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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm stupid. I give people the praise they deserve, even when it hurts me.
I'm stupid in this way, too.
Mine is ruined and this might have contributed a little. I'll never be more than an intermediate developer and I'm worried about being fired/laid off.
From my experience, especially in big companies (but not only) most of the feedback is negative. People are not sharing positive feedback, and when they contact your manager it's usually an escalation process. That's why it's so important to reach to people who support you or simply create a content you like (blog posts, webinars, etc) and say: "thanks, I found a lot of value here".
To my surprise when I first started doing this, the majority of them reply back with a genuine thanks.
This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster…
This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster…
It's something that on a casual basis no big deal. But once you ask folks to do it and there's any positive outcome ... it becomes a thing. I've been a part of similar systems and as soon as it is sort of institutionalized, it is a nightmare. It became office politics and groups of mutual admiration clubs, and frankly a lot of folks who maybe needed to up their game in the view of their bosses got in on these sort of…
Right, the incentive problem is especially hard here, because "compliments" and "praise" by definition involve unverified info, so it's really easy for the whole thing to devolve into a popularity contest, and you can only avoid this by discouraging it. OTOH it might still be possible to reward employees for praise of coworkers that involves some amount of verifiability. It's not that everything is going to be verified after-the-fact, but the possibility has to be real so that everyone's behavior is kept in line.
While I really like the sentiment, I think there's a reason why people naturally don't provide much positive feedback about individuals at workplaces. What do you really get by pointing out the good work of a coworker? A warm fuzzy feeling, to be sure. Maybe greater comradeship. But wait, who's the next person to get a promotion? Maybe it'll be the person you keep praising to management. So you'll probably have to wo…
I'm not the kind of person that gets promoted, for whatever reasons, so I've been moving up by moving sideways. It sucks, but it is what it is.
Lost in this is just the work ethic of doing incremental non-glamorous work and managers and people around you _doing their job_ by recognizing it. Many corporate perf processes, peer bonuses, and so on simply smudge this over, and they indirectly or directly encourage _fame seeking behaviour_ which is in my opinion the most corrosive thing to a company's long term performance and bottom line.
This is the biggest problem with stack ranking software engineers, the practice I had to endure while at a well known software company. All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else. I needed to make sure that my rank was as high as I could make it, which really sucked during performance time. It was very stressful, even though I was a high performer, because it didn't foster…
Humans have proven time and time again that we are very good at optimizing for specific metrics, and apparently generally very poor at choosing the right metrics to target. School is a prime example, in my opinion - there is so much I "learned" in school that I'll never remember, because I didn't take a proper approach to learning - I just optimized for grades. I had a 4.7 GPA and could hardly tell you a thing about…
Maybe it's Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
This should be a monthly census: it needs to be automatic. If you're the manager of a company and you are relying on people to say something about their co-workers, then you will miss most of the information that you could be capturing, and you will get highly biased impression of your workforce, because only a certain type of person will come forward to praise their co-worker. There are various voting systems that w…
Wouldn't co-worker upvotes lead to workers prioritizing their output for what attracts upvotes rather than what the company needs to get done? You'd get a team constantly making tools for each other and no sellable product.
It's almost a reflection of 'Golden Parachute CEO' behavior: There's an implicit benefit to making decisions that have 'good optics' at the moment even if it takes you down a road you'll regret.
Seen this a LOT with 'buy/build' decisions almost everywhere I've worked. The cost savings look great up front, but by the time you've added all your custom bits, you're hitting things like API limits (either in surface or billing) and having to shell out, or building so much boilerplate to get around the limits you may as well have built it yourself.
But hey, it saved X$ the first year, who cares if it costs more the next 5 to maintain?