Atlassian ditches ‘brilliant jerks’ in performance review overhaul
news.com.au
news.com.au
>Instead, equal weighting will be given to how each of its 3000 employees impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values. Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work”.
For a company that seems to be catching on to the idea that working at a company might involve being good at working as part of a time, I can't help feel describing that as "having nothing to do with job skills" is probably not the right way of looking at it.
In fact, there are some really funny points in this article that point to the bias that this is being met with
>Asked if it would be possible for someone who did well in their role to be outscored by someone who did poorly but was more likeable
For gods' sakes it is not about being likeable, it's about being able to work productively in a team environment. You aren't going to get a good review by being useless but really good at small talk in the kitcken. It's about being able to perform at the company in a way that positively impacts others whilst getting your own work done. Is is easier to work with someone if they're likeable? Probably. If someone is difficult to work with are they dislikeable? Sure. But stop talking about the side-effects and talk about the actual thing that's important - ability to add value to the company.
I'd much rather work on a company that has a pleasant atmosphere but not insane growth than on a shitty environment grinding my ass off.
But ignoring performance completely, that is nuts. Because output and success also bring joy and enhance the atmosphere of teams.
I agree this is poorly worded on their behalf. A better approach would be to reframe team-player, and being somewhat likeable as job skills.
In reality though, this is exactly what happens, and this mindset is exactly what creates entire departments of incompetent but friendly, 'team oriented', well-meaning idiots. These kinds of people are fine for BAU operations (and to be fair that's pretty much all Atlassian now does) but not for outcome focused project driven work.
Eventually leadership catches on and creates a dedicated 'get things done' team where this friendly fishpond HR shit doesn't fly and people have to actually pull their weight again.
You'll note those words are not a quotation. They're the journalist's phrasing.
You probably would if you talk to the right people. When performance criteria are not objective, it's easy to fire or retain people at will.
Many former employees blamed [Facebook's] cult-like atmosphere partly on Facebook’s performance review system, which requires employees to get reviews from approximately five of their peers twice a year. This peer review system pressures employees to forge friendships with colleagues at every possible opportunity, whether it be going to lunch together each day or hanging out after work.
“It’s a little bit of a popularity contest,” said one manager who left the company in 2017. “You can cherry-pick the people who like you — maybe throw in one bad apple to equalize it.”
Inside Facebook’s ‘cult-like’ workplace, where dissent is discouraged and employees pretend to be happy all the time
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-perfor...
Not sure being an extrovert is quite so important to fixing bugs in the Facebook stack. (Maybe more so for the key account managers selling ads.)
Personally, I prefer peer reviews, even though they do often lead to likeable no-ops being promoted, and introverts being passed over for a promotion.
At least in "peer review" companies I never felt like my peers are trying to stab me in the back all the time.
I'd much rather work under a brilliant jerk than a hypocritical fool.
Good news: There are people who are neither. I prefer to work for competent non-jerks. A team of good people will always outperform a brilliant jerk that drives everyone else away.
True, but from my experience, companies are shockingly terrible at identifying and promoting those. Instead, they tend to promote the foolish but politically correct loud mouths.
High intelligence which is unrewarded tends to leave signs of trauma in a person. So they might seem like greedy selfish jerks, but in fact, they're frustrated for good reasons and we should listen to them and tolerate their harsh but accurate views about reality.
Jerks are fine so long as they're not afraid to criticize you to your face and give you a chance to improve. Not all jerks are sociopaths. For example, Linus Torvalds has described himself as a jerk - I'd be honored to work for such person. Altruism is about actions, not about choice of words or tone of speech.
I prefer to work with brilliant people and love to learn from them.
I am pretty sure, Linus qualifies as one in past, not sure about the current developments there.
I personally know several truly brilliant people at what they do and none of them are jerks. I have yet to see this 'brilliant jerk' everyone seems to be taking about.
You're talking as if most, if not all, companies are engaging in R&D at the level of the Apollo 11 space mission. You don't need brilliant people in most cases, merely having honest, diligent, persistent normal human beings can get the job done.
Instead it's very clear this is the result of 'wokeness' winning a culture war inside Atlassian: a giant red flashing warning sign to not work there or use their products.
It starts with this phrase:
We recognise things are not the way they used to be, yet companies haven’t evolved (from) 30 years ago when they were primarily made up often of white men. Tech standards have evolved, we have new ways of working, new demographics and generational change.
There's a dead comment on this thread pointing out that Atlassian are engaging in blatant and shameful racism and sexism here. It's based in Australia, a country full of white people, and is a software company - developers are mostly men. Demographics haven't actually changed as any quick consultation of computer science courses will show, so this statement is not only racist and sexist but also a blatant lie.
What might motivate a change to ensure that 2/3rds of job performance is no longer defined by skills? The explanation is quite obvious - if jobs are allocated based on ability then Atlassian will always be dominated by white men, simply because that's overwhelmingly the Australian demographic that learns computer programming, the most relevant skill to a software company. There's simply no way around that.
But if performance is assessed based on "how they bring their whole self to work", "how they live the company values" and how they "impact others on their team" then suddenly anyone can be promoted, anyone can be hired, and most importantly anyone can be fired by random employees asserting that they're a "brilliant jerk". There's no defence against such an accusation - it's entirely subjective and arguing with it would require effectively saying, your emotional reaction to this person is invalid. That would itself be taken as evidence of jerkhood!
This change will allow the "millenials", as Chee puts it, to completely purge the company of anyone who isn't a fanatical hater of white men. After all, actually being good at your job is no longer a defence against a colleague who doesn't like your politics.
There's another important message being sent by this article - Atlassian no longer cares about their customers (like my firm). Customers don't care about how much of their own self Atlassian employees bring to work, or whether its employees live their company values. These things might matter to some of their employees or their HR team, but it's irrelevant to the users. What does matter to users is whether the software is any good i.e. if it was written by people who are "brilliant". If actual skill is only considered of 1/3rd importance relative to the feelings of their employees, it seems clear that Atlassian staff prioritise their own feelings more than the needs of the people who buy their products. Not a good sign!
To me, this story just indicates that Atlassian is trying to be as "Australian" a company as it can be.
However, I may just be a small poppy in this thought. I'm willing to entertain the idea that I'm critical of Atlassian for their tall-poppy ideology simply because I am in fact a white male, however ..
Introverts can have a disadvantage in social perceptions not because they are actually a jerk but instead because they come off as a jerk due to lacking the practice and confidence of social interaction.
This seems like a great way to push out your brilliant people who won't tolerate bullshit or sacrifice their point for the sake of social cohesion.
Why do you believe such people shouldn't be pushed out? Social cohesion is important in any group of people working on a common goal and a company is made up of groups of people working together on common goals. Likewise, there's always bullshit in larger companies and those who don't "tolerate" it usually just force others to deal with twice as much.
Why should bullshit be tolerated when it leads to waste and stagnation? That sort of attitude is why Detroit fell so hard along with many post industrial wastelands. They scorned higher education or going another direction and then their keystone economies collapsed.
I dunno about that. Sometimes I run into folks who went to "a small school outside of Boston", and well...
The upper class in a capitalist society are capitalists and not laborers and, as such, are not subject to employee performance reviews. So changing such a process to punish “brilliant jerks” has no adverse impact on brilliant jerks in the upper class.
If brilliant jerks are the people most likely to be able to move upward in class if not actively sulpressed, then suppressing them via employee performance review process may be an effective means of suppressing upward class mobility, though the evidence that this is the actual effect or motivation here seems to be missing.
Though I think that it may be that the reference to the working class was somewhat imprecise and the real boundary-enforcement that the concern addresses here is between the non-intelligentsia portion of the proletariat and a group comprised of the proletarian and petit bourgeois intelligentsia.
If not done properly the whole company starts to feel like high school politics all over again as it loses track of what it’s actually accomplishing or not accomplishing and focuses too much on poorly implemented soft metrics. I’ve seen excellent managers that drive high performing teams get dinged by under-performers on those teams who say said manager is hard to work with. Sure they’d be much happier with a manager that let them slack off but that’s not going to help the company.
I think that people often take an extremely puerile view as to how exclusion and bullying manifest. I once saw an HN commenter suggest that the solution was to ban profanity. Now, obviously you shouldn't be screaming "fuck you" at your colleagues, but removing certain means won't fundamentally change behaviour if the ends remain the same. It's important to think about the incentives you've set up for your workforce. Are they playing a zero sum game? Does an assist count for as many points as a goal?
> I’ve seen excellent managers get dinged in such a System because a few poor performers just mark the manager as difficult to work with to cover for their own underperformance.
Which raises another question - why are these discussions always centred around "brilliant jerks" and not just, you know, "jerks" ? Is there any actual evidence that being a jerk correlates with being a good engineer? Or that brilliant jerks are harder to fire than incompetent jerks?
The "My company was acquired and I got a management position out of it, so nothing I say is wrong" jerk.
The "I've been successful here by not collaborating, so I don't have to collaborate with you either" jerk.
The "I'm to busy to even acknowledge your E-mail" jerk.
And all the many, many "Taking credit for other people's work" jerks.
None of them were particularly brilliant or productive. Just jerks who flourished in environments where jerky behavior was either not punished, or got you promoted.
1. Don't tolerate jerks regardless of their level of "brilliant". And simply not being likeable isn't enough to categorise someone as a jerk.
2. Give your employees honest reviews focusing on their actual skills, performance and impact. Don't come up with artificially soft language and treat them like children who need to tiptoed around.
Being opposed should be encouraged even if it's just a way to internally test ideas; being obnoxious should be discouraged.
You, your team and your manager should be able to make that distinction. If work at a place where disagreement is systemically taken personally, look for another place to work at.
The lines between "opposed" and "obnoxious" are very blurry and depend a lot on whether the respective person is very socially adept or not.
The problem is that if 9/10 have a bad idea, the 9 decide whether the dissenter is simply opposed or obnoxious.
Or it could be that only 3/10 have a bad idea, and 6/10 are afraid to side with 1/10 out of fear of likewise being considered obnoxious.
Any filter on honesty is a hazard IMO.
This requires lots of political skills that only few people have.
Well then, then that sounds like a pretty valuable skill that should be given greater focus during performance reviews, doesn't it?
Rather, being a very rational person instead of being pissed off by arguments, is a skill that should be given greater focus during performance reviews for programmers.
I mean I can think of multiple times over the years where projects absolutely failed even though people politely pointed out the flaws but did not push to correct them because they did not want to rock the boat and knew it would make them unpopular or "a jerk".
Sure there are _actual_ jerks that theoretically this would "catch", but it seems like competent managers would give them a warning and if they weren't obviously improving, eliminate them by necessity.
Another aspect of this is that politically connected (office politics) people in the organization are often immune to this type of thing, and calling them out in a review could be career suicide.
vs
"I don't think this is a good idea. I still think xyz is a more optimal solution".
(This works for our industry. May not work for most people on the planet, for whom abandoning a job is quite literally life-threatening. But that's an entirely separate topic.)
This is often an issue in big corporations by my experience. People complain about others behind their back, but never in the face, feedback just doesn't get back to originators so little changes. Its all nice and quiet and then bam! and the person is fired. Or not.
I'd advertise a different model where who works for whom is strictly voluntary. Somebody wants something done and needs somebody else to work with them; that other person needs to agree to work with that person and should have the option to join another team instead of being assigned to a group of people. Nobody likes working for jerks and the whole thing will sort itself out in no-time. Team players joining forces together will produce great results and you can then simply judge the output.
You'll get certain people having a hard time getting a team together or finding a team that will have them because they are jerks, that would be a reason for them to get a bad review (because they don't deliver). People voting with their feet is a more honest model than people whining to their managers. Empower people to vote with their feet. Small teams, empowered to do what needs doing, with people committed to working with each other can get things done.
You'll get all your performers joining forces and you can expect great results. Everybody else ends up stuck with each other and it should show in whatever teams results you get from that. Some people get a lot of stuff done by themselves and that might still be positive. Linus Torvalds is a jerk, I wouldn't want him on my team but I use Linux and Git on a daily basis and I'm glad he's working on that.
I also like the implication that there's nothing wrong with a couple of "great" years in a row, while a couple of "average" years in a row would at some point be pretty demotivating.
The last place I worked with levels like that used "met expectations" for the average, which seems more accurate, and isn't something to be ashamed of.
Not an improvement, IMO, and it also feels infantilizing. So Atlassian determined their workers are not adults but little children, who can't handle knowing whether their performance was better or worse than expected and how much, so instead they get gamified with a kindergarten-named, 1.3-bit scale?
This is babysitting of adult people.
Any kid must tolerate/live-with way more insulting behavior every freaking day without anything in return like regular pocket money.
Somebody think your code is shitty, you smell funny, you have weird glasses, you talk to quite, wow, lets immediately make a drama.
World of adults has become inferior to the world of kids.
I turned down a job this week because it became clear that the CEO couldn't handle any non-positive feedback and took it as a personal criticism.
Hey dude, if you have a redux reducer file that's over 11k+ lines long that doesn't mean that I'm "not smart enough to understand your code" it means you haven't bothered to keep basic code hygiene and break up your files.
It was a shame too - cool industry and tech stack and an odious toxic suck-bro culture. /smh
While I haven't seen the code, this belief that large files are bad "by default" to me is a clear sign of an developer who puts superficialities before more important work.
In any event, any significantly evolved system has lots of sore spots that are nevertheless not the most pressing issue at any particular moment. This is the nature of things. Learning to accept that and still getting things done is valuable.
They don't want people to bring their whole selves to work; nobody actually wants that. Lies like this cast immediate doubt onto everything else they're saying about the workplace environment.
...and right there flips the Bozo Bit.
The description brilliant jerks; does come over as despising of talent.
I don't actually have an issue with getting rid of people that really are a drag on team morale with their antics, even when they're highly productive. Perhaps you can find another spot for them, otherwise let them go their merry way and have them be brilliant elsewhere.
Having said that, there's a lot of people "on the spectrum" that are jerks not out of arrogance, but because their brain happens to make them essentially tone deaf. With all this talk about "diversity", I hope Atlassian doesn't forget about neurodiversity.