When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

Raises were completely divorced from any performance assessment. You were paid whatever they thought the max was for your skillset, based on a bunch of data they had on what people at other companies got paid for similar work.

What we did have was 360 reviews once a year. It was basically a small survey you could fill out about anyone in the company, which they and their manager would see. You could evaluate your boss, your VP, or people who worked for you, or anyone else you worked with anywhere in the company. It was expected that managers do a 360 review for all of their reports, but beyond that you could do as few or as many as you wanted to. It was basically a start/stop/continue kind of thing.

It was such a refreshing change from the stack ranking at eBay, which forced good people to get shitty reviews just so they could "fit the bell curve". And as you said, it incentivized you to not praise coworkers and some people even actively sabotaged their coworkers to get a better rank.

School is a prime example, in my opinion - there is so much I "learned" in school that I'll never remember, because I didn't take a proper approach to learning - I just optimized for grades. I had a 4.7 GPA and could hardly tell you a thing about US history or recite a lick of Spanish, because I simply did not care about anything but getting the A so I could get into the college I cared about.

In the work environment, I can see a lot of parallels to this. If I'm competing with my coworkers, my incentive is to outwork and outshine them. A common thing I see is when a coworker does a bit of innovative work - it's almost guaranteed some other coworker will intercede before a chance at applause is given to discuss its obvious flaws, the plethora of alternatives out there, etc., leading the developer to feel like their implementation was not good. (For the record, I'm not talking about general criticism - I'm talking about the general pattern of not celebrating someone's achievements and then discussing how to continue improving, but rather a "why did you even do this" mentality).

Sadly, many people who don't do well take their feedback to mean that they need more code commits or comments. Some of them might even succeed at gaming the system for a short while due to a bad manager. The truth from my experience is that as long as you drive meaningful impact, and are able to convince you manager and others of it, you will be doing well. Falling back to silly stat numbers is the toolset of people who don't have enough achievements. In a way, good numbers don't mean good performance. But bad performance really does correlate with bad numbers. So people who are unhappy with their ratings will deduce that is the problem. It's aggravated by the fact people with good ratings don't boast about it (which is considered rude). I've noticed similar effects in college with grades. Judging by the vocal people one could assume the majority of the class failed at the exam, since whoever succeed will do well to not rub in their friends' faces)

* Personally I do use numbers in reviews, but only as a secondary way to backup my claims for what I did, or why it was important

* * If you are convinced that your manager and team only cares about stats, I recommend switching to another team or company when you have the opportunity.

I do a good job because I'm a professional, and care about what my peers think about me. I'm not competing with them, I'm living up to the high standards that they have to me and vice versa. I don't do a good job because of some carrot on a stick tier "promotion" or "raise". Those are easy enough to get by job hopping or having the option of job hopping.

The PSC cycle (bi-annual review) is stressful, which I think is where the "craziness" stems. OTOH, there's not much day to day oversight - employees have an insane amount of freedom - so these 2x / year reviews are the tradeoff. ICs have tons of freedom, then twice a year, have to stand account for how they spent the last 6 months, compared to what other people in the same role and at the same level have done. (It's not stack ranking, it's more like grading on a curve across very different exam questions.)

There are mechanisms to provide feedback more frequently than every 6 months. It's agreed that the manager failed at their job if an IC is surprised by how a review ends up.

(FB also has 360 reviews every 6 months, offset from PSC by 3 months. These are usually upward reviews, and they are taken very seriously. Results from these determine manager career progression, so it's a chance for ICs to have their voices really well heard.)

Gaming the stats does exist, just as it exists everywhere. I think this is probably the only part that I don't strongly disagree with. It's also a hard problem to solve, with significant tradeoffs for different approaches. (And might be the most interesting piece)

But once you ask folks to do it and there's any positive outcome ... it becomes a thing.

I've been a part of similar systems and as soon as it is sort of institutionalized, it is a nightmare.

It became office politics and groups of mutual admiration clubs, and frankly a lot of folks who maybe needed to up their game in the view of their bosses got in on these sort of mutual admiration clubs. More so than those who didn't, and that really skewed things.

The underlying fact is a complement from a coworker might have jack squat to do with ... actually doing anything good, it could even be because of a bad thing, who knows, you just never know.

As soon as it isn't 'organic' it becomes kinda horrible.

The first iteration can work very well. But what about the next iterations? People will adapt to the process and change their behavior.

Under stacked ranking, if you are interviewing someone brilliant that can potentially be the strongest member on your team, is it in your best personal interest to hire that person?

The answer is: no. Because if you add high performance members to your team, with each iteration of stacked ranking not only it will be harder for you to be promoted, but you will be closer to being terminated.

So what ends up happening is that people hire the worst possible candidates, which defeats the purpose of stacked ranking. With stacked ranking, instead of iterating towards stronger people, you iterate towards mediocre, political people.

Which is exactly what the employer wants.

It's also why they don't want people talking to each other about their salaries, which is a practice that needs to die.

I think that's not quite right. You have incentive to compliment those who you would rather be working with, which hopefully correlates pretty well with those who deserve compliment. Of course, this is weighed against your other incentives, some of which are probably more important.

This comment should not be taken as any meaningful endorsement of stack ranking.

The way this is achieved at my company is having no quantitative performance indicators and having your performance decided in a completely opaque process by leaders three levels above you in the organisation who you have never met.

As a consequence, we have all given up on engaging in the formal side of the performance review process because we know it is a waste of time. However, if you have a good line manager, you end up having a genuine conversation about what went well and what could be done better.

An odd situation, but infinitely preferable to counting up the number of fake "thank you" comments you receive (which just makes me vomit).

named...? :-)

I've been in too many performance-review manager meetings where someone under Manager A is up for promotion, and Manager B steps in and says "my engineer had a bad interaction with your engineer" and that's enough to put the promotion at serious risk. Managers are happy enough to effectively kill a promotion with a clean conscience by saying "let's re-evaluate this one in mid-cycle reviews". Sure, set this engineer back 6 months, a year, a year+, no worries all good.

Maybe it helps people to think of their manager/work as being analogous to a startup product? You build an awesome product, but then spend zero budget on sales and marketing, and are then super-sad that you're not magically growing up and to the right.

Conversely somebody who readily gives credit to others might come off as high-integrity and trustworthy. Perhaps a person like that is an incredibly positive influence and valuable member of their team.

Each approach can succeed or fail depending on what your manager values. I wouldn’t say one is more likely to succeed than the other, but if you want to end up working for a boss that values integrity, then I’d suggest taking the integrity route.

I mean that on the macro and the micro level. Does it also lead to bad abstract ideas developing because nobody is willing to be critical, especially of broad approaches? I'm thinking along the lines of: "there are serious and fundamental flaws with the way you guys are approaching this."

For that, no internal culture is really needed: Google is in California, a state where the use of positive superlatives is mandatory for every single human interaction :)

The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or anything, they showed up randomly.

Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll of the dice you helped a nice person, that's it.

In the meantime if you went the extra mile for someone, never would any sort of attaboy would show up. In fact you might even get complaints from those folks.

For the support team watching some manager trot out an "attaboy" for no apparent reason as if it was a merit type thing was kinda demoralizing.

Similar things happen when you try to use feedback systems like this as a component of internal review processes - they tend to get gamed extremely quickly.

I'm not sure what benefit one of the certificates (they have serial numbers!) actually confers, but I imagine it's more about the emotional uplift than it is monetary value.

I've long wanted a way to bring this to more workplaces. In previous companies, we had shout-outs at our company all-hands, which were low-effort to write and a fantastic way to recognize a coworker. It didn't involve any $$ compensation, which made it all the more meaningful to me.

I've been trying to start up a blog this year (three posts in 7 months, woo!) and someone recently contacted me to tell me that my RSS feed was down and they didn't want to miss the next post. It carried me into the next week it meant so much.

To my surprise when I first started doing this, the majority of them reply back with a genuine thanks.

What really infuriates me is that even though I take the time to provide good feedback on how to improve, other people don't return the favor. I'm young and lazy. I know that my work is terrible. Yet no one has bothered to call me out on it in years or given me meaningful suggestions on areas to work on.

Constructive feedback might hurt someone's feelings for a few minutes, but if it is provides structure on how to improve in the future the recipient will come to appreciate it after a few minutes to calm down.

"Hey GEBBL, you did a really good job on that project. It was great that you focused on the end-to-end problem, and not just the main part that PM asked for. This is something you're better at than some other members on your team -- do you think you could help me keep an eye out during design reviews for gaps along these lines?"

It can also be useful to use a related positive to explain a negative.

"Hey GEBBL, you're usually a good speaker, so I thought you'd want to know that I found your presentation this week a little hard to follow. I think it would have been easier to follow with a high-level overview like the one you included at the beginning of last week's."

You can, of course, look at people's weaknesses to find opportunities for improvement, but you can also look at people's strengths. I think think the best feedback is not only constructive, but also motivating and actionable.

For more difficult feedback to navigate, you should be able to funnel it through a manager. "Hey GEBBL's manager, I noticed that GEBBL checked in a change yesterday without testing it properly. It's not a major thing, but I know you're looking for opportunities to give GEBBL constructive feedback." (If you're going to do this, I suggest trying to do it in a balanced way; share positive feedback too so that it's clear you're not complaining all the time.)

I don't want to be scared to make mistakes, I want to be scared to ship mistakes.

This strategy has worked great for me in the long term so far, because I have so many random connections now from every job who like me because I'm friendly. I have a reputation of pulling everyone up around me and being easy to work with because... I am.

Don't compete for a 5% raise for 25% more hours when you can get a 25% raise for 5% less hours somewhere else.

I'm not the kind of person that gets promoted, for whatever reasons, so I've been moving up by moving sideways. It sucks, but it is what it is.

Now, the most difficult part, is when someone in position of power decides to keep silent — like your manager or another high profile individual. In that case, it's better to bounce, you don't want to work in an org that promotes those kind of people.

Peter Thiel said it best in Zero to One. I'm paraphrasing here, if a start up is not rewarding individuals based off of merit, but PR, then it's time to go.

Speaking from my own experience, I tend to be a quiet person who doesn't say much. However, since joining my current team, and having consistently received compliments from both managers and teammates (and seen the same getting passed around to others), it has lead me to make a point of looking for opportunities to do the same. It's become the norm to compliment others on their good work, and passing that up the chain and through official channels when the opportunity presents itself.

If you mention that, you will be seen as whiny and a complainer. But if you praise someone who does it, well now you're being positive. Both things have the same effect, in that they communicate that you want people to do more of a certain behavior ... but they are perceived differently by others in the group.

It has the same effect the other way. If you generally provide positive feedback for good work and someone does mediocre work. Your lack of feedback is noticed, without you actually sticking your neck out and saying anything negative.

Then loop your manager in. I work for a marketing agency primarily doing consulting work, and operate semi-autonomously from my manager. For the clients and accounts I support, I am the face of my group. A client may not even know my manager's name, unless there's been cause for someone with a fancier title than mine to make an appearance. And account teams may have found their way to me directly rather than routing through my boss, so have no working relationship with him.

If I get a kudos via email, I either BCC him on my reply, or forward it to him as an fyi. If it's given verbally, I thank the person giving it, and let them know how much I'd appreciate if they could jot that down in writing and send it over. If it came through something like a Slack DM, I'd either screenshot it for something minor and pass that along or again express my appreciation and call out how much it'd mean if they could throw that into an email.

I've never had anyone balk at or refuse to do the above. If someone has taken the time to give you kudos for your work, they're usually appreciative enough with what you're doing that they are perfectly happy to put it in an email for you if prompted. And more often than not, the writeup that comes through talks you up far more than the informal shout out they originally made, as they're well aware of why you're asking for it.

You'd get a team constantly making tools for each other and no sellable product.

Thanks to this article (which I didn't even read), I was inspired to write something heartfelt to my own manager about another person on my team. No system would have pried that from me. I just needed a subtle reminder.

The point of telling the manager is to help the coworker get their next raise or promotion, not for the manager to be the one to tell them.