9 ms·

This resonates a lot with my experience. Take OKRs, for example. Everyone is expected to set their target goals, publicize and discuss them with others, and fo

• RetpolineDrama 3y ago
  You brought this on yourself when you signed up to work at $bigCo. There's a whole wonderful world of startups out there that don't work this way, and it sounds like you'd be a lot happier there.
  • sarchertech 3y ago
    I’ve also worked at plenty of startups that worked just like this. Once they hire an engineering VP from bigco, the infection spreads quickly.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • barbazoo 3y ago
    Smaller shops too, not just startups. I've been in places with ~300 employees that don't have all that ceremony around performance and self set goals.
    • dilyevsky 3y ago
      And ive worked at places with fewer than 50 devs that had implemented the okr nonsense with predictable result so it’s not universal. The truth is that unless you run the place you really have no control over some bigco management getting hired and trying to parrot all this stuff
  • mjx0 3y ago
    I hate these rituals at $bigCo, but pretty strongly believe I need the stability of working for $bigCo to feel happy. Is there somewhere that isn’t a startup that doesn’t have these issues?
    • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Do you have stability at $bigCo? Yes, they're less likely to close up completely. But how likely are you to get laid off? In fact, you can think about OKRs as a cargo-cult magic charm to try to keep layoffs from hitting your manager.
      • robotresearcher 3y ago
        > But how likely are you to get laid off? Enormously less likely than you are to have a startup or SME shut down.
      • lnsru 3y ago
        As recent tech layoffs showed, job security is an illusion even at big corps. I work in toxic and heavily understaffed group. And guess what, the guy who loudest complained about being understaffed was let go. Problem solved!
      • Domenic_S 3y ago
        > But how likely are you to get laid off? Much less likely, and guaranteed to be with some not-unsubstantial severance. Non-RIF layoffs (aka 'firing') comes with months or years of warnings.
    • dbrueck 3y ago
      It's a false sense of security. At a $bigCo, your entire division might disappear tomorrow because the Board wants to cut costs. A shift in perspective might help: instead of tying "stability" to time at a particular company, think of it in overall employment terms, and in that sense things can be extremely stable even if you work at a lot of different companies.
      • 3y ago
  • sirsinsalot 3y ago
    Maybe so, but their culture can be just as horrid. You've gotta believe in the cause, which is really just a narrative used to promote extended work hours and grind. Then you've got to evangelise and act as a missionary for this world changing product ... the business has a cult like sheen of "changing the world" and everyone is the smartest person in the room just for being smart enough to be there. Behind the bullshit narrative, everyone is overworked and the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises of a great product to hide their greed. It's all the same really.
    • aprdm 3y ago
      Not every startup is like that. There's plenty of 9-5 out there. Look for startups with older people who have kids..
      • sirsinsalot 3y ago
        And plenty of large companies without excessive ceremony. Black and white thinking, needless polarization ... really gets us nowhere. That was sort of my ham fisted point.
    • fakedang 3y ago
      > the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises I wish I didn't visualize this. This could be a Renaissance painting.
      • sirsinsalot 3y ago
        Feed it as a prompt to Stable Diffusion or something and its the perfect attack on corporate greed.
  • WaitWaitWha 3y ago
    It is always greener on the other side of the fence, but sometimes it is greener because the septic tank is leaking. I did several tour of duty in startups. There were good, bad, and ugly, just as much as in $bigCo.
• ajkjk 3y ago
  I like offices, but I agree that OKRs and performance reviews are a farce. OKRs in particular: I cannot believe how frequently people act as though there is no way to think about work other than OKRs, as if it was some immutable natural law instead of just a thing somebody thought up one time. As far as I have seen, OKRs are a mechanism for leaders at every level to divest themselves of the responsibility to _lead_, by making "accomplishing things" somebody else's problem, as measured by a number that they will get perfunctory status reports on.
  • wildrhythms 3y ago
    The OKRs at my workplace are self-defined and self-rated. It's a total sham. Every cycle I will write OKRs for things I've already completed, or things that will be completed a week from writing. And I'll leave 1 or 2 items I know will extend to next cycle. And 3 months later I mark those few as 'done' and make up a couple more. Nobody cares. My manager doesn't care. Nothing changes at all in the org. I've been doing this for over 6 years. I'm not sure who exactly looks at the OKRs, but I assume there is a dashboard- somewhere that I don't have access to- with numbers in green and red that must mean a lot to somebody I've never met.
    • ajkjk 3y ago
      Sounds about right.
• barbazoo 3y ago
  > Your work would apparently be invisible to the company if there were no performance reviews Yet another indicator of poor (i.e. lazy) management maybe if you have to keep track of every single accomplishment yourself. How about managers keep track of the awesome things their employees do and celebrate them for it and help them improve if they're lacking.
  • Cyberdogs7 3y ago
    I am a lazy manager then. The problem is context. I ask all my engineers to self track accomplishments for several reasons: 1. It puts them in control. If they want to leave the team, they have a handy list to hand to their new manager right away. 2. They can capture details I would miss, no matter how close to the work I am. They will capture exact why that design process was hard and what it was like dealing with those 4 external teams. 3. It improves their writing and communication skills. I spend my 1:1's going through the accomplishments and working with them on how to expand and add context to items, where to add detail, and how to be concise with the results. So far, I receive positive feedback on this. On the flipside, I don't do this for myself :)
    • Eldt 3y ago
      You could do the work and allow them to supplement what you've noted down.
      • filoleg 3y ago
        Not a manager and not the person you are replying to, but I kind of get their perspective, as I see it somewhat similar to how I treat referral/recommendation letters. If someone I closely know asks me for a recommendation letter, and they are a person who (in my eyes) deserves a great letter, I just tell them the format for the specific letter (e.g., 2 paragraphs, less than 300 words, what type of content the letter is supposed to contain, etc), and ask them to write it themselves. Then I take it, review to make sure all is good, go over it with the person (in case there are any potential suggestions for improvements [based on my knowledge of them] or parts that i find questionable), edit if necessary with them, and then submit it. Now that I am looking at it, that's a very similar process to how performance review historically went with my managers.
• AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  > The amount of time and effort spent just doing this management work makes up a large portion of working hours. Not anywhere I've ever worked. Yeah, such things exist. Yeah, they take a bit of time. "A large portion of working hours"? No. If they actually do take a large portion of working hours, then you're at a company that either doesn't have enough work for people to do, or else that has work that needs done but the people aren't doing it. Either way, that's a place where layoffs are likely to show up sometime rather soon, and that's a drain to work at in the meantime. Look around. There's better places out there - places that care more about the work, and less about the ceremony. (Don't get me wrong, there's still ceremony. It just doesn't dominate.)
• eweise 3y ago
  Theater and politics is the main reason I liked contracting. There's just no bullshit. Do your work and get paid. Feels great.
  • kranke155 3y ago
    Not dealing with Office politics and incompetent or slow management is the main reason I remain a freelancer.
  • azemetre 3y ago
    How do you handle healthcare and retirement as a contractor? Many contracting shops I see offer very poor benefits. Might be looking at the wrong companies, but it seems like worse compensation than FTE.
    • eweise 3y ago
      I pay for healthcare and retirement myself. Retirement is great because you can put a lot more in than you can via 401K or IRA. I don't contract anymore because the compensation is worse than it used to be unfortunately. It used to pay roughly 2x a salary and now I don't think you can even make as much as salary. This was for being essentially augmented staff.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kenjackson 3y ago
  > I just want to get good work done, and go home. You can do that. You just may not get paid by a third party, if no one else can assess or help determine if the work you're doing is aligned with what they're trying to accomplish as a group. But as an entrepreneur this is probably great. Your payment is from customers who have agreed that you've delivered something of value. Of course, I've learned, even with the two startups I've done -- once you get above a certain size you do need to ensure everyone is aligned on priorities and that there is a structure to talk about promotions/pay raises/bonuses. It doesn't have to be OKRs and performance reviews, but its some mechanism that ends up eventually being equally hated.
• itisit 3y ago
  My armchair wisdom: the degree to which a worker must generate metrics, however contrived, in order to provide accountability and transparency, however inaccurate, is directly proportional to the size and complexity of an organization. There comes a point (let's call it the Gibbons Threshold) where the work of generating metrics takes more time and effort (and cost) than what an outsider would deem to be real work that truly benefits the business's bottom line.
  • jon-wood 3y ago
    I think this is a really key thing to take into account when choosing where to work. Where I am now I report directly to one of the founders, and I'm one step removed from the CEO, that means there's approximately zero ceremony around tracking achievements and value added. The same was true in other small companies I've worked for. The ceremony starts to be introduced when people become further removed from those who are ultimately responsible. In my previous job there was a whole process, company wide, to ensure everyone got properly ranked based on performance and potential. As a management team we'd spend half a day every six months just going through this process, which was preceded by everyone in the company doing a self-assessment that would then be reviewed by your manager. It was all incredibly tedious. Some people thrive in an environment where what you're doing is driven by whatever currently seems the most important, and value is apparent just from everyone knowing what's going on. Others want more structure to things, and a clear path to get from where they are to where they want to be. I don't see either as being invalid.
  • ilyt 3y ago
    I'd say it's directly proportional to the incompetence of the manager managing the worker.
• harryquach 3y ago
  > The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home. Remote work has largely removed the theatrical aspect of my position. This is one of the reasons I hope to never work in an office again.
  • johnea 3y ago
    Oh yes, I too would much rather watch the theater from home on TV...
  • Spivak 3y ago
    And during the lulls replacing doom scrolling on Reddit with house chores has been a godsend for my mental health. I pretty much only go into the office when there's catered food (ie when there's planned non-work related socializing).
    • ilyt 3y ago
      Or just having mid-day break to cook and eat some food in peace. Splitting 8h day into 2x 4h parts helped a lot.
      • mcbutterbunz 3y ago
        And not just food, healthier food (hopefully). Good that’s fresh and not just microwaved frozen pizza.
  • nkjnlknlk 3y ago
    It depends if you're trying to get promoted or not. One of the reasons I never aim for a promotion internally--remote or in person--is the requirement of theater over everything else. It perverts the day to day.
  • jpm_sd 3y ago
    "LARPing your job" on Slack seems to be a common issue with remote work. https://annehelen.substack.com/p/larping-your-job https://annehelen.substack.com/p/larping-your-job https://www.theawl.com/2015/04/are-you-just-larping-your-job/ https://www.theawl.com/2015/04/are-you-just-larping-your-job...
• hourago 3y ago
  Ironically, all these will be solved by raising everybody 3% and that's it. By trying to measure individual performance, the company is taking away time from their employees. And the ones that end up getting the rise are the best ones at doing reviews, not at doing the job. I prefer that everybody gets the same raise, and that the company pays competitive salaries. To spend so much time justifying your own job for a company that is making a lot of profits makes little sense.
  • devhead 3y ago
    i would add that this must include executives; 2 years ago we all got the same 3% while executives got 40% (while overseeing a stock drop of 65%). one side effect though is w/o equity it's easy to feel a lack of motivation to work as hard if you get the same raise as everyone else who might not be doing great work.
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      You’re actually motivated by equity in a private company that will statistically not be worth anything?
  • Hermitian909 3y ago
    > I prefer that everybody gets the same raise, and that the company pays competitive salaries. I'm not sure how you square this with promotions (the main driver of performance reviews). No company who hired me five years ago could have kept me with a constant 3% increase, that is significantly less than I achieved through promotions, the rate would no longer be competitive.
    • lliamander 3y ago
      Indeed. I've averaged about 10% per year, and I probably could have gone for more.
    • dontupvoteme 3y ago
      That makes sense in a boom cycle, but we're seemingly entering a bust now. This era of CS was probably unique in the history of STEM of having high salary rewards for changing jobs quickly. This never existed in Medicine, Maths or Engineering really (unless you found your own company or such.)
• boredemployee 3y ago
  Coincidentally, the company I work for, which notably has a culture unlike anything I've ever seen, has just fallen into the OKRs trap. Took away all the joy I had to work in this place.
• brazzy 3y ago
  What's an OKR?
  • jghn 3y ago
    Objective & Key Result. IOW a measurable goal with a designated target
    • naavis 3y ago
      What's an IOW?
      • esafak 3y ago
        In other words
        • xcxcx 3y ago
          It's almost rude not to bother spelling out three words with such unique acronyms. The time one person saves not typing an additional whopping 11 characters is wasted by the number of readers trying to figure out what it means
          • Apocryphon 3y ago
            I don't know about rude, but AKA is a much better known phrase than IOW.
          • skirmish 3y ago
            You obviously meant to say: "IAR not to bother spelling out three words...".
          • jghn 3y ago
            > with such unique acronyms It's been part of netspeak since at least the late 80s
            • 3y ago
• esafak 3y ago
  OKR exist to align and motivate the company. It works top down and bottom up; the executives announce what the company is going to be doing for the next term, and it ripples down as each org and team sets goals that are aligned with the plan. That's all it has to be; a good thing done right. Have you worked at a company where you had no idea what the plan was and where the company was headed? I have and it is frustrating. That is the kind of company that would benefit from the alignment that OKRs instill.
  • skirmish 3y ago
    Same happens with OKRs. Once there is a meeting to review them, 2/3 of OKRs have been deprecated and not even started, and everybody talks about all this other exciting new work they did that is not reflected in OKRs at all. Deprecation and new work comes from management. How is that better?
    • esafak 3y ago
      You should not veer that far off your OKRs, otherwise you spend more time on the process than you get back in alignment. You describe a company with no resolve. The leadership has to want alignment for OKRs to work. I think it is a good practice in any case to set yourself goals, and demand the same of your team or as wide a circle as you can influence. It's just shared planning.
  • emptysongglass 3y ago
    So align the company, no OKRs required. I'm living OKRs now and they are the biggest waste of time I've ever experienced. They encourage work that fits whatever you've nailed yourself to for the quarter. They give people who are good at dressing up their work in charts a podium. These same people are most often the people who do the least real work. OKRs are unequivocally a disaster for productivity. Real output and its impact is not as simple as any box you can invent to hold it.
    • mateo411 3y ago
      I think it's really hard to do OKRs correctly. It seems like you are working at a place that is not doing them correctly. I've also worked at places that haven't implemented OKRs correctly. At the very least it appears that not everybody has bought into the OKRs and alignment has not been achieved.
• mgkimsal 3y ago
  "that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise." I once 'earned' a 4% raise at a perf review in July. Was then was told because I only started in January that year, my raise - affecting the pay going forward - was prorated to how long I'd worked already, so .. I only get 50% of the 4%, so... 2% raise. Felt far more manipulative and shady than if I'd just been given a 2% raise.
  • TylerE 3y ago
    I would have walked out if someone tried to pull that on me.
    • mgkimsal 3y ago
      FWIW, I left about 3 months after that. That was the tipping point.
• takinola 3y ago
  I share the frustration you express based on my experience working at large companies. However, there is a strong steelman explanation for why this is required. In a 5 person company, it is easy to sit around the table and decide what needs to be done and then have everyone "get good work done and go home". In a 5,000 person company, it is not obvious what needs to be done in the first place talk less of making sure everyone knows their part in it. Should we be going after SMBs or Enterprise customers? What do we (or more importantly I) do differently based on that decision? How do we time the next campaign push to line up with the product launch? There are thousands of decisions that need to be made and it is impossible to do that without having these formal processes that allow people to coordinate in large groups. I would argue that >60% of work involved in a large company is coordination rather than actual building, selling, marketing, whatever. The larger the company, the greater this percentage becomes. I would love to know if anyone has found a solution to counteract this phenomenon but it seems like an immutable law based on my experience.
  • nine_zeros 3y ago
    I think OKRs are required to communicate intent and targets. It is a great way for communication "across" and "upwards". But it is a shitty tool "downwards". Suddenly you have managers insisting that a feature must be rolled out before the 31st of March, even though rolling out 2 days later will be safer. It creates perverse incentives such as OKRs used for "individual" performance reviews when in reality, a lot of work is team/x-team/group effort. It causes ICs to play corporate games.
    • takinola 3y ago
      But that's an issue with how the OKRs are derived rather than if the OKRs are required. If the teams come up with OKRs with bottoms-up involvement then the issue you mention is mitigated. The fact that a thing can be done badly is not an argument for not doing the thing.
      • nine_zeros 3y ago
        > If the teams come up with OKRs with bottoms-up involvement then the issue you mention is mitigated This still does not solve the problem that "individuals" are scapegoated for OKRs defined by someone else. I have actually seen people getting fired for not delivering on OKRs, which were ultra ambitious in the first place. The problem was not ambitious OKRs. The problem was individual consequences for team/management ambition. > The fact that a thing can be done badly is not an argument for not doing the thing. Sure, but this doesn't prevent discussion and bringing the failure modes to the fore. In fact, I would suggest that Gen-z and gen-alpha will be very difficult to hire and keep because they naturally understand the BS that OKRs are, having been exposed to BS games in school, college and with friends.
• dtjb 3y ago
  Metrics/KPIs/OKRs are how we align large organizations around complex outcomes. Highly effective workers always see these measurements as a waste of time, but when you're trying to validate and steer the contributions of thousands of workers - with varying levels of skill, motivation, and accountability - you need a GPS to make sure you're still on the path. While I think goals and metrics are necessary, I do agree that organizations tend to over-formalize the process. "The map is not the territory" etc.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  > The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home. At the heart of it, this is why I tend to avoid working in particular parts of the software industry. Not every company engages in this sort of thing, and I prefer working for those that don't.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  > In the ever-important self-review you're expected to present proof to your higher-ups that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise. While I’m not going to say I’m “quiet quitting” as far as my work, I quiet quit a couple of years ago as far as being concerned about promotions and raises. I do just enough bs to get through the review process knowing that real raises come from job hopping.
• kirso 3y ago
  I share this perspective and frustration. However, I also realise its always easy to critisize the processes from down to top. Now put yourself in the shoes of the CEO or C suite. How do you organise an entire organisation to be efficient? What is a better alternative to OKRs? Most of the proposals I see in this thread are catering towards smaller companies but quite frankly not a lot of us managed a 1000 people company. I would be curious to know from practitioners about what worked and what didn't.