People can read their manager's mind | Hacker News Reader

People can read their manager's mind

yosefk.com

158 pointsdochtman60 comments

My company has metrics and goals but rewards a limited pool of annual bonuses based on all managers getting together and calibrating contributors on gut feel. Rewards have literally been based on an outside managers opinion that "my perception is your Apple doesn't really do work worthy of a bonus increase this year, but my Orange does" we've lost a lot of good people over the years

And yet you're still there?

Is it really different elsewhere? Besides despite this politics approach to reward it's prob the best deal I personally can get in a job

IMO, you need a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures when setting compensation. Pure qualitative and you encourage a lot of pointless politicking. Pure quantitative and you encourage a lot of pointless gaming.

True story about gaming that I'll try to keep short: we had a promotion process that was multi-dimensional and one dimension was "scope of impact" (ie: how broad is your influence: self, team, group, organization, company, world).

We literally had a director present a promotion case for a manager and the scope element was assessed at "world" (several levels higher than needed to qualify). When asked for supporting evidence, he regaled us with the tale that the manager had taken initiative to place small cardboard boxes in each break room to collect spent alkaline batteries for recycling. Because allowing the batteries to be more effectively recycled helped the global environment, the scope of impact was "world".

Whoosh...

I think most things that are not manual labor should be more qualitative though.

So, stack ranking, even if the stack isn't recorded?

Nothing is worse than doing the unfun grunt work, that you know won't really be appreciated, while somebody else gets to tackle the unique 'cool' stuff that is seen as difficult. You'll get so much more done, but because, "anybody could have done it," you're not valued, even though nobody wanted to do it. Then you burn out, the other person is considered the "rock star," and now you're pigeon-holed into more grunt work for the foreseeable future... This article hit pretty close to home for me.

This can also work the other way, you can be the person doing the unique difficult stuff that nobody else on the team can do and be not recognized.

Being recognized by management as contributing is more a social issue than anything else. I feel that you implicitly recognize this when you characterize work as "'cool' stuff that is seen as difficult" - the perception is more important than the work or productivity.

A modicum of time spent communicating what you have gotten done can pay dividends. A lesson I need to remember from time to time.

On that note, I had a year where besides doing (and finishing) a bunch of decent size projects that I thought my manager was going to highlight, I spent like a day or two optimizing some daily batch process. All I did in the end was change one line of code to enable batched inserts, which brought the finish time from later afternoon to early AM hours. Come yearly review time, one of the bullets high up on what the manager wrote was that particular speedup, which surprised me given it was done just in passing and I forgot all about it.

I guess you really never can tell what the other side is thinking. But at the same time, in hindsight this was predictable since it impacted a bunch of high-visibility reports and the manager probably got feedback from upstairs.

As a corporately smart man once told me: Your job is to make your manager happy.

This has more to do with making their life easier and giving them bragging rights, than it does with anything else. If you can make your manager look good in front of their manager, then good things will happen to you.

I'm one of the only people who can code where I work. Nobody understands or cares at all what it is that I do. Their eyes glaze over if I try to tell them.

There was one time that stands out where everybody expressed gratitude for my hard work and asked if they could help me out. It was when I spent a week running cables and setting up PCs for our incoming batch of interns.

I know that programming is much more challenging than crawling under desks and plugging things in, but none of them ever really saw the programming. All of that crawling, though--I looked like such a hard worker that week.

Do you take vacations? It's important to demonstrate what happens when you're not around.

It's likely they won't notice anything at all if he is doing a good job. That's the other issue: not only the product of programming is not easy to see but consequences of good or bad practices do not become visible before the author is long gone and forgotten. Sometime doing IT feels like delivering medicine.

The first sentence of the article sums up the entirety of the human behaviour pretty nicely: People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Pretty much all of social history of the world can be explained with that.

Read about how this is actually harmful for long-term motivation though in a book called 59 Seconds with latest psychological research.

Basically as kids we are rewarded for doing things like going to school. Good effort on exam and learning = A+. But then carrying into real life that kills our motivation for doing things without the reward (if we're not getting paid for it we must not like it).

It also has the opposite affect, if we get a reward for something we don't like doing it either. Maybe people would like doing things more if they got paid less!

It might be harmful, but this is nevertheless the fact. And "rewarded" here doesn't refer only to what is actively given to them as a reward, it applies to all forms of motivation (e.g. not getting harmed, less work, more money etc).

Even just eyeball to eyeball respect.

link to '59 seconds' book please? (there are more than a few out there)

In large corporations it is less sinister than that. Managers do not value fixing bugs, improve user experience etc. Priority is to add more stuff and features...

Right now there is an article about bloated web pages, good illustration of that.

Depends. I work in SWQA in a regulated industry. My manager rates me partially on bugs found. After triaging, the devs' managers rate them partially on bugs fixed. People who do those things well fare well.

All the world is not a Vax, and all the world is not the Web.

Not just large corporations.

I just couldn't agree less. We must run in very different circles.

Did you really mean to imply that you run in circles where people just do as they are told?

You probably need to recalibrate your definition of "reward". It's not just about money. One way or another, though, your actions either need to result in some sort of real reward, or you will eventually stop doing them. Things like "good feelings because I helped someone in need" are absolutely a form of reward.

In the HBO miniseries "Generation Kill" a sergeant would constantly be on the Marines to be clean shaven. Shaving was beside the point and an activity that the Marines could control unlike the battlefield. At the end he made clear that constantly being on everyone's ass about shaving was to keep the Marines moving forward through the battlefield.

KPIs and all are great, but matter little if a company is not making money for shareholders it first and foremost goal.

Great point! KPIs are often milestones in the achievement of an overall goal, not the end game themselves.

KPI's can be can be useful if correctly employed, but the overzealous desire to apply metrics to everything, even things that are so abstract that they seem random, causes moral breakdown withing the ranks. I've seen so many people looking like a whipped dog because they are unable to achieve some fictitious measurement goal, especially one they have no control over.

How does shaving keep Marines moving forward?

I think it's about being correlated to following orders, discipline, doing things even if you don't understand the reason. In the middle of battle, you're trained to trust and can use those skills...?

Shaving is a luxury in the field, but it is a tell tale for essentials. Being shaven means the soldiers have both the resources and time necessary to attend their hygiene. A lack of hygiene is often far more dangerous than combat [1]. Shaving is also something many young soldiers do not feel strictly necessary. They do it because they are told so to do. Therefore it is a mark of some basic discipline.

Look at historic pictures of soldiers under continuous stress. Not shaving is the first thing you'll notice.

[1] Up until the Korean conflict, far more soldiers were killed by disease than contact with the enemy. That changed with anitbiotics and better field medicine (think MASH) but disease remains a serious threat.

In other words, you try to inculcate a desire to stay shaved whenever possible, because then you can use whether shaving happens as a metric to get a conservative estimate of a troop's hygiene generally, and this is an important thing to know.

Not just that. As GP wrote: "They do it because they are told so to do. Therefore it is a mark of some basic discipline.". Discipline is paramount for managing an army in combat.

Trying to enforce a proxy (shaving as a sign for a not over-stressed platoon) instead of tacking real issues is exactly the kind of thinking that makes working in enterprise so tedious.

I'd rather spend my time with soldiers practicing tactics or doing comms training.

I think looking after your feet /boots would be more useful - there's a great scene in "when we where soldiers" where the CO points this out.

Of course in some recent conflicts soldiers grow beards to fit in with the locals.

Back in the day the SAS in Northern Ireland grew mustachers to help their cover.

That kind of uniform and grooming standard is only for special forces in special operating enviroments. It almost never applies to regular soldiers. I say almost because regular soldiers attached to special forces units in special operating environments can sometimes get away with similar standards as their special forces counterparts.

In the infantry, we were required to shave in the field. Sometimes this means choosing between dry shaving or wet shaving with cold water, but not shaving is not an option, even during combat operations. There were times I hadn't showered for over thirty days, but was still shaving to standard. I think calling it a luxury is a stretch.

The sergeant you mentioned was arrested for child molestation, and was universally reviled and hated by his soldiers. Exactly the kind of person that worries about shaving in the field. Counter productive micro managing that misses the point entirely.

There's some additional nuance to Sergeant Major Sixta and his enforcement of the grooming standard. His intention was not to psychologically trick his marines into being good soldiers by way of facial hair. The idea was to set himself up as a common annoyance that the marines shared without actually harming anybody, reducing combat effectiveness, or undermining his own authority. The marines are all comrades when it comes to Sixta. They all think he's an asshole together. That sense of camraderie is priceless in groups of soldiers, and it can't be bought. If they weren't all pissed at him, they would certainly be pissed at something else, and the likely targets are the other officers or each other. Sixta is a convenient lightning rod for the base level of resentment that's always going to be there. Nobody needs to like him all that much for him to do his job.

The whole concept sounds insane, and it is insane and probably a completely bad idea, but it's important to remember that marine recon units are not like most groups of workers. They have a lot of downtime, they get yelled at more, and other people are telling them what to do basically all of the time. My boss screaming about my chin hair would cripple my output, but that's probably not going to make a marine lose his next fight. Frankly, there's not a lot we can apply to normal office environments here. There are no conceivable workplace scenarios where you need to play negative head games with a group of armed twentysomethings in the desert.

This is absolutely true, and very well said.

> My boss screaming about my chin hair would cripple my output

Mine too, because I'd vanish. I did the military, and nobody anywhere gets to treat me that way.

And hey, managers and leads reading this, you should always remember that every one of your people are volunteers.

> And hey, managers and leads reading this, you should always remember that every one of your people are volunteers.

That's, sadly, just the privilege of the growing industry like ours. Majority of population are not volunteers, they're little more than slaves and managers know that very well. The fact that you absolutely, positively need a job and that you won't find another one quickly is one of the strongest ways of keeping workers in line, and what lets many of the higher-ups be openly and freely abusive towards their employees.

I'm not complaining about IT here. We just need to remember that our industry is special right now, and that it won't last forever.

tl;dr what managers say and what they reward can be different - what they reward is what gets done. Even if that's to the detriment of all. There are no clever hacks, just better managers.

Actually I think there are clever hacks - measure what you want, publish it. Preferably measure outcomes and processes (number of outages, linting scores of code base)

Most managers won't agree to the types of metrics that you say. Yet most will agree to more arbitrary metrics, like much of what makes up Agile/Scrum.

Many managers do this intentionally, because the greater degree of control over metrics wielded by the manager, the greater degree of arbitrary political manipulation which can be inserted, and the greater freedom to pretend after the fact to have always supported only winning ideas and always opposed only losing ideas all along. Real metrics force managers to be accountable for their true beliefs, which is often what the company needs most and what managers will avoid most.

What is a good metric? How can we come up with good metrics?

What is a good metric?

My take: a good metric is one that is correlated with customer happiness and can't be gamed by engineers.

No such thing. You can game any metric.

Only if you know that such a metric exists

That's the whole point of the parent article. People are really good at figuring out what the real metrics are (even when management says otherwise), by simply observing what gets rewarded and what doesn't.

I feel like a good metric is how subjectively valuable the person's teammates feel that person is to the team when answering the question anonymously. Being socially awesome will only get you so far, eventually everyone on your team will realize you're not pulling your weight. And team members have a lot more visibility to a person's value than managers.

There will always be political deception in the debate over choosing metrics. But one thing that indicates a good management structure is that after metrics have been chosen, there is a very strict and quantitative process for holding people accountable for the metric.

In things like Agile/Scrum, it's usually the opposite. Whatever the metrics are doesn't matter. What matters is that the process of holding people accountable is intentionally not consistent or quantitative. One week some burndown graph is the end of the world for your team because some manager was cranky. The next week, a different team with the same burndown graph is lauded as extraordinary and hard-working.

It's all about giving managers the maximum possible surface area from which to cherry pick metrics that suit their changing political circumstances. It's hardly at all about actually having an accurate measure of productivity or adherence to timelines.

I would argue that this means the subjective debates about metrics aren't very important. Pick some metrics that other people have used, even if they are crappy. Hell, even use Agile/Scrum metrics.

But whatever metrics you do use, you have to create a bulletproof way of holding people accountable for them. If doing this leads to bad business outcomes because the metrics weren't good enough, then you can iterate on the metrics themselves and bring them more into alignment with your business constraints. But you can't do anything if the process of holding people accountable is subjected to significant political manipulation.

One of the best tools for this is the use of internal prediction markets. Employees must "buy shares" in the project outcomes they believe will be true (e.g. "we will solve problem X by the stated timeline Y and under budget Z"). If you commit to these timeline and budget metrics, say, and you "buy shares" in this business outcome, then you only get paid if the outcome happens. It doesn't matter if some unforeseen event prevented it (you should have impounded the probability of that unforeseen event into your model for the price you are willing to pay for a share of the business outcome).

In this manner, people are held accountable for their true beliefs. DARPA and some defense contractors have done experiments on using these to govern expensive military contracts. What is amazing is that often the experiments show that projects governed by prediction markets tend to succeed much more frequently, they tend to be completed fully rather than only partially meeting the required specs, and even after being finished faster and more completely, they also come in under budget more often.

And the reaction to the use of prediction markets within the companies where it has been tried: outrage and complete refusal to ever work with them again. Managers become so angry that they don't have the option to engage in political manipulation, to secure blame insurance and make sure they get paid regardless of the business outcome, that they outright refuse to use this technique which is overwhelmingly positive for the business bottom line.

There have also been lots of studies showing that prediction markets are very robust against rogue actors or people who attempt analogues of "insider trading" and so forth -- rather than this stuff sabotaging projects, it actually creates a free lunch for other internal stakeholders, and is quickly defeated by the internal market.

Of course, these types of markets are only as good as the highest level managers who oversee their internal use, so they are not magic solutions or anything. But the point is that this method exists, and has been shown to work well, and all it costs is for managers to give up their ability to game systems with political manipulation. And that cost appears to induce outrage in most managers, who are unwilling to give up political manipulation in exchange for truly better overall business outcomes.

There's another angle as well at play... My command chain cares about delivery of services and products at our below the budget, period.

But there are others with other interests. Program/project methodology religious adherents. Batshit crazy bureaucrats.

All of these people want to insert stuff to serve whatever agenda. I want to deliver on my commitments. Letting people without a clue evaluate my team's effectiveness is not in my team's interest or mine.

> There's another angle as well at play... My command chain cares about delivery of services and products at our below the budget, period.

This is classic duplicitous manager babble that really just means, "I want authority to decide arbitrarily when we should adhere to bureaucratic rules or project management methodology (... or good coding practices, or sane deadlines, or ...)."

When people actually care about the business bottom line (what you describe as delivery of services and products at [or] below the budget), they tend to behave rationally and expand their point of view to include things like bureaucratic necessity, the importance of strictly adhering to chosen project management and code quality standards and never cherry picking which business concerns are supposed to override them, and so forth.

When people up the command chain don't behave rationally about this stuff, it's generally because they are bad at their jobs. Bad managers see subordinates as work receptacles who should "just get shit done" and "solve my problems" without any understanding as to how it works or what constraints from reality actually mean in terms of unpackaging business priorities and mapping them to actions to accomplish them.

As a manager caught in the middle, you can chose which way you want to go. Appease the batshit bureaucrats by hammering down on your own subordinates, bottomlessly compromising away standards all in the name of so-called business bottom line.

Or stand up to them and explain what it takes to actually deliver products. If you lose your job doing this, it's a good thing! It allows you to rejection sample bad employers and more quickly find good employers where the managers realize that the phrase "business priorities" has to be recursively unpacked into all the messy details of project management, budgets, deadlines, work/life balance, and so on, and who actually care to do so (and yes, they really, really exist, just not embedded in brainfucked corporate/organizational hierarchies).

One example from my own career: I worked on a team of developers for an education technology company. The company acquired a start-up that had created a suite of learning applications. The code was an unbelievable mess: written in a (bad) proprietary language, poor anti-patterns all over, no usage of proper version control or issue tracking, no sane build or deployment system.

To boot, the apps themselves consistently got poor reviews from users in all of the app stores and review sites. And instead of fixing the app and improving the project management methods (truly the only two options for even short term profitability of the app), the management decided to essentially throw gas on the fire and pursue a strategy similar to regulatory capture, and attempt to make the creation phase of the learning materials (things only professors, teachers, or administrators would do) into the first-class constructs of the whole system, further crapifying the experience and functionality for end users (students) and driving app engagement and reviews even lower.

After a while of this utterly not working, there were several heart to heart meetings between engineers, middle management, and senior management, at which point it came to light that one of the main reasons we were even pursuing this strategy at all is that there was somewhat of a dick-measuring competition going on between the company's CTO (who was in charge of this portfolio of products), and the CEO of the start-up that had been acquired.

Apparently the folks in that start-up, once their golden handcuffs contracts ended, basically took most of the same e-learning idea and tried to spin it to sell it for corporate learning (like corporate training videos and stuff). And our CTO, who was under pressure about the whole deal and our continued poor app ratings, took it personally and basically started enforcing business strategy solely to "stick it" to that startup CEO and compete directly with him for a new market (corporate learning) that we weren't set up to service and had no prior ties into and had no infrastructure to deal with.

And of course, every middle manager in between was feeding all of us engineers the same line of bull as from your comment. Everything was just "upper management cares about most efficient delivery of our product" -- when it was patently obvious that they did not at all care about this and that we were being reprioritized constantly to service the arbitrary whim of the CTO.

And because this was a huge organization with tens of thousands of employees, consistently losing tens of millions of dollars on a monthly basis to competitor apps who actually took software quality seriously didn't even register as a blip to worry about. If our whole team got laid off because this CTO's strategy of irrational pissing contest competition didn't pan out, who cares? We'll just slap some crap on the front about how the market is changing or we need to streamline or restructure or whatever.

My main takeaway was basically that any time a middle manager tells you a decision is being made because it is important for the efficiency of reaching the company's bottom line goals, that manager is just spewing bullshit.

When that stuff really happens, non-bullshit-spewers will actually sit down with you and explain it, in nitty gritty detail, and will actually listen to and value your input about whether it's a good idea or not. They won't rush to label you as a "batshit bureaucrat" or a "religious adherent" of quality practices. They'll just listen and be open and transparent.

To agree with the article, you'd need to measure what you want, publish it and then reward it. Otherwise, most people skip doing it. I've worked at that company ;-)

True. I kinda assumed publishing metrics so everyone could see them missed/hit was rewarding ... But you are quite right.

But its normally HR that sets the metrics which is often not what the company needs but the latest fad.

Not sure if the author is in this thread but your article was great in both content and style. The point you were communicating was definitely not trivial: I hadn't thought of "what was said" vs "what as valued" that way before, or at least had not simplified that part of my mental model to see that. The way you communicated with examples was also spot on: at no point did I feel like I have to go back to read a certain part here or there to understand.

Excellent show!

The author is lurking in this thread and says thanks :-)

In other words: you will get what you pay for so think carefully that you pay for what you want.

Yeah, I have seen this. I think the reason being, evaluation is not objective or quantitative. I think it needs to be. If people game the system, then you have to tweak redefine those criteria over iterations to get it right.

Evaluation is above all a people skill. While I agree that "objective" quantitative data should be part of the evaluation, where it is available and relevant, too often managers with no people skills absolve themselves of that responsibility and hide behind numbers.

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