11 ms·

More frequent performance feedback is a good thing. Just don't think for a second that it changes the nature of the employer-employee relationship. The employe

More frequent performance feedback is a good thing. Just don't think for a second that it changes the nature of the employer-employee relationship. The employer wants: best work at the lowest price. The employee wants: to do best work (hopefully) at the highest price. That tension in price comes into play in all the big (hiring, raises, promotions, bonuses) moments of this relationship and the deck is mostly stacked against the employee. What's an employee to do? Get leverage. And when i say get, I mean earn it (because you work hard and smart and are killing it at work) and show it (be savvy). You need to track every instance of your good work, every demonstration of your value to the company. You need to know what form your performance feedback will take (quick meeting? annual review? panel?) and be ready with all the ammo/leverage/savvy/whatever you want to call it. You have to be able to show what you're worth, what the company loses by losing you (loss aversion works on your boss too) and all that.

SapphireSun 10y ago
That's small ball leverage. Real leverage is being irreplaceable so that if you leave they're screwed. Think of it like being a monopolist supplier. Competition depresses wages, so the way to be rich is to be a monopolist. Straight out of Peter Theil, though I don't think he'd like this version as much.
- gentleteblor 10y ago
  Being irreplaceable is only step 1 (see: "...killing at work"). Some companies probably don't know which employees are irreplaceable (lower level managers might, but that might not mean much [e.g. stack ranking environment]). Even worse, there are tons of employees that don't realize, track or display their value. It's not enough to be irreplaceable.
  - SapphireSun 10y ago
    If your managers don't know it, odds are you're probably not as irreplaceable as you think. Basically, it should be a very simple story to communicate: "I leave, this system goes down because XYZ. That costs you some highly uncertain or unbounded amount and could bring down the business." If they care about their business, they're paying attention. (Not to say you should be this blunt, but it should be the subtext.)
    - hibikir 10y ago
      I think that the "caring about their business" is the grandparent's point: There are a lot of bad low level and middle managers whose whole reason for being bad is either not caring or having no ability to measure employee contributions. I think of a job I quit a while ago: I was getting all the credit in the world, as I had been hired by the rare competent manager. The department had a non-public document rating each employee and contractor, and their idea of how likely they were to leave. I got to take a peek at it, and any technical employee could use it to easily identify the bad managers, if just because their team's scores were all wrong: Terrible, toxic employees being rated as great and at risk of fleeing because they behaved like Linus. Good people that were actively looking for other jobs seen as under average but with no risk of leaving... completely wrong. In the last 15 years I have seen plenty of good and bad developers, but, for the most part, there is little disagreements among the technical staff about each other's competence. If kept in a purely technical role, a bad employee can produce nothing. Bad managers, however, are often seen as successes by their own managers, and end up killing teams and companies.
    - gentleteblor 10y ago
      I'm not sure it's that simple, especially on large systems. I've seen several cases where an employee was responsible for only a small section of a huge system but was actually the only one who knew how the whole thing fit together. We (his co-workers) all knew it, we were asking him questions all day. Our manager had a vague idea he was good, but that was it. The system doesn't always reward the best performers...it doesn't even know who they are (that's why performance management is a multi-billion dollar industry).
      - lawpoop 10y ago
        > The system doesn't always reward the best performer Reading your comment, it brought back to mind: employee value isn't a linear scale, from "bad" to "good". What they contribute is complex.
        gentleteblor 10y ago
        Amen. If that isn't the truth, i don't know what is. To me, that complexity is what makes it difficult for the system to find and reward the right people. That's what make it easy for employee value to get lost in the numbers, in exhaustion, in time crunches and stack rankings.
- angersock 10y ago
  Any smart engineer or manager knows that the very first piece of a system you try to remove is the irreplaceable one, because that is the most dangerous piece when--not if!--it fails. If a place is so incompetent that they foster such people, they deserve to get taken for a ride.
  - SapphireSun 10y ago
    You're absolutely right. The trick is to get into a game where there are barriers to entry (e.g. hard to acquire knowledge, legal barriers, monetary barriers). It's almost like being an entrepreneur!
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  "Never make yourself indispensible. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted." -- Something I once read somewhere. I can't say I've followed its advice, but I also can't say I've observed it to be false.
  - dagw 10y ago
    Personally I don't want to be promoted. Promotions suck. Just keep feeding me hard technical problems and keep administrative and management responsibility as far away from me as possible and I'll be happy.
    - igf 10y ago
      Unfortunately the indispensible employee generally isn't the one getting fed hard technical problems, he's the one responsible for maintaining the complex, mission-critical thingy that only he understands and which seems to break down on a regular basis. I do not envy the indispensible employee.
      - Ntrails 10y ago
        It's a trade off. I got in at 9.30, left at 5, was overpaid and spent most of my day reading HN, doing side projects, or playing cool js games like that cat one. My only meaningful responsibility was to make sure we didn't break down too much or for too long, and that took a few hours a week. I think that for some people that would have been a trade off they'd be happy to make (and in many ways it was attractive), I think if I'd got on with the people I worked with I might still be there.
      - Terr_ 10y ago
        Also pity them if they want to fix the mission-critical thingy (after staring into the void for so long) but the business' "plan" is to quietly limp along forever.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Who wants to change job titles if instead they can just keep doing what they're good at for more money?
- vibrato 10y ago
  Real leverage is financial independence. No matter how badly they need your skillset, there is likely to be someone who can do the job. If an employee's best alternative is to do precisely whatever they want with their time, that is a more powerful position than anything they can provide to an employer.
  - SapphireSun 10y ago
    That's part of the answer, but if you're financially independent and chilling that won't get anyone to pay you anything more. It's the ability to walk away from a deal, but it's not the deal itself.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - gentleteblor 10y ago
      These are both great points, really. Financial independence is the dream. Until then, the deal matters.
benjamincburns 10y ago
[Edited for tone - first pass was written on my phone.] > You need to track every instance of your good work, every demonstration of your value to the company. You need to know what form your performance feedback will take (quick meeting? annual review? panel?) and be ready with all the ammo/leverage/savvy/whatever you want to call it. You have to be able to show what you're worth, what the company loses by losing you (loss aversion works on your boss too) and all that. While it's true that you should know why you are valuable to your company, I think following this advice thinking it will help you to get ahead would be a misstep. I've found since moving abroad that this attitude and the environment which cultivates it is one of the less healthy aspects of working for a US software company. I think anyone in a New Zealand software company who tracked their every achievement and bandied it about looking for their prize would be the least trusted person in the organisation. As an engineer-turned-manager myself, I can tell you that the best way to get promoted is to consistently deliver value and to help others to do the same. While in a formal performance review it's likely necessary as a matter of process to hold up past achievements, you'll do much better to focus on the future value you'll deliver. If you're feeling like your achievements are going unnoticed perhaps be a bit proactive and ask your manager if they might offer some advice on areas in which you could improve and how you might go about this improvement. Assuming they bite, follow their advice. That said, if you feel consistently undervalued you're either not good at consistently delivering value, or you work for a bad manager/company. If it is your own incompetence you likely won't recognise it if you are spending all of your time tracking what you perceive to be achievements.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Not safe to trust a manager to remember all you do. At annual review time I simply scan my email history, and make a list of project contributed to or consulted with. To remind said manager. Its so easy for the last thing you did to color your manager's view of your performance.
  - rubidium 10y ago
    Esp. if your manager is swamped with work. A good manager is practically begging for for good reasons to give you a raise if you're a high performer, but they need the ammo to convince HR/their manager.
tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
this works in theory, but in practice unless you go somewhere else or you have an exceptional boss willing to go to bat for you not much will change between being competent at your job and killing it. Your manager and, most important, his manager and the execs, won't know the difference if your code is world class or just average for your position, they are not doing your code reviews after all. If the lay of the land from high above is that in this company we have only X fellows, Y architects and Z distinguished, you can be the best developer in the world, but until one of those retires / leaves you won't get promoted. And if the lay of the land is stack ranking, you can be world class, but if your teammates are even more world class than you (or can play the politics game better) then you are going to be punished regardless of your effort. It's not that just because you get an outstanding performance review, or two, or three you will be promoted. You might get a salary/RSU bump (within the band of your position) or you might not (for reasons beyond your control the company might have decided to freeze salary increases for a year) I am sure companies where promotion from within and strong rewards for developers exist, but I don't think they are that common, when talking to peers it seems the only more or less guaranteed way to get promotions, recognition and significant salary bumps are to leave and go work somewhere else. It's also surprising how many companies will allow great engineers with 5-10 years of domain experience to leave with just a "ah, it's normal, attrition happens" without actually trying hard to keep them, but I guess they figure that if they reward one for staying, others will want rewards as well, and so it's easier to just not do anything (which is of course helped by the widespread notion that engineers are just replaceable cogs, so if one leaves you can just get another or hire 3-4 offshore replacements for the same amount) In the end it seems one should either try to work for a company where one enjoys what they do, and forget all about the career ladder, or one should think about moving around every 2-3 years and keep chasing the promotions / salary bumps instead, it feels like the time of working for a company where good work is rewarded is long past. I hope that the tone of this post is not too pessimistic, it's just that it feels that chasing the career ladder is a goal in its own right as opposed of a side effect of a career well spent: as you said the deck is stacked against the employee, and the only thing an employee has on their side is the threat to leave, you can't do anything else, unlike employers who have a lot of tools in their arsenal.
- Yhippa 10y ago

SapphireSun 10y ago

That's small ball leverage. Real leverage is being irreplaceable so that if you leave they're screwed. Think of it like being a monopolist supplier. Competition depresses wages, so the way to be rich is to be a monopolist. Straight out of Peter Theil, though I don't think he'd like this version as much.

gentleteblor 10y ago
Being irreplaceable is only step 1 (see: "...killing at work"). Some companies probably don't know which employees are irreplaceable (lower level managers might, but that might not mean much [e.g. stack ranking environment]). Even worse, there are tons of employees that don't realize, track or display their value. It's not enough to be irreplaceable.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  If your managers don't know it, odds are you're probably not as irreplaceable as you think. Basically, it should be a very simple story to communicate: "I leave, this system goes down because XYZ. That costs you some highly uncertain or unbounded amount and could bring down the business." If they care about their business, they're paying attention. (Not to say you should be this blunt, but it should be the subtext.)
  - hibikir 10y ago
    I think that the "caring about their business" is the grandparent's point: There are a lot of bad low level and middle managers whose whole reason for being bad is either not caring or having no ability to measure employee contributions. I think of a job I quit a while ago: I was getting all the credit in the world, as I had been hired by the rare competent manager. The department had a non-public document rating each employee and contractor, and their idea of how likely they were to leave. I got to take a peek at it, and any technical employee could use it to easily identify the bad managers, if just because their team's scores were all wrong: Terrible, toxic employees being rated as great and at risk of fleeing because they behaved like Linus. Good people that were actively looking for other jobs seen as under average but with no risk of leaving... completely wrong. In the last 15 years I have seen plenty of good and bad developers, but, for the most part, there is little disagreements among the technical staff about each other's competence. If kept in a purely technical role, a bad employee can produce nothing. Bad managers, however, are often seen as successes by their own managers, and end up killing teams and companies.
  - gentleteblor 10y ago
    I'm not sure it's that simple, especially on large systems. I've seen several cases where an employee was responsible for only a small section of a huge system but was actually the only one who knew how the whole thing fit together. We (his co-workers) all knew it, we were asking him questions all day. Our manager had a vague idea he was good, but that was it. The system doesn't always reward the best performers...it doesn't even know who they are (that's why performance management is a multi-billion dollar industry).
    - lawpoop 10y ago
      > The system doesn't always reward the best performer Reading your comment, it brought back to mind: employee value isn't a linear scale, from "bad" to "good". What they contribute is complex.
      - gentleteblor 10y ago
        Amen. If that isn't the truth, i don't know what is. To me, that complexity is what makes it difficult for the system to find and reward the right people. That's what make it easy for employee value to get lost in the numbers, in exhaustion, in time crunches and stack rankings.
angersock 10y ago
Any smart engineer or manager knows that the very first piece of a system you try to remove is the irreplaceable one, because that is the most dangerous piece when--not if!--it fails. If a place is so incompetent that they foster such people, they deserve to get taken for a ride.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  You're absolutely right. The trick is to get into a game where there are barriers to entry (e.g. hard to acquire knowledge, legal barriers, monetary barriers). It's almost like being an entrepreneur!
ScottBurson 10y ago
"Never make yourself indispensible. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted." -- Something I once read somewhere. I can't say I've followed its advice, but I also can't say I've observed it to be false.
- dagw 10y ago
  Personally I don't want to be promoted. Promotions suck. Just keep feeding me hard technical problems and keep administrative and management responsibility as far away from me as possible and I'll be happy.
  - igf 10y ago
    Unfortunately the indispensible employee generally isn't the one getting fed hard technical problems, he's the one responsible for maintaining the complex, mission-critical thingy that only he understands and which seems to break down on a regular basis. I do not envy the indispensible employee.
    - Ntrails 10y ago
      It's a trade off. I got in at 9.30, left at 5, was overpaid and spent most of my day reading HN, doing side projects, or playing cool js games like that cat one. My only meaningful responsibility was to make sure we didn't break down too much or for too long, and that took a few hours a week. I think that for some people that would have been a trade off they'd be happy to make (and in many ways it was attractive), I think if I'd got on with the people I worked with I might still be there.
    - Terr_ 10y ago
      Also pity them if they want to fix the mission-critical thingy (after staring into the void for so long) but the business' "plan" is to quietly limp along forever.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Who wants to change job titles if instead they can just keep doing what they're good at for more money?
vibrato 10y ago
Real leverage is financial independence. No matter how badly they need your skillset, there is likely to be someone who can do the job. If an employee's best alternative is to do precisely whatever they want with their time, that is a more powerful position than anything they can provide to an employer.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  That's part of the answer, but if you're financially independent and chilling that won't get anyone to pay you anything more. It's the ability to walk away from a deal, but it's not the deal itself.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - gentleteblor 10y ago
    These are both great points, really. Financial independence is the dream. Until then, the deal matters.

benjamincburns 10y ago

[Edited for tone - first pass was written on my phone.] > You need to track every instance of your good work, every demonstration of your value to the company. You need to know what form your performance feedback will take (quick meeting? annual review? panel?) and be ready with all the ammo/leverage/savvy/whatever you want to call it. You have to be able to show what you're worth, what the company loses by losing you (loss aversion works on your boss too) and all that. While it's true that you should know why you are valuable to your company, I think following this advice thinking it will help you to get ahead would be a misstep. I've found since moving abroad that this attitude and the environment which cultivates it is one of the less healthy aspects of working for a US software company. I think anyone in a New Zealand software company who tracked their every achievement and bandied it about looking for their prize would be the least trusted person in the organisation. As an engineer-turned-manager myself, I can tell you that the best way to get promoted is to consistently deliver value and to help others to do the same. While in a formal performance review it's likely necessary as a matter of process to hold up past achievements, you'll do much better to focus on the future value you'll deliver. If you're feeling like your achievements are going unnoticed perhaps be a bit proactive and ask your manager if they might offer some advice on areas in which you could improve and how you might go about this improvement. Assuming they bite, follow their advice. That said, if you feel consistently undervalued you're either not good at consistently delivering value, or you work for a bad manager/company. If it is your own incompetence you likely won't recognise it if you are spending all of your time tracking what you perceive to be achievements.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Not safe to trust a manager to remember all you do. At annual review time I simply scan my email history, and make a list of project contributed to or consulted with. To remind said manager. Its so easy for the last thing you did to color your manager's view of your performance.
- rubidium 10y ago
  Esp. if your manager is swamped with work. A good manager is practically begging for for good reasons to give you a raise if you're a high performer, but they need the ammo to convince HR/their manager.

tetraodonpuffer 10y ago

this works in theory, but in practice unless you go somewhere else or you have an exceptional boss willing to go to bat for you not much will change between being competent at your job and killing it. Your manager and, most important, his manager and the execs, won't know the difference if your code is world class or just average for your position, they are not doing your code reviews after all. If the lay of the land from high above is that in this company we have only X fellows, Y architects and Z distinguished, you can be the best developer in the world, but until one of those retires / leaves you won't get promoted. And if the lay of the land is stack ranking, you can be world class, but if your teammates are even more world class than you (or can play the politics game better) then you are going to be punished regardless of your effort. It's not that just because you get an outstanding performance review, or two, or three you will be promoted. You might get a salary/RSU bump (within the band of your position) or you might not (for reasons beyond your control the company might have decided to freeze salary increases for a year) I am sure companies where promotion from within and strong rewards for developers exist, but I don't think they are that common, when talking to peers it seems the only more or less guaranteed way to get promotions, recognition and significant salary bumps are to leave and go work somewhere else. It's also surprising how many companies will allow great engineers with 5-10 years of domain experience to leave with just a "ah, it's normal, attrition happens" without actually trying hard to keep them, but I guess they figure that if they reward one for staying, others will want rewards as well, and so it's easier to just not do anything (which is of course helped by the widespread notion that engineers are just replaceable cogs, so if one leaves you can just get another or hire 3-4 offshore replacements for the same amount) In the end it seems one should either try to work for a company where one enjoys what they do, and forget all about the career ladder, or one should think about moving around every 2-3 years and keep chasing the promotions / salary bumps instead, it feels like the time of working for a company where good work is rewarded is long past. I hope that the tone of this post is not too pessimistic, it's just that it feels that chasing the career ladder is a goal in its own right as opposed of a side effect of a career well spent: as you said the deck is stacked against the employee, and the only thing an employee has on their side is the threat to leave, you can't do anything else, unlike employers who have a lot of tools in their arsenal.

Yhippa 10y ago