and while I didn't cheat by any definition of the word, it certainly did affec…
When I brought it up to various PMs and execs, I got the same answer - "that's the way it's supposed to work."
And they used these point counts and burndowns to analyze performance of each dev in comparison with the rest of the team as a whole!
So if you estimated 1 point for your story, but some other dev estimated 5 for their story, and they are essentially the same tasks just on different projects - that developer is 5x as productive as you are by their record.
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We use Slack
The flip-side seems to be that if you close Slack for a few hours of focussed work on something tricky, that's counted the same as spending the afternoon at the beach. Sure, communication is important, but there are relatively few things that can't wait half a day (and for those, there are alternative channels if you're not on Slack)
I've had a manager in the recent past try to call me out on it, even though I was always in contact within seconds/minutes..."yeah but Slack doesn't show you as online..."