Google tells employees more of them will be at risk for low performance ratings
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
It seems likely that Google over-hired and is trying to avoid public layoffs or just raise productivity/velocity. I wish employers who wanted to layoff workers would do it directly instead.
It's dehumanizing and unsustainable -- any job that sets a pace you can't keep up until retirement (i.e. 30+ more years) is overtaxing you. Not to mention the lack of psychological safety -- no point befriending anybody at work if you're all interchangeable at a moment's notice.
I think to turn this trend around we need to say "no" to places that treat you this way, and not glorify them simply because they are big (I'm referring to the F-word).
Absolutely. And there are a variety of legal solutions to this. Unions are the big scary one in the US. Other nations give employees equal voting power to shareholders etc.
I think tech unions could be good. Everyone always defaults to “blue collar” unions like factories that set wages but there are “high skill” unions where wages aren’t set (eg Hollywood unions). They spread the protection around too. Eg if you want to hire a famous Union actor, you need Union cameramen. Everyone wants the famous actor, and that protects the camera crew. In Hollywood unions, they set hours and expectations and basic standards but not salaries and other perks.
Another benefit a Union could get is related to on-call load and getting paid for that overtime.
There are absolutely lower stress, lower pay jobs out there for a lot of these “high stress” skill sets.
The declining economy does the same with these choices as it does everywhere - make the risk more acceptable.
Obviously most people make less, and most households in America make less, but a solid, comfortable, stress free, middle-class life expects that now.
Especially in cities like New York, San Francisco, etc...
A lot of total comp is in the form a stock grants, which given stagnating and decreasing stock price represents a reduction in total comp for folk who are there long enough.
But also there's a difference between "this is your salary" and "this is your salary, but your job is no longer any safer than a contractor's"
Bosses should provide frequent feedback on employees' performance, not just once a year. I don't believe that low performers (or perhaps employees that the boss dislikes) should be surprised that they're getting fired. They should be able to see it coming well before it happens.
I agree, but I don't think this addresses the problem; a boss with an axe to grind, or some quota to fulfill still leaves the worker with no means of pushback within the organization (absent of collective action).
There's really no expectation that anyone ever get that top rating. Most employees never will. That's fine.
They have zero commitment to any of these products. If they don’t suddenly become the next search they’re dead.
Basically what I’m saying is they’d do fine if all their engineers just stayed home for a year.
Which part of their scale did companies like Google and Netflix make up?
The support check in process was explained not too long after. The rollout was indeed messy, with a lot of support check ins being given in December as a “check the box” process to make getting a low rating possible, with no time for a report to adjust. But this is only because the new system requires a formal check in before making it possible to get the lower ratings. This is portrayed as insidious but actually makes it strictly more difficult to get low ratings.
The new “meets most” rating captures an implicit “low CME” from the old system and does mean that more people will now officially get undesirable ratings. But this was known ahead of time.
None of the material in this article is new.
> The rollout was indeed messy, with a lot of support check ins being given in December as a “check the box” process to make getting a low rating possible, with no time for a report to adjust.
That is what said: "managers provide feedback/checkin ruling in a way that impacts the ranking of the IC without any time for the IC to address the concern"
Given that it is December still, and it's apparently only in December that this is seems to have started occurring, I fail to see how "None of the material in this article is new" unless this was also reported as happening some other report in the last two weeks that I missed.
I am not saying the details of the stack ranking are new, I'm saying the events described in the article (the December shafting of ICs) is new.
I manage a team at Google. I’ve been aware of every single one of these elements for more than six months.
What December shafting? Imagine there was no check in requirement (as was in the old system and how it works at almost all companies) and people just got below-si ratings in February with no notice. Would that be better for people?
The former is a significant part among the issues raised in the article. The said, even if details are not "news" internally, what matters on HN is what is externally known. Saying "we've known about this for ages" is not dissimilar to any product announcement from company X on HN being discarded by people saying "this isn't new, I'm an employee of X working on this product for years".
There is no "december shafting" happening. Almost all media coverage has been clickbait at best or lies at worst.
P.S - in a recent past I also had to take over administration of a google apps account for a small company and discovered that the admin UIs for that product were too a barely passable garbage lacking bulk operations and defaulting grids to 20 items per page.
I wonder what would improve performance better: rank and yank, or disincentivizing the politics and doc writing?
Also Google: “We have hired a bunch of slackers who need to be fired!”