Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

> Performance reviews are a joke because almost nobody knows how to measure anyone else's effectiveness. They are just a continuation of the same popularity contests you thought you left behind from middle school, high school, and maybe even your college/university days.

This has a bit of truth. In my experience climbing up the ladder is so disconnected from actual reality. There’s quite a bit of a buddy buddy / quid pro quo system that goes on when it comes to promos.

There are people who do the actual work and take it 99%, and others who stitch the last 1% and take credit for all of it. Our Industry loves rewarding for features over things that customers actually care about. I’ve seen many feature promos in my life. One year later we’d have to kill the whole feature because it’s not worth the maintenance cost.

One of my managers believed folks who write python and JS are not real programmers, C and go programmers faced hard problems therefore they are more real. There was also the unconscious bias that women can’t lead projects so opportunities weren’t given to them. Over time women kept leaving. Over time really stellar frontend engineers kept on leaving.

It also baffles me how much energy is spent on hiring people, vs mentoring and fostering them so they grow and are promoted.

There's a concept of "visible productivity", where you do good work but also make it visible. I learned pretty early in my career that merely doing good work is not enough; it's not that someone else will take credit, it's that few people will notice, especially outside your immediate area.

Features are much easier to make visible, but it's not universal... a long time ago my manager told me to shift the perspective on some crappy boring perf work I did by multiplying milliseconds saved by runs per day and converting CPU time into dollar cost in the datacenter ;) IIRC I literally put the dollar figure into my perf review.

A semi-related point w.r.t. visibility/popularity, is that your team is much more likely to be continuously aware, and depend on, your work; whereas controlling for levels/etc. each person's opinion of you counts roughly the same, and in fact that of the people from other teams may matter more because working across teams is perceived as a sign of seniority. So, doing awesome job when you work with other teams is much more important as far as your "popularity" goes.

This is on point. Unfortunately many people confuse make your work visible with licking your superior's boot or just showing off(part of it is simply...the clashing of ego)

I personally think it's different. I'm not showing off type(and even the opposite) but I see how visibility of what you(or your team did)it is very important, because I don't notice other people's work outside of my team, either!:p

> It also baffles me how much energy is spent on hiring people, vs mentoring and fostering them so they grow and are promoted.

I used to be baffled by that too (and frustrated when they hired someone from outside, when we had IMHO better candidates in-house). However the alternative leads to the Peter Principle, won't it (I've seen that too and the result was worse)?

Factor in nepotism and the alternative is even worse.

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