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When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

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

#121

Post by OliverJones »

This article's top line is really good advice. But, with respect, the author is overthinking it just a little.

When somebody helps me out, I say to their manager, "when you get a chance please tell them I'm grateful for their good work."

Was it their distinguished expertise that made it possible for them to help me? Was it a spirit of collegiality? From my perspective, I don't care when I thank them. They did me a favor, I'm happy, I'm grateful.

Give and Take is a book by Adam Grant on this part of the workplace. https://www.worldcat.org/title/give-and-take-the-revolutiona...

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

#122

Post by jedberg »

Traster wrote: post #120
jedberg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I loved about working at Netflix. We didn't have performance reviews. It was assumed that your performance was good to excellent, otherwise you wouldn't be working there anymore. You had a constant feedback loop with your manager on performance, but nothing was ever formal. Raises were completely divorced from any performance assessment. You were paid whatever they thought the max was for your skillset,…

I think this culture is often the difference between a company that's in exponential growth mode - where you care more about velocity than costs. When a company becomes a stable giant, the engineering department is no longer necessarily creating value in the same way it was before and often slowly becomes bloated.

That may very well be true. It also only seems to work at companies without junior engineers. Junior engineers need more guidance and more feedback and a more hands on approach from their managers to guide career growth.

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

#123

Post by joshuamorton »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #117
moab wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really unfortunate. I agree that the $$$ and accounting help make sure the system is not abused in the usual case. Unfortunately jerks are unavoidable, and even if the manager knew the true story they could ignore it to emphasize the contributions of their own reports. It's hard to imagine a promo system that rewards hard work, where feedback comes from ones peers, and only promotes a fixed number of people wh…

Unfortunately I don't think it's a case of jerks vs not-jerks. Many years at a BigCorp has underlined to me now that the ethics and "professional economy" of working in one is entirely different than SmallCorp. SmallCorp you all work for the bottom line or company goes bust. That acts as a damper on empire builders who build for their own sake, though there is still that behavior. BigCorp it's unlikely your contribut…

This is so strange. I feel weird enough telling people to send me a gThanks when they ask what the best way to recognize me for something is, doing it unsolicited is just crazy.

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

#124

Post by TheSoftwareGuy »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #42
ar_lan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If we don't have metrics, how are we to fairly and objectively compare one worker's performance to another?

I've been thinking about this recently, what if we're doing it all wrong? what if, instead of your manager giving their reports a review, and then also giving raises based on that we go with a more market-based approach. Hear me out:

Every year, and once a year, all the managers in the company submit bids to the employees that they want to work under them. Employees then select their favorite bid, and that becomes their new manager. Employees are free to accept/reject bids based on any criteria: Salary/PTO/On-call requirements, etc.

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

#126

Post by giantg2 »

opportune wrote: post #100
giantg2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I’ve been told this several times when I’ve asked what I could do to get a higher rating or promotion. It always meant that there was some tenure element to the rankings. I think from the manager’s perspective they are being both honest and reassuring, but from the report’s perspective, it’s very frustrating knowing your progress is being limited, and hard work wasted, due to some bureaucratic limitation. And knowing…

At my company it wasn't a tenure thing, although I think that played an informal role as to why I was picked vs someone else. When a manager picks someone for the highest rating some departments require the manager to also pick someone as an FDN to "balance it out".

In this case I know the guy that got the high rating. As weird as it is to say, and even when the wound was fresh, I was/am happy for him and he deserved it. He's a nice guy and he had nothing to do with the rating I recieved. He's now a manager several levels up.

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

#127

Post by cpeterso »

yreg wrote: post #70
ar_lan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Planet Money had an episode on such metrics[0] The host shares a personal story from time when he was a cashier. The grocery chain measured performance as items scanned per minute and shared internal leaderboard. Some items are hard to scan so the cashiers ended up skipping scanning them – so the store gave them away for free. But the managers were happy about their KPIs. (Look how many items are we suddenly selling…

I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls, so workers started immediately hanging up on some calls to bring their average call duration down.

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

#128

Post by PopeDotNinja »

giantg2 wrote: post #71
castlecrasher2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wo…

Wanna go 50%/50% on a farm? We can be nerd neighbors.

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

jpadkins wrote: post #115
leetcrew wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, what if you just don't? at my company, raises have more to do with the financial situation of the company than subjective reviews (although we do have these, they just don't factor into compensation that much). if the company is doing well, everyone gets a nice raise. everyone gets the same percentage bonus every year which is calculated based on the entire company's performance. maybe this makes us unattract…

the theory is that high productivity people will not want to work there, as everyone else benefits from their excellence. If companies that retain these high productivity people perform better than companies that don't, evolutionary pressure will force these egalitarian companies out. I think this theory may be true in some fields like hedge funds or heavy sales performance based businesses. In software, I am not sur…

[deleted]

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

#130

Post by PopeDotNinja »

giantg2 wrote: post #77
t-writescode wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

What's an FDN rating?
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