4 ms·

> The problem is that every employee is judged by their ability to get work done That's mostly not true.

mil22 3y ago
Agreed. The employee is rather judged by something like their peer's perception of how competent the employee is, their knowledge of the work the employee did, and their own belief of how important that work was, all filtered through their various cognitive biases about what work is important to the company and what a competent employee looks like. There are so many of these biases. As just one example, studies have shown more talkative people are perceived as being more intelligent, even when this is objectively not true. I will take the time to find references if anyone's curious; I recall an experiment in which a group discussion was held and participants were rated by their peers on intelligence. The experimenters then measured how talkative each person was during the discussion, and their actual intelligence was assessed via a standardized test. Peer's perceptions of intelligence were uncorrelated with actual intelligence, but strongly correlated with talkativeness. The result is that fast talking employees who focus on impression management, self-promotion, and securing juicier work - work that is of a quality or type more likely to be perceived as being important - at the expense of getting genuinely important but often less glamorous things done, and less things done overall, get rewarded. This problem is particularly pronounced in American culture where extraversion is already a highly regarded and arguably overvalued trait (e.g. show and tell). It's less of a problem in other cultures, e.g. European cultures, that place higher value on introversion (e.g. quiet work and study).
- rramadass 3y ago
  I think the entire field/practice of "Performance Management" as it stands today needs to be thrown out and reinvented from ground-up by Behavioural Psychologists/Biologists on a proper scientific base. The current practice is basically ad-hoc management with some so-called scientific methods/metrics thrown in based on the current fad. As an example; here is a long list of Cognitive Biases from wikipedia to ponder over - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    Think of "Performance Management" like Capatalism , nobody likes it but it's the "best" that we have found [for sufficiently large orgs]" I'm sure you could think of a hypothetical system that is better than what we have. But there are probably good reasons why they haven't been used and I doubt worker fairness is one of them. This is a hard problem to solve.
    - rramadass 3y ago
      I disagree because we are not doing it based on the Science we already know now; we can do much better. From behavioural psychology/social biology/game theory(Prisoner's dilemma) etc. we know Humans naturally have a in-group vs. out-group social structure. Within a group, cooperation with trust and fairness rules and competition is generally absent or if it exists is playful. The research by Frans de Waal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal) on Primate Social Behaviour (Cooperation/Fairness/Empathy/Reciprocity/etc.) is path-breaking. Here is one of his excellent must-watch Ted talks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk Machiavellian competition comes in only for "status"/"reward" within a group and is not the norm. Competition is more prevalent between groups. Thus if you look at a person in a organizational hierarchy, there are three immediate groups; a) the people you report to (out group), b) your peers (in group, cooperation predominating, with maybe a little bit of playful competition), c) the people that report to you (in group, cooperation but with trust/fairness predominating). For everybody else we don't know and hence almost always respond with tit-for-tat principle. Finally there is also a need to understand what drives self-motivation. This is the natural order for Social Homo Sapiens as we understand from current knowledge. But none of this is being considered when measuring Performance/Productivity. For example, all Leaders/Managers almost always place Trust above everything else, Peers emphasize Fairness and the Managed Underlings emphasize Empathy. So while i may accept my manager "grading" me however begrudgingly provided it is "Fair", i will resent the same done by my immediate peers and underlings. One way to do this properly would be; a) Everybody does a self-appraisal and gives it to their Manager b) The Manager does his job properly by closely monitoring throughout the year and makes his independent appraisal c) Both are submitted to a panel consisting of Managers (one of whom is my immediate Manager with one vote) who don't know the appraisee and finally d) The panel discusses the appraisals with the appraisee in a private interview-like setting. This takes care of the needed Objectivism, Self-Interest, Fairness all together. PS: Resources for further study can be found in my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39086359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39086359
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jimberlage 3y ago
  I’m trying to find the study you mention, but a huge caveat IIRC is that these were not people who knew each other, but a random sample of experimental participants (likely college students.) I’d expect this effect to be less pronounced among a group of peers who sees how the others work on a regular basis. Still there, but a lot less pronounced. Behavioral psychologists don’t tend to have access to a group of peers like that, though.
WalterBright 3y ago
It's mostly true. What's also mostly true is people have a mostly incorrect perception of their abilities. It's like when 85% of drivers believe they are above average. If it was mostly untrue, they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job.
- lmm 3y ago
  > If it was mostly untrue, they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job. This is incredibly naive. The same logic would say that if project estimates were mostly wrong in a given company then they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job. And yet project estimation is notoriously terrible across the whole industry.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Since everyone here knows how to do it better, start a company and crush those incompetent companies!
    - lmm 3y ago
      Saying it's being done badly is not the same as saying that one could do it better. Some things are hard to do, hard to incentivise, or both. And sometimes there really is a dollar bill lying in the street.
      - josephg 3y ago
        Some things also, weirdly, turn out to be unimportant. If you start a company with great project estimates internally but a mediocre product, you’ll fail. And if you make a great product but struggle to estimate feature costs internally, you’ll do fine. It sure would be nice if we could all correctly estimate costs, but accurate estimates are clearly not essential for startups to crush it.
        WalterBright 3y ago
tetromino_ 3y ago
It is true. The trouble is that different parties disagree over what is counted as "work" and when is it "done".
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Absolutely. I'll never forget a straight faced conversation about a project dashboard filled with red statuses, with 2 layers of management asking me "what if we change the definition of done?" I mean sure, what if we pretend delivering code to DEV was done, then it would be done sooner, absolutely. If we never spin up a PROD env, we could mark that green as well, right. But is the rag status to save managements a* (yay all green) or to represent reality of work remaining to be done to deliver work to clients (its not done).

Agreed. The employee is rather judged by something like their peer's perception of how competent the employee is, their knowledge of the work the employee did, and their own belief of how important that work was, all filtered through their various cognitive biases about what work is important to the company and what a competent employee looks like. There are so many of these biases. As just one example, studies have shown more talkative people are perceived as being more intelligent, even when this is objectively not true. I will take the time to find references if anyone's curious; I recall an experiment in which a group discussion was held and participants were rated by their peers on intelligence. The experimenters then measured how talkative each person was during the discussion, and their actual intelligence was assessed via a standardized test. Peer's perceptions of intelligence were uncorrelated with actual intelligence, but strongly correlated with talkativeness. The result is that fast talking employees who focus on impression management, self-promotion, and securing juicier work - work that is of a quality or type more likely to be perceived as being important - at the expense of getting genuinely important but often less glamorous things done, and less things done overall, get rewarded. This problem is particularly pronounced in American culture where extraversion is already a highly regarded and arguably overvalued trait (e.g. show and tell). It's less of a problem in other cultures, e.g. European cultures, that place higher value on introversion (e.g. quiet work and study).

rramadass 3y ago
I think the entire field/practice of "Performance Management" as it stands today needs to be thrown out and reinvented from ground-up by Behavioural Psychologists/Biologists on a proper scientific base. The current practice is basically ad-hoc management with some so-called scientific methods/metrics thrown in based on the current fad. As an example; here is a long list of Cognitive Biases from wikipedia to ponder over - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Think of "Performance Management" like Capatalism , nobody likes it but it's the "best" that we have found [for sufficiently large orgs]" I'm sure you could think of a hypothetical system that is better than what we have. But there are probably good reasons why they haven't been used and I doubt worker fairness is one of them. This is a hard problem to solve.
  - rramadass 3y ago
    I disagree because we are not doing it based on the Science we already know now; we can do much better. From behavioural psychology/social biology/game theory(Prisoner's dilemma) etc. we know Humans naturally have a in-group vs. out-group social structure. Within a group, cooperation with trust and fairness rules and competition is generally absent or if it exists is playful. The research by Frans de Waal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal) on Primate Social Behaviour (Cooperation/Fairness/Empathy/Reciprocity/etc.) is path-breaking. Here is one of his excellent must-watch Ted talks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk Machiavellian competition comes in only for "status"/"reward" within a group and is not the norm. Competition is more prevalent between groups. Thus if you look at a person in a organizational hierarchy, there are three immediate groups; a) the people you report to (out group), b) your peers (in group, cooperation predominating, with maybe a little bit of playful competition), c) the people that report to you (in group, cooperation but with trust/fairness predominating). For everybody else we don't know and hence almost always respond with tit-for-tat principle. Finally there is also a need to understand what drives self-motivation. This is the natural order for Social Homo Sapiens as we understand from current knowledge. But none of this is being considered when measuring Performance/Productivity. For example, all Leaders/Managers almost always place Trust above everything else, Peers emphasize Fairness and the Managed Underlings emphasize Empathy. So while i may accept my manager "grading" me however begrudgingly provided it is "Fair", i will resent the same done by my immediate peers and underlings. One way to do this properly would be; a) Everybody does a self-appraisal and gives it to their Manager b) The Manager does his job properly by closely monitoring throughout the year and makes his independent appraisal c) Both are submitted to a panel consisting of Managers (one of whom is my immediate Manager with one vote) who don't know the appraisee and finally d) The panel discusses the appraisals with the appraisee in a private interview-like setting. This takes care of the needed Objectivism, Self-Interest, Fairness all together. PS: Resources for further study can be found in my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39086359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39086359
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jimberlage 3y ago
I’m trying to find the study you mention, but a huge caveat IIRC is that these were not people who knew each other, but a random sample of experimental participants (likely college students.) I’d expect this effect to be less pronounced among a group of peers who sees how the others work on a regular basis. Still there, but a lot less pronounced. Behavioral psychologists don’t tend to have access to a group of peers like that, though.

WalterBright 3y ago

It's mostly true. What's also mostly true is people have a mostly incorrect perception of their abilities. It's like when 85% of drivers believe they are above average. If it was mostly untrue, they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job.

lmm 3y ago
> If it was mostly untrue, they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job. This is incredibly naive. The same logic would say that if project estimates were mostly wrong in a given company then they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job. And yet project estimation is notoriously terrible across the whole industry.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Since everyone here knows how to do it better, start a company and crush those incompetent companies!
  - lmm 3y ago
    Saying it's being done badly is not the same as saying that one could do it better. Some things are hard to do, hard to incentivise, or both. And sometimes there really is a dollar bill lying in the street.
    - josephg 3y ago
      Some things also, weirdly, turn out to be unimportant. If you start a company with great project estimates internally but a mediocre product, you’ll fail. And if you make a great product but struggle to estimate feature costs internally, you’ll do fine. It sure would be nice if we could all correctly estimate costs, but accurate estimates are clearly not essential for startups to crush it.
      - WalterBright 3y ago

tetromino_ 3y ago

It is true. The trouble is that different parties disagree over what is counted as "work" and when is it "done".

steveBK123 3y ago
Absolutely. I'll never forget a straight faced conversation about a project dashboard filled with red statuses, with 2 layers of management asking me "what if we change the definition of done?" I mean sure, what if we pretend delivering code to DEV was done, then it would be done sooner, absolutely. If we never spin up a PROD env, we could mark that green as well, right. But is the rag status to save managements a* (yay all green) or to represent reality of work remaining to be done to deliver work to clients (its not done).