4 ms·

Isn't there an alternative interpretation, that the internal evaluation process is just as broken as the hiring process?

by n4r9 4y ago

siggen 4y ago
Correct. You have unethical people now, you are probably “cheating” at work by taking credit for ideas not theirs.
- brookst 4y ago
  But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Amazon might be unethical or immoral or unpleasant, but it is extremely successful at its founder's goal.
    - FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
      It has succeeded at making Bezos money. It has become the premier cloud provider. That wasn't the original goal, but it's good for them. As a marketplace it is degenerating into an absolute mess. The force that maintains Prime membership is about 70% inertia.
      - tough 4y ago
        One can imagine AWS surviving longer than the marketplace in 10-20y
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    This same process can be applied on a community/country level. Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.
  - jatins 4y ago
    > ... because the company is toxic I mean one of the companies they mention is Amazon
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Everyone knows who committed which piece of code. It's much less clear the origin of ideas. Did my comments spark an idea in your head? Did you share that with someone else who made it slightly better? If so, what's the split among me, you, and the third person for that idea? If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    > Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example. As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that. At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Seen the exact same personality at many employers, it's like they all come from the same factory. I can smell it a mile away now. OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.
      - sota4077 4y ago
        Exactly. I commented to a different person, but I will repeat it here. Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Many "upper management" types have no idea who actually did the work.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      They care more about “who made it happen”.
      - icedchai 4y ago
        That PM who can barely open a spreadsheet made it happen, of course.
  - itronitron 4y ago
    >> everyone knows who did the work. Not the people deciding rankings and promotions. Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.) Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion. And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    Or they're the "smartest guys in the room!" /s
  - sota4077 4y ago
    >But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement. Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  Depending on the corporate culture: feature, not a bug.
pydry 4y ago
It's a bit like their abysmal process for detecting product fakes and review fakes.
bee_rider 4y ago
In that case, the market should take them out, right?
- WJW 4y ago
  Only if the other companies perform better, but since they also might have a corrupted culture that may not be the case. Also, relying on "the market" to fix things can take decades so it is not really a useful strategy for individuals.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    If the other companies don’t perform better, then this company has found a process that works (I mean not filtering to only select people who play leetcode is a pretty good idea, the only questionable thing is asking leetcode style questions in the first place if they don’t need that data). If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.
- FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
  A venal, decrepit empire can last for hundreds of years.
- n4r9 4y ago
  Amazon is large enough to maintain market dominance via strategies other than technical excellence.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    So then why hire technically excellent people? They might expect excellent salaries or excellent working conditions.
    - scaramanga 4y ago
      That's like asking why do kings buy wonderful artworks when they could save their gold and hang mediocre artworks on their wall? Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
There is another, even more cynical, interpretation. They may have been discovered to be incompetent, and promoted into a role where they can do less damage.
- scaramanga 4y ago
  And an interpretation more cynical than that: The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget. Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    People get kicked upstairs to sinecures all the time
roenxi 4y ago
It is more likely that the internal evaluations process is working fine. There are >$200k salaries on offer and the challenges Amazon et al. are dealing with aren't that demanding on an absolute scale. There are a lot of smart people out there. The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.
shusaku 4y ago
How about the lack of personal ethics correlating with success in what we know to be highly unethical companies…
marcosdumay 4y ago
Possibly. But if that's the case, the best thing that can happen is for bullshiters to fill up all of the positions there and drive the company down fast as possible. I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.

Isn't there an alternative interpretation, that the internal evaluation process is just as broken as the hiring process?

by n4r9 4y ago

Isn't there an alternative interpretation, that the internal evaluation process is just as broken as the hiring process?

siggen 4y ago

Correct. You have unethical people now, you are probably “cheating” at work by taking credit for ideas not theirs.

brookst 4y ago
But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Amazon might be unethical or immoral or unpleasant, but it is extremely successful at its founder's goal.
  - FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
    It has succeeded at making Bezos money. It has become the premier cloud provider. That wasn't the original goal, but it's good for them. As a marketplace it is degenerating into an absolute mess. The force that maintains Prime membership is about 70% inertia.
    - tough 4y ago
      One can imagine AWS surviving longer than the marketplace in 10-20y
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  This same process can be applied on a community/country level. Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.
- jatins 4y ago
  > ... because the company is toxic I mean one of the companies they mention is Amazon
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Everyone knows who committed which piece of code. It's much less clear the origin of ideas. Did my comments spark an idea in your head? Did you share that with someone else who made it slightly better? If so, what's the split among me, you, and the third person for that idea? If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.
- pdpi 4y ago
  > Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example. As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that. At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Seen the exact same personality at many employers, it's like they all come from the same factory. I can smell it a mile away now. OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.
    - sota4077 4y ago
      Exactly. I commented to a different person, but I will repeat it here. Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Many "upper management" types have no idea who actually did the work.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    They care more about “who made it happen”.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      That PM who can barely open a spreadsheet made it happen, of course.
- itronitron 4y ago
  >> everyone knows who did the work. Not the people deciding rankings and promotions. Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.) Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion. And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  Or they're the "smartest guys in the room!" /s
- sota4077 4y ago
  >But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement. Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.
VectorLock 4y ago
Depending on the corporate culture: feature, not a bug.

pydry 4y ago

It's a bit like their abysmal process for detecting product fakes and review fakes.

bee_rider 4y ago

In that case, the market should take them out, right?

WJW 4y ago
Only if the other companies perform better, but since they also might have a corrupted culture that may not be the case. Also, relying on "the market" to fix things can take decades so it is not really a useful strategy for individuals.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  If the other companies don’t perform better, then this company has found a process that works (I mean not filtering to only select people who play leetcode is a pretty good idea, the only questionable thing is asking leetcode style questions in the first place if they don’t need that data). If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.
FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
A venal, decrepit empire can last for hundreds of years.
n4r9 4y ago
Amazon is large enough to maintain market dominance via strategies other than technical excellence.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  So then why hire technically excellent people? They might expect excellent salaries or excellent working conditions.
  - scaramanga 4y ago
    That's like asking why do kings buy wonderful artworks when they could save their gold and hang mediocre artworks on their wall? Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

There is another, even more cynical, interpretation. They may have been discovered to be incompetent, and promoted into a role where they can do less damage.

scaramanga 4y ago
And an interpretation more cynical than that: The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget. Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  People get kicked upstairs to sinecures all the time

roenxi 4y ago

It is more likely that the internal evaluations process is working fine. There are >$200k salaries on offer and the challenges Amazon et al. are dealing with aren't that demanding on an absolute scale. There are a lot of smart people out there. The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.

shusaku 4y ago

How about the lack of personal ethics correlating with success in what we know to be highly unethical companies…

marcosdumay 4y ago

Possibly. But if that's the case, the best thing that can happen is for bullshiters to fill up all of the positions there and drive the company down fast as possible. I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.