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Comment by battlebot | Hacker News Reader

You know what's even worse at trying to surface? When you saved your company millions of dollars! I'm not talking theoretical dollars here, I'm talking about last year X cost $Million, and this year due to my finding out some egregious mistakes and fixing them, that cost was measurably less by seven figures, and no one bothers to tell that story to the higher ups! I just wonder what these people do all day? Darn few managers I have ever worked with seemed able to even tie their shoes properly.

Meanwhile, I had to sit through an all hands meeting where some dingy broad got a 5 figure award for cooking up an Access database that some asshat manager used for like a week!

Franz Kafka could not dream this up!

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Because of stories like this I am generally against publicly praising individual employees. Whenever you do that there is gonna be somebody who did something great you don't know about and aren't praising. There might even be people who think that what the person you are praising did something bad. I remember a all-hands meeting where somebody got praised for working all weekend. Later in private several people were disgruntled and claimed the person only had to do so because they had messed it up before despite being told to use a different approach repeatedly.

Just praise people in private, actually trust them and listen to them and reward them accordingly comes compensation time.

> Later in private several people were disgruntled and claimed the person only had to do so because they had messed it up before despite being told to use a different approach repeatedly.

This sounds like every tech company ever. I used to excitedly watch youtube videos about the extreme measures startups took to scale to "massive" amounts of traffic while undergoing huge growth spurts.

Now I just kind of roll my eyes and think "Yeah, obviously a message bus in a relational databse using rails wasn't the optimal solution for scaling that app".

In the real world emergencies happen. The unexpected happens. But the truth is that if you actually prepare and have been around the block once or twice, they don't happen all that often. And when they do, there's usually a handy little knob to ameliorate the issue.

Well, "they just didn't know," is different than, "they were directly warned and didn't listen because they though they knew better." In the latter case, working all weekend to fix the mistake isn't necessarily praise-worthy.

I don't think I agree; I think that your examples show that it's important to know your employees' accomplishments, and to praise people accurately. Public praise matters; I like it when my managers and coworkers acknowledge good work I do, and it's nice hearing that my coworkers are doing good work, too. Why should we all labor in the shadow? Why should we be afraid of praise?

I don't think that this means that we have to labor in the shadows. Typically people notice pretty well who is competent, who puts in effort and who actually gets work done. In a healthy organization that also will get acknowledged organically in all kinds of ways. High performers will be asked for help by others, people insist that they will be invited to meetings or that their opinion will be asked on certain matters. We shouldn't be afraid of praise but of awkwardly praising a subset of people in a all hands meeting where we might miss people who did good work and now will feel that their work isn't acknowledged. This also easily gets political. You have one manager who judges their employees wrong and their reports who did questionable work get praised at the all hands. Maybe they were recommended for praise although there manager knew they didn't really deserve it but needed done if their reports to also be mentioned. It frequently also leads to a hero coder culture. Someone who stays up all night and implements a feature that management wants really badly in a hard to maintain and buggy fashion will get praised at all hands. People who end up fixing the mess won't. Very frustrating for people who fixed it. Obviously this will kick off a feedback cycle leading to more and more all nighters producing crappy code.

Public praise and recognition, yes.

Public announcements of awards and raises, hell no.

Sounds like your manager didn't do his or her job. As a manager of people, you have to own these kinds of metrics and be prepared to wield them whenever the "value of an employee" question comes up.

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