4 ms·

I've yet to see anything better than years-of-experience (or years-in-company). I've worked in both FAANG and startups plenty, and personally I've seen worse ou

I've yet to see anything better than years-of-experience (or years-in-company). I've worked in both FAANG and startups plenty, and personally I've seen worse outcomes from "impact-driven" OKRs, nepotism, team-surfing, than from coasting. Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs (which I consider a healthy lifecycle for any company). "Coasters" at least know that what they do today they might have to support for N years following, so design accordingly. (Although I've also heard horror stories when they make it intentionally hard to understand for job security reasons, fortunately never seen myself).

tcbawo 5y ago
A part of me wonders whether certain organizations tolerate "coasters" as a talent reserve of sorts, expected to engage when things get busy or new/interesting challenges emerge. For whatever reason, many businesses fire underperformers, promote overachievers but treat the 80% in the middle very generically. Why work to be a top 20% performer when you are treated the same as the bottom 20% performer? Coasting seems like a natural outcome.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Your best employees should always be working on the least important projects. Thus they will seem like coasters. By making the best be on unimportant projects you get the following benefits: Nobody worries about interrupting them if they have a problem - who cares if you make the unimportant project take more time. Your second best people get to experience leading important projects and thus you grow them into the best people (sometimes the previous best people may need to take a turn leading, other times the third best get promoted). See above about asking questions - the best people can mentor them as needed - again nobody cares if it makes their project late. Unimportant projects sometimes turn into next years most important project - and your best people have been creating a good base to throw lots of people at. When sales/marketing discovers an sudden opportunity that needs people now - you have experienced engineers to take it over without killing progress on what was the most important project. (be careful about this one - if they only rarely have such requests it is fine, but if such requests take up too much time you probably should either have a dedicated department of engineers for this - with a real budget and management to ensure the requests are really valuable enough to be worth the time - or you need to tell sales not to make such promises)
  - ashtar 5y ago
    This is a great way to lose your best people. Or it's pure /s
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Not if handled right. Remember those unimportant projects are often self-assigned as try the latest thing to see if it is useful to us, and they often get high visibility to management as cool things we want to do next. Of course if this is only treated as unimportant projects they will leave.
      - pmmck 5y ago
        Maybe a better term would be "critical projects" instead of "important projects" in that case?
- ryandrake 5y ago
  I think "coasting" is a really uncharitable word to use, too. For some people, yea they really are just throwing the gear into neutral and drawing a paycheck while they play Minesweeper. But for a lot of people, they reach the point in their careers where the next step is "up" but there are very few "up" roles available. So they end up in this slugfest, competing with a lot of people for that one rare "Director" slot that opened up. And for every 1 person that rolled snake-eyes and got promoted, there are 10-30 that are thrown back to Thunderdome to compete again the next time an opportunity arises. I don't think it's fair to label these people who keep fighting for those rare promotions "coasters" just because they've been doing the same thing for the last 15 years. I've been in the Thunderdome for even longer, and I'm still "Senior Individual Contributor number 32291." Am I coasting?
robertlagrant 5y ago
> Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs Based on what? You've just invalidated all the tools one would use to evaluate performance.
- darkerside 5y ago
  Probably based on an engaged managers evaluation of their work output
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    See above - it's strange to discount management techniques for promotions and pay rises, but still use it for firing people.
    - darkerside 5y ago
      I think I missed the point where parent said not to use management techniques for promotion and comp. Can you highlight what you are seeing?
      - closeparen 5y ago
        We're talking about leveling and compensation based mostly or entirely on years of experience; this implies they are based only a little or not at all on performance reviews.
- deepsun 5y ago
  You can still use self-assessments, manager and peer reports on the work done, e.g. each quarter. Just explicitly don't use them for promotion. If they are used only for "whether this person brings more to the company than company spends on them", then it unlikely to become a metric to game around.
closeparen 5y ago
Recently I have been musing about a SlateStarCodex-ish "compensation systems very different from ours." One is Oxide [0], which has uniform compensation across the board, explicitly with reference to this problem about how performance processes influence work and culture. Another might be to take LeetCode-style interviews more seriously. We have already concluded that the most important criteria for whether we want to work with someone is their ability to solve algorithmic programming tests under time pressure. Why stop at initial hire? Maybe they got lucky with familiar material. Maybe they crammed and didn't actually internalize it in a stable way. We should probably be giving coding interviews continuously to existing employees. Further, since we have concluded that shades of interview performance are a good way to determine seniority and responsibilities, we could also use these continuous tests in place of the promotion process. Knock it out of the park? Congrats, you're a staff engineer now. Barely squeak by? Back to intern. It sounds facetious but it also addresses the "promo criteria distort architecture" problem and the "YOE isn't ability problem." The civil service is not too different. Officials get to the next level by passing written and oral exams. Another might be to have stakeholders bid on talent per project. This would match e.g. the creative industry where teams are constantly created and disbanded, and your next gig is based on the department head or director’s assessment of the quality of your work or the experience of working with you in a previous project. [0] https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-values https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-...
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Assuming you're being serious - all of that sounds nightmarish and extremely subjective and failure-prone. Subjective assessments can easily skew towards politics and patronage. Your dept head is very likely indeed to confuse likability with technical ability. The leetcode stuff doesn't necessarily correlate to actual productive capacity. Good teams tend to be a mix of complementary talents, and if you put a group of algo hackers together you'll get a lot of algo hacking. You won't necessarily get a lot of maintenance or debugging. All of which highlights that the industry has no clue how to quantify talent either during hiring or after. And even less clue how to quantify the business value of talent. It has even less clue how to quantify needed talent - in the sense of creating teams with a productive mix of interlocking skills. Abstract discussions about comp are meaningless from a business POV without that information. This applies particularly to management. Some managers are clearly better than others, but in spite of all of the books, lectures, and general opportunism around management theory, many corps struggle with creating a sane productive culture.

tcbawo 5y ago

A part of me wonders whether certain organizations tolerate "coasters" as a talent reserve of sorts, expected to engage when things get busy or new/interesting challenges emerge. For whatever reason, many businesses fire underperformers, promote overachievers but treat the 80% in the middle very generically. Why work to be a top 20% performer when you are treated the same as the bottom 20% performer? Coasting seems like a natural outcome.

bluGill 5y ago
Your best employees should always be working on the least important projects. Thus they will seem like coasters. By making the best be on unimportant projects you get the following benefits: Nobody worries about interrupting them if they have a problem - who cares if you make the unimportant project take more time. Your second best people get to experience leading important projects and thus you grow them into the best people (sometimes the previous best people may need to take a turn leading, other times the third best get promoted). See above about asking questions - the best people can mentor them as needed - again nobody cares if it makes their project late. Unimportant projects sometimes turn into next years most important project - and your best people have been creating a good base to throw lots of people at. When sales/marketing discovers an sudden opportunity that needs people now - you have experienced engineers to take it over without killing progress on what was the most important project. (be careful about this one - if they only rarely have such requests it is fine, but if such requests take up too much time you probably should either have a dedicated department of engineers for this - with a real budget and management to ensure the requests are really valuable enough to be worth the time - or you need to tell sales not to make such promises)
- ashtar 5y ago
  This is a great way to lose your best people. Or it's pure /s
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Not if handled right. Remember those unimportant projects are often self-assigned as try the latest thing to see if it is useful to us, and they often get high visibility to management as cool things we want to do next. Of course if this is only treated as unimportant projects they will leave.
    - pmmck 5y ago
      Maybe a better term would be "critical projects" instead of "important projects" in that case?
ryandrake 5y ago
I think "coasting" is a really uncharitable word to use, too. For some people, yea they really are just throwing the gear into neutral and drawing a paycheck while they play Minesweeper. But for a lot of people, they reach the point in their careers where the next step is "up" but there are very few "up" roles available. So they end up in this slugfest, competing with a lot of people for that one rare "Director" slot that opened up. And for every 1 person that rolled snake-eyes and got promoted, there are 10-30 that are thrown back to Thunderdome to compete again the next time an opportunity arises. I don't think it's fair to label these people who keep fighting for those rare promotions "coasters" just because they've been doing the same thing for the last 15 years. I've been in the Thunderdome for even longer, and I'm still "Senior Individual Contributor number 32291." Am I coasting?

robertlagrant 5y ago

> Coasting can be fixed by firing or layoffs Based on what? You've just invalidated all the tools one would use to evaluate performance.

darkerside 5y ago
Probably based on an engaged managers evaluation of their work output
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  See above - it's strange to discount management techniques for promotions and pay rises, but still use it for firing people.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    I think I missed the point where parent said not to use management techniques for promotion and comp. Can you highlight what you are seeing?
    - closeparen 5y ago
      We're talking about leveling and compensation based mostly or entirely on years of experience; this implies they are based only a little or not at all on performance reviews.
deepsun 5y ago
You can still use self-assessments, manager and peer reports on the work done, e.g. each quarter. Just explicitly don't use them for promotion. If they are used only for "whether this person brings more to the company than company spends on them", then it unlikely to become a metric to game around.

closeparen 5y ago

Recently I have been musing about a SlateStarCodex-ish "compensation systems very different from ours." One is Oxide [0], which has uniform compensation across the board, explicitly with reference to this problem about how performance processes influence work and culture. Another might be to take LeetCode-style interviews more seriously. We have already concluded that the most important criteria for whether we want to work with someone is their ability to solve algorithmic programming tests under time pressure. Why stop at initial hire? Maybe they got lucky with familiar material. Maybe they crammed and didn't actually internalize it in a stable way. We should probably be giving coding interviews continuously to existing employees. Further, since we have concluded that shades of interview performance are a good way to determine seniority and responsibilities, we could also use these continuous tests in place of the promotion process. Knock it out of the park? Congrats, you're a staff engineer now. Barely squeak by? Back to intern. It sounds facetious but it also addresses the "promo criteria distort architecture" problem and the "YOE isn't ability problem." The civil service is not too different. Officials get to the next level by passing written and oral exams. Another might be to have stakeholders bid on talent per project. This would match e.g. the creative industry where teams are constantly created and disbanded, and your next gig is based on the department head or director’s assessment of the quality of your work or the experience of working with you in a previous project. [0] https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-values https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-...

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Assuming you're being serious - all of that sounds nightmarish and extremely subjective and failure-prone. Subjective assessments can easily skew towards politics and patronage. Your dept head is very likely indeed to confuse likability with technical ability. The leetcode stuff doesn't necessarily correlate to actual productive capacity. Good teams tend to be a mix of complementary talents, and if you put a group of algo hackers together you'll get a lot of algo hacking. You won't necessarily get a lot of maintenance or debugging. All of which highlights that the industry has no clue how to quantify talent either during hiring or after. And even less clue how to quantify the business value of talent. It has even less clue how to quantify needed talent - in the sense of creating teams with a productive mix of interlocking skills. Abstract discussions about comp are meaningless from a business POV without that information. This applies particularly to management. Some managers are clearly better than others, but in spite of all of the books, lectures, and general opportunism around management theory, many corps struggle with creating a sane productive culture.