Inside Uber’s new approach to employee performance reviews | Hacker News Reader

Inside Uber’s new approach to employee performance reviews

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50 pointsmalandrew36 comments

There is some insight in the article, and things I didn't know before.

However...

"Hustling meant being dependable and working hard"

Yeah, sure it did. No revisionism there.

Maybe it's An American Thing, but as I grew up and participated in school sports, our coaches often told us to "hustle" -- I don't think they intended for us to defraud or swindle anyone, or to break any laws.

The full phrase is "always be hustlin". That does have a certain context. Not necessarily fraud, but certainly cutting corners, winning at any cost, etc.

See Glengarry Glen Ross for something very similar.

It's just A Word Meaning Different Things Thing; hustle can mean 'hurry' or something similar to 'sprint,' but it can also mean a side gig that gets you a bit of extra income. The typical connotation is with under-the-table stuff and contraband-y stuff in prisons, though, so you might not expect to hear someone talk about their 'new hustle delivering newspapers.'

Uber is currently running ads on Pandora advertising driving for Uber as "the ultimate side hustle".

So did I, but outside the context of sports it still mostly means scamming people and/or generally earning money illegally to me. Or maybe a dance.

I don't think I ever saw/heard it used in its startup culture sense until I was in my late 20s or so, probably on this very site (and no, I didn't grow up in a place where "hustling" in the sense of scamming/dealing was common) so the scamming/defrauding/dealing/etc. meaning is what sticks with me. Definitely colors my perception when I see it used for other things.

When I was a kid in the 80s, it was totally normal for our gym teachers to tell us to "hustle" when we were running, lining up or doing some drill. I'm not sure about the dependable part, but working hard and moving quickly are absolutely what the word has meant to me since I first started hearing it.

I think hustle/hustling has some context:

Street hustler is one thing.

Hustler the mag was another.

Hustle to get ahead is yet another.

So same word or root word in different syntactical contexts can have somewhat different meanings.

Yah, same thing struck me as incongruent.

Hustling in workplace would more likely mean "thinking out of the box and wearing multiple hats". On the street it typically means "doing anything for a buck, including ripping people off".

I grew up in Houston where hustling is a word that is heavily used in various contexts. In my experience it has a dual meaning of working really hard and also doing anything for a buck. I've heard it used either way and both.

In America, using the word "hustling" in this context means to work diligently and to do what is needed to complete a project. Similarly, a "hustler" is someone who works very hard and constantly at something.

Certainly not in the part of America I currently live in, where "hustling" means ripping off or defrauding someone.

I actually literally heard it a few hours ago while watching The Wire, where someone is playing pool, his partner walks in and asks him "yo, you hustlin'?".

I was a bit taken aback when I came across that verb in the article.

Yes - of course hustling in the context of pool takes on that meaning.

You can cleave things apart, yet you can cleave things together. Words have different meanings depending on context.

Look at the actual definition of the word Hustle in M&W. The way hustle was used in the article was a more common usage of the word than as a con.

transitive verb

1 a : to crowd or push roughly : jostle, shove had been hustled into a jail cell with the other protesters

  b :  to convey forcibly or hurriedly grabbed him by the arm and hustled him out the door — John Dos Passos

  c :  to urge forward precipitately hustling tourists from one museum to the next

2 a : to obtain by energetic activity —usually used with up hustle up new customers try to hustle up some tickets to tonight's game hustling up some grub

  b :  to sell something to or obtain something from (someone) by energetic and especially underhanded activity :  swindle hustling the suckers an elaborate scam to hustle the elderly

  c :  to sell or promote energetically and aggressively hustling a new product

  d :  to lure less skillful players into competing against oneself at (a gambling game) hustle pool

intransitive verb

1: shove, press

2: hasten, hurry you'd better hustle if you want to catch the bus

3 a : to make strenuous efforts to obtain especially money or business our quartet was out hustling … and we knew we stood good to take in a lot of change before the night was over — Louis Armstrong

  b :  to obtain money by fraud or deception

  c :  to engage in prostitution

4: to play a game or sport in an alert aggressive manner She's not the most talented player on the team, but she always hustles.

It can mean both, it's entirely down to context.

To me it means someone who simply works harder and incessantly compared to others when used in a work context. The guy who puts in the extra time/hours/learning/whatever to out "hustle" their peers.

In small business circles in Minnesota where I grew up it was pretty universal - those that that were known to "hustle" were revered. Example would be two lawn care companies where the owner of one would be working dawn to dusk and then spending 2 more hours distributing fliers, where the other guy knocked off at 4pm every day. The former would be known as someone who has some hustle, and you'd want to work for that guy over the latter.

Of course it also has the swindler meaning as well - street hustler, etc. Plenty of folks in my life describe themselves as having a "side hustle" and they certainly are not doing anything illegal or immoral. Just instead of going home to veg out watching TV or whatnot, they are pursuing more productive activities and that is how they describe it.

So to me - if someone came up to me and described themselves as a hustler I would default imagine someone who is more motivated than most, and is always looking for opportunity no matter where that may come from.

It's an interesting word, it seems!

My experience has been that it almost always has that meaning, unless the context is 1) a sports coach talking to players, or 2) HN and related startup culture. I'm not sure why startup people latched so strongly onto a word that's got very negative connotations for lots of people, especially when attached to making money.

For those of you arguing about the defintion, here's relevant definitions from Webster:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hustle

": hasten, hurry; you'd better hustle if you want to catch the bus"

"b : to sell something to or obtain something from (someone) by energetic and especially underhanded activity : swindle; hustling the suckers / an elaborate scam to hustle the elderly"

"Since joining Uber in early June, Uber SVP of Leadership & Strategy Frances Frei has conducted sessions with 9,000 employees, 3,000 of which are managers, around goals and feedback."

3/~12k [1] employees are managers? That sounds really management-heavy, or did I misinterpret that?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_(company)

They're probably counting e.g. SWEIII with an intern. Still, I'm more amazed that a single person has done feedback session with 9000 people in two months ;)

Two months are around 40 business days, which gives over 200 people per day, or one person every two minutes. The only way this would be possible is when he did mostly collective sessions, which heavily undermines the impressivness of the feat.

*she

My guess would be that the "conducting" sessions actually means sending out 9000 emails with a link to a survey.

Probably some heavy delegation.

A manager can also be a report. I assume that statistic includes middle managers, such as group managers, directors, etc.

Ex:

* Director might have 3 group manager reports

* Each group manager might have 3 manager reports

* Each manager might have 4 engineer reports

In the above example, we have 10 managers and 36 engineers, which isn't too far off from the 25% management statistic.

I'm parsing this as: "Of the 9000 employees that attended sessions, 3000 were managers."

Yes, that is the correct way to parse it. That implies that Uber has at least 3k managers, possibly more.

OP was commenting that >3k managers seems like a high proportion of their ~12k total employees.

Yes, I think you misinterpreted that.

The sentence from the article says 3,000 out of 9,000 (not 12,000) that have had sessions are managers...

Wasn't one of the problems at Uber that HR was complicit in the toxic culture and would falsely (and I can only presume illegally) tell victims that it was the first complaint against someone they knew to be a repeat/serial harrasser? How does the chief HR officer not get fired after that?

Uber's head of HR is new since the events Susan Fowler wrote about (but before she posted it).

Feedback is a hard problem but this sounds fluffy and unhelpful. Are there any tools out there that have effectively been implemented in a large organization to facilitate feedback?

The only one I've seen work at any kind of scale is anonymous peer-to-peer feedback where the company only sees aggregate numbers. You pick who rates you, but you have to pick X number from your direct group, X from groups you support, X from leaders, etc.

Doesn't help the company do anything actionable at an individual level, but does give you a more clear idea of how others see you. Which is more likely to feel actionable to you. Less threatening if there is real assurance that only you see the scores too.

Of course, you still need something for leaders so they can dole out whatever limited bonus or promotion opportunities, so it isn't a panacea.

> Of course, you still need something for leaders so they can dole out whatever limited bonus or promotion opportunities, so it isn't a panacea.

But, how do you ensure that that feedback even plays a role in one's review? In most companies I've worked, I'm skeptical. At the end of the day, one's job performance is judged by a human that is free to use or ignore all this feedback. And that human is usually your direct manager, so they often already have their own biases and self-generated feedback in their own head. "I think this direct report of mine is performing badly, but all of their feedback is good so I'll give him a raise" - said no manager ever.

Right. I pointed out it was useful for the person getting feedback, and not useful for the boss, company to do reviews.

I have seen no process that helps make reviews better.

Not really. Mostly because feedback by its nature is personal and doesn't scale.

There are tools to send out surveys which somewhat-anonymize feedback by methods like "at least three people must answer". It's not really helpful for anything that requires full sentences, though - you'll be able to tell fairly quickly from speech patterns who says what.

The things you can do as an org:

* Encourage a blame-free culture.[1]

* Mandate it on a regular basis (and make sure the mandate is followed), with a goal of going to "continuous" feedback.

* Give people lightweight tools to collect quick feedback

* Provide pseudo-anonymization in those tools to remove the barrier to reply

Hey, look - it's like CI, just for people :)

Does anyone have any positive experiences with HR performance reviews? I am genuinely curious because in my experience they have been pointless except from making the organisation feel good.

No, I've never felt they are good and/or useful. Best performance reviews are during 1on1 conversation with CTO or whoever was directly responsible for my work.

>Without concrete ratings in place, the promotion and raise process is going to look different. The process for managers might also take a big longer, Hornsey said. That’s because it won’t be as simple as giving the biggest raise to the person at the top, and the smallest one to the person at the bottom. Sounds like "finally you won't need any excuse to promote those who you personally like and fire those who you don't".

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