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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

#211

Post by HarryHirsch »

jedberg wrote: post #201
HarryHirsch wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get let go, they ask in the exit interview if you were warned Why would anyone give any kind of useful information in the exit interview? The only one who benefits is the company, they need to cover their back in case a suit over harassment comes up. If anyone wants revenge over poor management, keep silent, let the fellow continue to lose the company money and set them up for a lawsuit. HR is not on your si…

That's a very cynical view. While the company may not be on your side, helping your coworkers by proving feedback about bad management is a good thing. Also, why would you want the company to fail? Just because they have one bad manager? My friends still work there, and if you have stock options, you even have a financial interest in the continued success of the company. I see no downside in providing truthful feedba…

The company only looks out for itself and will support you only when it benefits. It will never benefit from supporting an ex-employee that left on bad terms, and the ex-employee will never benefit either from supporting it. So why bother, there is no rational reason.

The bond to co-workers at a former workplace is strange and tenuous - actually it goes the other way around, they reach out to you when they want to improve their situation. Let them ask you when they want out, then offer a hand.

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

#212

Post by modernerd »

The company I work at uses https://www.15five.com/ for reviews and 1-on-1s. It has a “High Five” feature to recognise big or small things anyone in the company has done to help.

It's low friction and it works well. They hook it up to a Slack channel for a steady stream of positivity, and its read by senior execs and mentioned during reviews.

More companies should make this part of their company culture via tools that make it easy and common.

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

#213

Post by traskjd »

xvector wrote: post #145
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.

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.

I feel like it has to be this way. You can’t both want to be trusted and enjoy the benefits of that autonomy and then expect others to not have that trust an autonomy. In many ways it shows it’s properly baked into the culture and not just some nice sound bite to attract engineering talent.

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

#214

Post by jedberg »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #211
jedberg wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very cynical view. While the company may not be on your side, helping your coworkers by proving feedback about bad management is a good thing. Also, why would you want the company to fail? Just because they have one bad manager? My friends still work there, and if you have stock options, you even have a financial interest in the continued success of the company. I see no downside in providing truthful feedba…

The company only looks out for itself and will support you only when it benefits. It will never benefit from supporting an ex-employee that left on bad terms, and the ex-employee will never benefit either from supporting it. So why bother, there is no rational reason. The bond to co-workers at a former workplace is strange and tenuous - actually it goes the other way around, they reach out to you when they want to im…

> and the ex-employee will never benefit either from supporting it.

Like I said, even when you get fired, you still have stock options. So you do in fact benefit by helping the company when you're leaving.

> The bond to co-workers at a former workplace is strange and tenuous - actually it goes the other way around, they reach out to you when they want to improve their situation. Let them ask you when they want out, then offer a hand.

Why not offer them help when they don't ask, in the form of giving feedback to HR? Why do they need to ask? Why can't I be altruistic and help just because?

I'll say this -- you're entitled to your opinion, but I really hope I never work with or for someone who shares your outlook. And I especially hope I never manage someone with your outlook.

Whatever happened to "we're all in this together"?

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

#215

Post by _y5hn »

jodrellblank wrote: post #192
lkrubner wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do reliably know which of their co-workers are good and which of their co-workers suck badly. But also, the rule of 150 applies here. At a startup with less than 100 people, each worker often has an idea of everyone's strength, throughout the company. However, if you are at a big company, with thousands of employees in multiple locations, then it is often best to restrict upvoting to some subset of the company…

> " Because, if you believe people can not evaluate their co-workers, then you must disagree with the above article. " The article includes that there are times when you can't evaluate your coworkers and don't realise that you can't, when it says: " giving someone the wrong “level” of compliment. For example, if they’re a very senior engineer and you say something like “PERSON did SIMPLE_ROUTINE_TASK really well!” —…

Pitching employee against employee, it's been tried since 2000 .com burst. Whatever edge that gave some owners, been hollowed out already.

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

#217

Post by madskdc »

ravenstine wrote: post #20

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…

Many people, when done a favor, want to repay it. So when you praise a person to their boss, they're more likely to be on the lookout for opportunities to praise you in return.

Speaking from my own experience, I tend to be a quiet person who doesn't say much. However, since joining my current team, and having consistently received compliments from both managers and teammates (and seen the same getting passed around to others), it has lead me to make a point of looking for opportunities to do the same. It's become the norm to compliment others on their good work, and passing that up the chain and through official channels when the opportunity presents itself.

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

#218

Post by Uhhrrr »

giantg2 wrote: post #157
fbanon9876 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt similarly, earlier in my career. Until a manager explained it this way: "Suppose you make the greatest thing in the world, but nobody knows about it. Wouldn't it be better to have spent 95% of the effort on making a slightly inferior product, and 5% to actually get people to use it? Isn't it more impactful to make something people use? Well, in order to get people to use anything, you have to talk about it."

Thats a cop out by a lazy or self-centered manager. The difference is that it's the manager's job to evaluate you vs marketing a product to an unknown buyer. A good manager would actively work with their employees to know what is going on. Most managers I've seen care about their own performance and hitting target metrica. If you're not good a marketing a product, you should still spend 100% of your effort on making…

It depends. Over time, I've seen a lot of cases where other teams were duplicating effort, or product owners or project managers were making bad guesses about what was difficult, or impossible, or already done - and the reason was that they either didn't know what was being worked on or didn't understand the impact.

When your head is down in an interesting, thorny problem, it is easy to forget how those other folks are affected by your work, and it's easy to lose appreciation for the fact that their head is filled with a completely different information set. So it can be very useful to spend 5% of your time on this.

Or heck, just try 2.5% - one hour out of a standard work week. Personal anecdote: I wrote up a little thing about why customers would pick one video encoder over another, and marketing just did backflips and started asking my manager if I could write more things.

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

#219

Post by derefr »

xvector wrote: post #145
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.

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.

In this sort of setup, you'd expect there to be a chance of asshole managers; but you'd also expect that those asshole managers would be quickly fired by their non-asshole managers. Being stuck under an asshole would only happen if you were in reality stuck under a whole chain of assholes, leading all the way to the top. And if that was true, the company would be in the middle of imploding anyway.
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