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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Weird (to me). I don’t care what a coworker makes or what their title is. I don’t even care what my own title is. When a former employer let me choose the title for my business card I went with “problem solver.” All I really care about is having competent coworkers with integrity who are respectful to each other. It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

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It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

It most certainly is, when you have to work with and clean up the mess.

Much like there is the notion of "10x" programmers, there are also "-10x" ones. Unfortunately they can stay around for a surprisingly long time.

What I was trying to say by “value” is that it’s not my job to determine the worth of a particular position to a company. i.e. it’s above my pay grade to decide what a web developer is worth vs a backend engineer, etc.

Judging the quality of someone’s work _may_ be my job if I’m asked for peer feedback, but even there I disagree. I feel it should be up to a manager to determine whether his or her reports are doing good work. (I’m not a fan of peer feedback for a variety of reasons.)

Of course if someone is incompetent, that’s a different matter. How I’d deal with that is too circumstance specific to outline here. I’ve been fortunate in that I can only recall a few such people.

Shouldn't everyone be judging (and improving) the quality of everyone's work in a team, if you want the project to succeed ? How is a manager to judge the quality of technical output other than peer feedback ?

Sure, code reviews, architectural review, etc. First line managers should be technical enough to know whether their reports are doing a good job.

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