Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

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I read 'standard' as implying a quality bar, beyond which there's space for flexibility.

Suppose we're giving out 100 promotions, and have 1000 promo nominations. You review the 1000 noms and find that there are 500 that pass the quality bar because your company is full of awesome people. So now you have to choose which 100 of the 500 to actually promote. You can do this in a number of ways, ranging from uniformly at random to doing a total stack rank and selecting the top 100. Or you can choose to try to correct systemic under-representation in management, which helps the company on a number of axes (including better recruitment of smart people from under-represented groups, providing a statistical bulwark against lawsuits, etc...).

(edit: It's worth keeping in mind that trying to do a full stack rank of your 1000 applications is going to be noisy as hell and an incredible amount of work, as there will be multiple (individually noisy) promo committees working on sub-sets of nominations. So it pays off to have a clear set of standards for promotion to a given level, even if you don't automatically promote everyone who meets that standard.)

Promotion is a touchy thing. As a manager, promoting your top performers seems like a no brainer, but sometimes if an employee is above a certain quality bar that warrants a promotion (as you mentioned), even though there are others who probably deserve it more, you sometimes have to spread the love around. Knowing who to promote (and who not to promote, knowing they'll still stick around) is a skill.

So I don't think that the promotion was necessarily done just because those employees are from underrepresented groups and just to hit some company diversity/equality metric, but I wouldn't know for sure

I’m not sure I agree with this statement at all.

Promotion is never a touchy thing when you set clear expectations for a persons progression - one that is measurable and comparable to their peers.

The individuals then know, directly or indirectly, if they are on the right path, and which one of their peers is ahead or behind. The incentive there is for them to either up their game, or stay where they are.

The only fear there is that the system / process can be gamed; but one almost always never picks the lesser of the two qualified individuals - you risk loosing the more qualified individual and the team no longer has any faith in the “system” and they too will loose respect and move on.

Perhaps I may not have the experience you do, but it’s something I would never stand for - I would love to hear examples of when and such a scenario would play out though as it’s something I may encounter at some point in my career.

doesn't work when like when I worked for BT in the UK where in systems engineering (67k head count division) there where only 18 or so promotions from level 1 engineer to level 2 engineer every 18 months or so.

you might have a lot of applicants of which maybe 600 got onto the short list (my boss commented if you get on the short list they know you can do the job)

What is measurable way to compare peers?

All the systems I’ve ever encountered are horrible: lines of code, hours spent coding, issues closed, bugs created, and so on.

Not all lines of code are equal. Not all hours are equally productive. Not all issues are equally difficult. Not all bugs are equally costly. And so on.

Impact.

It's not directly measurable, but you know it when you see it. And sometimes that impact is negative.

“Impact” sounds like a qualitative metric, not a quantitative one, which is fine of course. But the parent asserted that promotions should be based on measurable data, which I’m still unconvinced is practical to do well.

How do you know it when you see it? How do you you aren't seeing BS?

Could everyone working at a company with more that 30,000 where there's clear measurable and transparent progression expectations and no-one has ever grumbled about not getting promoted please stand up.

Also worth noting that a promotion is not just a raise, it is also a change of job. See Peter Principle.

There is even a igNobel winning publication suggesting that it might be more efficient to promote people at random... https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455

What is the end result? You go up to someone who isn't a minority and tell them that even though they did everything right and were in the top 100, you choose a minority who was in the top 500 but not the top 100 over them due to their status as a minority? What will the impact of telling them that be?

Of course, no employer (that I have ever seen) is that open. We share a common expectation that the people who qualified but were passed over won't be told. Maybe an open ended promise of "next time". All this does is allow the same effects to be diluted to anyone who might have been impacted. So now even those outside the top 100, even those outside the top 500, consider there is a chance they were impacted by such an action. So while the impact is less than telling the person passed over, you now have more people feeling it.

And this does seem to be a damned if you do/damned if you don't, because even if you did create a top 100 ranking and used it to promote, that would be influenced by subconscious biases and other factors based on minority status and people aware of that who didn't get promoted would also be negatively impacted.

Isn't is degrading towards minorities? It's difficult to understand sometimes the American way of thinking, but in my eyes things like that only want to make the negative stereotypes stronger about some groups of people not being intelligent enough.

A business exists to solve problems for money, not run IQ tests.

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