Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm stupid. I give people the praise they deserve, even when it hurts me.
If praising others hurts your position you should find a new employer.
If only it were that easy for me...
When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
161–170 of 378 posts
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm stupid in this way, too.
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.
Why are you worried about being fired? If you are underpaid for your work, your manager is happy to have you.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#163While 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.
It's more than morale, it's just being a good human.
If a promotion is coming down to how someone got thanked by a peer, if that's the differentiator like some of these poster are suggesting, then it's probably not a great place.
Be a good human, thank people and express gratitude whenever they help you. Our culture has become so jaded in some many ways that it actually sort of disarms some folks. they will help you more in the future. When someone asks for help, help them, stretch to do it, it can be hard to ask for help so make it worth their while to take that risk. Give praise, it costs you nothing. It will pay dividends in the long run, big ones that you probably can't imagine yet. Being someone that people like to work with is huge...
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm stupid. I give people the praise they deserve, even when it hurts me.
You'll always have people across the industry who want you to go work with them :)
Thanks, but I'm turning into a miserable, no skills, scrooge so I don't think that will be the case much longer.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#165This 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…
> All it does is create a zero-sum game, so I have no incentive to compliment anyone else.
I think that's not quite right. You have incentive to compliment those who you would rather be working with, which hopefully correlates pretty well with those who deserve compliment. Of course, this is weighed against your other incentives, some of which are probably more important.
This comment should not be taken as any meaningful endorsement of stack ranking.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#166The flip side of this is, if you want to sink someone's career, badmouth them to their manager.
Having worked at many companies, I've observed how shockingly easy it is for a manager's assessment of their reports to be colored by "hearsay" whether good or bad.
I once had several members of another team who deeply disgreed with a product decision I'd made complain to my manager that I was being uncooperative, not a team player, etc. To avoid getting fired, I had to ask a bunch of members of various other teams to (honestly) tell my manager what a good job I was doing. Which worked -- according to him I'd really "turned things around" in the space of just a couple weeks (!). In the end it was 100% political, a bad manager who had no idea how to actually assess my work for what it was and so relied entirely on what he was "hearing", and I quit as soon as I could for a better job.
So yes, tell someone's manager when they're doing a great job. But it sucks that we have to rely on this stuff at all, rather than managers who can actually assess your work directly.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Start a new "congrats on amazing work" email chain to thank your coworker, and cc: their manager
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#168Earlier 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.
Why are you worried about being fired? If you are underpaid for your work, your manager is happy to have you.
I recently switched stacks and I'm not coming up to speed as fast as they would like.
I'm also becoming demoralized after being looked over or screwed over for about 4 years.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
ah the shit sandwich, I trust you're joking ;)
If you're having a bad time with PRP you're just trash at implementing it. PRP doesn't mean you should literally "Good job on X. You fucked up on Y. Also good job on Z." -- you still need to have some human interaction skills. But in general, your feedback (whether it's a conversation or an email or a comment on a PR) should follow the general guidelines for what order to present things in.
You raise an interesting point.
Your comment failed at PRP.
You showed how difficult giving criticism is.
Re: When your coworker does great work, tell their manager
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but in the specific case of Netflix, people are let go all the time , and managers have a lot of authority to make the decision to fire someone. Tenure doesn't matter, either -- you could work there for 6 years and end up getting fired when you get a new manager or the existing one decides you're phoning it in.
That's a massive amount of trust placed in managers. I've had asshole managers before that didn't have this much power thanks to company structure. Honestly I would never work at a place like this. Maybe it's lean and efficient for the company, but it definitely doesn't sound fun for the employee.
It's not as bad as it sounds. Yes, it certainly happens and it sucks for the good person that it happens to. But managers like that don't last very long.
When you get let go, they ask in the exit interview if you were warned, if your manager gave you any feedback leading up to it, etc. And then they follow up if the person says, "it was a total shock". I've definitely seen managers make some bad firing decisions, but they were let go soon afterwards. Word gets around quickly to their manager that they let go someone who was a strong contributor.