5 ms·

Still it is a faulty metric. 200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing develo

• Arainach 10mo ago
  Then what's your proposal? People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.
  • palata 10mo ago
    > Then what's your proposal? Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them. "What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.
    • oatmealcookie 10mo ago
      [dead]
    • Arainach 10mo ago
      "What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful griping. Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them. "All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.
      • palata 10mo ago
        > if you don't have a better option My whole point here is that "doing whatever bullshit makes you feel good" is not necessarily the better option. Either you can prove that it's worth something, in which case you will not have to ask "What's your proposal?" because people won't complain about it, or you're just doing something for the sake of doing something, and your only recourse when people show you that it's bullshit is to get defensive. > If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. And if you don't identify good performers properly and don't reward them, they will leave as well. A pragmatic approach is to reward your team, as a team. If you go with "we fire the lowest 10% every year because there have to be low performers", you're creating an adversarial situation. Wanna know what happens if you're my manager in an adversarial context? Easy: I will be an adversary. How constructive is that? Not my problem, I did not make the rules.
  • ipdashc 10mo ago
    > People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it. Not without flaws, of course, but preferable to chasing a made-up metric. It's arguably the entire point of a manager, to know what their employees are doing at a high level. We managed to do this for hundreds of years without needing shiny dashboards and counting every meeting attended. Metrics have their place as well, of course, but they should be one data point, and should not be chased after so religiously that recording the metrics becomes significant work on its own.
    • Arainach 10mo ago
      >Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it "My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?" "My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?" "My manager keeps hiring only people of their race and playing favorites with them, what do I do?" "Coworker X gave me a bad review because I wouldn't go on a date with them" Even in the best case it biases heavily towards the people most enthusiastic about selling an image of themselves rather than those who are necessarily contributing. Relying on someone's perception/vouching for you rather than performance metrics can be an absolute disaster - for the people involved and for the company if it turns into a lawsuit.
      • devsda 10mo ago
        > My manager hates me, how do I get promoted? > My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?" There may be legitimate cases but if someone runs into these issues often, may be its just excuses for bad performance. If the issue is genuine, find out what your specific organization can do about the situation and resolve it within that framework or find a better manager. No amount of metrics are gonna help if you are going against a hostile manager, team or leadership.
      • ipdashc 10mo ago
        These are all pretty extreme cases that apply if your managers/coworkers are horrible people. Most people are thankfully, as a rule, pretty normal. Obviously discrimination exists, which is why metrics should still be used (as data points) and why larger companies need an oversight process. Turning ourselves into automatons, promoting and praising people exclusively based on some arbitrary set of numbers, just to try and make it fairer, won't lead to a happier or genuinely fairer workplace. At the end of the day, most jobs relevant to HN are complicated and explicitly involve a lot of human interaction. You need humans to judge performance in human-interaction jobs.
• tester756 10mo ago
  >Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task. In general you pick companies, products, teams, initiatives, tasks that you're interested about, so it's not like it is purely dependent on luck If you have skills and see opportunity then going for that may result in nice outcomes :)