Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

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At a FAANG and I can tell you it's not nearly so positive as this.

It was shocking coming from startup world.

It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do this week"

It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying to get it done...

oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to get things done here?

Promo is seniority-based?

There's silly unspoken rules like after you get promoted, you're _guaranteed_ a middling performance rating because its an easy horsetrade to do?

Your manager doesn't have to argue $X was super important and strategic and this newly promoted character needs a better rating, and the other manager doesn't need to argue $Y needs to keep a high rating to show continued momentum in his growth, they just do it.

There's no way to rebel against this system, or work within it, other than transfer companies?

It's a rather horrific situation and I don't think it's helping anyone or anyone is particularly satisfied with it. The problem is, any other solution is worse and will hurt The Vibes in the short run. Interesting to see Zuck move towards Dark Zuck and say things I've never heard at FAANG

I have a bad habit of working on important things that don't actually glitter, unblocking other teams and people constantly and recommending against shiny cool solutions, so promotions this year went to my two colleagues who took a glittery project, recommended a shiny shit idea, and have now delivered shit covered in glitter that is immediately getting sales/support feedback like um but it doesn't do what we needed and it is missing what we asked for.

I complained about a bug that blocked our CI for a week, which I'd shepherded around; that the company needs people to be prepared to work on things that they "don't own" because surprise, we don't have anyone assigned to owning the interaction of those six systems! Actual response: well, you didn't have to do that work.

Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.

>Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.

There's nothing like being annoyed at waiting for a blocker to motivate me to do the dishes. Second best motivation is being in a boring meeting I'm not really needed in.

I was in a team like that. One person in particular would pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate implementation, reject all feedback and then leave everyone else to deal with the production outages.

Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else.

You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.

Ya know what sitting in the manager chair other than not taking feedback I would probably give them kudos too.

Being the person who comes up with mediocre solutions to hard problems is way more impressive than the guy who has expertly designed solutions to easy problems. One of the devs on my team is like that. Everything he writes is like 30% broken from the get go but all his stuff ships and nobody else has the moxy to blindly charge into the unknown and not get stuck because their afraid to cut themselves on edge cases.

Just curious, what kind of software is this? Is it ETL stuff or what?

I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing.

Working under conditions of pressure and stress provides few long term benefits and is the refuge of those who don’t have the smarts to perform well and need to look like they do.

> I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing, but the parent you are replying to never said otherwise. They were talking about a fake performance rating that is given for political reasons.

Anyone who thinks that performance ratings aren’t dog and pony shows have drunk the corporate Kool-Aid. Either you have a manager that likes you and will play the game to give you the best politically feasable ratings because it’s the tool they have as middle management to keep you around or you will toil to meet whatever arbitrary expectations someone with authority but no power has and you should run.

Yeah, first after a promo is “fake” in the sense it is purposefully low pressure.

At Google, which I'm pretty confident the parent comment was describing, promotion is supposed to be recognition that you've already been consistently performing at that level for a long time. So someone newly promoted is not actually up-leveled, they're just no longer down-leveled.

I’m aware, point stands. If you meet somebody for the first time the L* sets an expectation. You need to grow into it.

Not in this case, here, my claim is the role was very clearly grown into, and the rating reflected the fact that these decisions are mostly tenure-based, + or - 2 or 3 years, and the rating was always going to be average even if I cured cancer, as was explicitly spelled out later. That disincentives putting in effort because it doesn't matter. Creates an uncomfortable nihilist atmosphere that can be suffocatingly depressive

Yeah...in at least one part of Google, as recently as last year, getting a rating higher than "meets expectations" in the second perf cycle after promo required a VP to approve an exception. Part of why I left.

Sounds like Google, specifically. I don't think Amazon or Meta or Netflix is like this. Don't know about Apple.

IIRC Amazon does stack ranking too.

The comment I was responding to wasn't about stack ranking, not sure if you meant to reply to someone else.

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