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> If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?

This is why I don't work for large orgs anymore. If you can't trust the manager's recommendation then why is that person a manager, in a position of power over people's lives? It's almost like acknowledging that you're too big to know whether your people can be trusted or not, so you need formalized checks and balances. I get that this in fact may be reality, and I also get that we need big companies to create many of these cool things modernity has given us, but man I have no desire at all to be part of such a thing.

Another way to frame this: new technical or social methods for enhancing/extending trust mechanism in large organizations would have massive societal benefits. I wish more people explicitly thought about and experimented with this.

A problem I'm noting is that information technology seems to have corrosive effects on interpersonal trust.

That's not a solid conviction, but it's how I'm leaning.

Subtle adjustment, I think the real cause is scaling human relationships. IT enables this scaling. So if interpersonal trust scales sub-linearly with number of connections, it's not really IT corroding trust, it's what IT enables.

It's ... complicated. More than I can get into here, or eveen than I've really worrked out.

Short version is that in the absence of advanced comms, you have no option but to extend trust. I'm thinking here where inteervals might have been months, eveen years. (Historically, sea passage was not possible from November through May.)

Instead you had trust-establishing institutions, a role usually filled by religion, in virtually every pre-industrial civilisation.

Comms, from the scroll and telegraph forward, obviate this. Wearables, CCTV, desktop tracking, cellphone monitoring, all substitute surveillance for trust.

They also come with significant opportunities for fake signaling.

Gaining trust means you signal properly to the people you are attempting to influence. With records you now move mechanisms with which your signal that trust.

Fake signalling is what's always been present in communications. Deception, bluff, camoflage, and distraaction are all highlydeeveloped even aamongst animals. It is scale and rate especially which are changed now, and the ability to entirely bypass trust or trust-development.

False signalling is an issue, but that's hardly novel. Mimicry, imitation, camoflage, and other forms of disguise and deception are found in nature.

There's the matter of taking what had been very strongly analogue, that is, analogous, forms of recordmaking and turning them into mediated forms: static images, audio, and video. But that is merely a regression to the status quo ante of preindustrial times. The magic of photography, tape, and film were that these, more or less, faithfully recorded what was before the lens or the microphone. We're returning to a period that bears more in common with the age of human testimony, at least in terms of its level of mediation. That is: you have to trust in the testifier. The distinction in the quantity (and detail) of the images presented is not as in earlier times.

It's the fact that communications cycles and volumes are so much greater though that reduces the reliance on trust, in ways I'm starting to suspect are more substantive than is generally appreciated.

There are several histories of corporate communications, where this trends appears, to an extent. James R. Beniger's The Control Revolution (1986 or thereabouts) and JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communciation (2005) are two of which I'm aware. The role of trust isn't central to either, but it's touched on.

Trust isn't a binary, it can be extended to differing degrees. In absence of advanced comms, you have to extend trust, but how far? That comes with an opportunity cost -- I wouldn't loan money to someone I'd only communicated by 8 week delayed handwritten letters, but I (possibly) would do that to someone I'd talked to on Skype for an equivalent amount of time.

(This might not be rational.)

> If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?"

Why would anyone suggest such a thing?

Absent new information shouldn't the default action be to humanely leave person X alone so they can keep doing work and paying their bills without costing the company more?

I must be very naive in the ways of management...

EDIT: This is a real question; what's with the down votes? Should I expect to be treated like this at work?

You seriously don't understand that sometimes people are promoted for being good at their job, and sometimes people are fired for being bad at their job?

I understand either of those, but not the case where an exec picks out some employee they don't know anything about and insists that they be either fired or promoted right just now.

You misread.

You're being asked to imagine yourself as the executive - you're the person with firing authority.

A manager who works for you asks you to fire someone on their team. There are a hundred people on various teams in your group, you don't have first-hand knowledge of all of their performance. You want to have a system in place for making sure this is a fair request, vs "we argued a few times the last week" or, in the really bad sorts of cases, something like "we had an affair and it ended badly and I'm trying to clean up the mess by firing them."

I honestly think you're misreading. My reading (consistent with the one you replied to) is:

a higher-level manager somewhat arbitrarily comes out of the blue and wants to fire one of your team. You have no paperwork to back the idea that the request is misplaced/misguided.

Let's look at the original line again:

"If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?"

So 'someone' isn't defined, but from context, my assumption is that 'someone' is their direct manager (who works for you), since it's mentioned that 'manager's recommendation' is all that's known.

A situation where, say, the CTO is asking a VP to fire someone three or four levels below would be much stranger than a lower-level manager asking a VP to fire one of their reports, so between these two things I think it makes much more sense to resolve the ambiguity in that way.

This reading also has the benefit of suddenly making perfect sense and fitting the rest of the context of the original comment, which was about >100 employee organizations needing a paper trail.

I agree that your interpretation has a lot of weight. However, you're forgetting a couple of things:

-. could be a request from the VP's peer; i.e., another VP. Or from someone in a lateral org (such as HR).

-. the manager himself in your interpretation of events should have the power at least to fire (if not to promote).

The fact is: it was a very confusingly worded post and we've probably wasted more time on it than it warrants. :)

Thank you, I think I see what you mean: a manager recommends an employee for promotion OR a manager recommends an employee for firing. My reading of the question might sound ridiculous, but I have been in situations like that in the past.

I once had a contract-to-hire job in which the contract supposedly stipulated that I was guaranteed a full-time permanent position if I passed the six-month performance review, otherwise I would be terminated. They told new hires this to convince them that it wasn't really a temp job. They kept me a temp for ten months, and then laid off all 120 of us.

I would love to believe that management is categorically reasonable, comprehensible, and truthful, but that’s not my experience.

There is no "management". There's just people, in positions or more or less power over others.

At some companies, these people are well selected, trained, and caring individuals who understand who to build and nurture teams.

At others, these people are dicks who have got into their position via Peter Principle. being frat buddies with CEO etc. who view workers as resources to be squeezed and discarded.

And everywhere in between.

Sounds like you got unlucky at that place.

You're totally misunderstanding the situation.There are three hypothetical people involved here. An employee, who works below a manager, who works below a VP.

The manager wants to promote the employee, but she needs permission from the VP. So the manager asks the VP to promote the employee.

I think the more likely scenario is that:

a) the company is growing by leaps and bounds and would rather promote internally X% of existing employees. --or- b) the company is facing a downturn and would like to get rid of X% of existing employees.

In neither case does it have much to do with the actual people falling into or out of that X% (unless a perfectly just system is in place [and it isn't]).

Most firings I've seen have much more to do with the people involved (harrasment, incompetence, interpersonal problems) than with wild changes in the company's trajectory, though I will admit that at early-stage companies this could be reversed since things are much more uncertain.

I think the down votes are from your response appearing fairly uninformed.

Growth and attrition are a regular part of a person's life cycle at a company. You ask if someone should be promoted both because companies need adept managers and because most employees look for growth trajectory. You ask if someone should be fired because companies need to continue refining their workforce for skill and cultural fit, or because it is financially necessary.

> If you can't trust the manager's recommendation then why is that person a manager, in a position of power over people's lives? It's almost like acknowledging that you're too big to know whether your people can be trusted or not, so you need formalized checks and balances.

People come into positions of authority for very varied reasons. Some might be very technically apt, others might have earned the trust of the founders or some were simply the only people available in a period of rapid growth. You absolutely cannot trust human nature, abuse and incompetence is always a risk and startups are not magically immune.

What might happen in a small company is that a bad manager is so obviously inadequate and has such a significant relative impact over the company that it's easily spotted and fixed without a formal system. But there are no guarantees, see for example the case of Sunny Balwani, a painfully incompetent software guy running the engineering department of a biotech startup, simply because he was the boyfriend of the CEO. He clung on as Theranos valuation balloned to a $10 billion and only got out after the company failed for essentially tech reasons.

As I said, I get why this might in fact be necessary. I simply find it dehumanizing and arbitrary and so I choose to avoid such situations. At the hospital where my wife works their review categories are graded from 1 - 3. So yeah you have a paper trail, but how useful can it honestly be? For a manager who is interested in knowing an employee's real strengths and weaknesses it's nearly useless. For a manager who just needs to fill in an upstream form, or quickly find a numeric justification for a decision, maybe these numbers make sense and are useful... but how would you feel if a decision on promoting you were made on such a basis, or if it went against you because someone graded you a 2 and another person a 3 in some category?

And for what it's worth performance reviews are not a remedy for cases like Balwani's. Anything like that which said something different from what the CEO wished the perception to be would simply have been rewritten/squashed/ignored. At least in a small company you can get a clear perception that this kind of thing is going on and get out, or make a conscious decision to stay because you think you'll be showered in filthy lucre or whatever.

The more common case is 5 managers coming to you to pitch their managees for promotion. You can’t just promote everyone the same, and hopefully the managers are pretty happy with their managees.

That’s where paper trail, or anything mildly objective is precious to adjust what needs to be done.

> You can’t just promote everyone the same

Why?

Most common reason is probably "budget."

A reason which is valid on the surface but difficult to implement properly is "it's bad for morale if deadweight employees get promoted just the same as people who contribute."

It makes more logical sense if you value people's achievements. Some years, I simply have to put more emphasis on family. Or I may get crappy projects or overwork myself and have to recover. Other years are better.

I think a strong (30%+) bonus compensation plans + automatic basic raises guarantees the best results. You know you aren't "going for the next level" but simply executing and on bad quarters/years you don't get as much. Easier to accurately quantify in a profit-center as opposed to a cost center, for sure.

Budgets, and org charts.

You can't have 5 people all leading a team. A good manager will give employees who want to lead an opportunity to do so in smaller ways, and when it comes time to figure out who gets promoted into a leadership role, being able to compare notes of how well each candidate went is essential.

Even for non-managerial roles, there may not be budget to promote everyone. Especially at larger companies where a promotion can be an extra 50k+ per year per employee, promoting all 5 people means there isn't budget to hire someone new, and those employees aren't suddenly working 20% more efficient thanks to a new title.

Good people will recognize that their work is not valued and quit. The value employees add is Pareto distributed, so you can lose only a handful of people but be crippled nevertheless.

Budgets, I guess.

When everyone's a tech lead, no one's a tech lead.

The simplest way to look at it: everyone is not the same

In particular everyone doesn't have the same experience, market value, expectations and behavior associated. For instance you will have a manager that is super happy with what an employee does, but in practice the employee is already at the top of the game, paid accordingly, and has a special status in the company.

This employee's raise will be proportionally a lot lower than a junior guy who went above and beyond his role and could leap two ranks ahead with the skills demonstrated.

Both employees are valuable and merit praise, it just won't translate to the same proportional amount.

> a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year.

Agreed. This is my experience at my current job, the first place I've ever worked for which runs reviews like you describe. Yes, we have boring and poorly done tools to "automate" reviews or whatever, pushed by clueless HR people, but the actual review is done constantly by your team leader. You -- and your direct boss -- mostly know what's going on and how your review is going to go, no bullshit or last minute surprises.

Unfortunately, my current workplace is the exception. Most other places I've worked for either had no formal reviews at all -- which may initially sound ok, except you get the nasty last minute surprises anyway -- or it was endless red tape.

what bugs me about performance reviews is feeling like I'm a copywriter writing ad copy for products. I have to try to come up with flowery text about the 5-10 major things I did rather than just "did x" which is already known.

the only part of perf atbmy last job I thought was useful was ranking my peers. I'm not saying my ranking was correct but I'm just guessing those ranked high or low more often probably deserve a look?

And you need it for labour law reasons. If someone claims unemployment, and you have one of those companies that doesn't like to pay, your lawyers are going to need those reviews. If they were truly a bad employee, specific things in the reviews help if you go to court.

>> Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?

But a perf review is just a manager's recommendation.