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Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

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Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#51

Post by babesh »

pbecotte wrote: post #36
kelnos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone actually is operating at a high level -- or at least enough to make a curve difficult -- keeping people under-titled is just a great way to allow your high performers to become discouraged and leave the company.

Titles, in my mind, reflect duties and responsibility rather then level. Not everyone can be in charge of the same things and have leadership responsibilities...therefore they cant all be staff engineer. They CAN all be top performers at their responsibility list...

Salary isn't the only thing people covet. Titles and responsibilities are also coveted since they increase future earning potential. When people don't feel that they can get them, they leave.

Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#52

Post by analog31 »

zachrose wrote: post #14
anonymousJim12 wrote: post #6

Career ladders and 360 performance reviews? Deming would be disappointed...

I’ll bite, what did Deming say about this kind of thing?

Deming told a story of visiting a business and seeing a plaque on the wall honoring the "employee of the month." He asked how many employees the business had. The number was exactly 12.

Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#53

Post by wpietri »

mkobit wrote: post #47
emtel wrote: post #13

Formal performance reviews are the worst method for evaluating your workforce that has ever been tried, except for all the others. For me, performance reviews are the single most demoralizing aspect of working at a large company. They are doubly demoralizing because I can see so many things wrong with them, but also can't imagine any system that would work better. So what's wrong with them? 1. Over the long term, the…

I read about the culture of Valve a few years ago and it seemed interesting. What have you seen come out that changed your opinion?

I would love to hear more than rumor about it, but what I've heard suggested a lot of "tyranny of structurelessness" [1] problems. If the former power structures go away, then people fall back on informal tools, including charm, popularity, favor-trading, and abusive behavior, and a de facto power structure emerges. Since this doesn't really include mechanisms for accountability, it can devolve into lord-of-the-flies scenarios.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne... and https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#54

Post by wpietri »

geofft wrote: post #40
johnrob wrote: post #12

Fundamentally, are performance systems done objectively or "on a curve"? Meaning, if 100% of the engineers are operating at say Staff Engineer level, do they all end up with that title? Or does the Staff Engineer title really come down to some sort of percentile in a stack ranking?

For almost any company, if 100% of your engineers are senior, you're overpaying for talent (and probably burning out some talent, too) because not all the work that needs to be done is senior-level work. This is not the same thing as 100% of your engineers being good , by any means, so it's not quite a stack ranking problem. In particular you can solve it by hiring good junior people, as long as you're not overstaffe…

> not all the work that needs to be done is senior-level work

Personally, I'm very suspicious of this theory. Whenever I've worked with a team that's all pretty senior, we work to automate away the boring stuff.

Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#55

Post by wpietri »

pbecotte wrote: post #36
kelnos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone actually is operating at a high level -- or at least enough to make a curve difficult -- keeping people under-titled is just a great way to allow your high performers to become discouraged and leave the company.

Titles, in my mind, reflect duties and responsibility rather then level. Not everyone can be in charge of the same things and have leadership responsibilities...therefore they cant all be staff engineer. They CAN all be top performers at their responsibility list...

To me, "in charge" is a dominance relationship. It imposes artificial scarcity. Leadership and responsibility, on the other hand, aren't zero-sum quantities. I think one of the best things you can do with junior people is to find things for them to lead on as early as possible.

Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#56

Post by muro »

walshemj wrote: post #37
emtel wrote: post #13

Formal performance reviews are the worst method for evaluating your workforce that has ever been tried, except for all the others. For me, performance reviews are the single most demoralizing aspect of working at a large company. They are doubly demoralizing because I can see so many things wrong with them, but also can't imagine any system that would work better. So what's wrong with them? 1. Over the long term, the…

No all PMS systems are worse that say giving every one the same pay rise even a lottery would cause less disruption.

Lotteries were tried, they are the worst system possible.

Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#57

Post by SatvikBeri »

snarf21 wrote: post #19
emtel wrote: post #13

Formal performance reviews are the worst method for evaluating your workforce that has ever been tried, except for all the others. For me, performance reviews are the single most demoralizing aspect of working at a large company. They are doubly demoralizing because I can see so many things wrong with them, but also can't imagine any system that would work better. So what's wrong with them? 1. Over the long term, the…

I agree with what you are saying but I think performance reviews can be extremely valuable. The issue is that at all big companies they are used for promotions, raises and bonuses. They aren't designed to accurately measure or predict these things. To me, the right kind of review (and done every six months) is something that takes an employee only an hour and the same for the manager. Its only purpose is to set and r…

How do you decide promotions, raises, and bonuses then? I'd think of that as the main purpose of performance reviews.

Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#58

Post by geofft »

wpietri wrote: post #54
geofft wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For almost any company, if 100% of your engineers are senior, you're overpaying for talent (and probably burning out some talent, too) because not all the work that needs to be done is senior-level work. This is not the same thing as 100% of your engineers being good , by any means, so it's not quite a stack ranking problem. In particular you can solve it by hiring good junior people, as long as you're not overstaffe…

> not all the work that needs to be done is senior-level work Personally, I'm very suspicious of this theory. Whenever I've worked with a team that's all pretty senior, we work to automate away the boring stuff.

Is automating away all the boring stuff actually the highest net business value approach you can take?

It might be necessary to let people do it to retain senior people and keep their morale up, and I've certainly seen companies be successful by letting good people overengineer things simply because it lets them attract good people and have them around when they're needed, so if that's your strategy, go for it. But you might be better off having a person with market salary $X spend a week doing something they don't yet find boring (and will learn from so that they can become senior) than having a person with market salary $2X spend three days automating and writing tests for their automation.

And there are a lot of interesting real-world problems (as in would-produce-business-value problems) that can't be automated, like gracefully remediating a legacy system where each user was able to get their own weird requirements supported. In the process of getting all the users onto a system you can automate, you need actual human time to work with each user and understand what they need out of your API surface, and while having senior people available is necessary for the complicated cases, it's unlikely to be necessary for all of them (and again, the ones that senior folks would find boring are good opportunities for junior folks to gain experience).

Re: Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch

#59

Post by emtel »

mkobit wrote: post #47
emtel wrote: post #13

Formal performance reviews are the worst method for evaluating your workforce that has ever been tried, except for all the others. For me, performance reviews are the single most demoralizing aspect of working at a large company. They are doubly demoralizing because I can see so many things wrong with them, but also can't imagine any system that would work better. So what's wrong with them? 1. Over the long term, the…

I read about the culture of Valve a few years ago and it seemed interesting. What have you seen come out that changed your opinion?

The most recent report about this is https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless... - this is maybe only one step above rumor, but most of what I've heard through the grapevine matches this. Basically super cliquey and horrible unless you are one of the cool kids.
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