Comment by stouset

Comment by stouset a month ago

Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.

One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned.

One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.

majormajor a month ago

The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.

Everyone needs to advocate for themselves.

A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own.

If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad.

And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.

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stouset a month ago

Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat.
Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block.
The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work.
Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.

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- geodel a month ago
  
  You made excellent points. As someone looking to solve problems, finish tasks and go home. I just don't feel energized marketing myself if it is not during changing jobs.
  And measurement has really taken over now. There is little value in getting task done well as compared to finishing more jira stories.
  
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- nradov a month ago
  
  And that's fine. It's why the lifecycle of most technology companies is fairly short. They grow for a while and eventually stagnate, to be replaced by the next crop of startups when a disruptive innovation comes along. And then the cycle repeats.
  
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WorldMaker a month ago

When it comes time for layoffs, it generally isn't what your boss knows, it's what your boss's grandboss thinks to throw onto a spreadsheet at the eleventh hour before Quarterly Reports are due.
A good direct boss might keep you on track for a bonus or other "local advancement", maybe even a promotion, but many companies you are only as valued as the ant numbers you look like from the C Suite's mile high club. (Which doesn't protect your good boss, either.)

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suzzer99 a month ago

> The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.
100%. You ask me to do the near impossible, I'll pull it off. But you will be very well-versed in how hard it is first.

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pdimitar a month ago

I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.

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animuchan a month ago

What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup.

One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that.

The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.)

(The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)

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grg0 a month ago

The classic one too is that as somebody who puts out the fires, you get all the praise; whereas if you just do the damn job right from the beginning, nobody notices. Corollary: create as many fires as you can, just don't completely burn the whole thing to the ground.

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the_snooze a month ago

It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

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2OEH8eoCRo0 a month ago

It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?

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- kevinventullo a month ago
  
  This was previously recommended to me on HN, so I’ll pass it along. The book “Seeing Like A State” gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
  The basic idea is that the only viable way to administer a complex and heterogenous system like a massive corporation is to simplify by enforcing “legibility” or homogeneity. Without this, central control becomes far too complex to manage. Thus, the simplification becomes a mandate, even at the cost of great inefficiencies.
  What makes the book particularly interesting is the many different historical examples of this phenomenon, across a wide array of human endeavors.
  
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  scarecrowbob a month ago
  
  I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.
  That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.
  I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.
  I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.
  But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.
  
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  sidewndr46 a month ago
  
  Maybe I would have found the book more impactful if I had read it earlier in life. I felt like it put together various ideas and presented them well in a comprehensible manner. What I feel it omits is that the mechanisms of a state only have to be actionable, not rational. If you ask me how to mow a lawn and I come up with some byzantine process involving multiple steps that don't even contribute to the end goal I'm going to be labeled nuts or maybe "eccentric" if they want to be polite. The same scrutiny doesn't apply to the various bureaucratic processes of a state for whatever reason.
  
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- LeifCarrotson a month ago
  
  The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.
  Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers.
  Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient.
  But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!
  
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  orwin a month ago
  
  Only revisionist history tell tales of flourishing kingdoms under a just king. In reality, the reason feodality worked for so long was the anarchy and power struggle, the cavalcades (basically raids) and a honour based justice (basically don't kill fellow nobility during war, and avoid killing militantes during cavalcades and you'll be good). The anarchical nature of the system made it particularly susceptible to organised raids, but also extremely 'agile' in it's political responses. Once power was consolidated however, the clergy and the royalty pushed their law and hierarchical order onto the mostly aristocratic feodality, it broke and you get the crusade against Alby, the war between Plantagenet and capetiens, and probably a lot of other misery inflicted to the general population. Then once the hierarchical order is set, you need an administration, which will become inefficient by nature.
  
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  danaris a month ago
  
  > The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.
  It "works" in the sense that it can be kept going by patching the damage it causes by throwing more money at it.
  What it mostly does at scale is appear to work, to those high enough above it that they can't see any of the details: only the metrics that are being optimized for.
  
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  xg15 a month ago
  
  The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.
  
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- WorldMaker a month ago
  
  > overeducated c-suite
  Arguably the modern MBA has gotten so insular, with many graduating with an MBA having only the barest modicum of humanities courses and the barest foot out of the door of a business college, that despite supposedly representing a higher University degree it seems increasingly fair to call it "undereducated". MBA programs got too deep into the business of selling as many MBAs as they could as quickly as they could they forgot to check their own curriculum for things like "perverse incentives" and "regulatory capture" and "tribalism".
  
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  nradov a month ago
  
  An MBA is a professional graduate degree, like a JD or MD. Criticizing professional degree programs for lack of humanities coursework rather misses the point. Students are supposed to have got that in undergraduate.
  
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  WorldMaker a month ago
  
  Sure, but a lot of Business undergraduate programs, even at prestigious Universities, are now "pre-MBA" and very MBA-focused, if not "direct to MBA" and allow taking bare minimums of non-Business classes and just about guarantee MBA program entry. For MD this sort of "academic incest" makes sense that you are going to have more because there is too much specialized knowledge to learn during graduate programs. (But also most pre-Med doesn't pre-qualify Med School like "pre-MBA" can.) JDs still seem to expect a variety of candidates of different undergraduate backgrounds, though "Pre-Law" sometimes exists, it often isn't a specific "program" and to my understanding can be several different options from very different undergraduate college options; "Pre-Law" seems as much about navigating the analysis paralysis of all the possible paths as anything else, without narrowing the number of paths.
  I think the MBA programs have built "pre-MBA" programs not because they have so many skills to specialize, and not necessarily because they have so many possible paths to try to navigate, but because the it sells more Business school undergraduate credits.
  Good MBA programs still exist. Not all MBAs involve "academic incest", and there are still MBA programs that encourage non-Business undergraduate degrees. Not all "academic incest" is bad either. But there's definitely an anecdotal sense that many of the people I see with MBAs spent the least time learning anything that wasn't taught in a Business School classroom, with the least consequences for their non-Business School GPAs, because the Business School wants that graduate degree funnel and the tuition dollars it guarantees, than any other graduate degree program I've seen. (Hence why I mentioned "perverse incentives", especially. The Business School wants you to do well in Business School so you keep paying the Business School. The Business School cares less what you do outside the Business School so that you keep paying the Business School.)
  
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- azemetre a month ago
  
  Try to make a thread about unions on HN and read the comments, then it'll make sense.
  
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- Avicebron a month ago
  
  There's chance that maybe there exists a revenue stream that increases by further applying that policy across a system that you don't have access to?
  
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sidewndr46 a month ago

While important, it actually misses a common problem I see: the assumption that every measurement is accurate.

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api a month ago

The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting:

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything.

I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.

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djmips a month ago

Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.

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zusammen a month ago

Worse yet, these are upward-censored metrics. Failing to make them hurts your career, but making or exceeding your targets doesn’t really help your career—it’s just seen as validating management’s approach.
As soon as they impose metrics, you need to bring in a union, and (to be frank) chase or bug out anyone who’s not on board with worker solidarity.

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chinchilla2020 a month ago

> Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued.

Never thought I'd see an intelligent point made on hackernews, but there it is. You are absolutely correct. This really hit home for me.

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Clubber a month ago

You could have made your point better without insulting everyone on the forum.

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