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Comment by tinkertamper | Hacker News Reader

I used to have a boss who’d ask me to rate my company satisfaction with the company 1-10 at every 1:1. This always struck me as one of the laziest/misguided management moves I’ve encountered, and I’m sure he felt it was both accurate and clever. If you manage people, and don’t understand that basic power dynamics will always trump encouragements for “openness”, you are naive at best and willfully blind at worst.

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One of things I always looked out for as manager (which I am not currently) was a change in feed-back I got. If it turned from open, direct and honest to tounge-in-cheek, carefully worded and limited, punctuated with various versions of "nothing to report" I took it as a sign something was wrong.

Obviously, this effect is much easier when you are not in a management position. Because of that I was usually borderline paranoid about these changes in 1:1s with my directs.

In small teams I found the way to have informal, spontaneous 1:1s very effective. The basis, so, always was regularly scheduled ones unless you just forget to have them.

EDIT: For sure every 1:1 is different, and every 1:1 with different people need to be run differently. Some people like to discuss private stuff, others want in-depth tech discussions. Sometimes 1:1s are over in 5 minutes, sometimes they take an hour. Be flexible, and never use anything said in a 1:1 "against" the other person.

Exactly this. As an employee, in this situation, you are always one step away from saying something to the person who can make your life miserable if they take offence. At no point am I ever open in these things, always guarded and watchful of what I'm saying because of who I'm saying it to. It's a corporate pipe dream to think otherwise.

Heard one of the Warby Parker founders speak once, and he mentioned a similar process at their company. I believe once a week all employees anonymously rated their satisfaction 1-10. He was very bought into the thought that "happy employees = productive employees". He said the weekly ratings was a very powerful tool for the executive team to get a feel for how the team was feeling, and if they could push harder or needed to ease up. Compared with the alternative of waiting to see resignation numbers go up, seemed like a pretty brilliant idea to me.

This was many years ago so apologies if some details are a bit off, but the gist of the story has stuck with me over the years.

A key difference though is that was anonymous (safe) and aggregated (large sample size).

Giving a 1-10 rating directly to your supervisor is a completely different thing and the number is tainted by all sorts of other dynamics.

Not to defend the constant ratings, but imagine managers are not in fact all stupid for a second, and that they realize the power dynamic is there. You still need to do the same job and fulfill the expectations of your own manager, as a manager. It's easy to assume stupidity, and I'm sure there's plenty dumb moves made, but what you find cringy another report finds cool and easy. I bet there are people who would love a no fluff rating and be done vs a bullshit 10 mins of talk where in the end the manager still makes a mental note of your face next to a 7/10. Anyone who manages people sees completely different reactions from different people to exactly the same thing, so that isn't surprising. But sometimes engineers adopt a cynical view of it all where because you don't like something it must mean nobody does.

> imagine managers are not in fact all stupid for a second

I don’t really see where the commenter implied this.

To support their stance, I have also had lots of managers at various-sized companies (FAANG incl), who didn’t understand the inherent 1:1 power dynamic. They would expect full honesty, while covering up anything above my pay-grade.

"Stupid" is a pretty accurate description for someone who thinks something lazy and misguided is accurate and clever.

Very few people can be fully open with their Managers; it is inbuilt into the hierarchy and nothing to do with stupidity. It is the Manager's job to be aware of it and then devise techniques for getting around it and/or make allowances for it.

100%, this is exactly where my head is at too.

I don't know. It would be bad to have that replace other real conversations, but i could see it being easier for some people to just answer a 6 instead of a 7 instead of the IC explicitly bringing up out of nowhere that they are slightly less happy thus week than last week for unclear reasons that they themselves don't understand.

> basic power dynamics

power dynamics vary. some developers can always easily get another job, so they have a lot of power. in a case like that, asking the developer to rate their satisfaction seems normal & good, like a customer satisfaction survey.

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