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Senior Manager here. This is common to any large entity and may only influenced by workers' rights and culture. 1. Large numbers In large companies, you have

Senior Manager here. This is common to any large entity and may only influenced by workers' rights and culture. 1. Large numbers In large companies, you have numbers. There are 10000 individuals so to say. There is a difference between individuals and groups. The larger the group, the more HR and controlling tend to use their understanding of statistics. This is the conflict between groups and individuals. Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off. This is not my opinion, but I heard it over and over behind closed doors: Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and so instead of working with the individual, you have different scenarios of the cost of litigation vs. others. 2. Job Offers and Rejections - Behind the scenes Also there are processes to be met officially. Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. In the end, HR "knows" whom to pick, and this is also a reason why a perfect job interview can mean rejection. You simply are not the chosen one. Process met, company happy - rejected candidate falsy scrutinizes himself. Would you as a company tell the candidate: "Hey, sorry for your time, investment, interest etc. But there was not really an offer for you, we simply had to comply to a process. Have fun + bye!"? Nope. Take this into account. There is a balance between "Not the right fit" and "Not the chosen fit".

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aestetix 3y ago
> Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off. That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. If they see you give someone who is struggling needed support, they will know that in the future, they might get that as well. Having a stable environment full of people who trust each other will pay off far more in the future. > Also there are processes to be met officially By "officially" do you mean legally? Because it sounds to me that a good faith law was met with a bad faith effort by that company. It wastes a candidates time, and gives false hope, while applying to the letter of the law without actually following the spirit of it. Which actually feeds into the broken legal culture of the PIPs. It also wastes HRs time, playing to make the government happy while ignoring potential workplace problems they could be addressing.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > By "officially" do you mean legally? Yes. Union contracts or in the case of public service actual law... basically, the provisions exist to prevent "backdoor deals" or at least make them really expensive. In the end, it's all performance theatre.
  - pierat 3y ago
    When I worked at a public university, that's exactly how that stuff worked. For any job on the portal, had 1 of 3 possibilities. 1. The team actually needed a person. Job is legit. 2. The team knew who they wanted, and opening the job was a formality that was legally required. Anybody other than chosen one is a no-hire. This can be spotted with very narrow skills and specific years of XP. 3. This job is a general description, but with no intent to hire anyone. The purpose here is to earmark funds so the department doesn't lose them. And since interviews are so subjective, departments can fail everyone with no effective oversight this is what's happening. Doesn't matter how good you are - nobody is hired.
    - _the_inflator 3y ago
      I can relate. A very specific profile means it is crafted for a certain person.
- _the_inflator 3y ago
  First of all, I side with you. Don't get me wrong, it is not that I encourage these practices, I talk about them and I fell pray to them many times when applying to other jobs as well. > That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. Not really. It is about network not performance. What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now? That's when magic happens or the least connected dude get kicked out. Also: What is performance anyway? It is fairly subjective and you don't rank and rate 100+ people against each other. Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone. > By "officially" do you mean legally? Yes. But again: no system is perfect. There will always be some bending. What I wanted to say is, performance reviews are mostly and at large the only question whether you make the cut or not. This is a 50% to 50% decision. Everything else is BS. How many "10x devs" are there? And same goes for applications: the best preparation, the best interview does never guarantee a job. If on one application 10 awesome devs apply - how do you decide? Take cheating into account, then you will understand that jobs are a number's game.
e40 3y ago
I fully agree. Just want to point out that all of this is because of lawsuits. When companies were more transparent they were sued, so they became less transparent.
DharmaPolice 3y ago
On your second point, I've seen this in the UK public sector. Because of a commitment to advertise every job that comes up when someone went from temp to permtheir job was re-advertised and they would have to reapply. Imagine competing against someone who was already doing that exact job and had been doing it well for two years. I had an interview like this (as the person already in-post). "Can you give an example where you did X" "Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it." What a waste of everyone's time.
- itronitron 3y ago
  >> "Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it." If that isn't already a Mitchell and Webb skit, it needs to be.
bsenftner 3y ago
This right here: a "senior manager" explaining in clear language how large organizations of humans simply do not scale. We revert to "statistics" and treat people as numbers, ignore they are human, and create misery at scale, not organizational efficiency, but tyranny.
murphyslaw 3y ago
About the job offers: at Cisco they have (or had) only 6 months to fill a "req", i.e. the permission to hire someone. If not filled by then the req got taken away. So what you do is, you find someone, then open the req, then wait a while and hire the person you already selected. Internal hiring websites are for show only.
- saiadarsh99 3y ago
  > If not filled by then the req got taken away. I've known teams that badly need junior devs, but the req can't be approved due to a lack of the business unit's budget. Hikes, promos — all depend on the budget. Flawed.
  - mlac 3y ago
    I’m not sure I follow - if there is no budget to hire a junior dev, or hiring a junior dev would further lose the company money, why would a company do that? A company can’t give promotions and hire new people if it isn’t a profitable thing to do.
civilized 3y ago
> Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. For example, companies must perform this process in order to defraud America's H-1B visa program, which is now considered a table stakes employment practice.
phpisthebest 3y ago
>>In large companies, you have numbers. This is the root cause of the problem, for many reasons that average size of a company has expanded, today the market share consumed by large enterprises is higher than it as ever been, cutting out SMB where employees are often treated as humans not as a numbers I think we will see a correction at some point, as I dont believe Companies on the scale of Amazon, Apple, Google, etc are sustainable and today are artificially supported by government regulation, at some point however that will prove to be these companies weakness
jvanderbot 3y ago
Former Manager here. Just to add some seasoning: I like to call this "Pip"/Pivot/Stack Rank process as "precedent caching". You can be sued for giving someone decent performance reviews and then not giving them the average raise - let alone ushering them out of the organization, passing up promotions, or re-orging them out of their job.
LtWorf 3y ago
If vested stocks are used to keep people long term, theknowledge that they will never vest makes them jump job just as easily as if you never even gave them any stocks to begin with.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aestetix 3y ago

> Why take care of one person? In sum, it does not pay off. That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. If they see you give someone who is struggling needed support, they will know that in the future, they might get that as well. Having a stable environment full of people who trust each other will pay off far more in the future. > Also there are processes to be met officially By "officially" do you mean legally? Because it sounds to me that a good faith law was met with a bad faith effort by that company. It wastes a candidates time, and gives false hope, while applying to the letter of the law without actually following the spirit of it. Which actually feeds into the broken legal culture of the PIPs. It also wastes HRs time, playing to make the government happy while ignoring potential workplace problems they could be addressing.

mschuster91 3y ago
> By "officially" do you mean legally? Yes. Union contracts or in the case of public service actual law... basically, the provisions exist to prevent "backdoor deals" or at least make them really expensive. In the end, it's all performance theatre.
- pierat 3y ago
  When I worked at a public university, that's exactly how that stuff worked. For any job on the portal, had 1 of 3 possibilities. 1. The team actually needed a person. Job is legit. 2. The team knew who they wanted, and opening the job was a formality that was legally required. Anybody other than chosen one is a no-hire. This can be spotted with very narrow skills and specific years of XP. 3. This job is a general description, but with no intent to hire anyone. The purpose here is to earmark funds so the department doesn't lose them. And since interviews are so subjective, departments can fail everyone with no effective oversight this is what's happening. Doesn't matter how good you are - nobody is hired.
  - _the_inflator 3y ago
    I can relate. A very specific profile means it is crafted for a certain person.
_the_inflator 3y ago
First of all, I side with you. Don't get me wrong, it is not that I encourage these practices, I talk about them and I fell pray to them many times when applying to other jobs as well. > That assessment is extremely short-sighted. The reason it will pay off is because other employees will see how you treat the one person. Not really. It is about network not performance. What is going on behind the scenes? Almost every team manager wants to keep his team. So they get at least a normal rating to prevent PIP. HR says, kick X% of the workforce. So what do you do now? That's when magic happens or the least connected dude get kicked out. Also: What is performance anyway? It is fairly subjective and you don't rank and rate 100+ people against each other. Promotion on the other hand is a pyramidal system. 10 promo slots receive 100 applications. How do you decide? Whom does a promo help? In reality, the senior manager pulls the strings. And there can always be creativity in downranking someone or promote someone. > By "officially" do you mean legally? Yes. But again: no system is perfect. There will always be some bending. What I wanted to say is, performance reviews are mostly and at large the only question whether you make the cut or not. This is a 50% to 50% decision. Everything else is BS. How many "10x devs" are there? And same goes for applications: the best preparation, the best interview does never guarantee a job. If on one application 10 awesome devs apply - how do you decide? Take cheating into account, then you will understand that jobs are a number's game.

e40 3y ago

I fully agree. Just want to point out that all of this is because of lawsuits. When companies were more transparent they were sued, so they became less transparent.

DharmaPolice 3y ago

On your second point, I've seen this in the UK public sector. Because of a commitment to advertise every job that comes up when someone went from temp to permtheir job was re-advertised and they would have to reapply. Imagine competing against someone who was already doing that exact job and had been doing it well for two years. I had an interview like this (as the person already in-post). "Can you give an example where you did X" "Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it." What a waste of everyone's time.

itronitron 3y ago
>> "Yes, last week - remember you were there and saw me do it." If that isn't already a Mitchell and Webb skit, it needs to be.

bsenftner 3y ago

This right here: a "senior manager" explaining in clear language how large organizations of humans simply do not scale. We revert to "statistics" and treat people as numbers, ignore they are human, and create misery at scale, not organizational efficiency, but tyranny.

murphyslaw 3y ago

About the job offers: at Cisco they have (or had) only 6 months to fill a "req", i.e. the permission to hire someone. If not filled by then the req got taken away. So what you do is, you find someone, then open the req, then wait a while and hire the person you already selected. Internal hiring websites are for show only.

saiadarsh99 3y ago
> If not filled by then the req got taken away. I've known teams that badly need junior devs, but the req can't be approved due to a lack of the business unit's budget. Hikes, promos — all depend on the budget. Flawed.
- mlac 3y ago
  I’m not sure I follow - if there is no budget to hire a junior dev, or hiring a junior dev would further lose the company money, why would a company do that? A company can’t give promotions and hire new people if it isn’t a profitable thing to do.

civilized 3y ago

> Say there is a job offer on a job portal and you apply to it. Behind the scenes, there is already the right candidate with the right profile. However, in order to get the candidate through all the controls along the process, you have to evaluate other candidates as well. For example, companies must perform this process in order to defraud America's H-1B visa program, which is now considered a table stakes employment practice.

phpisthebest 3y ago

>>In large companies, you have numbers. This is the root cause of the problem, for many reasons that average size of a company has expanded, today the market share consumed by large enterprises is higher than it as ever been, cutting out SMB where employees are often treated as humans not as a numbers I think we will see a correction at some point, as I dont believe Companies on the scale of Amazon, Apple, Google, etc are sustainable and today are artificially supported by government regulation, at some point however that will prove to be these companies weakness

jvanderbot 3y ago

Former Manager here. Just to add some seasoning: I like to call this "Pip"/Pivot/Stack Rank process as "precedent caching". You can be sued for giving someone decent performance reviews and then not giving them the average raise - let alone ushering them out of the organization, passing up promotions, or re-orging them out of their job.

LtWorf 3y ago

If vested stocks are used to keep people long term, theknowledge that they will never vest makes them jump job just as easily as if you never even gave them any stocks to begin with.