6 ms·

Come on, it's yet another HR bullshit vehicle to suck away time and good-will. Any happy, healthy and productive working group with a manager and directs enjoy

Come on, it's yet another HR bullshit vehicle to suck away time and good-will. Any happy, healthy and productive working group with a manager and directs enjoys an environment where feedback is "realtime" and context sensitive. It has been this way since the dawn of modern workplaces. People got stuff done and companies flourished even without HR-driven company-wide "reviews". HR departments, unfortunately, aren't satisfied with the annual hoop-jumping exercise that everyone hates but finishes in haste to get it over with. The fashion now is to drag out this process over the whole year. Instead of you and your boss having to "prove" your worth once a year to HR, you now have to do it several times a year, tracked and nagged by a "realtime" system. Goldman Sachs isn't the only company doing this stuff, it's all over the place, sadly. For once, I would like to see large companies take a step back and reduce the burden of these stupid reviews, but it has only been getting worse and more annoying.

alexanderh 10y ago
Yea I hate this stuff... No longer is it good enough to work hard, you have to work hard, and then campaign for recognition for it... It should be the job of good management to recognize and foster tallent... but unfortunately, you have to be a good worker and a good politician on your own behalf to get ahead in a lot of corporate environments nowdays.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  > No longer is it good enough to work hard, you have to work hard, and then campaign for recognition for it... I find it interesting that people seem to think that there was a time when this wasn't the case. I think it is potentially true in a small-group setting. And by that, I mean that magic number around 150 people where you can have a fully-connected network. The moment you cross that mark, the network can no longer maintain full connection. That is the very same point when signaling worth becomes important. And humans have had organizations larger than 150 people for a very long time. I've posted before about "meritocracy" being a fairy tale that technical workers need to stop telling themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978841#10980628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978841#10980628 EDIT: Sorry, was off on Dunbar's number, which is 150. Though I think the constraints required for a desired organization without signaling are a bit heavier -- you need to not only maintain the social network, but also the value of each person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
  - kefka 10y ago
    Yeah, a fellow commentor posted here a few weeks ago the following: "An infernal situation. There is no solidarity in a meritocracy, and no reward for merit with solidarity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022296) The semantic and meaning packed in that is deep to the core of unions and the rights of an individual. Not only that, it also unpacks why a meritocracy is wanted when the individual is a genius. I'd think it's one of the best quotes of the year, thus far.
- venture_lol 10y ago
  Do you know why companies spend billions on marketing? And why there are a gazillions companies helping people market their brand, product, and services? Yeah, marketing matters. Take a look at any successful business and see how much they spend on marketing vs product development. Perhaps, personal career management ought to reflect that ratio.
  - crispyambulance 10y ago
    You're right about the value of marketing yourself and taking responsibility for your personal brand. People should take that seriously. Unfortunately, having an HR department mediate the experience for you in a shitty way on your behalf is not a very rewarding experience!
delibes 10y ago
You might like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-Backfire-Instead/dp/1576752003 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-B...
lefstathiou 10y ago
I respectfully disagree here. Having worked in the industry for many years (now at a startup) the review process was deeply flawed. Because it happened once a year and your bonus was tied to it people always erred on the side of providing 100% positive and thus superficial feedback. There wasn't a mechanism to know where you really stood and how you could get better. I'm not saying this is the solution in itself but the current low touch twice a year process which is minimally invasive is a disaster in my opinion. I think this solution has merit as it takes a page out of Ryan Dalio's Principles which is to shorten the feedback loop as quickly and as much as possible. What I think would be interesting is to see behaviorial benchmarks for employees that are auto tracked. I sat next to kids that always printed 5+ extra color copies of 100 page presentations just in case. That could cost the desk 20k over the course of the year. banks have no way of knowing if employees are going out of their way to be efficient, save costs, or be productive other than subjective year end measures. bottom line is as someone in the industry I think this is a positive step forward and wanted to throw that in the mix for consideration.
- AcerbicZero 10y ago
  I can respect your experience, and in fact it mirrors mine, in that any review process invented by HR inevitably becomes a broken, gamed system, with limited value. Where it seems we disagree is on the solution. I don't think adding an even more burdensome artificial review system will fix what is still the same review process, just sped up. They've missed the entire human aspect of how immediate feedback is used/interperted, i.e. how a manager can correct a poor attitude or a deficiency without turning it into an everlasting stigma. As much as HR would like to pretend otherwise, good management is a skill and requires some basic human interaction talent to do correctly. This will be another failed HR initiative within a year or two, at best. At worst, it'll turn into an episode of Black Mirror. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
  - user5994461 10y ago
    The solution is to game the system to advance your career. That's how it always worked.
chaostheory 10y ago
> another HR bullshit vehicle to suck away time and good-will One of HR's main functions is to protect the organization from lawsuits. That said, this can be seen as yet another 'quantifiable' way to rationalize promotions and even firings.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
AcerbicZero 10y ago
At this point I can't tell where the made up busy work HR invents to keep themselves employed starts and where the "real" work they're supposed to be doing begins. Enterprise HR has become a bloated cost center, which brings almost nothing to the table, except terrible ideas such as this one.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
flyinglizard 10y ago
HR, just like any other department, is under pressure to perform better. Given the axiom that you can not improve what you can not observe, they are under pressure to improve their quantifying methods. In itself, it's not bad, but unfortunately we're a very long way from having a meaningful quantification that measures the right things. Ideally, having a dashboard that can show the real, applicable performance of each employee would go a long way to improve the organizational personnel. People just don't want to consider themselves as a resources; they have feelings and emotions, desires and goals. But at the end, some employees are better than others and improving the quality of the workforce is a significant factor in improving the overall performance of a company.
- sjg007 10y ago
  How about hire smart people, trust them to do the job, and then leave them alone!
  - leggomylibro 10y ago
    That would mean fewer HR jobs to go around, presumably.
  - zzalpha 10y ago
    Because no one can possibly get better at their jobs? Everyone just wants to hide away and quietly keep doing what they were originally hired for? And feedback has no value in helping people improve? Seriously, I'm baffled by this attitude... yes, I love to hire smart people. And the smartest people? They realize they can learn stuff from other smart people, and that sometimes, those smart people are even their... gasp... managers. Worse, the really smart, driven people may even want to stretch or achieve career goals and don't want to just do the same thing forever! OMG! Frankly, it's the folks who don't understand this that worry me the most. I've worked with my fair share of talent that believes they're the absolute best at everything they do, no one can possibly teach them anything new, and we should all just leave them alone to achieve greatness in solitude. They're a nightmare.
    - 10y ago
sf_rob 10y ago
I do love the (potentially untrue) story about Apple managers trying to track progress by lines of code written: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin... Bit of a tangent but worth the short read
nihonde 10y ago
It sounds like the infamous Bridgewater hedge fund's tablet-based employee review app. You can be having a conversation with someone while they're casually rating your performance. To be honest, I'd actually like to get that kind of data about what people think of me.
mythrwy 10y ago
"Will to Power" I've seen more than a few HR departments that seemed to feel they should be running the whole company. And I haven't seen one capable of running a gumball machine.

alexanderh 10y ago

Yea I hate this stuff... No longer is it good enough to work hard, you have to work hard, and then campaign for recognition for it... It should be the job of good management to recognize and foster tallent... but unfortunately, you have to be a good worker and a good politician on your own behalf to get ahead in a lot of corporate environments nowdays.

jdmichal 10y ago
> No longer is it good enough to work hard, you have to work hard, and then campaign for recognition for it... I find it interesting that people seem to think that there was a time when this wasn't the case. I think it is potentially true in a small-group setting. And by that, I mean that magic number around 150 people where you can have a fully-connected network. The moment you cross that mark, the network can no longer maintain full connection. That is the very same point when signaling worth becomes important. And humans have had organizations larger than 150 people for a very long time. I've posted before about "meritocracy" being a fairy tale that technical workers need to stop telling themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978841#10980628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978841#10980628 EDIT: Sorry, was off on Dunbar's number, which is 150. Though I think the constraints required for a desired organization without signaling are a bit heavier -- you need to not only maintain the social network, but also the value of each person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
- kefka 10y ago
  Yeah, a fellow commentor posted here a few weeks ago the following: "An infernal situation. There is no solidarity in a meritocracy, and no reward for merit with solidarity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022296) The semantic and meaning packed in that is deep to the core of unions and the rights of an individual. Not only that, it also unpacks why a meritocracy is wanted when the individual is a genius. I'd think it's one of the best quotes of the year, thus far.
venture_lol 10y ago
Do you know why companies spend billions on marketing? And why there are a gazillions companies helping people market their brand, product, and services? Yeah, marketing matters. Take a look at any successful business and see how much they spend on marketing vs product development. Perhaps, personal career management ought to reflect that ratio.
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  You're right about the value of marketing yourself and taking responsibility for your personal brand. People should take that seriously. Unfortunately, having an HR department mediate the experience for you in a shitty way on your behalf is not a very rewarding experience!

delibes 10y ago

You might like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-Backfire-Instead/dp/1576752003 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-B...

lefstathiou 10y ago

I respectfully disagree here. Having worked in the industry for many years (now at a startup) the review process was deeply flawed. Because it happened once a year and your bonus was tied to it people always erred on the side of providing 100% positive and thus superficial feedback. There wasn't a mechanism to know where you really stood and how you could get better. I'm not saying this is the solution in itself but the current low touch twice a year process which is minimally invasive is a disaster in my opinion. I think this solution has merit as it takes a page out of Ryan Dalio's Principles which is to shorten the feedback loop as quickly and as much as possible. What I think would be interesting is to see behaviorial benchmarks for employees that are auto tracked. I sat next to kids that always printed 5+ extra color copies of 100 page presentations just in case. That could cost the desk 20k over the course of the year. banks have no way of knowing if employees are going out of their way to be efficient, save costs, or be productive other than subjective year end measures. bottom line is as someone in the industry I think this is a positive step forward and wanted to throw that in the mix for consideration.

AcerbicZero 10y ago
I can respect your experience, and in fact it mirrors mine, in that any review process invented by HR inevitably becomes a broken, gamed system, with limited value. Where it seems we disagree is on the solution. I don't think adding an even more burdensome artificial review system will fix what is still the same review process, just sped up. They've missed the entire human aspect of how immediate feedback is used/interperted, i.e. how a manager can correct a poor attitude or a deficiency without turning it into an everlasting stigma. As much as HR would like to pretend otherwise, good management is a skill and requires some basic human interaction talent to do correctly. This will be another failed HR initiative within a year or two, at best. At worst, it'll turn into an episode of Black Mirror. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
- user5994461 10y ago
  The solution is to game the system to advance your career. That's how it always worked.

chaostheory 10y ago

> another HR bullshit vehicle to suck away time and good-will One of HR's main functions is to protect the organization from lawsuits. That said, this can be seen as yet another 'quantifiable' way to rationalize promotions and even firings.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

AcerbicZero 10y ago

At this point I can't tell where the made up busy work HR invents to keep themselves employed starts and where the "real" work they're supposed to be doing begins. Enterprise HR has become a bloated cost center, which brings almost nothing to the table, except terrible ideas such as this one.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

flyinglizard 10y ago

HR, just like any other department, is under pressure to perform better. Given the axiom that you can not improve what you can not observe, they are under pressure to improve their quantifying methods. In itself, it's not bad, but unfortunately we're a very long way from having a meaningful quantification that measures the right things. Ideally, having a dashboard that can show the real, applicable performance of each employee would go a long way to improve the organizational personnel. People just don't want to consider themselves as a resources; they have feelings and emotions, desires and goals. But at the end, some employees are better than others and improving the quality of the workforce is a significant factor in improving the overall performance of a company.

sjg007 10y ago
How about hire smart people, trust them to do the job, and then leave them alone!
- leggomylibro 10y ago
  That would mean fewer HR jobs to go around, presumably.
- zzalpha 10y ago
  Because no one can possibly get better at their jobs? Everyone just wants to hide away and quietly keep doing what they were originally hired for? And feedback has no value in helping people improve? Seriously, I'm baffled by this attitude... yes, I love to hire smart people. And the smartest people? They realize they can learn stuff from other smart people, and that sometimes, those smart people are even their... gasp... managers. Worse, the really smart, driven people may even want to stretch or achieve career goals and don't want to just do the same thing forever! OMG! Frankly, it's the folks who don't understand this that worry me the most. I've worked with my fair share of talent that believes they're the absolute best at everything they do, no one can possibly teach them anything new, and we should all just leave them alone to achieve greatness in solitude. They're a nightmare.
  - 10y ago

sf_rob 10y ago

I do love the (potentially untrue) story about Apple managers trying to track progress by lines of code written: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin... Bit of a tangent but worth the short read

nihonde 10y ago

It sounds like the infamous Bridgewater hedge fund's tablet-based employee review app. You can be having a conversation with someone while they're casually rating your performance. To be honest, I'd actually like to get that kind of data about what people think of me.

mythrwy 10y ago

"Will to Power" I've seen more than a few HR departments that seemed to feel they should be running the whole company. And I haven't seen one capable of running a gumball machine.