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This sounds good, but in my experience bad employees were known to everyone. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly why they were bad or toxic, but pretty much ev
by bko 2y ago
This sounds good, but in my experience bad employees were known to everyone. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly why they were bad or toxic, but pretty much everyone agreed. If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so. So creating a documentation trail is difficult, especially if its based on people saying they don't think he does good work or people don't want to work with him.
This is where I break with the "pro worker" dialog you hear online a lot. In my experience, competent employees are incredible difficult to come by. Recruiters are paid a few months salary just to get someone through the door. To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true. I'd prefer the quick to hire, quick to fire economy. Especially since employers would be much less likely to take a chance if they know there are a lot of hoops they'd have to jump through if it didn't work out
- axus 2y agoIt's like the unpopular, friendless kids in high school, you just know. And there's nothing they can do to change it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mensetmanusman 2y agoLess negativity and more listening by everyone can be a place to start.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoWith what time? Middle managers don’t suddenly get 28 hours in a day after someone offers this suggestion. Their schedules are already maxed out, so every extra minute of focused attention needed is literally coming from someone else’s (or some other department’s) budget.
- ars 2y agoI tried that with someone once, I got an enormous list of complaints about all the wrong things everyone else was doing wrong. And utterly zero awareness of what they themselves were doing wrong. Attempting to explain it to them was a complete failure.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoIt’s a fun challenge to try to enlighten them about how things can go wrong with their approach.
- akdor1154 2y agoAnd then they go on to be a (difficult to work with) 10× developer? Instinctive social judgement definitely exists. Is it a good metric to find good employees? Dunno, maybe?
- tssva 2y agoIf they are meeting the metrics set to judge their performance how are they bad employees? If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics.
- School-Cotton 2y ago> If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics. Nobody has ever come up with a good set of objective metrics to judge software engineer performance. So the best we have is still the subjective opinions of your managers and peers.
- fallingsquirrel 2y agoWhat metrics do you propose that aren't susceptible to Goodhart's law?
- joenot443 2y agoLike in the cases of US courts defining obscenity or fair use, there isn't necessarily a set of metrics which can be used to perfectly taxonomize something. Imagine I sent a manuscript to a publishing house and they rejected it for being bad. I wouldn't expect they got to that conclusion by comparing it to a set of metrics, I would assume they have people in authority whose judgement is the decider on whether something is "good" or "bad".
- 39896880 2y agoYour analogy only works when applied to the hiring stage, as that is when the publishing house decides to work with you. If the publisher accepted your manuscript, assigned you an editor, gave you a target publish date, and gave you advance and then suddenly booted you and said “your work isn’t good” you’d have some questions, and rightly so.
- stickfigure 2y agoThis sort of thing happens all the time? Many manuscripts and screenplays are stillborn. Movies make it halfway through production before the plug is pulled. Software projects fail left and right, with millions of dollars spent (sometimes billions!) Human endeavors sometimes fail to live up to expectations.
- slg 2y ago>If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so. Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line, it isn't a question of skill or ability. It is a failure of the company to properly motivate, challenge, and reward them for their work.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line It’s HN. We’ve all been maliciously compliant. I can close tickets without solving any problems or be on call in the most useless ways imaginable just fine.
- slg 2y agoI just read that as "management has no idea how to evaluate the quality of work of their employees". Either the company should be able to evaluate an employee's performance and therefore can show proof of poor performance or it can't properly evaluate an employee's performance and therefore shouldn't be firing people based off an admittedly inaccurate measure of performance.
- stickfigure 2y agoHow are you going to accurately measure "your code is shit"? If it was that easy, it would be a standard git hook.
- WalterBright 2y agoI've noticed it is entirely possible for code to be written that absolutely conforms with every good coding style rule, and is utter garbage (even if it works!).
- School-Cotton 2y ago> I just read that as "management has no idea how to evaluate the quality of work of their employees". You probably couldn't explain how you walk, or how you cook an egg, or how you speak English, at the level of detail that would be required for something like this. Yet you do know how to do all those things. Just because you can't write down detailed objective instructions for how to do something does not at all mean you have no idea how to do it.
- legitster 2y agoI worked in fast food and this resonates extremely with me. There were only 4-5 people in a kitchen during the busy rush, and there was a list everyone knew of people they didn't want to get stuck in a shift with. If someone sucks to work with, it really sucks, and because everyone is pitching in and working together, there is no indication that the person was bad at their job. If you were fired, it was usually because your fellow workers said you were bad. I'm all on board with better pay and benefits. But protecting mediocrity doesn't benefit customers or other workers. Companies may occasionally arbitrarily fire good employees without a good cause, but that would be their loss. One thing you'll notice in employee-owned companies (as opposed to unionized companies) is that they generally do no tolerate such clauses in their contracts.
- shagie 2y agoPrice's Law is "50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work." https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ https://routine.co/blog/what-is-the-prices-law-and-why-is-it-important https://routine.co/blog/what-is-the-prices-law-and-why-is-it...
- araes 2y agoSo, extending that rule (approximately): All the actual work on Earth is performed by sqrt( 3,630,000,000 )[1] or: ~60,000 workers [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN "Based on choosing the current estimates of Labor force, total"
- beepbooptheory 2y agoYou can still be pro-worker even if you think sometimes a certain worker is bad, or hard to work with, or otherwise a "bad employee." It is more something political and something about how you view the world/humanity in general. It is not an "identity politics" where the discussion is around certain kinds of people or not. That would be kinda silly anyway on its face, we are virtually all workers!
- taurath 2y ago> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true Have you only ever worked with reasonable management? The problem with quick to hire quick to fire is that eventually you might be quick to fire. I suspect you have a much higher level of security than most people to have quality of coworkers as a top priority!
- RHSeeger 2y agoHeck, there's companies where standard practice is "fire the lowest x% of workers on a regular basis". Doesn't even matter if they're doing a good job or not; just that someone else is doing a _better_ job. Optimal strategy is to sabotage your coworkers in such an environment.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ta_1138 2y agoAnd don't forget that the percentages are not global, but in small buckets. This makes the worst performers extremely valuable, because not only you have someone to get rid of, but if they are bad enough, the rest of the team knows who will be laid off, so they can be far less tense. It's also bad for the high performers, as working in the same team is bad: Having 3 great performers in a team means at least one, if not two are going to get a middling review. Everyone's behavior gets warped in ways that don't align well with what would be good for the company
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JamesBarney 2y agoAnd the problem with slow to hire, slow to fire is one day you might be incredibly slow to hire. And overall if you're looking to be employed as much of your life as possible quick to hire/quick to fire is obviously better based on unemployment data.
- vundercind 2y agoThe looser overall firing rules are, the harder it is for the union to protect members from e.g. firing for insisting on adherence to safety/security/contractual/employment policies/laws. Threat-of-firing-backed pressure on all those fronts is incredibly common outside companies with strong unions.
- lmm 2y ago> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true. Of course not. They fire people with different taste in music, or who don't listen enthusiastically to their complaints about other people, or who refuse them sexual favours, or...