61–70 of 140 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know that they're a fantastic engineering company. I don't know what Google is great at - a few things, which feel like they're successful almost because they're treated as separate from the rest of the organization. OKRs are one of many parts of that, in my opinion.
Google engineering is fantastic and respectable. What gives the impression that it is anything else other than excellent?
Here, here!
OKRs are being rolled out at work, and there's a pretty clear managerial vacuum. You could call it the KRO: leadership makes a request that trickles down to line staff for projects and goals, then each layer of management tries to glue them into a coherent Objective.
Not very sure if OKR should replace the KPI in most of IT companies since OKR mostly aims at developers. I've experienced one company that request their employees to do OKR weekly and monthly. It actually helped a lot at the beginning coz everyone is curious and energized. But after a few weeks, indolence came out because someone forgot to submit the OKR. And other members also do the same thing. Pretty much of a "br…
Ops can totally have OKRs. Fewer incidents, faster resolution, faster deploy times, longer log retention, decreased AWS spend, the list of objectives I can think of off the top of my head is quite long.
Same for project managers: on time projects and reporting, better estimates, faster issue triage, more a/b experiments, more features launched.
OKRs done well are effectively a method of improving KPIs by recursively breaking work up into subtasks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know that they're a fantastic engineering company. I don't know what Google is great at - a few things, which feel like they're successful almost because they're treated as separate from the rest of the organization. OKRs are one of many parts of that, in my opinion.
Google engineering is fantastic and respectable. What gives the impression that it is anything else other than excellent?
Another is the frat boy hazing code review culture. Heck there are plenty of noogler’s first code review memegens floating around. It’s totally not bullying it’s just joking right?
I really ought to read an OKR book, because the telephone-game version I hear about seems problematic. For example, Austin's Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations [0] gives a helpful 3-party model for understanding how simplistic measurement-by-numbers goes awry. He starts with a Principal-Agent and then adds a Customer as the 3rd party; the net effect is that as a Principal becomes more and more energe…
I would argue the system is working as intended. Contrary to your assertions, you don't want employees spreading effort like peanut butter, you want to focus them on executing one or two things quickly and getting value out of that quickly. Instead of launching 12 features a year from now, I'd rather launch 1 feature a month.
> you cannot improve a process that you have not first measured and then stablised.
There is of course, a certain amount of reasoning under uncertainty involved. One of the lessons many folks learn from a/b testing and OKRs is just how hard it is to actually make a difference, and folks need practice calibrating.
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I don't know. I don't feel that I have to know to make the statement I made.
Curious to know from your point of view; which company is well organised and well-run?
But I have a very limited view, having lived in SF for a few years and just having insight into the companies I've seen. I bet there are loads of them that I'm just ignorant to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google engineering is fantastic and respectable. What gives the impression that it is anything else other than excellent?
Well here’s one example: https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/inde... . Another is the frat boy hazing code review culture. Heck there are plenty of noogler’s first code review memegens floating around. It’s totally not bullying it’s just joking right?
Not very sure if OKR should replace the KPI in most of IT companies since OKR mostly aims at developers. I've experienced one company that request their employees to do OKR weekly and monthly. It actually helped a lot at the beginning coz everyone is curious and energized. But after a few weeks, indolence came out because someone forgot to submit the OKR. And other members also do the same thing. Pretty much of a "br…
> OKR mostly aims at developers Ops can totally have OKRs. Fewer incidents, faster resolution, faster deploy times, longer log retention, decreased AWS spend, the list of objectives I can think of off the top of my head is quite long. Same for project managers: on time projects and reporting, better estimates, faster issue triage, more a/b experiments, more features launched. OKRs done well are effectively a method o…
Well, of course Ops can have OKRs as an HR evaluation method. KPI's shortcoming is obvious, most of the results need to have a quantified indicator which is not very appropriate for engineers' situations.
But it still can be used as a complementary of OKR to provide clear numbers or date time as a target.
I just guess that iterating the OKR every week and month is quite challenging. And most of the OKR stays unchanged even after months of iterations. HR and managers need to figure out the way to keep everyone update their OKR effectively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. I don't feel that I have to know to make the statement I made.
Your statement was the google was successful because of their starting position only, and that their bad management doesn't matter because they can't screw it up being in such a great position. I think the existence of other companies that were in similar starting positions, and then subsequently failed, would prove that you need more than just that starting position to succeed.
What allowed them to 'win' in that space decades ago? I don't know, nor do I feel the need to know in order to just much more recent history. It could have been organizational structures that either in a different time, or with a different group of people, or at a different scale, or whatever, were the key. Or something else. I have no comment on it.