5 ms·
There are a few other things people almost don't talk about because these blogs seem to always be from people in level 60 (junior people). - There is really no
by hyperliner 11y ago
There are a few other things people almost don't talk about because these blogs seem to always be from people in level 60 (junior people).
- There is really no 20% rule that applies to teams. The calibration process is across bands / levels across a given product area. So it is not that you are supposed to give a score of 5 (deadwood) to a member in your 5-people team. It means all people across the division who are at level X are looked at and "sorted" to do that assignment. People level 64-65 and above typically have these "cards" that they use to sort people. That is the meeting where your manager or his manager is supposed to support you. But the other managers don't really know who you are for real. In the best case, they may know of you. So it is really hard to have a conversation because only one or two people have context about every person. So just to summarize, there are these cards that people drop on a table where they do the classification, and people don't really know who they are ranking.
- the second point is that moving into new teams is in many cases a really bad idea because the new manager now inherits a new person that cannot be defended as well as the existing team for the simple reason that the new person is not known as well. Many people have been in the same division for 15 years or more. You know they are not going to be an unknown and they coast on the legacy reviews. The new guy / gal is an easy victim unless she is some sort of Bill Gates right off the bat.
- one thing that was crazy in that review is that they not only let go of people with bad scores. They also let go of people with good scores but who are deemed to have reached their plateau level. So you may still be a great director or GPM but if the system decides the director is not going to make GM or the GPM is not going to make director, then they also see you as a candidate to get rid of.
- the most important problem for the industry I believe is that the system perpetuates the need to create NEW stuff. So for example, why would somebody create Powershell instead of using a perfectly fine alternative from the Linux / Unix world? Well, because that way you are the person who created a NEW thing and not who simply PORTED a solution! Can you imagine the world today if we could use the same commands or patterns of commands in Windows as we do in Linux? Clearly the OS are too different for that to be practical but we cannot argue that the syntax and paradigm could have been more similar.
- MichaelGG 11y agoPowershell's object pipeline far outshines the Unix style "pass around strings and dick with parsing everywhere". It also handles quoting in a much more sane manner, eliminating security holes or just plain bugs you get in, say, bash. The included editor and command line completion for arguments is really slick. Painting PS as just NIH is simply incorrect. MS bringing back Services for Unix for real is a somewhat orthogonal issue than coming up with a superior shell.
- pjmlp 11y agoMany people fail to understand how Powershell is actually closer to the workflow from Xerox PARC OSes than UNIX shells. Specially when they take UNIX way of computing as the only way, without room for any improvement.
- melted 11y agoIt doesn't matter what Powershell does and doesn't do. People aren't going to learn yet another shell scripting language just because someone at Microsoft wanted to get promoted and rolled a new one. I want Windows shell to look like UNIX, to be scriptable exactly the same, and to have a proper SSH remote login. Apple managed to do this with OS X. Microsoft is denying the reality and substituting it with their own.
- rosege 11y agoSnover actually had to take a demotion and pay cut to get permission to create PowerShell but he believed it was the right thing to do for the company.
- melted 11y agoI bet plenty of PMs got a promo, though.
- chris_wot 11y agoIt doesn't matter what Powershell does and doesn't do. People aren't going to learn yet another shell scripting language just because someone at Microsoft wanted to get promoted and rolled a new one. I'm a bit of a bash scripting nut, but I've recently had to do some Windows administration via Powershell and actually it's pretty awesome! I want Windows shell to look like UNIX, to be scriptable exactly the same, and to have a proper SSH remote login. So install Cygwin. Apple managed to do this with OS X. OS X uses a Unix shell. Most of it is based on Unix principles. It wasn't that hard! Microsoft is denying the reality and substituting it with their own. Really? It still uses pipes and redirection, has command history and tab completion. You can alias commands, but Powershell has functions which allow for parameters. The thing is - Powershell is, somewhat surprisingly, more powerful in many ways than bash, especially around variable handling. I'd be pretty happy if it was ported to Linux, which I'm actually rather surprised about!
- rosege 11y agopretty sure Jeffrey Snover has said that he thought about that but believed PowerShell should be different and could be better. Personally, I find PS syntax to be pretty logical and fairly easy to work things out in.