> Trust them to produce, and if they are not producing, let them go.
If you are firing someone for performance, you have done a performance review. It's just that it might be entirely in your head or based on office gossip about who appears most productive.
You wouldn't optimise a program without a profiler, so you shouldn't make hire/fire decisions on productivity without some means of measuring productivity. I know it's hard and tends to result in stupid metrics, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted.
Idk about the US, but I imagine it's more similar to the EU than the press suggests....
Anyway in most of the EU, by law and by convention^ people don't get fired often. When they do, it's a part of a greater process where a department is reorganized, jobs have been made redundant or somesuch. Firing individuals for below average performance is rare. It needs to be an extreme. If it is dines, it's done as part of a performance review) evaluation process with feedback, time...
The reality is that
^The convention part is important. Regardless of laws, it's very hard to operate a business that's firing a lot. Firing someone is like exiling/outlawing them, to borrow analogies from older societies.
If you try, you'll encounter a huge pile of difficulties. Moral/culture will be one. Politics will be another.
Usually each worker have management, I mean those guys to whole everybody is reported. In IT I am talking about TLs, PMs and so on. Maybe it's easier just to ask them or even better to have a a personal meeting. Nobody experienced believes in performance reviews, it's a fiction.
Personally I hate performance reviews, but if a formal system doesn't exist people will demand something. In the absence of a system there can be appearances of favoritism and, if the managers aren't disciplined, things like raises and promotions can end up being ad-hoc and random.
That said a performance review system doesn't necessarily completely cure favoritism but it at least leaves a paper trail. It should also force management into thinking about how to structure raises and promotions in a way that they're more evenly and rationally applied.
Trust them to produce, and if they are not producing, let them go
This is incredibly wasteful and an easy to way to lose good people. Take a few minutes to conduct a 'performance review' and see why they aren't producing. Sometimes it's an easy fix. I've seen companies fire people who where world class at Y simply because they weren't performing at X, despite the fact that the company also had a different department that did Y.
It's not even a performance review; it's just root cause analysis. Something like,
"Why isn't Sally meeting her deliverables?"
"Because she spends her time doing PM work."
"Ok, let's see if she want to transfer roles."
Your world class Y people should have valued communication. They should raise red flags every time they need management to remove an obstacle in order to increase their productivity and realize their full potential.
Indeed some of these rules and policies are ridiculous. I particularly enjoyed my time as a mid-level manager at a large aerospace company where we did stack ranking each year. We had to stack rank an organization that consisted of five departments with over 300 engineers. I was one of the department managers. Each department manager's goal was to get as many of his members ranked as highly as possible. The game theory was thick in those meetings. Unfortunately, one of the other managers had weak game and ended up with poor rankings every year. It seemed very unfair to his better people.
However, this statement in the article is pretty dumb:
"If you don’t trust the people you hired, why did you hire them?" How about because they interviewed well and you thought you could trust them but once they started working they proved themselves untrustworthy. That's not rocket science; it's something that happens and is not particularly rare.
Let people work from home at their own whim. Never inquire about their performance. Never document anything related to their performance. Shutter your company in 5 years when you have a bloated payroll, terrible products, and nothing ever gets done on time.
I get that actually managing people and their performance is harshly frowned upon on HN, but it is a very necessary evil. Working in a place where the inmates run the asylum is is not fun either from my experience.
Adding another one: the advice on "Feedback methods" (don't send out engagement surveys, just walk around and ask people how they're doing) is incredibly hard to get right.
It takes a remarkable amount of trust for a random individual employee to feel confident that they can voice their concerns to management. And that trust takes an enormous amount of effort. If you're a manager and you're not absolutely sure that your employees would feel free to speak their minds, giving them a risk-free way of doing so isn't a bad idea. Employees feeling they can't speak honestly to someone who is in control of their livelihood isn't a "problem with communication", it's the status quo at the majority of companies.
"If you have mediocre people doing mediocre work, you are going to have a mediocre company."
Aren't most people mediocre per definition?
I really hate all this talk about "We want the best of the best!"
Sure you want them, but there aren't enough for all and chances are, if you aren't a really big company, you won't get the few that exist.
You need to shape you company so that you can deliver value to your customers without the need of a few geniuses. Your company should be more than the sum of its (mediocre) employees.
A lot of articles recommend against formal performance reviews, and in some sense I agree, but it is important to be thoughtful about how you're going to give feedback and work with your employees to help them perform more effectively.
Oftentimes formal performance reviews are replaced with some sort of continual feedback system (whether through an actual formal system or just an informal process), but in my experience a lot of continual feedback systems just turn into a back-patting machine and lose a lot of the constructive criticism that a formal review process can bring out.
Stack-ranking is obviously dumb, and yes, assigning things to a 5 point scale probably is too. But those were never the actually valuable parts of good reviews. You should always find a way to spend time and be thoughtful about where team members are excelling and where they're falling short.
I've worked a few jobs that decided that performance reviews were a pointless exercise and I honestly couldn't have told you what everyone thought of my performance prior to me leaving.
I agree. I have a very good relationship with my boss, we speak about performance and stuff casually all the time. But we also have a formal review once a year, and it’s really helpful for me. I learn some weaknesses that I have that I might not always have time to talk about in every meet ups.
It’s hard to explain but the context change definitely helps to see exactly where you stand as an employee.
Personally, blunt candor can work as well. I do not let anything slip, if I think someone needs some direction or coaching it basically happens in realtime. There's really no need for a formal review if feedback is constant. Sometimes the feedback can be more general, I feel someone needs some hints I just give it to them.
I don't make it personal and don't expect people to take it personally, it's jarring at first but quickly it just feels really quite normal.
Technically, there are still room for performance reviews ... but if as a manager you're telling someone in a review something they're hearing for the first time then you've failed. They should know right away.
We had a chap who wore leather, except sometimes a T-Shirt expressing quite harshly an opinion about a globally recognised major religious figure from antiquity.
People know when you're not productive. Co-workers in particular but managers, too. When this is detected, I would rather tell a non-productive person this right away and not wait for any review. Perhaps then, after a few of these, an adjustment in salary or employment can be made.
Rally anyone? I have a hard time getting used to it, and I've seen stories being worked on for the sake of being in rally even though there isn't enough information for good work to be done. I've seen engineers do good work to build features that the product needed but engineer was discouraged from doing it because it wasn't in rally first. And pointing sucks, we're trying to fill stories in just to meet certain point quota per Sprint.
> Faced with a rule-driven culture, the best employees ... are usually the first to go, because they’re in high demand and have more opportunity than most. What’s left is a pool of people who are mediocre at what they do ...
And that is when I stop reading any article.
EDIT: She's stating rules in the workplace make good employees leave and only mediocre employees remain. The term BS automatically applies here.
Clean-desk policies, bans on "personal items" (want a photo of your family on your desk? nope), strict uniform policies ("failure to wear the company polo shirt AND jumper, even if it's 30C, will result in dismissal")...
Individually the rules don't mean much. But when they're added together -- and especially if they're changed (removing 'dress-down Fridays', say) can end up creating a bit of a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario.
Because really, who's harmed by someone putting a photo of their wife and kid on their desk? Or a quiet little office toy (a stress ball maybe?) they were given at a trade show?
But easily the biggest way you can show that you don't trust your employees is to pretend to listen to their concerns and suggestions for improving the workplace, only to laugh at them and dismiss them. That type of treatment is just about guaranteed to lose you good people.
Let your staff work on their own initiative, foster their creativity, and they'll produce magic. And when they're slipping a bit - have a polite, private conversation, away from the eyes of the madding crowd and office gossipers, and ask how you (As a manager) or the company can help them.
Some rules are good, some rules are bad. Too many bad rules result in people with the possibility of leaving to leave. The better an employee is, the more possibilities it has to leave. In conclusion, given a company with enough bad rules, good people will leave.
I don't see a problem with this premise. You can argue about which rules are good, and which rules are bad, but to skip the entire article (and brag about doing it) is shortsighted.
I think she was close to figuring out what can happen, but missed the mark. Great developers leaving are your canaries, and the Dead Sea Effect is a real thing. So what do rules and processes have to do with this?
I'm currently happiest at my job that is the most "enterprisey" and has more rules. I can't wear shorts or sandals to work, which perpetually irritates me. I can't run the OS I want at work, and I have a hard time getting simple things like a decently sized monitor because of esoteric rules. A lot of these rules are dumb, and sound like the ones in the article, but I'm planning on staying for as long as I'm challenged and having fun.
Our team runs kanban instead of scrum/sprints, and we're constantly asking to use non-approved technologies (where appropriate) in a traditionally Java-based company. We have individual and team agency, and there is an implied trust that we will prioritize accordingly, get things done, and make good technology decisions. I would gladly deal with a dozen other dumb rules as long as I'm able to hold onto the above, as interesting work and agency to solve it in creative ways is the number one thing I'm looking for.
Contrast that with some of the other places I've worked. I used to be able to drink beer at work, we could have dogs in the office, I had more vacation time, free beverages and snacks, etc. All those things are nice perks, but they came tethered with what I consider the detestable processes that the article glosses over.
Any process related to productivity is designed to set a bar which will bring up your lower performing individuals. This bar will drag down your good developers - that is what makes good developers leave. Knowing how to fix problems and being unable to do anything about it while stuck in an endless barrage of sprint planning, sprint retros, forced demos, velocity tracking, etc. is not fun. Forced consensus on any decisions is like pulling teeth and people end up afraid to contribute or have a dissenting opinion.
The people that are OK with the productivity bar are the ones that stick around for 15 years and become "indispensable" because they know where the bodies are hidden. Anyone good that joins the company probably won't last more than 18 months.
I apologize for the long rant, but it's been a topic I've spent a great deal thinking about in the last 2 years after trying (and eventually succeeding) to find a good place to work.
The issue I have with cellphones is I've routinely seen people browsing Facebook or chatting to their friends. This lasts for _hours_, as in 1pm-6pm with overtime all while others working extremely hard.
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
> Trust them to produce, and if they are not producing, let them go.
If you are firing someone for performance, you have done a performance review. It's just that it might be entirely in your head or based on office gossip about who appears most productive.
You wouldn't optimise a program without a profiler, so you shouldn't make hire/fire decisions on productivity without some means of measuring productivity. I know it's hard and tends to result in stupid metrics, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted.
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
Anyway in most of the EU, by law and by convention^ people don't get fired often. When they do, it's a part of a greater process where a department is reorganized, jobs have been made redundant or somesuch. Firing individuals for below average performance is rare. It needs to be an extreme. If it is dines, it's done as part of a performance review) evaluation process with feedback, time...
The reality is that
^The convention part is important. Regardless of laws, it's very hard to operate a business that's firing a lot. Firing someone is like exiling/outlawing them, to borrow analogies from older societies.
If you try, you'll encounter a huge pile of difficulties. Moral/culture will be one. Politics will be another.
[+] [-] kertis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgh|7 years ago|reply
That said a performance review system doesn't necessarily completely cure favoritism but it at least leaves a paper trail. It should also force management into thinking about how to structure raises and promotions in a way that they're more evenly and rationally applied.
[+] [-] dagw|7 years ago|reply
This is incredibly wasteful and an easy to way to lose good people. Take a few minutes to conduct a 'performance review' and see why they aren't producing. Sometimes it's an easy fix. I've seen companies fire people who where world class at Y simply because they weren't performing at X, despite the fact that the company also had a different department that did Y.
[+] [-] krainboltgreene|7 years ago|reply
I have never seen a company implement a performance review:
[+] [-] Delmania|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nurettin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolco|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geomark|7 years ago|reply
However, this statement in the article is pretty dumb: "If you don’t trust the people you hired, why did you hire them?" How about because they interviewed well and you thought you could trust them but once they started working they proved themselves untrustworthy. That's not rocket science; it's something that happens and is not particularly rare.
[+] [-] dagw|7 years ago|reply
Or just as likely, "you" didn't hire them. Someone else in the company did based on criteria that are different than yours.
[+] [-] mberning|7 years ago|reply
I get that actually managing people and their performance is harshly frowned upon on HN, but it is a very necessary evil. Working in a place where the inmates run the asylum is is not fun either from my experience.
[+] [-] fjsolwmv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanbrunner|7 years ago|reply
It takes a remarkable amount of trust for a random individual employee to feel confident that they can voice their concerns to management. And that trust takes an enormous amount of effort. If you're a manager and you're not absolutely sure that your employees would feel free to speak their minds, giving them a risk-free way of doing so isn't a bad idea. Employees feeling they can't speak honestly to someone who is in control of their livelihood isn't a "problem with communication", it's the status quo at the majority of companies.
[+] [-] k__|7 years ago|reply
Aren't most people mediocre per definition?
I really hate all this talk about "We want the best of the best!"
Sure you want them, but there aren't enough for all and chances are, if you aren't a really big company, you won't get the few that exist.
You need to shape you company so that you can deliver value to your customers without the need of a few geniuses. Your company should be more than the sum of its (mediocre) employees.
[+] [-] Jedi72|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanbrunner|7 years ago|reply
Oftentimes formal performance reviews are replaced with some sort of continual feedback system (whether through an actual formal system or just an informal process), but in my experience a lot of continual feedback systems just turn into a back-patting machine and lose a lot of the constructive criticism that a formal review process can bring out.
Stack-ranking is obviously dumb, and yes, assigning things to a 5 point scale probably is too. But those were never the actually valuable parts of good reviews. You should always find a way to spend time and be thoughtful about where team members are excelling and where they're falling short.
I've worked a few jobs that decided that performance reviews were a pointless exercise and I honestly couldn't have told you what everyone thought of my performance prior to me leaving.
[+] [-] rhodysurf|7 years ago|reply
It’s hard to explain but the context change definitely helps to see exactly where you stand as an employee.
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|7 years ago|reply
Personally, blunt candor can work as well. I do not let anything slip, if I think someone needs some direction or coaching it basically happens in realtime. There's really no need for a formal review if feedback is constant. Sometimes the feedback can be more general, I feel someone needs some hints I just give it to them.
I don't make it personal and don't expect people to take it personally, it's jarring at first but quickly it just feels really quite normal.
Technically, there are still room for performance reviews ... but if as a manager you're telling someone in a review something they're hearing for the first time then you've failed. They should know right away.
[+] [-] Mtntk|7 years ago|reply
"We have smart casual dress code in this software department. So you can't wear shorts event if its 40 degrees celsius. Oh and shirt is mandatory"
[+] [-] sonnyblarney|7 years ago|reply
So wait, coding without a shirt on is how a thing?
My god man.
If there is air conditioning, slacks shouldn't be a problem though shorts aren't extraordinarily unsuitable.
You can wear a shirt man.
[+] [-] EliRivers|7 years ago|reply
I was glad to see a dress code come in.
[+] [-] csunbird|7 years ago|reply
This sentence is contradicts :
"Let’s be honest: Performance reviews are a waste of time."
How are you going to know if the person is productive if you are not doing performance reviews?
[+] [-] onion2k|7 years ago|reply
You have to take an active role in managing them rather than just passively checking in occasionally.
[+] [-] sureaboutthis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] songzme|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sureaboutthis|7 years ago|reply
And that is when I stop reading any article.
EDIT: She's stating rules in the workplace make good employees leave and only mediocre employees remain. The term BS automatically applies here.
[+] [-] philpem|7 years ago|reply
Clean-desk policies, bans on "personal items" (want a photo of your family on your desk? nope), strict uniform policies ("failure to wear the company polo shirt AND jumper, even if it's 30C, will result in dismissal")...
Individually the rules don't mean much. But when they're added together -- and especially if they're changed (removing 'dress-down Fridays', say) can end up creating a bit of a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario.
Because really, who's harmed by someone putting a photo of their wife and kid on their desk? Or a quiet little office toy (a stress ball maybe?) they were given at a trade show?
But easily the biggest way you can show that you don't trust your employees is to pretend to listen to their concerns and suggestions for improving the workplace, only to laugh at them and dismiss them. That type of treatment is just about guaranteed to lose you good people.
Let your staff work on their own initiative, foster their creativity, and they'll produce magic. And when they're slipping a bit - have a polite, private conversation, away from the eyes of the madding crowd and office gossipers, and ask how you (As a manager) or the company can help them.
TL/DR: Treat your staff like adults.
[+] [-] rootlocus|7 years ago|reply
I don't see a problem with this premise. You can argue about which rules are good, and which rules are bad, but to skip the entire article (and brag about doing it) is shortsighted.
[+] [-] lllr_finger|7 years ago|reply
I'm currently happiest at my job that is the most "enterprisey" and has more rules. I can't wear shorts or sandals to work, which perpetually irritates me. I can't run the OS I want at work, and I have a hard time getting simple things like a decently sized monitor because of esoteric rules. A lot of these rules are dumb, and sound like the ones in the article, but I'm planning on staying for as long as I'm challenged and having fun.
Our team runs kanban instead of scrum/sprints, and we're constantly asking to use non-approved technologies (where appropriate) in a traditionally Java-based company. We have individual and team agency, and there is an implied trust that we will prioritize accordingly, get things done, and make good technology decisions. I would gladly deal with a dozen other dumb rules as long as I'm able to hold onto the above, as interesting work and agency to solve it in creative ways is the number one thing I'm looking for.
Contrast that with some of the other places I've worked. I used to be able to drink beer at work, we could have dogs in the office, I had more vacation time, free beverages and snacks, etc. All those things are nice perks, but they came tethered with what I consider the detestable processes that the article glosses over.
Any process related to productivity is designed to set a bar which will bring up your lower performing individuals. This bar will drag down your good developers - that is what makes good developers leave. Knowing how to fix problems and being unable to do anything about it while stuck in an endless barrage of sprint planning, sprint retros, forced demos, velocity tracking, etc. is not fun. Forced consensus on any decisions is like pulling teeth and people end up afraid to contribute or have a dissenting opinion.
The people that are OK with the productivity bar are the ones that stick around for 15 years and become "indispensable" because they know where the bodies are hidden. Anyone good that joins the company probably won't last more than 18 months.
I apologize for the long rant, but it's been a topic I've spent a great deal thinking about in the last 2 years after trying (and eventually succeeding) to find a good place to work.
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwmcsween|7 years ago|reply