When your coworker does great work, tell their manager • Hacker News Board

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#71

Post by giantg2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

castlecrasher2 wrote: post #51

giantg2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's your career? Did this have an impact? 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.

>I'll never be more than an intermediate developer Do you mean this at your specific company? I felt the same way in my last company because there was definitely nowhere to go up, but I've since moved on and am in a more senior role.

I'm in my 30 with a family and find that I am much slower at learning new stacks now. I was a FileNet developer and then a Neoxam developer. There aren't many opportunities for me.

I'm also just tired of the bullshit and and mind games that management plays. My current plan is to gamble in the stock market and 'retire' whenever I can't take it anymore or get fired. I would love to retire to run a small farm and/or work a retail job like Lowes.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#72

Post by GEBBL » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

I hate the fact that in my current role, I am expected to give my colleagues ‘constructive feedback’.

It seems like a minefield , when I am trying to focus on my own role, that I have to negotiate the feelings of a colleague as I leave feedback on them. I’d prefer to leave only positive feedback, but what my boss wants is that I need to find an improvement that my colleague has to make. I don’t like it.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#73

Post by giantg2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

shahbaby wrote: post #45

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm stupid in this way, too.

I used to be this stupid too but then I learned that it's better to just play their game, win and then move on, no point in fighting it, just think of it as another part of the job.

I want to, but I find the lying and mind games to be morally offensive, especially when they can have such a large impact on a person's wellbeing.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#74

Post by KitDuncan » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

benlumen wrote: post #15

While we're at it - when someone you manage does great work - tell your manager. I do this out of professional decency, not social justice (angle of the article).

Just in general say thank you more often. It helps a lot with team morale.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#75

Post by mark-wagner » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #53

ping_pong wrote: post #17

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…

> well known software company named...? :-)

Until November 2013 Microsoft used stack ranking.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#76

Post by jabroni_salad » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

ping_pong wrote: post #17

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 is easy to see zero-sum as noncooperative but in reality there is more than one winner. In fact, the number of losers is relatively small. One thing you can do to ensure your own position is to find some people you like and trade feedback with them. Everyone not included in the deal will have less feedback and you will be slightly advantaged over them.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#77

Post by giantg2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #64

giantg2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's your career? Did this have an impact? 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.

Don’t believe that about yourself for a second. I regularly scored low marks at a previous company of mine; and, even during one review, I got a ‘you improved a lot! But your coworkers improved even more, so you’re getting a [low rank] again.’ I’ve since moved on to different positions at different companies and am doing plenty fine. I’m even the senior member on a new team I’m joining now. A few bad years or even ma…

I once had a manager give me an FDN rating and when I asked what I can do to improve she told me "just keep doing what you're doing".

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#78

Post by mdorazio » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

AceyMan wrote: post #8

I worked for the airlines (first career) and for public-facing employees it was a big deal if you got a 'good letter' from a customer. (It was equally suck if you happened to get a bad one...). We also could file 'thank you / attaboy' paperwork for our colleagues, both in our own department or ones we interacted with. Those were just as valuable (if not more) than ones from the customers. Over the years (11) during m…

This works for airlines because compliments for employees are unsolicited and customers mostly have to go out of their way to give them. As a result, if one is given you can be pretty sure it's both genuine and meaningful. As soon as you apply a metric to feedback, though, the effectiveness goes out the window. For example, I spent some time in the automotive customer experience world and car dealers routinely abuse the hell out of feedback systems by pressuring customers into providing positive scores and comments.

Similar things happen when you try to use feedback systems like this as a component of internal review processes - they tend to get gamed extremely quickly.

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#79

Post by lkrubner » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

T-hawk wrote: post #13

lkrubner wrote: post #3

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.

In terms of gaming the system, that is largely avoided by use of the Google PageRank algorithm, as I mentioned below. On a team of 100 you don't have to deal with the millions of spammers that exist on the Internet. On a team of 100, the Google PageRank algorithm works almost perfectly.

But as I also mentioned, any 360 tool should be just one tool that a manager uses, it should not replace all other tools.

I'm curious what you thought of the original article and its idea "When your coworker does great work, tell their manager". Are you opposed to that? If you are not opposed to that, then why would you be opposed to any other system of feedback, especially those that are formalized and structured?

Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

#80

Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

moab wrote: post #65

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #36

Google has a culture of internal peer bonuses and kudos, which in some ways is great and meant to help with this kind of thing... except that it also leads to an internal culture of "congrats!" and "thank you for your amazing work!" centi-threads which often overlook other contributors on a project, or are used strategically by overly political managers to boost their own reports and projects and gain corporate visib…

Not my experience of Google, at least having worked there as an intern multiple times. All of the peer bonuses on our teams and affiliated teams have been for people going out of their way to help out with some project even if it was not part of their day-to-day work. I can only speak for the research-y side of Google, which in my experience seems to avoid most of these problems probably due to having managers that a…

It's true peer bonuses in particular seem to be mainly reponsibly used. Probably because there's $$ and an accounting chain attached to them.

But just last week I watched the hard work of a coworker get completely bowled over by another manager's "congrats on amazing work" email chain to someone else who used the work of my coworker without recognition.