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Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

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

#61

Post by nine_zeros »

tengbretson wrote: post #58
nine_zeros wrote: post #7

The whole "fitting on a curve" thing is so awful and so stupid, tech companies engaging in it should be ashamed. It's like asking to rank every player on a soccer team. Gotta get rid of the goalkeeper because we decided to stack rank every one on goals - disregarding that everyone plays a different role on the team and the team can only win together.

Look into "wins above replacement" value calculations. It can be done.

Aha, but a "wins above replacement" is a metric that can be calculated in the world of baseball where

1. Every player is guaranteed to bat. Baseball players are largely fungible, except the pitcher maybe. Soccer is not like that since different players play completely different roles. In fact, there are players in soccer whose entire mandate is to not attack (and thus not score goals)

2. Even if you find such a metric in soccer, both these games have the advantage that engineering doesn't have - a bounded set of rules. Engineering is too creative, too experimental, and relies on innovation and agility.

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

#62

Post by gnopgnip »

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…

If this was in CA, since 2022 non disclosure agreements that restrict employees from disclosing mistreatment in the workplace are illegal. This applies retroactively.

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

#63

Post by rramadass »

jupp0r wrote: post #39
rramadass wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't think that is true in the places I've worked at. Whether in interviews or in daily work, people only pretending to know things are not rewarded (unless nobody notices, but that means that nobody in the room is knowledgeable, which…

You have either been very lucky or have a very optimistic viewpoint :-)

These things are never overt (they get weeded out early) but subtle and one has to read between the lines (and take into consideration one's own biases) to correctly gauge someone else's depth. Enthusiasm should not be mistaken for Capability. The key for proper Management is to read Engineers correctly and provide Training (introductory or more) where they might be deficient/needed/based-on-company-domain without anybody asking for it explicitly. AFAIK nobody does this; you are supposed to be magically "productive" from day 1 and are expected to continue at a "high-level of productivity" independent of the stage of the project/product/your life problems/etc. which is an impossibility.

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

#64

Post by mango7283 »

cloche wrote: post #48
dasil003 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good analogy as professional sports is much easier to assess performance and also much much more ruthless in terms of being cut.

It's also not a good analogy because it compares across positions. Someone in marketing would not be compared against an engineer.

No this is on point. Managers often have multiple people on different roles but are still forced to stack rank them as if they are equally comparable. The analogy is sound and illustrates the problem.

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

#65

Post by josephg »

lmm wrote: post #49
WalterBright wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since everyone here knows how to do it better, start a company and crush those incompetent companies!

Saying it's being done badly is not the same as saying that one could do it better. Some things are hard to do, hard to incentivise, or both. And sometimes there really is a dollar bill lying in the street.

Some things also, weirdly, turn out to be unimportant. If you start a company with great project estimates internally but a mediocre product, you’ll fail. And if you make a great product but struggle to estimate feature costs internally, you’ll do fine.

It sure would be nice if we could all correctly estimate costs, but accurate estimates are clearly not essential for startups to crush it.

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

#66

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

It's really sad to see all these people have to learn the hard way that it was all BS.

This author had a great stunt many years ago, before he joined "Big Tech", where he set up a fake "startup company" website. Apparently he got lots of inquiries from easily duped people who thought it was real. These companies were BS back then and are still BS now. But lots more people have gotten duped. Many, many thousands. Easy money has blinded people from seeing the truth.

There are only so many people that a company actually needs to run a search engine with ads that generates ~85% of their revenue along with other stuff that generates the remaining ~15%. To believe they truly need 139,000 or whatever the headcount is/was, that's just fantasy land. But that's what "Big Tech" is, a fantasy, just like the system described in this blog post. It's incredible how many people bought into it.

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

#67

Post by josephg »

neilv wrote: post #40

> The promise of a more egalitarian performance management process is a part of the mythos of Big Tech; but it’s also a fascinating study of painting oneself into a corner, unable to walk back. What other Big Tech cultural policies haven't worked out, but they're stuck with? And are those mimicked by countless other companies?

Arguably whiteboard interviews - which spread like wildfire after Google and Microsoft started doing them.

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

#68

Post by mango7283 »

cloche wrote: post #48
dasil003 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good analogy as professional sports is much easier to assess performance and also much much more ruthless in terms of being cut.

It's also not a good analogy because it compares across positions. Someone in marketing would not be compared against an engineer.

Also, you do realise that then on the same team the engineers may not be doing 1-1 comparable work right?

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

#69

Post by cmrdporcupine »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #66

It's really sad to see all these people have to learn the hard way that it was all BS. This author had a great stunt many years ago, before he joined "Big Tech", where he set up a fake "startup company" website. Apparently he got lots of inquiries from easily duped people who thought it was real. These companies were BS back then and are still BS now. But lots more people have gotten duped. Many, many thousands. Easy…

Most of us didn't buy into it. We were bought by it.

A big paycheque and a comfortable workplace is a nice thing and hard to turn down.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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