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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

#351

Post by coldpie »

iamacyborg wrote: post #333
sobani wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With stack ranking a manager must rank the entire team from worst to best and fire / warn the lowest ranked person in the team. Imagine a team with the 10 best people you ever worked with. Now fire the least great of them. You must, because didn't you just say he/she is the worst of the team? Instead the Netflix process sounds a lot more fair. If everyone is awesome, no one needs to be fired.

I mean, they both sound like dystopian nightmare scenarios tbh.

Yeah. Threads like this whole discussion are why I never want to work for a "big" company. More than about 50 people and you start to get into this kind of managerial/competitive BS. No thanks, I'll take the lower (but still more than sufficient) pay of a small company over that any day.

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

#352

Post by thatoneuser »

slim wrote: post #323
RotANobot wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I heard about a call center that rewarded customer service agents for short calls Almost all call centres reward agents for short calls.

There's a target time. Something like 6 minutes. You can't just hang on customers

Of course you can hang up on customers. You just can't do it very often enough to get noticed.

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

#353

Post by jkinudsjknds »

sobani wrote: post #332
brianpan wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not stack ranking by firing instead of by formal review?

With stack ranking a manager must rank the entire team from worst to best and fire / warn the lowest ranked person in the team. Imagine a team with the 10 best people you ever worked with. Now fire the least great of them. You must, because didn't you just say he/she is the worst of the team? Instead the Netflix process sounds a lot more fair. If everyone is awesome, no one needs to be fired.

You don't NEED to fire the lowest ranking person in a stacked ranking system. It's not impossible to recognize the lowest of 10 is still pretty good. You could also just do this at a much larger scale. The lowest of 10 has a high chance of being decent. The lowest of 200 might actually crop up something interesting.

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

#354

Post by skocznymroczny »

wolco wrote: post #301
jedberg wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Netflix everyone gets an exit interview, no matter the reason for leaving.

How does it physically happen? Usually you are called into a meeting. Told your services are no longer required. Then you are given career resource support / paperwork with an offer and helped off the property. At what point is there a chance for an exit interview? After they first fire you, you are in shock.

The "helped off the property" part always surprises me as a non-American. In Poland, unless you get fired for disciplinary reason (which would be reserved for conscious infractions against the company, e.g. sending confidential data to a competitor), you still work for two months at the company. This is the time in which you can look for another job, pass over your tasks to your other coworkers, release all the accounts, make sure the data is backed up where it should be etc.

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

#355

Post by aidenn0 »

kingbirdy wrote: post #206
jedberg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't, but do you think at other companies people don't get fired for bad reasons?

Of course people get fired at other companies, but that's whataboutism - it's bad no matter where it happens.

It's not whataboutism when you are comparing two things. Jed is suggesting one company culture is superior to another. The fact that it doesn't solve a problem that the other also doesn't solve is non-sequitor in such a discussion.

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

#356

Post by bpyne »

She brought up an interesting point: asking your colleague if (s)he wants recognition.

Sending recognition is usually a decision made in the moment. Asking permission makes a process out of it. Having a process reduces your motivation to send recognition.

Her five reasons are spot on. But I'd like to add that people should understand their work environments and the politics involved. It's easier with small to small-medium sized organizations where you know all or most of the managers and their quirks and know the politics at work.

My environment is small-medium. Part of what we're judged on is helping colleagues. The managers are all onboard with it. When a colleague from the Unix admin team went out of his way to help my team I didn't hesitate to send his manager a message in praise of the effort. Getting a colleague in trouble for taking time out of assigned work is not an issue.

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

#357

Post by fatnoah »

fbanon9876 wrote: post #135
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…

I work at FB. Can't speak for other teams, but this does not match the culture I've seen in 3+ years. There is a tool to send thanks, but there are no expectations -- it's just a nice thing to see coworkers appreciate you. I've done reviews and never heard anyone mention the number of "thanks" their report has received. The PSC cycle (bi-annual review) is stressful, which I think is where the "craziness" stems. OTOH,…

>I work at FB. Can't speak for other teams, but this does not match the culture I've seen in 3+ years.

I'm an Eng Manager at FB and my experience matches fbanon9876's.

In the rating calibration sessions I've been a part of, stats come into play as a data point in the overall package and usually as factors IN SUPPORT of improving someone's rating. i.e. This higher level person wasn't really driving a lot of cross-function efforts, but man were they shipping code...and vice versa.

I'm over 20 years into my career and have been around the block a few times at companies large and small. Overall, I feel that FB's performance process is, by a massively wide margin, the most fair process I've been a part of.

Also, one of the reasons for high pressure at FB is that there is a serious financial incentive for top performance. We're talking 25%-300% multiplier to your bonus AND stock refresh. For those at levels where RSU is a big part of your compensation, that can literally mean a 6 figure bump for 4 years. Contrast that at other companies I've been at, where I've received top ratings that resulted in a pay increase of 4% instead of the standard 2% and an extra 1-5% on my annual bonus.

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

#358

Post by fatnoah »

azemetre wrote: post #309
fbanon9876 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at FB. Can't speak for other teams, but this does not match the culture I've seen in 3+ years. There is a tool to send thanks, but there are no expectations -- it's just a nice thing to see coworkers appreciate you. I've done reviews and never heard anyone mention the number of "thanks" their report has received. The PSC cycle (bi-annual review) is stressful, which I think is where the "craziness" stems. OTOH,…

How does FB handle people that are strict 9-5'ers? I read a lot of conflicting things on teamblind or glassdoor about a poor WLB. It's hard to tell if this was someone in their early 20s out of school struggling to work with a large company or someone mid 30s that burned out. If you just do your obligations does it look bad? I mean not everyone can be a top performer, especially if there is a curve. Some companies wi…

I'll back up what strulovich said. Every team is different, but most folks on my team are in the office from 9:30-6 or so. Some come in earlier, some come in later. I'm a parent and on a train commuting schedule, so my day is 7:45-5:15 or so.

You can get PIPed out at FB, but in my org it's very, very, rare. Out of 100 people, only a few people received a rating that was less than "Meets All Expectations" and none were in danger of a PIP.

Regardless, people are measured by the work they do and against expectations of their level. There is no "hours your butt is in a chair" requirement. The big caveat is that some teams are more hectic than others and quality of managers may vary.

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

#359

Post by akavel »

At a company I joined recently (WPEngine), there's an app called 15five deployed internally, where every 2 weeks we're encouraged to single out some coworkers with "high fives", thanking them for whatever we want. Those are then visible to us and our managers (and by default are also shared publicly in a special purpose chatroom). I am really impressed that this is systematically implemented and encouraged throughout the whole company!

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

#360

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bananaface wrote: post #346
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…

Do you find that this culture leads to bad code slipping through, because people aren't as direct about its flaws? I mean that on the macro and the micro level. Does it also lead to bad abstract ideas developing because nobody is willing to be critical, especially of broad approaches? I'm thinking along the lines of: "there are serious and fundamental flaws with the way you guys are approaching this."

Bad code doesn't tend to slip through at Google because the review process is pretty intense.

Bad design does, though, because it's easy to get lost in the weeds of incremental small code reviews.

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