6 ms·

The rating system matters because if it affects pay then it sets the incentives. If you use lines of code, you incentivize inefficient boilerplate. If you use

by zepto 5y ago

The rating system matters because if it affects pay then it sets the incentives. If you use lines of code, you incentivize inefficient boilerplate. If you use peer evaluations, you incentivize positive social behaviors and favors, but not necessarily productivity or good engineering. What you measure becomes the goal. Being predefined and available only amplifies the effect.

joshuamorton 5y ago
Yes exactly. With transparency and predefined incentives, you can now make informed rational decisions about what company you want to work for based on how you feel their values (and yes, what you're describing are essentially values) align with your own and with where you feel you'll be successful. If you think about this over a long enough timescale, and believe in something like the efficient market hypothesis, companies will converge on near-optimal structures that pay for the performance that is valued in their niche, and individual will be able to make informed decisions to work with companies that will pay them based on their strengths. Note that I'm not saying that a company can't ever change its compensation and performance evaluation, so if LoC is a bad metric, over time I'd expect companies to move away from it as they find it to be gamed. But like, I'm not going to stop a company from picking a bad metric, or claim that transparency is bad because companies can make bad decisions. Companies can make equally bad decisions today, and you won't know.
- zepto 5y ago
  You are making the assumption that an easily written set of fixed rules will outperform the more fluid and less easily quantified but nonetheless real heuristic of “anticipate what leadership needs”. I’d be very surprised if the game like companies you describe can outperform a well led organization.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Addressing the other thread first: > What if the better criteria for picking a good place to work is good leadership, and not a rule set? I think an attribute of good leadership is being able to clearly communicate goals and priorities. If you can clearly communicate those goals and priorities in advance, you can evaluate people based on how well they perform against those goals and priorities. If I'm forced to "anticipate what leadership needs", without any guidance on how or what leadership values, I'm doing the same job as "leadership", in that I'm defining organizational values, goals, and priorities. That's bad, because it dilutes leadership. > You are making the assumption that an easily written set of fixed rules will outperform the more fluid and less easily quantified but nonetheless real heuristic of “anticipate what leadership needs”. > I’d be very surprised if the game like companies you describe can outperform a well led organization. I don't think I am. I don't think such heuristics are particularly easy to quantify or easy to write down, nor do I think they're particularly fixed. I do however think that most successful organizations do something like what I'm doing. As far as I know, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all provide more concrete performance expectations than "anticipate leadership needs". It would be hard to describe all of those as not "well led" or underperforming. In fact, most modern companies with more than a few hundred engineers develop some form of leveling system and rubric. The challenges with these are that they often remain vague, since they need to apply reasonably well to every new-grad engineer working at the company, from someone working on client features in javascript, to someone optimizing the C++ compiler, to everything in between. But even still, you can usually get better, pre-registered answers from your manager or director that are more relevant and local: "If you complete this project on time, that should prove performance at rating X or at level +". How exactly this works depends a bit on the company (e.x. at Google, since peer reviews are important, having a senior peer or two whoa aren't your manager clearly state that something is L+1 work is probably more valuable than your manager stating it, and good managers communicate that). This of course doesn't mean that you have no autonomy. Goals can be vague and high level. "Ship Frobulators by the end of the year" is a goal, and "we value end-user experience over implementation cost" is a value. If you know your company (or perhaps at a large company, your organization) has those goals and values, and you know the method by which they convert achievement of goals and values into compensation, you can better do what they want. The alternatives are that: 1. Leadership is unable to express their goals and values in a way that clearly communicate what they want from employees. This appears to be what you're getting at with the example of LoC. 2. Leadership is unable to maintain consistent goals and values 3. Leadership doesn't want to reward people based on their stated goals and values etc. etc. etc. In the first case, they're incompetent. In the second case, they're unreliable. In the third, they're duplicitous and trying to compensate you based on some secret, second set of values, as opposed to the ones that they're claiming to share. None of those alternative are things that inspire confidence in leadership.
    - zepto 5y ago
      I think you are missing some possibilities: > 1. Leadership is unable to express their goals and values in a way that clearly communicate what they want from employees. This appears to be what you're getting at with the example of LoC. An alternative you haven’t considered is that leadership is excellent at communicating what they want, but it’s not reducible to a simple set of incentive foals. 2. Leadership is unable to maintain consistent goals and values Another alternative that you are not considering is that the world is dynamic and excellent leadership involves adapting goals as the world changes, not maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison with other organizations. 3. Leadership doesn't want to reward people based on their stated goals and values This is a non-sequitur if we consider 1 & 2. None of this implies duplicity or secrets. Perhaps people can judge leaders based on results and culture without needing to see it reduced to a rule set.
      - joshuamorton 5y ago
        > An alternative you haven’t considered is that leadership is excellent at communicating what they want, but it’s not reducible to a simple set of incentive foals. Can you give an example? > Another alternative that you are not considering is that the world is dynamic and excellent leadership involves adapting goals as the world changes, not maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison with other organizations. I did consider this. I don't think maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison is a good reason to maintain consistency, but consistency in values is good because it changing values is damaging to an organization. It requires a cultural shift that usually causes deep pain and often requires firing members of leadership (I suggest reading https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 for a good post that influences my thoughts here and matches my experience). If leadership is unable to maintain consistent values, that is a failure of leadership in my eyes. They are unreliable. Values can change, but they should do so slowly and rarely (and with good, and preferably transparent, reason). If a leader is unable to maintain cohesive goals over a reasonable timescale, that's also an indictment of their abilities to plan within and understand the space they are working in. Or to put another way, your organization will not develop a cohesive identity and culture without clear goals and values. Now oftentimes, you do have some clear values even if you don't state them, but then the question for leadership becomes "are those really the values you want"? And if you don't know them well enough to be able to state them, I'd suggest that the answer is probably not. > Perhaps people can judge leaders based on results and culture I'll reiterate: you cannot judge a leader based on culture if they don't declare what that culture is, or if their values and goals change too often. Values and goals set culture, and if values and goals change, culture changes. If all you know about a leader is that their values and goals change often, you can't judge them and their organization by how it looks today, because you can have high confidence that it will look fundamentally different soon. That's a sign of dysfunction. So I do judge them based on that: I judge them to be bad leaders. You appear to disagree, but I'm not sure how you are judging them if you can't even be sure of what their values will be tomorrow.

by zepto 5y ago

joshuamorton 5y ago

Yes exactly. With transparency and predefined incentives, you can now make informed rational decisions about what company you want to work for based on how you feel their values (and yes, what you're describing are essentially values) align with your own and with where you feel you'll be successful. If you think about this over a long enough timescale, and believe in something like the efficient market hypothesis, companies will converge on near-optimal structures that pay for the performance that is valued in their niche, and individual will be able to make informed decisions to work with companies that will pay them based on their strengths. Note that I'm not saying that a company can't ever change its compensation and performance evaluation, so if LoC is a bad metric, over time I'd expect companies to move away from it as they find it to be gamed. But like, I'm not going to stop a company from picking a bad metric, or claim that transparency is bad because companies can make bad decisions. Companies can make equally bad decisions today, and you won't know.

zepto 5y ago
You are making the assumption that an easily written set of fixed rules will outperform the more fluid and less easily quantified but nonetheless real heuristic of “anticipate what leadership needs”. I’d be very surprised if the game like companies you describe can outperform a well led organization.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  Addressing the other thread first: > What if the better criteria for picking a good place to work is good leadership, and not a rule set? I think an attribute of good leadership is being able to clearly communicate goals and priorities. If you can clearly communicate those goals and priorities in advance, you can evaluate people based on how well they perform against those goals and priorities. If I'm forced to "anticipate what leadership needs", without any guidance on how or what leadership values, I'm doing the same job as "leadership", in that I'm defining organizational values, goals, and priorities. That's bad, because it dilutes leadership. > You are making the assumption that an easily written set of fixed rules will outperform the more fluid and less easily quantified but nonetheless real heuristic of “anticipate what leadership needs”. > I’d be very surprised if the game like companies you describe can outperform a well led organization. I don't think I am. I don't think such heuristics are particularly easy to quantify or easy to write down, nor do I think they're particularly fixed. I do however think that most successful organizations do something like what I'm doing. As far as I know, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all provide more concrete performance expectations than "anticipate leadership needs". It would be hard to describe all of those as not "well led" or underperforming. In fact, most modern companies with more than a few hundred engineers develop some form of leveling system and rubric. The challenges with these are that they often remain vague, since they need to apply reasonably well to every new-grad engineer working at the company, from someone working on client features in javascript, to someone optimizing the C++ compiler, to everything in between. But even still, you can usually get better, pre-registered answers from your manager or director that are more relevant and local: "If you complete this project on time, that should prove performance at rating X or at level +". How exactly this works depends a bit on the company (e.x. at Google, since peer reviews are important, having a senior peer or two whoa aren't your manager clearly state that something is L+1 work is probably more valuable than your manager stating it, and good managers communicate that). This of course doesn't mean that you have no autonomy. Goals can be vague and high level. "Ship Frobulators by the end of the year" is a goal, and "we value end-user experience over implementation cost" is a value. If you know your company (or perhaps at a large company, your organization) has those goals and values, and you know the method by which they convert achievement of goals and values into compensation, you can better do what they want. The alternatives are that: 1. Leadership is unable to express their goals and values in a way that clearly communicate what they want from employees. This appears to be what you're getting at with the example of LoC. 2. Leadership is unable to maintain consistent goals and values 3. Leadership doesn't want to reward people based on their stated goals and values etc. etc. etc. In the first case, they're incompetent. In the second case, they're unreliable. In the third, they're duplicitous and trying to compensate you based on some secret, second set of values, as opposed to the ones that they're claiming to share. None of those alternative are things that inspire confidence in leadership.
  - zepto 5y ago
    I think you are missing some possibilities: > 1. Leadership is unable to express their goals and values in a way that clearly communicate what they want from employees. This appears to be what you're getting at with the example of LoC. An alternative you haven’t considered is that leadership is excellent at communicating what they want, but it’s not reducible to a simple set of incentive foals. 2. Leadership is unable to maintain consistent goals and values Another alternative that you are not considering is that the world is dynamic and excellent leadership involves adapting goals as the world changes, not maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison with other organizations. 3. Leadership doesn't want to reward people based on their stated goals and values This is a non-sequitur if we consider 1 & 2. None of this implies duplicity or secrets. Perhaps people can judge leaders based on results and culture without needing to see it reduced to a rule set.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      > An alternative you haven’t considered is that leadership is excellent at communicating what they want, but it’s not reducible to a simple set of incentive foals. Can you give an example? > Another alternative that you are not considering is that the world is dynamic and excellent leadership involves adapting goals as the world changes, not maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison with other organizations. I did consider this. I don't think maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison is a good reason to maintain consistency, but consistency in values is good because it changing values is damaging to an organization. It requires a cultural shift that usually causes deep pain and often requires firing members of leadership (I suggest reading https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 for a good post that influences my thoughts here and matches my experience). If leadership is unable to maintain consistent values, that is a failure of leadership in my eyes. They are unreliable. Values can change, but they should do so slowly and rarely (and with good, and preferably transparent, reason). If a leader is unable to maintain cohesive goals over a reasonable timescale, that's also an indictment of their abilities to plan within and understand the space they are working in. Or to put another way, your organization will not develop a cohesive identity and culture without clear goals and values. Now oftentimes, you do have some clear values even if you don't state them, but then the question for leadership becomes "are those really the values you want"? And if you don't know them well enough to be able to state them, I'd suggest that the answer is probably not. > Perhaps people can judge leaders based on results and culture I'll reiterate: you cannot judge a leader based on culture if they don't declare what that culture is, or if their values and goals change too often. Values and goals set culture, and if values and goals change, culture changes. If all you know about a leader is that their values and goals change often, you can't judge them and their organization by how it looks today, because you can have high confidence that it will look fundamentally different soon. That's a sign of dysfunction. So I do judge them based on that: I judge them to be bad leaders. You appear to disagree, but I'm not sure how you are judging them if you can't even be sure of what their values will be tomorrow.