[asQuirreL]

A couple of other points that struck me as different from my experience, and maybe more a function of where this person is working rather than some fundamental difference between the roles:

The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more.

I have to admit that this may have been one of the reasons I felt the need to switch to a management role myself (I was an IC that had recently been promoted to a staff level role and subconsciously I felt like I lacked credibility and hiding behind a title would help me get some). In practice that turned out not to be true -- I didn't need to do that at the time, and now as an IC in a different company, my thoughts and feedback are taken seriously at an organisational level and by my peers.

The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken. I know it's a sad reality of performance management in a lot of places but it's not a universal truth that you will have to do that as a manager. Statistically, you can't avoid having difficult conversations about real performance problems, but there are companies where managers don't have to have the "everyone else on the team did better than you this half" conversation or the "I had to pick so this half you got the short straw" conversation.

[csydas]

> The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more

i thjnk this has to do with where you’re testing your word as the power of a statement from anyone in an org from my experience has entirely to do with how much money is missed potentially by listening to someone’s opinion.

im quite far up the management chain in past orgs and while i could make calls like “no we aren’t hotfixing in a new feature the client wants in 2 days since it will never work well and that’s not enough time to properly smoke test this very involved feature.”

the rnd team loved this statement because they understood it and agreed with it and saw i took their concerns seriously.

sales management was pissed understandably as the client abandoned the negotiation because we didn’t meet their demands, no matter how right i thjnk we were to deny this request. but the argument got pretty far in the company despite the fact that everyone agreed it would be a disaster to do this.

it’s not really about power and position i guess, it’s how convincing you can be this is profitable for most companies. ego and power tripping are of course part of it but the ultimate decision is how well you can paint the financial prospects of it.

a similar request in the future was shit down faster as i asked the qa test to show on some mock code how many considerations we needed and the plain time for such a feature to be properly implemented — the financial impact was dire if we raced it out and that stopped the conversations very fast.

[fabianholzer]

> The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken.

I've sworn to myself, that the moment that this idiotic idea get introduced in the "performance management" process at the place I work, will be the day that I'll start to send out resumes. Even if it were handled lottery style ("the short straw") I would not cut slack to either manager or company for such an indignity.

[Infinitesimus]

It mostly masquerades as performance curves.

You're not being told to pick someone, you're being told that your org cannot really have 80% of people meeting/exceeding expectations and that because reasons (budget), you should review the cusp cases and adjust them down.

[zeroonetwothree]

IME in ~20 years I’ve never been on a team where there wasn’t someone underperforming (I acknowledge sometimes it was me!). So while I agree it’s stupid to force a curve, it also doesn’t seem realistic when every manager claims their entire team is great.

[rusticpenn]

Yeah, I even asked my current employer if its there in the company. He said no. Its there under a different name. I realised why the team culture was so bad. I am sending resumes to other companies already.

[robertlagrant]

> The fact that you have to stack rank and pick an under-performer every half is just broken

I didn't realise places still did this. Even Microsoft stopped, and I think acknowledged that it was crippling to them in the 2000s as talent rushed to less silly companies.

[margorczynski]

Isn't this the standard in Amazon? But I guess the cutthroat approach is part of their corporate DNA.

[treflop]

What you’re saying is true but being able to talk and convince people gets you wayyy further than any other method.