4 ms·
If we don't have metrics, how are we to fairly and objectively compare one worker's performance to another?
by JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
If we don't have metrics, how are we to fairly and objectively compare one worker's performance to another?
- btowngar 6y agoIt's not that metrics in general are bad, it's that bad metrics are bad.
- amznthrowaway5 6y agoHow is obsessive focus on metrics making anything more fair? Even if you have metrics, choosing which ones are important still ends up being subjective, and the metrics are usually incomparable between projects. So the metrics alone don't tell anything useful and can still be easily gamed to make the manager's preferred employees look good and disliked employees look bad.
- andreilys 6y agoMetrics are CYA insurance for managers to promote or PIP employees without getting into trouble with HR
- milesvp 6y agoLet me ask you another question. How do you identify the additive employees from the multiplicative employees? You probably don’t want all multiplicative employees on a team, but you surely want some of them. How do you create metrics that don’t encourage too much of one or the other? How much is too much of one or the other?
- toast0 6y agoThe performance evaluations I've been through claim to be evaluating how an employee does vs expectations. That doesn't demand comparing workers to each other. In theory, you have a list of things to check for each category of performance. If you tick enough boxes, you get a certain category. In reality, it seems managers stack rank, and then apply the required curve to the stack rank. If everybody on your team does their job as expected (or better), too bad, X% need to be flagged as poor performers as declared by the performance curve.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- leetcrew 6y agoI mean, what if you just don't? at my company, raises have more to do with the financial situation of the company than subjective reviews (although we do have these, they just don't factor into compensation that much). if the company is doing well, everyone gets a nice raise. everyone gets the same percentage bonus every year which is calculated based on the entire company's performance. maybe this makes us unattractive for very competitive people, but it leads to a very cooperative environment. senior devs don't really have anything to lose by spending a few hours helping newer people, so they just do it.
- jpadkins 6y agothe theory is that high productivity people will not want to work there, as everyone else benefits from their excellence. If companies that retain these high productivity people perform better than companies that don't, evolutionary pressure will force these egalitarian companies out. I think this theory may be true in some fields like hedge funds or heavy sales performance based businesses. In software, I am not sure high productivity people care about this issue, as long as their compensation is high enough.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- treis 6y ago> high productivity people care about this issue, as long as their compensation is high enough. That circles back to the original problem of how do you identify the high productivity people to give them high compensation. It works when the person spending the money is close enough to evaluate employee performance. But when it's some middle manager spending Zuckerburg's money you run into the agent/principle problem. The managers will do what's best for them (raises for everyone!) and not the enterprise.
- jlokier 6y agoI think high productivity people by definition cause everyone* else to benefit from their excellence. So high productivity people who don't want everyone else to benefit are a bit of an oxymoron. (* or at least most others)
- TheSoftwareGuy 6y agoI've been thinking about this recently, what if we're doing it all wrong? what if, instead of your manager giving their reports a review, and then also giving raises based on that we go with a more market-based approach. Hear me out: Every year, and once a year, all the managers in the company submit bids to the employees that they want to work under them. Employees then select their favorite bid, and that becomes their new manager. Employees are free to accept/reject bids based on any criteria: Salary/PTO/On-call requirements, etc.
- treis 6y agoThere's a company that does this and more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252759
- TheSoftwareGuy 6y agoHah, I think I heard of that company on a podcast, it may have inspired the idea
- pfortuny 6y agoYou are conflating justice with “objectivity”. They are not the same thing.
- gdy 6y agoHow so?
- whywhywhywhy 6y agoMetrics don't mean it's fair it just means you're judging someone on a handful of numeric values rather than them as an individual. If you judged me on the metric of turning up on time I'd be doing appalling [0], yet I'm still one of the first people to be brought in on every critical project in the company. Obviously metrics vs just manager instinct/observation will benefit and harm different people in different ways. A combination would be better. But life isn't really fair or objective, end of the day I'd rather work with someone I like and can socialise with and know working with them is stress free (which means my work is better) and can be trusted to just do their thing even if their performance is lower than someone who's a pain to work with but maybe puts in more hours. Making software is a combination of engineering + artistry, it's not flipping X burgers an hour, objective performance isn't important it's the contribution of the whole individual. [0] : I did have a manager judge me on this before, all it meant was I'd stay up all night, go into work, sit there like a zombie doing close to nothing, go home then sleep. Doesn't matter if I was barely doing anything, by their bum on seat metric I was doing great.
- rocqua 6y agoWhat is better, an objective measurement of the wrong thing, or a subjective measurement of the right thing? Which is more fair? Note that objective measurement of the wrong thing will reward people for stuff other than quality, and probably stuff beyond their control.
- burntoutfire 6y agoCan you do that even with metrics? I really doubt that.