Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

lcamtuf.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 135 posts

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#21

Post by rramadass »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #12

> " ...as well as a handful of unlucky folks who deliver solid results but lack social grace and self-promotion skills. " Ironic that what was once the character archetype for geeky programmers have now become pariahs in the industry they pioneered. Now we all toot our own horns as loudly as we can, hoping to drown out our fellows, in search of the next bonus or job hop and devil take the hindmost. Introverted, have…

The original archetype was a completely overblown caricature (based on some outliers) and wasn't true mostly. It was just an image pushed by the industry so that "Engineers" can be kept out of "Business Decision-Making" and thus Controlled/Managed easily.

But now as you say, self promotion is everything and has been taken so far that one cannot call oneself "A Programmer" but a "Rockstar/Ninja/10x/whatever Programmer" with superlative knowledge and insight into every problem domain and Technology. We all know our limitations but are not allowed to admit/work on them publicly since that might "out" oneself as "not good enough"; we have to become "posers/fakers" if we want to "play the game" and get ahead.

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#22

Post by mil22 »

seattle_spring wrote: post #5

Ugh spot on. I actually quite enjoyed the work I was doing at the Big Cos and Unicorns, and wouldn't mind doing it to this day. However, the culture that performance management wrought was so awful, it makes me not want to work in tech at all. The incentives they create are so perverse, it's sad how much they crush otherwise fun and innovative environments.

Small companies with better aligned incentives (equity incentives vs. bonus and promotion as the primary upside), indie work (and unrelatedly thereby also not giving away 80-90% of the value you create to the founders and VCs), or being a founder, is the answer, at least it was for me.

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#23

Post by supriyo-biswas »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #2

I'd guess a lot of people would have their own special stories to tell. However, do not underestimate the fact that some of these stories might not be easily disclosed. A "friend of mine", let's call it Bob, decided to leave one of the big tech companies (call it "A"), and join another big tech company (call it "B"), which offers him exactly double the salary. Due to a very unlucky combination, a former colleague at…

I know of a similar case, the employee in question had to go through a similar process of questioning and audits just because they switched from FAANG A to B and somehow their manager came to know about it.

After that incident, many members left the team for other companies; they’ve been careful to not update their LinkedIn page with the actual company that they’re working for. When asked, they often said that they were working for a small time firm, and declined to name which one it was. As for their manager, they often claimed that they were taking a career break or would be pursuing higher education.

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#25

Post by tjpnz »

Success is mostly a function of which project you get dumped in. Spend six months singlehandedly cleaning up a compliance disaster waiting to happen and get told that while it was appreciated it didn't have any impact. Spend six months on a successful project with several launches and get promoted. There's no appreciation for the dirty work, no wonder why so little of it gets done.

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#26

Post by neilv »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #2

I'd guess a lot of people would have their own special stories to tell. However, do not underestimate the fact that some of these stories might not be easily disclosed. A "friend of mine", let's call it Bob, decided to leave one of the big tech companies (call it "A"), and join another big tech company (call it "B"), which offers him exactly double the salary. Due to a very unlucky combination, a former colleague at…

That sounds awful. I'm guessing Bob had signed some kind of employment agreement that included a clause about not being involved in other employees leaving?

When I was trying to help draft a fair (startup) employment agreement document, I tried to ask HN about some of the clauses I'd seen (including one like might've bit Bob), but the post got zero traction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26016445

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#27

Post by waynesonfire »

neilv wrote: post #9

> doubly so in places that attract talent through the mythos of only hiring the best. Does any job-seeker think of that in recent years? I can't think of a company who only hires the best, and I don't very often anymore see companies trying to claim that. I suspect job-seekers are thinking about compensation, career advancement, and what they'd be working on.

> see companies trying to claim that

You're not paying attention. Did you see the Internet Brands return to home viral corp video they emberrassingly took down?

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#28

Post by mewziq »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #2

I'd guess a lot of people would have their own special stories to tell. However, do not underestimate the fact that some of these stories might not be easily disclosed. A "friend of mine", let's call it Bob, decided to leave one of the big tech companies (call it "A"), and join another big tech company (call it "B"), which offers him exactly double the salary. Due to a very unlucky combination, a former colleague at…

I took the Tim Leary approach.

I’m so happy I don’t have to deal with the crap Bob or Simone deals with.

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#29

Post by andromeduck »

I think root problem here is trying to estimate the net present value of work that may take several quarters to play out. This forces everyone to be fairly conservative in their estimates and generally results in institutional high time prefrence.

Idealy, comp would recognize and compensate the concrete/realized impact rather than expetcted impact but doing so would require that retroactive compensation be dependable implying either payout independent of present employmet status or long average tenures in lieu.

In this enviroment, having people reguarly & annonymously assess/attribute the extent to which their work was enabled/assisted by their peers would be more straight forward.

Re: Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

#30

Post by rramadass »

mil22 wrote: post #17
ergocoder wrote: post #8

> The problem is that every employee is judged by their ability to get work done That's mostly not true.

Agreed. The employee is rather judged by something like their peer's perception of how competent the employee is, their knowledge of the work the employee did, and their own belief of how important that work was, all filtered through their various cognitive biases about what work is important to the company and what a competent employee looks like. There are so many of these biases. As just one example, studies have…

I think the entire field/practice of "Performance Management" as it stands today needs to be thrown out and reinvented from ground-up by Behavioural Psychologists/Biologists on a proper scientific base. The current practice is basically ad-hoc management with some so-called scientific methods/metrics thrown in based on the current fad.

As an example; here is a long list of Cognitive Biases from wikipedia to ponder over - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Post reply on HN