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I thought it was a great article, but how do you actually apply the "up or out" principle in the real world? The thing I have found is that in most work enviro
by illumin8 17y ago
I thought it was a great article, but how do you actually apply the "up or out" principle in the real world?
The thing I have found is that in most work environments the good engineers accomplish great things, get burned out, then leave, while the bad engineers become exceptionally good at playing political games. You know, the same engineers that have appalling work performance are the ones that are ass-kissing all day long, forming alliances, playing the office politics game like they are desperate to keep from getting voted off a reality TV show.
The sad thing is, it actually works in most companies. The really unqualified employees will never be let go, or even disciplined, because they are "friends" with the management.
I think this creates a low morale for everyone. In some companies, the really talented engineers just quit because they get too frustrated with the general lack of motivation and laziness of the "political" engineers, and either drop out or burn out, knowing full well that the "political" engineer will probably be promoted to become their superior, even though they are grossly incompetent at their present job.
How do you solve this problem?
- anonjon 17y agoI think that's the point about the culture of quitting. If you have a culture where employees are expected to move on after a few years, the people who are playing politics and trying to get entrenched for job security are really easy to pick out. (They've been there 10 years while the average stay is maybe 3 or 4). No amount of ass kissing will save you from being the weird guy who can't move on.
- count 17y agoOur company gives every employee a 'projected promotion date', from Day 1. If you don't meet your promotion date (and that is adjusted based on how the economy and the company as a whole are doing, etc. - it's not set in stone), then you are asked to leave. Plain and simple. Up, or Out. There is no settling into a role as a mediocre mid level manager - the only role you can settle into is that of partner (which requires $millions of dollars in sales and revenue per year, so you can't exactly slouch at that either). It works AMAZINGLY well at keeping/attracting awesome talent. I've yet to meet anybody 'below average' or really even 'average' from a motivation/kick ass perspective. The culture is refreshingly honest and progressive.
- asmosoinio 17y agoWhat is your company doing? Software? B2B? Something else entirely?
- count 17y agoConsulting (mostly management and strategy).
- dcx 17y agoAgreed - this is a very hard problem. "Out" works well as incompetence/slow progresss is very obvious. But as OP suggests "up" is more tricky due to its less objective nature. And worse, if you try to make it objective by quantifying achievements, at the management level this leads to horrible short term decision-making. The promotion cycle is generally a year or half year, so that's how long you have to show results. This method probably works very well for large scale, non-technical corporates because the aptitude to practice politics successfully would logically have strong correlations with other useful soft work skills (sales, negotiation, social skills). However in a highly technical company this might not be as effective. I wonder how Google does it?