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> But if your team members close twice the tickets you did, they will have trouble justifying you are contributing as much as them. The metrics make reporting

> But if your team members close twice the tickets you did, they will have trouble justifying you are contributing as much as them. The metrics make reporting to higher ups easier, no doubt. But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager: one who cannot justify their decisions except via reference to made up metrics.

passwordoops 2y ago
>the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager Well then it means the vast, vast, vast majority of companies with a coherent corporate structure are shit. Welcome to reality
Arainach 2y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of things boil down to metrics, even at companies with great engineering cultures. If you have four L4 engineers on the team, all of whom are performing at the level described in the career profile as L5, but only budget to promote two of them, how do you pick which two? What if they have different managers, all of whom sincerely believe their report is the one delivering essential value? If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics. This system is soul crushing but it exists all over the industry.
- alextingle 2y ago
  > If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? Easy. You quit, and find a better job. That practice is so toxic that it's sufficient to condemn the organisation as unworthy of any buy-in whatsoever. Just leave.
  - jart 2y ago
    Nah you make sure X% of your team is staffed with losers. It's a nutty system I know. But I'd imagine that's how things worked at companies that have stack ratings. Managers probably traded low performers like baseball cards.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    In defense of stack ranking, it does solve a very common problem -- managers who never fire people who deserve to be let go. This ultimately rots an organization from the inside, as it leads to attrition of higher performers because they're forced to work with useless people. You see this a lot in companies that rarely fire people, because managers optimize for accumulating direct report count (whether or not those direct reports are doing valuable work).
    - convolvatron 2y ago
      companies need to do much better about letting managers go. I get it, they are hard to find. and those that actually have any engineering management skill at all are even harder to find. and every time you hire a new one you're taking a risk that they'll be a absolutely terrible manager. a terrible manager can cause a huge swath of destruction. but the answer can't be an army of useless middle managers diluting the impact of the people who actually do want to help the company and providing cover for people like them that are just phoning it it.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        Absolutely. I'd like to see companies get more serious about driving manager requirement from span of control. As well as regularly rotating managers, like the military does (e.g. 3 year reassignment).
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      > This ultimately rots an organization from the inside Hum... So instead you decide to immediately rot the organization from the inside. I can see how it avoids that one problem. The important problem is the waiting, right?
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        Try working for IT in a utility, insurance company, or other stable business. You'd be amazed how high the bar for termination is.
- gradstudent 2y ago
  > how do you pick which two? You (=hypothetical manager, please excuse second-person tense) use your managerial skills to make a decision, which considers metrics and other contributing factors. Then you write a justification which you defend, to higher ups and to those who weren't promoted. Because that's your job.
  - eesmith 2y ago
    Yes, the Nuremberg defense - "I was just following orders" - is one approach. It's a lot easier than applying back pressure, fighting for your reports, or quitting in solidarity. "Sorry, Hugo and Maryna, you two only got the Fields medal while Anton and Alain got a Nobel Prize, so we'll have to let you go for your under-performance."
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Arainach 2y ago
      Here's how this works in practice: * Corporate says "here are the buckets. They should match at the VP level since that's a large pile of people" * VPs tell their Directors to match these buckets, who recurse further * L1/2 Manager Alice says "my team is too small, this isn't how statistics work, I want an exception" * Problem #1: the teams with actual low performers will often make similar claims * If the claim actually gets escalated all the way to the VP, the VP says "tough, fit the buckets". * Alice is now a troublemaker in VP/Director's eyes * If Alice and everyone who feels the same way quits in protest, nothing changes except that the org is full of yes men, none of whom are even trying to push for changes in the system any more.
      - eesmith 2y ago
        So it's better that Alice stays because ... why?
        Arainach 2y ago
- kaashif 2y ago
  > If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics. This is a case where you're forced to rate people who are up to par as subpar - the rating system is simply bullshit. You should be allowed to rate people according to their actual performance. Metrics don't solve the underlying problem which is that the rating system sucks. Having a random number generator called "metrics" to "make decisions" isn't good either.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  Dice.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  > If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? I think it's Joel Spolsky who has a tale of a manager asking him to do that for his team when everyone had gone all in with overtime to get something shipped on time. To their great credit, the author refused, and the manager saw sense.
- Yizahi 2y ago
  Pfff, what kind of problem question is that. Manager promotes the ones who go with him for a smoke or do some other regular informal activity together, obviously. :)
- csa 2y ago
  > If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics. If you’re a manager in this type of system, your job is to reach out constantly and find folks who are low performers and get them into your department. They will fill the bottom of your team rating chart. At that point, they can be managed out (ideally in a humane way) or just held onto to fill that cellar dweller role while not slowing others down (some people are ok with this as long as they get paid). I would never choose to work in an environment like that, but some people find themselves there without better options (e.g., being location-bound due to family, etc.).
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    Wow, I never saw this type of advice before, but I like it. In short: If you are required to do stack ranking, where at least one person must get a shitty score/grade, then recruit someone internally who is below average and will take the hit. Brutal, but practical.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Or externally! I posted an idea here a while ago, where I thought I'd start a staffing company called "Scapegoat Consultants" and we would offer your team a "low performer" that you could hire and then fire after a year, to protect the rest of your team from stack-ranking. Our consultant will join your team and do as little as you want, or even nothing at all! We'd guarantee that they will at least not actively make your code base worse, but that's it. After a year of this, you can easily make the case that our recruit was a low-performer and manage them out. Don't worry, he won't mind--his job was to be the low performer, and we'll hire him out to the next BigTech company who struggles with stack ranking. It used to be tongue in cheek, but maybe the industry actually needs something like this.
      - Calamitous 2y ago
        Cynical, but probably the most humane take I’ve seen here so far.
red_admiral 2y ago
I've had experience with internal "support" that marks tickets as closed without actually fixing the problem. Sometimes the reason for closing suggests they haven't even read the email that opened the ticket. Think something like "Tool $X is missing on machine $Y. Please can you install it, according to $POLICY it is meant to be on all prod machines." Then the ticket gets closed with "The policy is correct. $X must be on all prod machines, we cannot change this." Without installing the tool. Then when the annual anonymous "rate your satisfaction with these services" survey came round, they wondered why the ratings were so bad - I made sure in the open text feedback not to go after the poor employee but to raise concerns about the performance of the team manager. I won't take credit for it, but I'm told things at $COMPANY have got better since.
dogleash 2y ago
> a shit manager This isn't about a singular individual, it's about a group of professionals. You have to deploy systems thinking. If you give a cohort a tool that allows and incentives them to do worse at their job, the average person in that group will perform worse. I like my boss; I have also built a skillset and frugalness where I don't worry about working for someone I don't respect ever again. But I still care about what's going on at large and trends. I don't want downward pressure on the average. Not only will that slowly seep into effecting me, I also care about the lives of the people at points in their career where they don't have employment opportunities that allow them to avoid bad management.
chipdart 2y ago
> The metrics make reporting to higher ups easier, no doubt. It's not about being "easy". It's about being objective, verifiable, and demonstratably unbiased. It's about justifying how you rank the performance in a way that's impossible to refute. > But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager: It's not, and frankly this "shit manager" accusation is an infantile remark that screams a failure to understand what it means to perform well.

passwordoops 2y ago

>the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager Well then it means the vast, vast, vast majority of companies with a coherent corporate structure are shit. Welcome to reality

Arainach 2y ago

Unfortunately, a lot of things boil down to metrics, even at companies with great engineering cultures. If you have four L4 engineers on the team, all of whom are performing at the level described in the career profile as L5, but only budget to promote two of them, how do you pick which two? What if they have different managers, all of whom sincerely believe their report is the one delivering essential value? If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics. This system is soul crushing but it exists all over the industry.

alextingle 2y ago
> If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? Easy. You quit, and find a better job. That practice is so toxic that it's sufficient to condemn the organisation as unworthy of any buy-in whatsoever. Just leave.
- jart 2y ago
  Nah you make sure X% of your team is staffed with losers. It's a nutty system I know. But I'd imagine that's how things worked at companies that have stack ratings. Managers probably traded low performers like baseball cards.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  In defense of stack ranking, it does solve a very common problem -- managers who never fire people who deserve to be let go. This ultimately rots an organization from the inside, as it leads to attrition of higher performers because they're forced to work with useless people. You see this a lot in companies that rarely fire people, because managers optimize for accumulating direct report count (whether or not those direct reports are doing valuable work).
  - convolvatron 2y ago
    companies need to do much better about letting managers go. I get it, they are hard to find. and those that actually have any engineering management skill at all are even harder to find. and every time you hire a new one you're taking a risk that they'll be a absolutely terrible manager. a terrible manager can cause a huge swath of destruction. but the answer can't be an army of useless middle managers diluting the impact of the people who actually do want to help the company and providing cover for people like them that are just phoning it it.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Absolutely. I'd like to see companies get more serious about driving manager requirement from span of control. As well as regularly rotating managers, like the military does (e.g. 3 year reassignment).
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > This ultimately rots an organization from the inside Hum... So instead you decide to immediately rot the organization from the inside. I can see how it avoids that one problem. The important problem is the waiting, right?
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Try working for IT in a utility, insurance company, or other stable business. You'd be amazed how high the bar for termination is.
gradstudent 2y ago
> how do you pick which two? You (=hypothetical manager, please excuse second-person tense) use your managerial skills to make a decision, which considers metrics and other contributing factors. Then you write a justification which you defend, to higher ups and to those who weren't promoted. Because that's your job.
- eesmith 2y ago
  Yes, the Nuremberg defense - "I was just following orders" - is one approach. It's a lot easier than applying back pressure, fighting for your reports, or quitting in solidarity. "Sorry, Hugo and Maryna, you two only got the Fields medal while Anton and Alain got a Nobel Prize, so we'll have to let you go for your under-performance."
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arainach 2y ago
    Here's how this works in practice: * Corporate says "here are the buckets. They should match at the VP level since that's a large pile of people" * VPs tell their Directors to match these buckets, who recurse further * L1/2 Manager Alice says "my team is too small, this isn't how statistics work, I want an exception" * Problem #1: the teams with actual low performers will often make similar claims * If the claim actually gets escalated all the way to the VP, the VP says "tough, fit the buckets". * Alice is now a troublemaker in VP/Director's eyes * If Alice and everyone who feels the same way quits in protest, nothing changes except that the org is full of yes men, none of whom are even trying to push for changes in the system any more.
    - eesmith 2y ago
      So it's better that Alice stays because ... why?
      - Arainach 2y ago
kaashif 2y ago
> If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics. This is a case where you're forced to rate people who are up to par as subpar - the rating system is simply bullshit. You should be allowed to rate people according to their actual performance. Metrics don't solve the underlying problem which is that the rating system sucks. Having a random number generator called "metrics" to "make decisions" isn't good either.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
Dice.
red_admiral 2y ago
> If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? I think it's Joel Spolsky who has a tale of a manager asking him to do that for his team when everyone had gone all in with overtime to get something shipped on time. To their great credit, the author refused, and the manager saw sense.
Yizahi 2y ago
Pfff, what kind of problem question is that. Manager promotes the ones who go with him for a smoke or do some other regular informal activity together, obviously. :)
csa 2y ago
> If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics. If you’re a manager in this type of system, your job is to reach out constantly and find folks who are low performers and get them into your department. They will fill the bottom of your team rating chart. At that point, they can be managed out (ideally in a humane way) or just held onto to fill that cellar dweller role while not slowing others down (some people are ok with this as long as they get paid). I would never choose to work in an environment like that, but some people find themselves there without better options (e.g., being location-bound due to family, etc.).
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Wow, I never saw this type of advice before, but I like it. In short: If you are required to do stack ranking, where at least one person must get a shitty score/grade, then recruit someone internally who is below average and will take the hit. Brutal, but practical.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Or externally! I posted an idea here a while ago, where I thought I'd start a staffing company called "Scapegoat Consultants" and we would offer your team a "low performer" that you could hire and then fire after a year, to protect the rest of your team from stack-ranking. Our consultant will join your team and do as little as you want, or even nothing at all! We'd guarantee that they will at least not actively make your code base worse, but that's it. After a year of this, you can easily make the case that our recruit was a low-performer and manage them out. Don't worry, he won't mind--his job was to be the low performer, and we'll hire him out to the next BigTech company who struggles with stack ranking. It used to be tongue in cheek, but maybe the industry actually needs something like this.
    - Calamitous 2y ago
      Cynical, but probably the most humane take I’ve seen here so far.

red_admiral 2y ago

I've had experience with internal "support" that marks tickets as closed without actually fixing the problem. Sometimes the reason for closing suggests they haven't even read the email that opened the ticket. Think something like "Tool $X is missing on machine $Y. Please can you install it, according to $POLICY it is meant to be on all prod machines." Then the ticket gets closed with "The policy is correct. $X must be on all prod machines, we cannot change this." Without installing the tool. Then when the annual anonymous "rate your satisfaction with these services" survey came round, they wondered why the ratings were so bad - I made sure in the open text feedback not to go after the poor employee but to raise concerns about the performance of the team manager. I won't take credit for it, but I'm told things at $COMPANY have got better since.

dogleash 2y ago

> a shit manager This isn't about a singular individual, it's about a group of professionals. You have to deploy systems thinking. If you give a cohort a tool that allows and incentives them to do worse at their job, the average person in that group will perform worse. I like my boss; I have also built a skillset and frugalness where I don't worry about working for someone I don't respect ever again. But I still care about what's going on at large and trends. I don't want downward pressure on the average. Not only will that slowly seep into effecting me, I also care about the lives of the people at points in their career where they don't have employment opportunities that allow them to avoid bad management.

chipdart 2y ago

> The metrics make reporting to higher ups easier, no doubt. It's not about being "easy". It's about being objective, verifiable, and demonstratably unbiased. It's about justifying how you rank the performance in a way that's impossible to refute. > But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager: It's not, and frankly this "shit manager" accusation is an infantile remark that screams a failure to understand what it means to perform well.