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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

This resonates a lot with my experience.

Take OKRs, for example. Everyone is expected to set their target goals, publicize and discuss them with others, and follow them religiously. Otherwise you send the signal that you don't like setting goals for yourself, and thus have no desire for self-improvement, which reflects poorly on your performance review. There are company-wide ceremonies about OKRs themselves; workshops, office hours and endless discussions about best ways to plan, track and meet your objectives. The amount of time and effort spent just doing this management work makes up a large portion of working hours.

Speaking of performance reviews, they're another huge waste of time. In the ever-important self-review you're expected to present proof to your higher-ups that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise. So you better have been taking notes of your accomplishments in the past 6 months, otherwise those OKRs might come in handy. Your work would apparently be invisible to the company if there were no performance reviews, so make sure to make the best case for yourself, and to cherry-pick peers that would leave you a positive review.

The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home.

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I share the frustration you express based on my experience working at large companies. However, there is a strong steelman explanation for why this is required.

In a 5 person company, it is easy to sit around the table and decide what needs to be done and then have everyone "get good work done and go home". In a 5,000 person company, it is not obvious what needs to be done in the first place talk less of making sure everyone knows their part in it. Should we be going after SMBs or Enterprise customers? What do we (or more importantly I) do differently based on that decision? How do we time the next campaign push to line up with the product launch?

There are thousands of decisions that need to be made and it is impossible to do that without having these formal processes that allow people to coordinate in large groups. I would argue that >60% of work involved in a large company is coordination rather than actual building, selling, marketing, whatever. The larger the company, the greater this percentage becomes.

I would love to know if anyone has found a solution to counteract this phenomenon but it seems like an immutable law based on my experience.

I think OKRs are required to communicate intent and targets. It is a great way for communication "across" and "upwards".

But it is a shitty tool "downwards". Suddenly you have managers insisting that a feature must be rolled out before the 31st of March, even though rolling out 2 days later will be safer.

It creates perverse incentives such as OKRs used for "individual" performance reviews when in reality, a lot of work is team/x-team/group effort. It causes ICs to play corporate games.

But that's an issue with how the OKRs are derived rather than if the OKRs are required. If the teams come up with OKRs with bottoms-up involvement then the issue you mention is mitigated.

The fact that a thing can be done badly is not an argument for not doing the thing.

> If the teams come up with OKRs with bottoms-up involvement then the issue you mention is mitigated

This still does not solve the problem that "individuals" are scapegoated for OKRs defined by someone else. I have actually seen people getting fired for not delivering on OKRs, which were ultra ambitious in the first place. The problem was not ambitious OKRs. The problem was individual consequences for team/management ambition.

> The fact that a thing can be done badly is not an argument for not doing the thing.

Sure, but this doesn't prevent discussion and bringing the failure modes to the fore. In fact, I would suggest that Gen-z and gen-alpha will be very difficult to hire and keep because they naturally understand the BS that OKRs are, having been exposed to BS games in school, college and with friends.

One solution is to establish a strict, clear company culture with guiding principles for making most decisions. All employees are expected to conform or leave. This allows for rapid alignment and execution. But it doesn't work as well for dealing with disruptive innovations.

1,000 separate companies of 5 people each.

Microservices vs monolith at the human level?

That is essentially the best reason to do microservices. You have small teams own a service each. If you are doing microservices and your company itself is a monolith, you've got competing agendas. Not impossible, just a bit of an anti-pattern.

communication overhead kills you though (in both cases)

OKRs etc are one approach - everything written, documented, and whatnot. Honestly though I think it's wildly ineffective.

What's a better approach? Every single manager, up to CEO level, trusts implicitly his or her direct reports. CEO trusts and delegates with confidence to their immediate reports. They in turn do likewise. Any missed opportunities or mis-steps are an issue between 2 levels in the org, IMO.

Fundamentally it's a people, comms, co-ordination and aptitude problem, so solve it like one.

I like offices, but I agree that OKRs and performance reviews are a farce. OKRs in particular: I cannot believe how frequently people act as though there is no way to think about work other than OKRs, as if it was some immutable natural law instead of just a thing somebody thought up one time. As far as I have seen, OKRs are a mechanism for leaders at every level to divest themselves of the responsibility to _lead_, by making "accomplishing things" somebody else's problem, as measured by a number that they will get perfunctory status reports on.

The OKRs at my workplace are self-defined and self-rated. It's a total sham. Every cycle I will write OKRs for things I've already completed, or things that will be completed a week from writing. And I'll leave 1 or 2 items I know will extend to next cycle. And 3 months later I mark those few as 'done' and make up a couple more. Nobody cares. My manager doesn't care. Nothing changes at all in the org. I've been doing this for over 6 years. I'm not sure who exactly looks at the OKRs, but I assume there is a dashboard- somewhere that I don't have access to- with numbers in green and red that must mean a lot to somebody I've never met.

Sounds about right.

> The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home.

Remote work has largely removed the theatrical aspect of my position. This is one of the reasons I hope to never work in an office again.

Oh yes, I too would much rather watch the theater from home on TV...

And during the lulls replacing doom scrolling on Reddit with house chores has been a godsend for my mental health. I pretty much only go into the office when there's catered food (ie when there's planned non-work related socializing).

Or just having mid-day break to cook and eat some food in peace. Splitting 8h day into 2x 4h parts helped a lot.

And not just food, healthier food (hopefully). Good that’s fresh and not just microwaved frozen pizza.

It depends if you're trying to get promoted or not. One of the reasons I never aim for a promotion internally--remote or in person--is the requirement of theater over everything else. It perverts the day to day.

"LARPing your job" on Slack seems to be a common issue with remote work.

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/larping-your-job

https://www.theawl.com/2015/04/are-you-just-larping-your-job...

I never understood this. If you can get away with "pretending to work" then either you have a bullshit job or everyone is in this bullshit rodeo together.

If I work with someone (supervising or not) I know if they are working or slacking off. And no, you don't need made up metrics or to be sitting next to them for that. If you really are in the midst of people that actually get stuff done, I should add.

On somewhat of a tangent, I'm not gonna lie: it sometimes feels like everything is a big farce in tech.

We write code for useless functionalities on mostly useless products. Product managers often don't even understand/use the product and copy competitors blindly. C-suite/founders pretend they know what they're doing but copy whatever is trending at the time (Agile, OKRs, Scrum, squads, etc). Investors give out money to people that yell the right buzzwords loud enough (and/or have the right connections). The list goes on.

The only people that really work are the ones in the lower echelons answering support tickets, keeping things running, actually committing code, etc. Everyone else sits on useless meetings adding "meeting for X" in their reports. Ironically those getting things done are the most scrutinized for "LARPing" by higher ups.

Maybe I've been really unlucky in my career but I've found this to be true in every single job.

I don't agree about the lower levels doing all the work.

People in the lower echelons usually don't understand what their product is for, how it works, who uses it or how it fits into their company's overall business strategy. They are only capable of understanding and working with a small part of the product. Because they don't see the "big picture", they often feel unmotivated and think their job is unimportant.

People who have a higher level of understanding- people who can intelligently talk about the product with stakeholders and make high-level executive decisions- these people are rare and extremely valuable, much more so than engineers and support people.

A lot of work being done at the lower levels is for done in the name of the same farcical issues pointed in the thread. We spend lots of time building absolute bullsh*t. The reality is a lot of these nonsense is fed from high-up without a good rationale.

I’m in a position of power now, and I’m constantly fighting for the idea that we should build what delivers the most value to our users. Nothing else. Any other ‘feature’ is a waste of time, effort, and money.

So I disagree. People in the trenches seem — to me at least — to have a much better grasp of the product, what it does, what it looks like, and how it’s really used. The further up you are from the trenches, the more you’re relying on reports of reports, proxy metrics, and so on; which further detach you from reality.

> People who have a higher level of understanding- people who can intelligently talk about the product

I agree with you here, those are valuable. But IME those are usually not the ones in positions of power.

I've met passionate developers that understand the issues of the product and not only the tech. Support folks that know exactly why and where the product falls short. Sales folks that deeply understand what the product doesn't offer and what it probably needs. The list goes on.

You said so yourself: these people are rare and even from a statistical point of view there will be way more people that understand the product down in the trenches compared to higher ups. Most of those at the top are hired because of previous prestige/success or more commonly: connections.

> People in the lower echelons usually don't understand what their product is for, how it works, who uses it or how it fits into their company's overall business strategy.

You've just described so many people at the top that I've seen first hand. VPs of X coming in, having zero understanding of the product (sometimes they never even used it) and making decisions that hurt everyone. Even the ones with previously successful products come in and it becomes apparent that success is not easily replicated. Survivorship bias is all too real. How many come in and try to copy/paste what worked in their previous company blindly only to fail upwards after the fact?

> I don't agree about the lower levels doing all the work.

If you want to see how right I am, all we have to do is examine the bus (or submarine?) scenario. If all managers vanished in a submarine today would the company stop? Now compare that to the same scenario with devs/support/infra/sales/etc. Yes, they do all the work.

One of the few issues the lack of management causes is regarding decision making. But not because folks are incapable of deciding, it's because they are powerless to do so. When they have that power, the company continues to move forward just fine - it might even thrive if you ask me.

People recognizing that their job is bullshit: contributes nothing to (or actively harms) society. The natural outcome is LARPing, don't you think? I don't blame them at all. I work in tech, we put in maybe 2 hrs of actual 'work' followed by a parade of time-wasting managerial aesthetic busywork. People aren't connected with their job because it's just a means to live. Perhaps you might find some extensive writing on this topic called labor alienation.

As an experienced developer, I love working remotely. As a younger developer, I'm glad I got the office experience a few times. Even if, the entire time, I hated the open office layouts.

It’s probably one of the reasons the managers want you back in as well - they want/need the theatre

> Your work would apparently be invisible to the company if there were no performance reviews

Yet another indicator of poor (i.e. lazy) management maybe if you have to keep track of every single accomplishment yourself. How about managers keep track of the awesome things their employees do and celebrate them for it and help them improve if they're lacking.

I am a lazy manager then. The problem is context. I ask all my engineers to self track accomplishments for several reasons:

1. It puts them in control. If they want to leave the team, they have a handy list to hand to their new manager right away.

2. They can capture details I would miss, no matter how close to the work I am. They will capture exact why that design process was hard and what it was like dealing with those 4 external teams.

3. It improves their writing and communication skills. I spend my 1:1's going through the accomplishments and working with them on how to expand and add context to items, where to add detail, and how to be concise with the results.

So far, I receive positive feedback on this. On the flipside, I don't do this for myself :)

You could do the work and allow them to supplement what you've noted down.

Not a manager and not the person you are replying to, but I kind of get their perspective, as I see it somewhat similar to how I treat referral/recommendation letters.

If someone I closely know asks me for a recommendation letter, and they are a person who (in my eyes) deserves a great letter, I just tell them the format for the specific letter (e.g., 2 paragraphs, less than 300 words, what type of content the letter is supposed to contain, etc), and ask them to write it themselves. Then I take it, review to make sure all is good, go over it with the person (in case there are any potential suggestions for improvements [based on my knowledge of them] or parts that i find questionable), edit if necessary with them, and then submit it.

Now that I am looking at it, that's a very similar process to how performance review historically went with my managers.

Part of the context of referral letters is you’re usually doing them a favor, not your job.

The manager is also doing you a favor by letting you express yourself to what you believe your strong points during the review cycle were, going over them with you, and helping you come up with ways of writing it that would result in your desired outcome. As opposed to the performance review process (which i've seen before), where the manager takes no input from you, compiles your pull requests/design docs/etc, provides zero context for your work to the higher ups, then "ships it", and you only get to go over the final outcome with them. The latter also counts as "doing your job" just as fine.

What I am trying to say is, just like with referral/recommendation letters, there is a large degree of how much the manager cares about your performance review, how much voice they want to give you in this, how much support and assistance they are willing to provide you, and how much work they decide to put into it on their end.

A wise manager knows that they cannot possibly know your work as well as you do. So they want to work with you on bridging that potential gap between the outer visibility/importance of your work and the true value/effort involved in it.

I really don’t have anything against managers having reports write their reviews. I’m just pointing out there’s a fundamental difference between that and a referral letter, specifically on the “doing your job for you” bit people were talking about.

Saying the manager is also doing you a favor is twisting the words a bit. Sure, you can make the point that it’s nice and it benefits you. But it is a routine part of their current job. Lots of cover letters, maybe most, are being asked outside of this context. Maybe the most obvious difference is it’s within your discretion to decide to not give someone a referral. Not really the same with a performance review.

These differences makes an “okay, but write it yourself” situation fundamentally different.

I very much could, but again, I am a lazy manager. Not even trying to convey sarcasm there.

I do believe them doing the work is important to point 1., putting them in-control. The most important part of my job is setting them up to succeed. If they require their manager to always positively advocate for them, they are leaving their careers up to change. Not all managers are looking out for their directs, so teaching people to look out for themselves is important to me.

Your job is to know who is creating value to the company. If the company comes to you and says "Tough times. Need to axe one person. Who is it?" are you going to ask your team?

Your job is to know how the team functions together. What are the skills of your team, who is better at what, who gets on with who, etc. You going to ask them each to write that down too?

I get the value of having them also do it for themselves, but if they write down total bullshit are you going to spot it? Seen that happen. Or if they miss things that you thought were valuable and they didn't? Are you planning on just remembering it six months later?

>I am a lazy manager

You will do well in corporate America or higher education, apparently.

I think people are making many assumptions about my overall management style based on my process for a very small aspect of the job.

While I joke about being a lazy manager, I do not agree I am uninformed.

I have ~20 hours of 1:1s per week. I take detailed notes of every single one (transparently, as I share my notes with the person I am doing 1:1's with).

Because I am talking with everyone across the org, constantly, I am getting a constant stream of data on accomplishments, struggles, motivations, working relationships, and performance. I can instantly name my top and bottom performers, by level, and go into detail on why they have that rating.

The accomplishment tracking that I have engineers do is more of an internal resume. It could even prove to be an external resume.

My manager does this for me and I adore him for it. I can just talk about myself with normal human words and he'll come back with it all written up in business-speak.

So, is a manager in this context really needed?

I'm in control, I need to make my case towards a new manager and team if I want to move (basically a new interview process), and try to improve on communication and writing even though +80% (number pulled out of empirical personal experience. YMMV) of my peers want to focus on work and be happy and introvert.

You have your context, your manager has everyone's context. They cannot understand the details of everything, but you cannot make strategic decisions (budgeting, staffing, which projects to do at all) because you don't have the overall picture and the input frim everyone else.

The moment I start dealing with other teams/depts, I almost certainly have more context about most things than the manager "managing" me. You end up asking other folks "why X? why Y?" and get their perspective in their terms, and incorporate that in to however you're getting your stuff done.

The only thing "managers" have access to is info they choose not to share, or info they're told not to share, which creates an explicit vaccuum/silo of info, and increases the power imbalance. Most of the teams I've worked on have been this way. Yeah, sure... I don't have "the big picture" you created on a corp retreat with other dept managers... but why don't I have it? Because you've chosen to only share bits and pieces... "for your own good". Makes very little sense to me.

If I know you're planning on doing "functionality A" at some point, inform us now, because that very likely has an impact on decisions I'm making today. I'm far more likely to understand the impact on my own work and my team's work than you are, given that you don't actually know how to do the work (in most cases).

I've had a couple good manager-types over the years, but only a couple.

Your view is ridiculously myopic.

The point is not about who strictly has access to the information, it's about whose job it is to deal with it. If you started dealing with other departments asking for information and perspectives, you'd have much less time left to actually do your tasks, and you'd run into cases where they will be very reluctant or slow to give you the information because compiling it takes time and they'd rather focus on their own tasks. Or simply because they don't like you - "people problems" are also something managers have to deal with.

And it's not about "if you're planning to do something at some point, inform us now" - if the plans are concrete enough to tell you, you'll be told, and if your input is needed you will be asked, but it makes no sense if the plans still need input from 3 other departments and may change according to that or be cancelled entirely.

It's a division of labor, plain and simple. Managers have to deal with a huge amount of small tasks that involve waiting for responses from other people and acting on incomplete information. It's not easy, and you'd probably hate it if you actually tried to do it, but it's necessary for an organization to actually achieve things.

No. Management is not needed in this context. Maybe for coaching/removing low performers.

>I am a lazy manager then.

And a very incompetent one. While there is some value in what you said i.e Engineers tracking their progress and what they did. This often results in bragging. The most competent people are generally not the best braggers. The best braggers often make a career out of it.

If I run a company and i had a manager like you, I would fire you. I really mean it.

You should review the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Whatever your opinion is, it was not worded in a productive way.

1. So, if they do not plan to leave the team they can skip it?

2. Why do you need this details? Why you did not recieve this details in the firts place?

3. As any other writing. If you believe that this skills should be improved then why not use some training? And again, if person writing skills is already good then its ok to skip it then?

> So far, I receive positive feedback on this.

Positive honest feedback from subordinate? Did you provide any alternative they can choose?

1. Yes, people can skip it. I can never force someone to do this and it's typically something only career driven engineers want to participate. I do have an 80% volunteer participation rate in my current team.

2. I need the details because I don't look over the shoulders of my engineers. I always evaluate the end product and provide support when asked. But if a design doc required an engineer to go escalate and issue with another teams director, how would I know that? Anytime they show initiative, by definition it would be without my knowledge.

3. This part of the training.

For the positive feedback, I am the highest rated manager for manage satisfaction in my org of 400 engineers. This is from anonymous survey results. This has been consistent through my past 4 companies, including multiple FANNGs.

I'm surprised everyone is roasting you for this. I personally don't want my manager breathing down my neck and monitoring everything I do. I'm paid well and given a lot of freedom at work, the "obligation" of spending 30 seconds every week to make a note of something cool I did so that I can tell it to the people who pay me seems pretty reasonable.

I read it as discourse related to a binary proposal without any nuance. The root being "Whose responsibility is it to keep track of accomplishments: The Manager or the Individual?"

I rarely comment on things and I am now being reminded why. I think people are also making the wrong assumption that it's an obligation. It's a recommendation I make to engineers. It just so happens they all see the value and do it. Once a quarter or so they get excited to review it with me and we use that moment to have candid discussions around career/role progress and start looking at trends for performance review or timelines for promotion.

> I am a lazy manager then

Indeed. From the sounds of that it sounds like you don't have the full picture at all.

Ironically, all these will be solved by raising everybody 3% and that's it. By trying to measure individual performance, the company is taking away time from their employees. And the ones that end up getting the rise are the best ones at doing reviews, not at doing the job.

I prefer that everybody gets the same raise, and that the company pays competitive salaries. To spend so much time justifying your own job for a company that is making a lot of profits makes little sense.

i would add that this must include executives; 2 years ago we all got the same 3% while executives got 40% (while overseeing a stock drop of 65%).

one side effect though is w/o equity it's easy to feel a lack of motivation to work as hard if you get the same raise as everyone else who might not be doing great work.

You’re actually motivated by equity in a private company that will statistically not be worth anything?

> I prefer that everybody gets the same raise, and that the company pays competitive salaries.

I'm not sure how you square this with promotions (the main driver of performance reviews). No company who hired me five years ago could have kept me with a constant 3% increase, that is significantly less than I achieved through promotions, the rate would no longer be competitive.

Indeed. I've averaged about 10% per year, and I probably could have gone for more.

That makes sense in a boom cycle, but we're seemingly entering a bust now.

This era of CS was probably unique in the history of STEM of having high salary rewards for changing jobs quickly. This never existed in Medicine, Maths or Engineering really (unless you found your own company or such.)

My question was about promotions - other engineering professions definitely have promotions, and those promotions come with >3% pay rises.

Also, even without boom times top engineers will still make a lot of money because top positions are still insanely hard to fill. I know of several top companies with L8+ positions that have been sitting vacant for over a year, competition for these candidates is fierce.

In this world your best, most productive people leave because they see the weakest performers getting rewarded the same as them.

Most people know when people on their team aren't pulling their weight. If it isn't addressed by management it turns into a demoralizing situation.

Same is true in the OKR world, but your most productive are leaving because they don't want to play the game or perform theater. You still end up with demoralizing situations as people who don't want to play the review game are going to lose.

I'm not saying OKRs are perfect, I'm saying "just don't measure performance at all" is a 100%-losing play for a manager, whereas if you try to manage performance, you have a chance of doing at least an adequate job at it.

Why pretend that there needs to be an objective way of doing this? A company is fundamentally a private club and they keep who they want and fire who they don't. Arguing that they should see your objective worth is like arguing that you are objectively a good friend and therefore should be invited to more parties.

Yes, there are meant to be protections so you don't just fire all the minorities and women but "competent engineer" and "masterful bullshit artist" are not protected categories.

If we don't like this (I certainly don't), then we need to stop letting private companies control so much of our lives and the economy.

That's how it works in a lot of places in Germany.

My armchair wisdom: the degree to which a worker must generate metrics, however contrived, in order to provide accountability and transparency, however inaccurate, is directly proportional to the size and complexity of an organization. There comes a point (let's call it the Gibbons Threshold) where the work of generating metrics takes more time and effort (and cost) than what an outsider would deem to be real work that truly benefits the business's bottom line.

I think this is a really key thing to take into account when choosing where to work. Where I am now I report directly to one of the founders, and I'm one step removed from the CEO, that means there's approximately zero ceremony around tracking achievements and value added. The same was true in other small companies I've worked for.

The ceremony starts to be introduced when people become further removed from those who are ultimately responsible. In my previous job there was a whole process, company wide, to ensure everyone got properly ranked based on performance and potential. As a management team we'd spend half a day every six months just going through this process, which was preceded by everyone in the company doing a self-assessment that would then be reviewed by your manager. It was all incredibly tedious.

Some people thrive in an environment where what you're doing is driven by whatever currently seems the most important, and value is apparent just from everyone knowing what's going on. Others want more structure to things, and a clear path to get from where they are to where they want to be. I don't see either as being invalid.

I'd say it's directly proportional to the incompetence of the manager managing the worker.

> I just want to get good work done, and go home.

You can do that. You just may not get paid by a third party, if no one else can assess or help determine if the work you're doing is aligned with what they're trying to accomplish as a group. But as an entrepreneur this is probably great. Your payment is from customers who have agreed that you've delivered something of value.

Of course, I've learned, even with the two startups I've done -- once you get above a certain size you do need to ensure everyone is aligned on priorities and that there is a structure to talk about promotions/pay raises/bonuses. It doesn't have to be OKRs and performance reviews, but its some mechanism that ends up eventually being equally hated.

Coincidentally, the company I work for, which notably has a culture unlike anything I've ever seen, has just fallen into the OKRs trap.

Took away all the joy I had to work in this place.

Theater and politics is the main reason I liked contracting. There's just no bullshit. Do your work and get paid. Feels great.

Not dealing with Office politics and incompetent or slow management is the main reason I remain a freelancer.

How do you handle healthcare and retirement as a contractor? Many contracting shops I see offer very poor benefits. Might be looking at the wrong companies, but it seems like worse compensation than FTE.

I pay for healthcare and retirement myself. Retirement is great because you can put a lot more in than you can via 401K or IRA. I don't contract anymore because the compensation is worse than it used to be unfortunately. It used to pay roughly 2x a salary and now I don't think you can even make as much as salary. This was for being essentially augmented staff.

> The amount of time and effort spent just doing this management work makes up a large portion of working hours.

Not anywhere I've ever worked.

Yeah, such things exist. Yeah, they take a bit of time. "A large portion of working hours"? No.

If they actually do take a large portion of working hours, then you're at a company that either doesn't have enough work for people to do, or else that has work that needs done but the people aren't doing it. Either way, that's a place where layoffs are likely to show up sometime rather soon, and that's a drain to work at in the meantime.

Look around. There's better places out there - places that care more about the work, and less about the ceremony. (Don't get me wrong, there's still ceremony. It just doesn't dominate.)

You brought this on yourself when you signed up to work at $bigCo.

There's a whole wonderful world of startups out there that don't work this way, and it sounds like you'd be a lot happier there.

I’ve also worked at plenty of startups that worked just like this. Once they hire an engineering VP from bigco, the infection spreads quickly.

Smaller shops too, not just startups. I've been in places with ~300 employees that don't have all that ceremony around performance and self set goals.

And ive worked at places with fewer than 50 devs that had implemented the okr nonsense with predictable result so it’s not universal.

The truth is that unless you run the place you really have no control over some bigco management getting hired and trying to parrot all this stuff

I hate these rituals at $bigCo, but pretty strongly believe I need the stability of working for $bigCo to feel happy. Is there somewhere that isn’t a startup that doesn’t have these issues?

Do you have stability at $bigCo? Yes, they're less likely to close up completely. But how likely are you to get laid off?

In fact, you can think about OKRs as a cargo-cult magic charm to try to keep layoffs from hitting your manager.

> But how likely are you to get laid off?

Enormously less likely than you are to have a startup or SME shut down.

As recent tech layoffs showed, job security is an illusion even at big corps. I work in toxic and heavily understaffed group. And guess what, the guy who loudest complained about being understaffed was let go. Problem solved!

> But how likely are you to get laid off?

Much less likely, and guaranteed to be with some not-unsubstantial severance. Non-RIF layoffs (aka 'firing') comes with months or years of warnings.

It's a false sense of security. At a $bigCo, your entire division might disappear tomorrow because the Board wants to cut costs.

A shift in perspective might help: instead of tying "stability" to time at a particular company, think of it in overall employment terms, and in that sense things can be extremely stable even if you work at a lot of different companies.

>It's a false sense of security. At a $bigCo, your entire division might disappear tomorrow because the Board wants to cut costs.

I know HN is 90% software guys but if your product is physical and you're at $bigCo this happens far less often.

More likely you get spun off as a different company.

You mean like car companies?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ford-latest-automaker-to...

Thanks for the reply!

I think I may be less exposed to the risk of losing my job to an RIF due to belonging to an especially small but necessary niche (cryptography).

That perspective is an interesting one that I’ll need to devote more thought to. It seems particularly interesting in the light that the most lucrative and numerous employment in my field (large financial institutions) tend not to provide significant raises or internal mobility. The oft-stated workaround is to leave the company for 6 months.

Have you been paying attention lately? BigCo is laying people off by the 10s of thousands.

Maybe so, but their culture can be just as horrid.

You've gotta believe in the cause, which is really just a narrative used to promote extended work hours and grind.

Then you've got to evangelise and act as a missionary for this world changing product ... the business has a cult like sheen of "changing the world" and everyone is the smartest person in the room just for being smart enough to be there.

Behind the bullshit narrative, everyone is overworked and the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises of a great product to hide their greed.

It's all the same really.

Not every startup is like that. There's plenty of 9-5 out there. Look for startups with older people who have kids..

And plenty of large companies without excessive ceremony. Black and white thinking, needless polarization ... really gets us nowhere. That was sort of my ham fisted point.

> the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises

I wish I didn't visualize this. This could be a Renaissance painting.

Feed it as a prompt to Stable Diffusion or something and its the perfect attack on corporate greed.

It is always greener on the other side of the fence, but sometimes it is greener because the septic tank is leaking.

I did several tour of duty in startups. There were good, bad, and ugly, just as much as in $bigCo.

Metrics/KPIs/OKRs are how we align large organizations around complex outcomes.

Highly effective workers always see these measurements as a waste of time, but when you're trying to validate and steer the contributions of thousands of workers - with varying levels of skill, motivation, and accountability - you need a GPS to make sure you're still on the path.

While I think goals and metrics are necessary, I do agree that organizations tend to over-formalize the process. "The map is not the territory" etc.

OKR exist to align and motivate the company. It works top down and bottom up; the executives announce what the company is going to be doing for the next term, and it ripples down as each org and team sets goals that are aligned with the plan. That's all it has to be; a good thing done right.

Have you worked at a company where you had no idea what the plan was and where the company was headed? I have and it is frustrating. That is the kind of company that would benefit from the alignment that OKRs instill.

Same happens with OKRs. Once there is a meeting to review them, 2/3 of OKRs have been deprecated and not even started, and everybody talks about all this other exciting new work they did that is not reflected in OKRs at all. Deprecation and new work comes from management. How is that better?

You should not veer that far off your OKRs, otherwise you spend more time on the process than you get back in alignment. You describe a company with no resolve. The leadership has to want alignment for OKRs to work.

I think it is a good practice in any case to set yourself goals, and demand the same of your team or as wide a circle as you can influence. It's just shared planning.

So align the company, no OKRs required.

I'm living OKRs now and they are the biggest waste of time I've ever experienced. They encourage work that fits whatever you've nailed yourself to for the quarter. They give people who are good at dressing up their work in charts a podium. These same people are most often the people who do the least real work.

OKRs are unequivocally a disaster for productivity. Real output and its impact is not as simple as any box you can invent to hold it.

I think it's really hard to do OKRs correctly. It seems like you are working at a place that is not doing them correctly. I've also worked at places that haven't implemented OKRs correctly.

At the very least it appears that not everybody has bought into the OKRs and alignment has not been achieved.

Why don't the OKR advocates tell us how to 'correctly' implement them? Start by telling us who should define the OKRs and how granular they should be for an engineer whose priorities change week to week.

I don't think there is one way to implement these correctly. It's a people/organization problem. It's a hard to get alignment and buy in from enough people in your organization.

OKRs should at least be for a period of time of one quarter. They shouldn't be changing constantly quarter over quarter. When they do change a lot, it indicates that the company is shifting strategy. Companies need to do this from time to time, but it's not a good sign if the company is doing this every quarter.

Engineering priorities shouldn't change week to week based on OKRs, because OKRs shouldn't change that frequently.

Implementing OKRs is aligning the company. Following shared Objectives is the definition of alignment.

It's a piss-poor method of aligning the company for the reasons I outlined.

> In the ever-important self-review you're expected to present proof to your higher-ups that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise.

While I’m not going to say I’m “quiet quitting” as far as my work, I quiet quit a couple of years ago as far as being concerned about promotions and raises. I do just enough bs to get through the review process knowing that real raises come from job hopping.

"that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise."

I once 'earned' a 4% raise at a perf review in July. Was then was told because I only started in January that year, my raise - affecting the pay going forward - was prorated to how long I'd worked already, so .. I only get 50% of the 4%, so... 2% raise.

Felt far more manipulative and shady than if I'd just been given a 2% raise.

I would have walked out if someone tried to pull that on me.

FWIW, I left about 3 months after that. That was the tipping point.

I share this perspective and frustration.

However, I also realise its always easy to critisize the processes from down to top. Now put yourself in the shoes of the CEO or C suite. How do you organise an entire organisation to be efficient? What is a better alternative to OKRs?

Most of the proposals I see in this thread are catering towards smaller companies but quite frankly not a lot of us managed a 1000 people company. I would be curious to know from practitioners about what worked and what didn't.

> The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home.

At the heart of it, this is why I tend to avoid working in particular parts of the software industry. Not every company engages in this sort of thing, and I prefer working for those that don't.

What's an OKR?

Objective & Key Result. IOW a measurable goal with a designated target

What's an IOW?

In other words

It's almost rude not to bother spelling out three words with such unique acronyms. The time one person saves not typing an additional whopping 11 characters is wasted by the number of readers trying to figure out what it means

I don't know about rude, but AKA is a much better known phrase than IOW.

You obviously meant to say: "IAR not to bother spelling out three words...".

> with such unique acronyms

It's been part of netspeak since at least the late 80s

IDKT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_key_results

There is actually a pretty good book about them.

Measure What Matters by John Doerr

It shows the history of how they have worked well at some companies in the Valley. You asked one question about this and now you have to read a book. That's a shame.

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