Hacker News Reader

Comment by endtime | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather be at the mercy of _relatively_ objective metrics than at the mercy of whoever my boss happens to be. (I happen to like my current management chain, but people come and go...)

View on HN

Meh.. you're still at the mercy of whoever your boss happens to be. They just need to put a little effort into framing the metrics the right way or to make sure you're getting work that doesn't touch on the right metrics. The idea that performance metrics are fair is just corporate propaganda designed to make you have the incentive to improve them, thus being easier to control and replace.

>or to make sure you're getting work that doesn't touch on the right metrics.

What? The metrics should be distilled from the overall company/org/team goals and mission and if you're working on things that don't align with those of course you're not going to have a good performance review.

Think more subtly - if you need to meet a metric/goal of 50% of your time on phone calls and 50% on tickets, a manager who wants to tank your metrics will game the system to feed you less than needed to make your metric on one or the other. Just because a metric exists does not mean it's applied fairly or evenly to all employees.

I said "relatively". Of course having a bad relationship with my boss would be bad for my career, no question.

More generally, I'd prefer being judged by a large number of people rather than one or two managers who may or may not have any idea what's going on.

I left my previous team partly because we went through three managers in less than a year, and I rarely saw them. I assume the performance feedback for the team was effectively nonsense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com