This isn't particularly surprising, the policy at Google was (possibly still is) much the same. The theory is that you don't interact enough with your peers if you're not face to face.
I wonder if secret calibration scores are next.
I wonder if secret calibration scores are next.
I'm really rather surprised that this is extending to customer support - that's one area that actually seems pretty cost-effective and efficient to use remote workers for. Face-to-face is always a great boon, but it just isn't an option for support reps at an Internet company. (At least not when speaking to customers, which is the important part of their job.)
Google has bad customer support because they simply don't want to put in the necessary manpower. Customer support scales much less than linearly, and to effectively support billions of users, you'd need hundreds of thousands reps, which would dramatically change the internal politics. So they just say "f*ck it, we'll do the minimum required by direct-revenue-generating services just to avoid getting sued, and everyone else can google their way out, for what we care."
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/do-as-we-say-not-as...
Good chance for a savvy startup to pick up some remote talent the big boys can't.
No, this is a chance to pick up talent the big boys don't need. "As few as possible" telecommuters means they do hire telecommuters. Apply, see if your skills make up for your telecommuting. As a telecommuter, your application will need to be particularly strong to make up for what the company risks and loses by not having you in the office - if it isn't, a big company won't take the risk on you.
Are you saying telecommuters are the key to staying big in tech? To encourage innovation big companies want happy engineers in close proximity, talking spontaneously in varied, positive environments. Hence the free food. And the massages. And all the other perks.
Considering how bad they are at hiring, there should be very competent people there.
> As a telecommuter, your application will need to be particularly strong to make up for what the company risks and loses by not having you in the office -
Which is, almost nothing, unless they are not set up for remote work, which every minimal competent company today is/should be.
> if it isn't, a big company won't take the risk on you.
Tell that to Red Hat. A big majority of their development positions (if not all) are remote.
The company under discussion at Google. They're great at hiring, at least by their metrics: they have thousands of the world's best engineers.
> Which is, almost nothing, unless they are not set up for remote work, which every minimal competent company today is/should be.
You're ignoring context again. Patrick Pichette, CFO of Google, said regarding the number of telecommuters: "as few as possible." In my response, I was addressing that comment by pointing out it implies the company is equipped to work with telecommuters but sees telecommuting as a disadvantage.
> Tell that to Red Hat. A big majority of their development positions (if not all) are remote.
Red Hat is a great example of a company whose unique business model lets them rely heavily on remote developers. It's unsurprising given the work they do: they take existing open-source software and package it, maintain it, and support it. This is work that can be largely done independently. They don't write OSes like the biggest software giants do - they keep the lights running for Linux, the FOSS community's shared OS.
Red Hat is an open-source utility company, and their margins (~10% - one of the lowest in software) reflect that. Few think there's room for many such large companies, given that Red Hat has only just hit $1b in revenue last year (woohoo!).
Yes, I know about the context. "At least by their metrics" which can be good, but certainly not great. To be fair they have a never ending flood of candidates and have to deal with that.
But the main issue is that it only gets candidates with a very narrow set of skills.
"it implies the company is equipped to work with telecommuters but sees telecommuting as a disadvantage"
Not necessarily, it can be a one-off setup for the few telecommuters.
"It's unsurprising given the work they do: they take existing open-source software and package it, maintain it, and support it. This is work that can be largely done independently. They don't write OSes like the biggest software giants do - they keep the lights running for Linux, the FOSS community's shared OS."
You are underestimating heavily what Red Hat does. Especially the amount of development that goes there.
These exceptions are fairly rare though.
I eventually became officially part of the DC office, and started a small eng team there.
Note that hiring remotees required very high level approval, even back then, and some areas of Google simply won't do it. 7 years ago, Google was also a little more lenient. :)
Nowadays I would expect that they grandfathered in most of the earlier remotees, and that there are no real remotee hires anymore, they have enough small sales/whatever offices that they just make them part of those offices, or don't hire them.
Also, what is Open Source lawyering?
You won't be able to get work at a large law firm doing anything but lawyering, of course.
Open source lawyering = I specialize in open source related issues (be they licensing, compliance in general, whatever).
Also, resentment issues.
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Where's Bob? He should be in this meeting.
He's "working" from home today. (Makes quotation mark signs with fingers)
Don't bother. I just called him and he's at his kids swim lesson.
Oh, I'll wait until tomorrow to talk to Bob about X, when he's back in the office.
So perhaps "Bob" in our example really does have a job which allows him to work as effectively[1] at home as he can at work. Bob should also be aware of the schedule. So when the meeting comes up, Bob should be ready for it. And I've known folks working remotely who where chilling on the conference line waiting for the rest of the meeting to show up. But if either Bob isn't there when he should be, or the manager isn't organized enough to give Bob at least 12hrs notice of a meeting he should be attending, then you've got a management problem.
[1] First tip is that a manager needs to have a way of evaluating their teams effectiveness, if they don't then they can't really say if Bob is or is not as effective as others in his position.
Also, in the example, it may be that the employees griping about Bob are not even going to try to notify him.
I agree with you that this requires an organized manager. Unfortunately, a ton of managers lack this kind of organization.
I agree with you, except for that part. For most jobs, it's incredibly valuable to have impromptu "hallway" discussions that can't be scheduled in advance, isn't it?
Your main point still stands - Bob needs to be available during office hours, even if he's at home.
No, it's not.
If your business is so undisciplined and random that it's "valuable" (and even more "incredibly valuable") to have improptu "hallway" discussions, then you're doing it wrong.
Disagree strongly. Creativity often comes from people synthesizing ideas that wouldn't ordinarily meet, and especially not in a way that can be planned by management.
In the typical corporate environment where employees are just expected to implement ideas handed down by management, there's no value in these unplanned discussions. However, if you're looking for creativity and organic development, then there's value in those sort of random encounters. That doesn't mean remote can't work. It does give it a different feel. But I strongly disagree that there's zero value to unplanned discussion.
That's totally orthogonal to "hallway" meetings.
To put it another way, if you can't do the above over IM/Skype/email/etc, you're doing it wrong.
Perhaps a more important note is that, in my experience, most distributed teams have /way/ less meetings than an in person teams. A lot of things are done informally over IRC/chat. I say informal, but since IRC is usually logged, if someone is not involved in the informal discussion at the time it takes place, they can just read it to catch up on why the decisions were made.
Where's Bob? He should be in this meeting.
He's outside having a coffee and cigarette with Jane.I think the sweet spot is when it is a combination of both.
There are issues with telecommuting that are difficult to overcome, but this one is ridiculously simple.
The solution (well, a solution) is to have business hours during which everybody needs to be available. I have an arrangement like that with my employer - between 9 and 5, even if I'm working at home, my manager needs to be able to pick up his phone and have me be instantly available.
At first, he was a little doubtful, but he soon realized that he can actually get a hold of me more quickly this way when compared with walking across the building from his office to mine. (And no, he doesn't abuse this... haha) :)
It gets slightly trickier when people are in different time zones, but nothing that can't be overcome. People need predictable office hours; there can't ever be a "Bob's at his kids' swim practice" moment. Barring emergency, of course.
Functioning planned culture: guild culture. Master crafts(wo)men and apprentices are clearly defined, but the managerial relationship is advisory and focused on mentorship. The major downside of guild culture (the rarest of the 4) is that it relies on employee loyalty to capture the value it generates.
Pathological planned culture: rank culture. (This is the most common corporate culture.) People rise or fall based on subordinacy, rather than the quality of their ideas or their level of effort. You end up with a lot of people who don't work hard because they realize that effort doesn't matter, and a lot of bad ideas getting into implementation. Rank cultures often can't compete on an open market or address new challenges.
Functioning market culture: self-executive culture. Here you have a flat hierarchy and employees have a lot of autonomy. However, they're usually expected to take responsibility for their own advancement. This is the Valve-style open allocation culture.
Pathological market culture: tough culture. High-stakes performance reviews, low trust of employees but similarly low guidance. This is the sink-or-swim culture.
Rank culture tends to turn into tough culture as it generates underperformers, and eventually the higher-ups get upset about the whole thing and have a crackdown. However, tough culture turns back into rank culture as the people who control the performance assessment become the new rank-holders and, in exchange for loyalty, offer safety and advantage in the evaluation process. So tough and rank cultures tend to fall into a degenerate, enervating pattern of oscillation from one extreme to the other. This back-and-forth eventually exhausts the company, leading to constant reorganization and turmoil.
When a company institutes permanent tough culture (stack ranking as an inflexible pillar, rather than a temporary measure) the political corrosion associated with rank culture still occurs, but there's a selection dynamic (similar to antibiotic resistance) where the forms of rank culture that survive are the least detectable. So you end up with a culture that's politicized and gamey like a tough culture, but inefficient and extortive like a rank culture, and ultimately you have a workplace where people put in lots of hours and apparent sacrifice, but there's little getting done and there's no vision.
My point is more regarding things like the dashboard updates - the XBox 360 dashboard slowly turned into a glorified billboard covered in ads that has incidental features tacked onto it. They've had consistent performance problems with their system software that have never really been addressed (though thankfully they've made slight improvements here and there) - at this point people who have to interact with it on a regular basis, like journalists, are barely able to contain their hatred for the user interface.
Microsoft has a well-known review system that engenders various feelings in various people, not all of them postive. I have posted here before how the stack ranking part is actually low on my list of objectionable things about the whole process, but it is what people know so it is what people cite. I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it, about how people are constantly obsessed with reviews and stabbing their teammates in the back left and right to get a leg up. I have never once witnessed that behavior or even heard of a remotely plausible instance of that happening. That said Microsoft is a big company, so I am sure it has/does happen somewhere. I dispute it is rampant or common.
I have heard stories of people that are terrible at working in groups and don't do well. I have heard stories of people that have an opinion of their own skills that seems objectively divorced from reality. I have heard stories of management hubris that ultimately doesn’t pan out. Some of the people that play a starring role in these dramas then invent conspiracies about plotting colleagues causing them to rank poorly, incompetent managers that didn’t recognize their delicate snow-flakism or any other number of explanations that conveniently don’t attribute any share of the blame to themselves. I suspect those tend to be fantasies made to soothe one’s ego.
I think anyone with knowledge of internal state at Microsoft could posit a much better explanation of why they have 'flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade' that doesn't involve Machiavellian competition between employees. Hell, reversion to the mean pretty much would cover most bases without any kind of comical soap opera drama needed.
You said that the last time I replied to you. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5100751
I thought readers could connect the dots but maybe a bit more explanation is due.
Having worked at the "new Microsoft" in recent history I feel like the part I quoted is highly indicative of someone who has their head in the sand. Across multiple divisions among people I've voiced opinions with openly I haven't talked to anyone at MS who shares his view. Even in his own DevDiv, I've heard people say that DevDiv is a bit better than the Microsoft average but yeah, it still has these problems.
At least, this is how I felt last month when replying to his previous comment. So I left a reply, even though it's taboo to talk this way about a former employer, even though I risked potential embarrassment attaching my name to this. And I said, hey, what they say about MS, what they said in that Vanity Fair article, it has a lot of truth in my experience, and I don't really know anyone who says otherwise without being a blind shill or a sociopath. (I'm saying it a bit more bluntly here but that was the idea.) I was reluctant to make that comment, but I did.
Then he goes around repeating still that all such comments are apocryphal and anonymous, despite the comment of a real person who is not writing anonymously. (Aside: He is probably not aware that current employees won't say this for fear of losing their job, and former employees probably feel the general taboo against speaking ill of a former employer.)
You are literally just making my point over and over again. This sentence is, like the previous post, utterly devoid of logical content. Are you seriously taking offense at being called "apocryphal"? Nevermind that ryanmolden never actually called you apocryphal.
As for comments about seeing who got rewards based on title change, a title change doesn't always mean a large pay raise, and there are hidden rewards like gold star bonuses and HiPo groups that have little/no outward evidence, unless the recipient starts talking about them (which they tell them not to do), so I would say you probably aren't seeing accurate signaling based on job titles alone. The fact that some of the best rewards are secret is one of my beefs with the system.
Also, to clarify, I am not a fan of Microsoft's system, but when I hear stories of people who claim it leads to internecine wars, well that just isn't my experience in the last 8 years, or the experience of anyone I have talked to personally.
Ultimately there has to be some kind of ranking system as there is a fixed pool of rewards. The only alternative I could see would be exactly even sharing amongst a team. You could argue for that, but even as someone that has socialist sympathies I don't think it would work or be fair. There are people on my team that produce more than me, whether it be through being smarter, working longer hours, whatever. To say I should get the same reward as them is just wrong.
So if we agree there has to be ranking, well there's your stack ranking. You could argue with the curve fitting, but your claim that 1 in a group of 10 would get no bonus is just false. Curve fitting doesn't happen on a per team basis. It's more like 10 in a group of 100 or 100 in a group of 1000. There is nothing saying that an entire team couldn't end up in the top 10% of rewards. It may well be the case that on your team of 10 superstars one doesn't get the reward they feel they deserve, but that is because someone else in the calibration meeting was deemed more worthy, your teams ranking isn't done in isolation and in a team with 10 superstars there can be other superstars in the general vicinity, even more than 10. To claim that the system results in people plotting against the ones they are ranked against in order to sabotage them just sounds like conspiracy theory thinking. In my experience it results in people upping their game, or leaving if they feel they are unappreciated. Both are reasonable responses, some attempt at sabotage is not.
Its the main problem with APR systems they get captured by sections of an organization who use it to achieve their own agendas with no though to what it does to the company as a whole.
Calibration happens every quarter and a manager can unilaterally ding you. However, a supportive manager doesn't guarantee a good score. He actually has to get involved in the horse-trading and tit-for-tat of the whole process. Some people get screwed because their managers don't show up to calibration and they get low scores.
Finally, you often have no idea what your score is. Meets Expectations is everything from the 2nd to 70th percentile of the company. At the high end of that range, you're OK-- you won't get fired, you can get a decent transfer. At the low end, you're fucked. However, you may have no idea where in that range you are.
It's a play-for-play copy of Enron's performance review system, except with even more managerial secrecy and, therefore, less accountability. In short, it's why Google has less future than past.
I agree with you that Google is probably no worse than the other large tech companies, but I wouldn't call that an endorsement. For one example of something I don't like about tech culture, these firms have a tendency to throw their employees under the bus when the economy gets bad. Banks have layoffs. It's just something you get used to on the Street. Good people get let go, take their severance packages, and find other jobs. No big deal. On the other hand, many tech companies, when they do the same thing, make it look like a wave of performance-based firings so they can say they've never had a layoff. Google still claims it has never had an engineering layoff, even though it's had waves of PIPs. That's slimy.
I believe managers are just human: even Google will have good and bad ones, evil but effective ones along with good but ineffective ones (wrt to biz goals), and lots of other different combinations. Until we can come up with a system that removes inconsistent human nature from the equation, we'll just have to tolerate what we have. Sliminess is just one common trait of human beings, and I'm sure even Google can't avoid hiring and promoting sociopaths.
"As a manager, I can’t easily know how many hours each person on my team is working. This is actually good for me because it forces me to look at what they’ve done. It’s good for the remote person as well: they can’t fool themselves into thinking that just because they’re in an office, surfing Reddit for an hour is work. In a perfect world we’d both already have this perspective, but it’s amazing how easy it is to delude yourself into thinking that “going to the office” = work."
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-i...