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Comment by maaark | Hacker News Reader

>And at Morning Star, employees get to write their own job descriptions based on how they plan to contribute to the company’s mission that year. But they have to get their closest colleagues to buy in on it, and then their coworkers rate their performance and determine their salary.

Sounds terrifying. Payscale linked to your coworkers opinions of you.

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And subject to gaming. Morning Star might be a nice cooperative environment - but when corporates try "360 review" it can get nasty. I've seen investment banks where people treat their colleagues as competitors for the bonus pool. If the review forms part of the bonus assessment why would people play nicely?

MBAs basically 5 star everyone in a 360 review. One reason is that you may work with these people again or they may be your boss sometime in the future (so yes do good work but why would you screw someone over). It should be noted that your 360 feedback is not anonymous. And two, it devalues the 360 review because it is effectively worthless. I've only seen 360s that work in cross functional teams where each person have independent and specific job responsibilities where the team is evaluated on performance and not the individual.

Absolutely -- in investment banking, 360 reviews are purely angling and knife-fighting. And "co-heads" of anything is an intentional Death Match.

Also, I suspect that this whole thing is for marketing executives or something, not the actual people making tomato paste. A job description of "I pull a lever on the assembly line to pour paste into the cans" isn't really a job description requiring a lot of explanation.

Not just terrifying, it could also lead to significant problems.

Depending on the job, but always to some degree, you'll have to do things that your coworkers won't like, but is actually good for the company, probably also good for your coworkers in the long run.

This system strongly discourages doing these things. And you generally can't just not do these things. They have to get done at some point.

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