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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

#181

Post by cookienapper »

giantg2 wrote: post #67
humanlion87 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I am also stupid in another way - I can't boast of my "incredible" accomplishments by sending out huge and beautiful emails to prove my "impact". With that kind of combination, I am looking forward to stagnation at my current level.

That's me. I don't like visibility. I like to do a good job for the sake of the job without bragging.

The dilemma is this... "Ignorance is bliss" - You can't be worried/stressed about problems you don't know...

What if you're consistently doing good work but have zero visibility? Then years down the road, you notice a trend of people around you getting promotions/raises/bounses more often than you? The same people that slack off & lack integrity; to name a few. As a human being with emotions... can you honestly say you won't feel resentful in your moment of realization?

I am asking as someone who's been in that situation more times than I care to admit... I do good work for myself and for the sake of doing good work; I take pride in the work I do... but as most of it was never communicated, no one knew about it and just took it's results for granted; I was bypassed for raises, promotions, etc... Was it worth it? I can't give you a answer... it's a very conflicting place to be.

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

#182

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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?

Metrics don't mean it's fair it just means you're judging someone on a handful of numeric values rather than them as an individual. If you judged me on the metric of turning up on time I'd be doing appalling [0], yet I'm still one of the first people to be brought in on every critical project in the company.

Obviously metrics vs just manager instinct/observation will benefit and harm different people in different ways.

A combination would be better. But life isn't really fair or objective, end of the day I'd rather work with someone I like and can socialise with and know working with them is stress free (which means my work is better) and can be trusted to just do their thing even if their performance is lower than someone who's a pain to work with but maybe puts in more hours.

Making software is a combination of engineering + artistry, it's not flipping X burgers an hour, objective performance isn't important it's the contribution of the whole individual.

[0] : I did have a manager judge me on this before, all it meant was I'd stay up all night, go into work, sit there like a zombie doing close to nothing, go home then sleep. Doesn't matter if I was barely doing anything, by their bum on seat metric I was doing great.

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

#183

Post by C1sc0cat »

sleepydog wrote: post #131
Traster wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Even a first line manager can fire? are there no hr processes

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

#184

Post by jmchuster »

crazygringo wrote: post #166

The 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 te…

I would also add that it's important to always be communicating with your manager and building that trust. You need to make sure that their initial reaction to any negative hearsay should be that the other party is then in fact bad and uninformed.

Maybe it helps people to think of their manager/work as being analogous to a startup product? You build an awesome product, but then spend zero budget on sales and marketing, and are then super-sad that you're not magically growing up and to the right.

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

#185

Post by johnm »

jedberg wrote: post #170
xvector wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So then what was the behavior after the bad manager was let go? Did they actually reach out to those who were let go? The toxic effects of bad managers is way larger than ICs.

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

#186

Post by wittyreference »

tomca32 wrote: post #68
wittyreference wrote: post #56

In my medical training, I had precisely one patient reach out to hospital leadership to commend my care of them. It was really appreciated - I like to think that patients appreciate when they're treated kindly and well taken care of, but it seems that's taken for granted. I didn't so much care for the official recognition as just knowing that the patient was actually touched by the trouble and feeling I put into look…

Makes sense it's taken for granted since health care is expensive as hell so people expect the service to be good if they pay for it.

Thing is, two points:

1) You can pay for plenty of shit, but you can't pay for human feeling.

2) A tiny fraction of that money ends up in the pockets of people actually providing care - most of it ends up with pharma, device manufacturers, PBMs, and other middle-men. You can expect whatever great service you want for your money, but it doesn't work when that money isn't going to the people providing the service.

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

#187

Post by johnm »

jedberg wrote: post #170
xvector wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there mobility so people can leave bad managers and move to other teams easily (i.e., vote with their feet) rather than being stuck under bad managers and getting screwed this way?

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

#188

Post by remote_phone »

jedberg wrote: post #148
sleepydog wrote: post #131

Earlier 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.

I think the number of people that are let go is overexaggerated. But yes, it is easy to fire and hire . The two go hand in hand.

My coworker was a product manager at Netflix and she said in a 2 year period she saw at least 20 engineers get fired. That seems pretty high to me.

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

#189

Post by tannerbrockwell »

I have refused to perform 360's in the past.

They are usually semi-anonymous though and no one really noticed. I think that we should be careful of inculcating such a culture. It can support and enforce clique's at work. It also as a deliverable, leans fairly hard on your co-workers. Why should we build a system that essentially delivers pre-digested content for management?

tl;dr: "Overall: a lot of people (for very good reasons!) want to have control over the kind of feedback their manager hears about them." exactly!

It also could become a Vanity Metric, and this doesn't help anyone. [1]

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/

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

#190

Post by giantg2 »

cookienapper wrote: post #181
giantg2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's me. I don't like visibility. I like to do a good job for the sake of the job without bragging.

The dilemma is this... "Ignorance is bliss" - You can't be worried/stressed about problems you don't know... What if you're consistently doing good work but have zero visibility? Then years down the road, you notice a trend of people around you getting promotions/raises/bounses more often than you? The same people that slack off & lack integrity; to name a few. As a human being with emotions... can you honestly say y…

I'm definitely resentful and demoralized.
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