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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

#101

Post by moab »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #80
moab wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my experience of Google, at least having worked there as an intern multiple times. All of the peer bonuses on our teams and affiliated teams have been for people going out of their way to help out with some project even if it was not part of their day-to-day work. I can only speak for the research-y side of Google, which in my experience seems to avoid most of these problems probably due to having managers that a…

It's true peer bonuses in particular seem to be mainly reponsibly used. Probably because there's $$ and an accounting chain attached to them. But just last week I watched the hard work of a coworker get completely bowled over by another manager's "congrats on amazing work" email chain to someone else who used the work of my coworker without recognition.

That's really unfortunate. I agree that the $$$ and accounting help make sure the system is not abused in the usual case. Unfortunately jerks are unavoidable, and even if the manager knew the true story they could ignore it to emphasize the contributions of their own reports.

It's hard to imagine a promo system that rewards hard work, where feedback comes from ones peers, and only promotes a fixed number of people where these kind of zero-sum issues don't appear.

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

#102

Post by codazoda »

parliament32 wrote: post #91
GEBBL wrote: post #72

I hate the fact that in my current role, I am expected to give my colleagues ‘constructive feedback’. It seems like a minefield , when I am trying to focus on my own role, that I have to negotiate the feelings of a colleague as I leave feedback on them. I’d prefer to leave only positive feedback, but what my boss wants is that I need to find an improvement that my colleague has to make. I don’t like it.

I've found PRP to be a godsend when you're expected to give "feedback". PRP is praise-reprimand-praise: so construct your comment where your negative feedback is sandwiched between two positive feedback items. People respond well to it.

It's not exactly PRP but I also like to give negative and then positive feedback. I asked some of my employee's about this, however, and some of them mentioned that receiving positive feedback after negative makes the positive feedback seem superficial. Different people prefer to receive feedback in different ways. It's more difficult but we should try to understand how people like to receive feedback (positive or negative) and provide that feedback in the way they prefer to receive it.

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

#104

Post by BurningFrog »

vidarh wrote: post #81
duxup wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ages ago when I did basic PC support we had a "attaboy" system. The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or anything, they showed up randomly. Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll of the dice you helped…

It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it. Personally I think it's risky to acknowledge these kind of things in front of a team for that reason unless it's better quantified. I've personally as well been in situations where I've been outright resentful because the recognition of someone I knew was…

> It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it.

This is why wages are secret. Everyone is convinced they deserve to be in the top half of earners.

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #42
ar_lan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have proven time and time again that we are very good at optimizing for specific metrics, and apparently generally very poor at choosing the right metrics to target. School is a prime example, in my opinion - there is so much I "learned" in school that I'll never remember, because I didn't take a proper approach to learning - I just optimized for grades. I had a 4.7 GPA and could hardly tell you a thing about…

If we don't have metrics, how are we to fairly and objectively compare one worker's performance to another?

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by gfody »

parliament32 wrote: post #91
GEBBL wrote: post #72

I hate the fact that in my current role, I am expected to give my colleagues ‘constructive feedback’. It seems like a minefield , when I am trying to focus on my own role, that I have to negotiate the feelings of a colleague as I leave feedback on them. I’d prefer to leave only positive feedback, but what my boss wants is that I need to find an improvement that my colleague has to make. I don’t like it.

I've found PRP to be a godsend when you're expected to give "feedback". PRP is praise-reprimand-praise: so construct your comment where your negative feedback is sandwiched between two positive feedback items. People respond well to it.

ah the shit sandwich, I trust you're joking ;)

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

#107

Post by jedberg »

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…

This is what I loved about working at Netflix. We didn't have performance reviews. It was assumed that your performance was good to excellent, otherwise you wouldn't be working there anymore. You had a constant feedback loop with your manager on performance, but nothing was ever formal.

Raises were completely divorced from any performance assessment. You were paid whatever they thought the max was for your skillset, based on a bunch of data they had on what people at other companies got paid for similar work.

What we did have was 360 reviews once a year. It was basically a small survey you could fill out about anyone in the company, which they and their manager would see. You could evaluate your boss, your VP, or people who worked for you, or anyone else you worked with anywhere in the company. It was expected that managers do a 360 review for all of their reports, but beyond that you could do as few or as many as you wanted to. It was basically a start/stop/continue kind of thing.

It was such a refreshing change from the stack ranking at eBay, which forced good people to get shitty reviews just so they could "fit the bell curve". And as you said, it incentivized you to not praise coworkers and some people even actively sabotaged their coworkers to get a better rank.

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

#108

Post by leetcrew »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #42
ar_lan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have proven time and time again that we are very good at optimizing for specific metrics, and apparently generally very poor at choosing the right metrics to target. School is a prime example, in my opinion - there is so much I "learned" in school that I'll never remember, because I didn't take a proper approach to learning - I just optimized for grades. I had a 4.7 GPA and could hardly tell you a thing about…

If we don't have metrics, how are we to fairly and objectively compare one worker's performance to another?

I mean, what if you just don't?

at my company, raises have more to do with the financial situation of the company than subjective reviews (although we do have these, they just don't factor into compensation that much). if the company is doing well, everyone gets a nice raise. everyone gets the same percentage bonus every year which is calculated based on the entire company's performance. maybe this makes us unattractive for very competitive people, but it leads to a very cooperative environment. senior devs don't really have anything to lose by spending a few hours helping newer people, so they just do it.

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

#109

Post by amatecha »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #92
ar_lan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have proven time and time again that we are very good at optimizing for specific metrics, and apparently generally very poor at choosing the right metrics to target. School is a prime example, in my opinion - there is so much I "learned" in school that I'll never remember, because I didn't take a proper approach to learning - I just optimized for grades. I had a 4.7 GPA and could hardly tell you a thing about…

One cannot overstate this and human capability to optimize for metrics ( and what is apparently rewarded ). Anecdote time. My former manager had an idea to measure the amount of average alerts per hour and tore into people, whose values fell below a certain treshold. What did people do? They stopped doing harder alerts whenever they could and did 'easy ones' to pump up their stats. I have seen it since and whenever I…

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".. I think this phrase all too often... haha

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

#110

Post by luckydata »

Whenever someone says something nice about my work I ask them “can I have that in writing?”. Then I go onto explaining that if they liked what I’ve done, by supporting me they can get more. It’s annoying that we have to do that in the workplace but it works.
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