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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> Define clear merit-based systems, which reduces confusion about what your team members need to do be recognized.

This is a great one, I wish more companies/managers did this. It's terrible when your company's advancement policy is "if your manager like you, you get promoted". It's demotivating when your bonus is based on someone's subjective feeling about how good a job you're doing, or some ridiculous self-assessment essay.

Give me clear, measurable goals, and a clear, scheduled (on the calendar) performance review.

Ship Product A or complete features B and C on time and your next raise will be X. Ship it on time and under budget and your bonus will be Y. Otherwise, Z% cost of living increase only.

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What if all your time is spent cleaning up after the cowboys? Or talking to the other team members about the problems they are stuck working on? A mission critical 2-line bugfix can take months. There aren't objective measures of performance. Any metric you come up with, employees will find a way to thwart it. Shipping a product on time? Easy. Just don't mention the bugs. Surely you don't believe it's possible to create bug-free software, do you? When all the team members have their performance tied to them, they'll all collude to game metrics. Don't even get me started on SLOC. Speaking from experience here, sorry if it's too cynical / bitter.

Picking good metrics that are not game-able is not easy, but as long as they are truly aligned with the company goals, it's kind of OK for people to optimize for them. You get the behavior that you measure.

From the point of view of an employee, anything is better than "your compensation depends on the subjective assessment of your manager". Talk about a system that can be gamed!

Well, I disagree, but it's subjective so you're entitled to your opinion. That said, the decision about whether or not to use metrics in the first place is also a subjective assessment by your manager.

Nearly everything i care about in a great programmer is way less well measurable than "ship feature X on time". I like your sentiment but I think real good work (for any office job, really) is very hard to measure.

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