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This form of argument always seemed disingenuous to me. After spending some time with a programmer, especially in a work environment, it's easy to get an overvi

This form of argument always seemed disingenuous to me. After spending some time with a programmer, especially in a work environment, it's easy to get an overview of how strong their skills are, and average would mean either the average of your employees or the average of similarly-positioned employees in general, neither of which is hard to have a handle on after being in the industry for a bit of time. Just because you can't with current technology write a program to give an output from 0 to 100 grading a metric doesn't mean that the metric is impossible or even difficult for a human to evaluate. Leave your metric at "a heuristic evaluation of the employee's overall effectiveness" and the only way to "game" it will be to be a better employee.

pbh101 10y ago
I think what you are suggesting is a classic recipe for office politics. It frequently can be more difficult for a supervisor to get an accurate assessment of a direct report's skill level than a peer, both because they have many other demands on their time and because employees know it is important to put best foot forward in interaction with their boss (or, more cynically, make themselves look better than their peers/competitors). If you leave your metric fuzzy, as you suggest, managers/whoever is doing the assessment will tend towards 'gut feel' and you will get people optimizing to be their boss's best friend or to be the one who makes life easiest for them, instead of optimizing for those who are doing the best job. It isn't always this bad: individuals in manager roles can mitigate this by doing their job well, but the system overall can tend that way.
harryf 10y ago
> After spending some time with a programmer, especially in a work environment, it's easy to get an overview of how strong their skills are If you're another programmer, yes perhaps. But I've seen weaker developers consistently claiming undue credit from management through superior social skills enough times to know that, even with the best evaluation system in the world, it's _always_ possible to game the system. More to the point, as the article points out, I've seen teams full of "stars" who's collective success depended on that weaker member that fixed all the bugs no one wanted to touch. Scoring that persons value directly would have missed their value entirely.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  In my dystopian nightmare, the employees rank each other to determine who's below average.
  - gumby 10y ago
    Welcome to the "360 degree review": https://www.qualtrics.com/qualtrics-360/360-degree-employee-assessments/ https://www.qualtrics.com/qualtrics-360/360-degree-employee-... I wish I had made it up to tweak your nightmare but it is reality at quite a few sucky companies.
- flukus 10y ago
  > If you're another programmer, yes perhaps. And even then, we can only really evaluate developers below and maybe slightly above our own skill level. And only if they're working in similar areas to us.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
swombat 10y ago
You implicitly assume such a measure is theoretically possible. Perhaps it is, but just asserting this as fact is not enough to make your argument valid. I believe that product development is creative, collaborative work and that there is no theoretical or practical way to design any sort of universal scale to rate individual contributions into it. Each team and problem combination is different. If I'm right with my belief your argument falls down. Not only that, but if I am right then what comes into play is team and collaboration dynamics, which rely on trust and safety far more than on individual brilliance. If so, any attempt to "get rid of the bottom half" will simply destroy collaboration and guarantee a dysfunctional product team.
dvtv75 10y ago
You have over-simplified the problem, apparently assuming that people will just do their jobs and not engage in a kind of guerrilla warfare intended to keep their jobs. Example: I once worked with a guy who knew he was an underperformer - he was also a manager, reporting directly to the CEO. He ensured his job for many years by sabotaging all of those around him, and then whispering sweet nothings into the CEO's ear about how he couldn't achieve the targets set because everybody else around him was incompetent. For example, he would sell something big as cheap as he could, so we would lose money on staffing while building the (not software) project, and in the last few days before it was to be delivered, he would come in with a major structural change that he knew about for weeks in advance, and it meant double-shifts with no extra pay for the workers. When the CEO came down on the business for not making a profit, he made sure that he was first in line, and complained about how we just weren't doing the job right, weren't working hard enough, all the usual kind of crap. He got caught because he once placed a few orders online, from a street address that didn't exist. It happened to be just a couple of doors from his house, so he would be pretty much the only person who would reasonably be expected to know about this. Nothing happened to him at all, and I was held responsible for not filling those orders, causing them to be cancelled. (I have absolutely no idea how this happened and nobody could explain it to me except for the CEO, who refused to on grounds that if I used my brains I could understand it.) The manager eventually resigned, incompetence widely known, and his replacement found his unlocked filing cabinet that contained a complete run-down on everyone, and what he could blame on them to get them fired if his position became untenable.
wanderer2323 10y ago
> After spending some time with a programmer, especially in a work environment, it's easy to get an overview of how strong their skills are if you are a significantly stronger programmer than they are AND 'some' time is 'alot' of time.
pjc50 10y ago
Come on, can we at least try to be scientific here on HN? You get an impression of someone's skills. Fine. Now, if I ask other people, do they give the same impression? How well are these impressions correlated with actual work output items? How do you measure intangibles like "contribution to team spirit"? How well are these impressions correlated with other forms of prejudice? How well do you rate someone with very different skills doing a different job? How do you even define "better employee"? Surely that's something thousands of pages of business books have been devoted to?

pbh101 10y ago

I think what you are suggesting is a classic recipe for office politics. It frequently can be more difficult for a supervisor to get an accurate assessment of a direct report's skill level than a peer, both because they have many other demands on their time and because employees know it is important to put best foot forward in interaction with their boss (or, more cynically, make themselves look better than their peers/competitors). If you leave your metric fuzzy, as you suggest, managers/whoever is doing the assessment will tend towards 'gut feel' and you will get people optimizing to be their boss's best friend or to be the one who makes life easiest for them, instead of optimizing for those who are doing the best job. It isn't always this bad: individuals in manager roles can mitigate this by doing their job well, but the system overall can tend that way.

harryf 10y ago

> After spending some time with a programmer, especially in a work environment, it's easy to get an overview of how strong their skills are If you're another programmer, yes perhaps. But I've seen weaker developers consistently claiming undue credit from management through superior social skills enough times to know that, even with the best evaluation system in the world, it's _always_ possible to game the system. More to the point, as the article points out, I've seen teams full of "stars" who's collective success depended on that weaker member that fixed all the bugs no one wanted to touch. Scoring that persons value directly would have missed their value entirely.

oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
In my dystopian nightmare, the employees rank each other to determine who's below average.
- gumby 10y ago
  Welcome to the "360 degree review": https://www.qualtrics.com/qualtrics-360/360-degree-employee-assessments/ https://www.qualtrics.com/qualtrics-360/360-degree-employee-... I wish I had made it up to tweak your nightmare but it is reality at quite a few sucky companies.
flukus 10y ago
> If you're another programmer, yes perhaps. And even then, we can only really evaluate developers below and maybe slightly above our own skill level. And only if they're working in similar areas to us.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

swombat 10y ago

You implicitly assume such a measure is theoretically possible. Perhaps it is, but just asserting this as fact is not enough to make your argument valid. I believe that product development is creative, collaborative work and that there is no theoretical or practical way to design any sort of universal scale to rate individual contributions into it. Each team and problem combination is different. If I'm right with my belief your argument falls down. Not only that, but if I am right then what comes into play is team and collaboration dynamics, which rely on trust and safety far more than on individual brilliance. If so, any attempt to "get rid of the bottom half" will simply destroy collaboration and guarantee a dysfunctional product team.

dvtv75 10y ago

You have over-simplified the problem, apparently assuming that people will just do their jobs and not engage in a kind of guerrilla warfare intended to keep their jobs. Example: I once worked with a guy who knew he was an underperformer - he was also a manager, reporting directly to the CEO. He ensured his job for many years by sabotaging all of those around him, and then whispering sweet nothings into the CEO's ear about how he couldn't achieve the targets set because everybody else around him was incompetent. For example, he would sell something big as cheap as he could, so we would lose money on staffing while building the (not software) project, and in the last few days before it was to be delivered, he would come in with a major structural change that he knew about for weeks in advance, and it meant double-shifts with no extra pay for the workers. When the CEO came down on the business for not making a profit, he made sure that he was first in line, and complained about how we just weren't doing the job right, weren't working hard enough, all the usual kind of crap. He got caught because he once placed a few orders online, from a street address that didn't exist. It happened to be just a couple of doors from his house, so he would be pretty much the only person who would reasonably be expected to know about this. Nothing happened to him at all, and I was held responsible for not filling those orders, causing them to be cancelled. (I have absolutely no idea how this happened and nobody could explain it to me except for the CEO, who refused to on grounds that if I used my brains I could understand it.) The manager eventually resigned, incompetence widely known, and his replacement found his unlocked filing cabinet that contained a complete run-down on everyone, and what he could blame on them to get them fired if his position became untenable.

wanderer2323 10y ago

> After spending some time with a programmer, especially in a work environment, it's easy to get an overview of how strong their skills are if you are a significantly stronger programmer than they are AND 'some' time is 'alot' of time.

pjc50 10y ago

Come on, can we at least try to be scientific here on HN? You get an impression of someone's skills. Fine. Now, if I ask other people, do they give the same impression? How well are these impressions correlated with actual work output items? How do you measure intangibles like "contribution to team spirit"? How well are these impressions correlated with other forms of prejudice? How well do you rate someone with very different skills doing a different job? How do you even define "better employee"? Surely that's something thousands of pages of business books have been devoted to?