5 ms·

First step would be to find a good way to evaluate peoples performance. Progress at that front seems to be ... very slow.

by sgift 9y ago

danieltillett 9y ago
Measuring performance is not hard. What is hard is estimating future performance at the hiring stage. One area that could be worked on is dealing with “difficult” people. At the moment most managers are not really incentivised to hire for performance, but they are certainly incentivised at a personal level to hire people who do as they are told and don’t make waves. Most managers would prefer a 0.1x person who was pleasant to manage than a 10x person who made their life difficult.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Measuring performance is very hard. Some very productive employees are great until they leave for another opportunity. Then team productivity grinds to a halt because they never optimized for maintainability or learnability of their code and systems. You could blame the 10X dev. But it's fair to say that there isn't much talk about how to quantify those kinds of concerns.
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    Well if you have not managed for the consequences of your 10x employee leaving then you have not managed very well.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    > Measuring performance is very hard. Some very productive employees are great until they leave for another opportunity. Then team productivity grinds to a halt because they never optimized for maintainability or learnability of their code and systems. It's not that hard to see that your codebase is a mess. Even if you have no ability to judge the codebase and systems yourself, extreme case, spin that super-productive person up on an independent side project for a few weeks or months and see how the rest of the team grapples with things. There are a lot of parts of management that aren't hard, but are annoying and potentially unpleasant - if you realize this dev is much less valuable to the long term health of your systems than you thought, that could lead to difficult decisions and a tricky mentoring situation - so they get ignored because managers are either too lazy, "too nice," or just too oblivious.
  - bobfunk 9y ago
    Make sure your people take vacations once in a while?
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  > Measuring performance is not hard. It really depends on how you define "measuring performance". Any high-level manager can pick a set of garbage KPI's and pretend that they're measuring what really counts. And and many get away with that especially in large organizations. This is why performance review time is universally despised and viewed as a bullshit politics-laden activity. Measuring performance of humans is an intrinsically subjective process when you're dealing with knowledge work or anything more sophisticated than a brutal piece-work assembly line.
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    It depends if the manager is actually interested in measuring performance or if the whole exercise is just box ticking. There is nothing wrong with subjective measures provided what is being measured is performance and not something else. Assuming a manager is not totally clueless they are able to subjectively measure performance just as well as the rest of the team. Everyone on a team knows who is pulling their weight and who is being being pulled along. There are course edge cases where some people go unrecognised or other get the credit, but in the main most people know who is contributing and who is not. The real problem is that actual performance is rarely even subjectively measured.
  - fogetti 9y ago
    I completely agree. Also there is an obvious discrepancy between the knowledge of the manager and the knowledge of the team member. How can a manager evaluate another person's skills when he doesn't have the knowledge in the first place? It's a misguided preconception that managers are more skilled than their subordinates. I am still have to see happening this in real life. OTOH what I usually see happening is that managers assign more challenging tasks to specific people based on their prejudice and assumptions then they evaluate those very same people as top performers, while other team members don't even have the chance to perform well (because of the lack of tasks). :D
    - xtracto 9y ago
      > How can a manager evaluate another person's skills when he doesn't have the knowledge in the first place? As a Manager, I am not measuring your performance based on your skill, but on the tangible output of solutions that provide value to the business that you produce. Your skills and knowledge are your own tools that you can use to produce such output in less time or with better quality.
- matwood 9y ago
  > Measuring performance is not hard. Measuring performance is incredibly hard in a team environment. People are not machines or cogs, and many skills that make a great functioning team are soft in nature. > Most managers would prefer a 0.1x person who was pleasant to manage than a 10x person who made their life difficult. If the 10x person can't get along with their team or manager, then they are probably not a 10x person. Every day I'm surprised that people still thinking writing code is the hard part of software development. For most software development, writing code is the easy part.
rurban 9y ago
More important would be to find a good way to get rid of toxic workplace politics and middle management. Scrum was good as idea but backfired into even more micro management. Just look at the recent Google executives leaks. Most workplaces might be even worse. And please stop with all this "war" talk. We know that the US is at war with everyone. You cannot even go to a basketball or football game to be reminded of the constant war. But stop it.
noarchy 9y ago
It does seem that it hasn't gone beyond looking at "burndown", or "velocity", in many cases I've experienced.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
True, but it's fairly easy to identify people who aren't the "fashionable ideal". There is a chain shoe repair company in the UK that hires ex-prisoners, they give the impression it is altruistic but it seems to make good business sense to me.
amorphid 9y ago
In my opinion, it's not really possible for dissimilar jobs. You can measure performance moneyball-style in baseball because everyone is playing the same game. For jobs, that'd only work if everyone did the same job, and if the companies at which these people worked agreed to share data.

First step would be to find a good way to evaluate peoples performance. Progress at that front seems to be ... very slow.

by sgift 9y ago

First step would be to find a good way to evaluate peoples performance. Progress at that front seems to be ... very slow.

danieltillett 9y ago

Measuring performance is not hard. What is hard is estimating future performance at the hiring stage. One area that could be worked on is dealing with “difficult” people. At the moment most managers are not really incentivised to hire for performance, but they are certainly incentivised at a personal level to hire people who do as they are told and don’t make waves. Most managers would prefer a 0.1x person who was pleasant to manage than a 10x person who made their life difficult.

humanrebar 9y ago
Measuring performance is very hard. Some very productive employees are great until they leave for another opportunity. Then team productivity grinds to a halt because they never optimized for maintainability or learnability of their code and systems. You could blame the 10X dev. But it's fair to say that there isn't much talk about how to quantify those kinds of concerns.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Well if you have not managed for the consequences of your 10x employee leaving then you have not managed very well.
- majormajor 9y ago
  > Measuring performance is very hard. Some very productive employees are great until they leave for another opportunity. Then team productivity grinds to a halt because they never optimized for maintainability or learnability of their code and systems. It's not that hard to see that your codebase is a mess. Even if you have no ability to judge the codebase and systems yourself, extreme case, spin that super-productive person up on an independent side project for a few weeks or months and see how the rest of the team grapples with things. There are a lot of parts of management that aren't hard, but are annoying and potentially unpleasant - if you realize this dev is much less valuable to the long term health of your systems than you thought, that could lead to difficult decisions and a tricky mentoring situation - so they get ignored because managers are either too lazy, "too nice," or just too oblivious.
- bobfunk 9y ago
  Make sure your people take vacations once in a while?
crispyambulance 9y ago
> Measuring performance is not hard. It really depends on how you define "measuring performance". Any high-level manager can pick a set of garbage KPI's and pretend that they're measuring what really counts. And and many get away with that especially in large organizations. This is why performance review time is universally despised and viewed as a bullshit politics-laden activity. Measuring performance of humans is an intrinsically subjective process when you're dealing with knowledge work or anything more sophisticated than a brutal piece-work assembly line.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  It depends if the manager is actually interested in measuring performance or if the whole exercise is just box ticking. There is nothing wrong with subjective measures provided what is being measured is performance and not something else. Assuming a manager is not totally clueless they are able to subjectively measure performance just as well as the rest of the team. Everyone on a team knows who is pulling their weight and who is being being pulled along. There are course edge cases where some people go unrecognised or other get the credit, but in the main most people know who is contributing and who is not. The real problem is that actual performance is rarely even subjectively measured.
- fogetti 9y ago
  I completely agree. Also there is an obvious discrepancy between the knowledge of the manager and the knowledge of the team member. How can a manager evaluate another person's skills when he doesn't have the knowledge in the first place? It's a misguided preconception that managers are more skilled than their subordinates. I am still have to see happening this in real life. OTOH what I usually see happening is that managers assign more challenging tasks to specific people based on their prejudice and assumptions then they evaluate those very same people as top performers, while other team members don't even have the chance to perform well (because of the lack of tasks). :D
  - xtracto 9y ago
    > How can a manager evaluate another person's skills when he doesn't have the knowledge in the first place? As a Manager, I am not measuring your performance based on your skill, but on the tangible output of solutions that provide value to the business that you produce. Your skills and knowledge are your own tools that you can use to produce such output in less time or with better quality.
matwood 9y ago
> Measuring performance is not hard. Measuring performance is incredibly hard in a team environment. People are not machines or cogs, and many skills that make a great functioning team are soft in nature. > Most managers would prefer a 0.1x person who was pleasant to manage than a 10x person who made their life difficult. If the 10x person can't get along with their team or manager, then they are probably not a 10x person. Every day I'm surprised that people still thinking writing code is the hard part of software development. For most software development, writing code is the easy part.

rurban 9y ago

More important would be to find a good way to get rid of toxic workplace politics and middle management. Scrum was good as idea but backfired into even more micro management. Just look at the recent Google executives leaks. Most workplaces might be even worse. And please stop with all this "war" talk. We know that the US is at war with everyone. You cannot even go to a basketball or football game to be reminded of the constant war. But stop it.

noarchy 9y ago

It does seem that it hasn't gone beyond looking at "burndown", or "velocity", in many cases I've experienced.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

True, but it's fairly easy to identify people who aren't the "fashionable ideal". There is a chain shoe repair company in the UK that hires ex-prisoners, they give the impression it is altruistic but it seems to make good business sense to me.

amorphid 9y ago

In my opinion, it's not really possible for dissimilar jobs. You can measure performance moneyball-style in baseball because everyone is playing the same game. For jobs, that'd only work if everyone did the same job, and if the companies at which these people worked agreed to share data.