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Comment by FigurativeVoid | Hacker News Reader

A few thoughts:

1. I have never really understood people that throw others under the bus. It seems like the wrong strategy to get people to like you.

2. Most people understand that these sorts of things aren't "the right way" to measure a peer. Fundamentally, I most remember how a person made me felt, not what they produced.

3. At a prior job, our weekly planning sessions were rated on a scale of 1-10 on how effective we thought the meeting was. After we found out that our manager was being evaluated on this score, we all started giving 10s no matter what.

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I have thrown people under the bus while under pressure from my manager to explain why reviewing a Pull Request takes me several hours or days while other members did it in a few minutes. It was the wrong thing to do but the pressure was unbearable.

I appreciate your honesty, that's not easy to admit even on anon forums. You seem to evaluate it correctly. Just one thing - if work is such shit ie due to manager, just leave, you don't own them nothing. First try to talk to manager that this doesn't work and what can be improved to bring out your potential, but in any case search of another job should run in parallel.

I've seen so many brilliant people stuck in jobs they didn't like or even hated, when it would be trivial for them to stand up and go to next door. Yet they didn't. Don't be that guy.

Combine the current job market with, say, a work visa tied to the employer, and it turns out "just" in "just leave" does a lot of heavy lifting...

Sure, but so does the word "unbearable." If your workplace is unbearable, you will probably need to leave sooner or later - either because you found a way out or because you burned out. Whatever GGP did might've saved their hide, but it probably didn't result in a "bearable" level of stress (indeed, they said it was "wrong", so it probably gnawed at them). Stress has a way of diminishing your capacity when you need it most. Better to act sooner than later.

> After we found out that our manager was being evaluated on this score, we all started giving 10s no matter what.

Same with Uber and other "sharing" apps: If you can't give the highest score, it's a sort of death sentence, so don't.

No it isn't. Users should rate in good faith, but honestly and correctly. The score will retain more value if they do. There is a lot that is commonly wrong with Uber drivers:

1. If they have a phone GPS, odds are 80% that it's mounted in a hazardous way or not at all.

2. They play hideous music and should just be silent instead.

3. They take non-urgent and prolonged calls while driving.

4. On rare occasions, some drive dangerously.

All of these are good reasons to not give the highest score.

You should remember drivers can rate you right back, and for both drivers and passengers alike, being rated below 4.90 is like being rated into negative stars, the way the current system works.

> being rated below 4.90 is like being rated into negative stars, the way the current system works.

I do not believe this at all. Even if were to be true today, it will cease to be true once the ratings are more spread out.

The issue is that the score is tied to someone's wellbeing and ability to earn an income in an unglamorous, insecure gig. Nothing besides actively putting me in harm's way would convince me to threaten the tenuous economic status of someone else.

e.g. Often times if a man is on an extended call, it's his wife or child, and he apologizes to me. As if calling your family is ever something to apologize for. I'm constantly appalled at how asocial social norms have become.

Great, so in addition to being guilted into tipping for ordinary, expected service so not to threaten the possible "tenuous" economic circumstances of servers, now I get guilted if I have an expectation of a professional environment when I contract a personal-taxi from a large personal-taxi dispatcher. I'm not a social service dispensary, I'm a customer. I'm paying for a service, and I'm allowed to have certain expectations for the service.

I think you’re ignoring an extremely real economic reality here. If this is what you want, maybe just get a chauffeur instead.

I don't think anyone is saying you can't not tip or you can't have expectations.

My problem with it is when people do these things but then maintain they're not directly, and tangibly, economically harming a lower wage person. You are, there's no way around it. It's perfectly fine to be okay with that outcome. IMO, it's not fine to pretend that outcome doesn't exist.

A reasonable social safety net would end insane systems like this.

What does "honestly and correctly" mean?

Users certainly aren't trained by Uber on what the ratings are intended to communicate. There is no agreed on scale.

"No issues whatsoever; smooth, helpful and professional" could be my "3" (where 3 means "as expected" and "5" is as exceptional as "1") but your "5" (where <5 indicates shortcomings).

When these five-star rating systems first came along, no rubric was provided: it seemed reasonable to me that the five stars ought to cover the range of possible experiences, from very bad to very good, and that the distribution would be Gaussian. I therefore rated everyone three stars, unless I had some reason to do otherwise.

After learning how these numbers were actually being used, the whole lopsided mess bothered me so much that I have refused to rate anyone or anything ever since; nor do I pay any attention to the rating numbers, which are clearly insane.

Hot take: I dont care if others think 5.0 is acceptable while 4.8 is disastrous. I’ll rate 1-5 on a scale normalized at 3.0 and meaning ”meets expectations”. Luckily scores in Europe seem to be much less lopsided than in the US so giving 3’s and 4’s probably doesn’t leave someone without food on the table.

Really they should just stop having number scores and have ok/not ok and anyone with a significant number of not ok shouldn’t get any more business. Beyond that they already have a metric: driver tips.

Doesn't this mean that rating scores end up measuring the distribution of what customers believe "decent service" corresponds to, rather than the performance of the driver? And in this case, whether a driver ends up with a score above or below their peers will just reflect which customers they were fortunate or unfortunate enough to have.

If Uber asks a stupid question they'll get a stupid answer. That's on them.

Actually it’s on the driver. Uber will be just fine either way.

They do lots of journeys. They'll be graded by people with every idea about what a 3 or a 4 means. The average they eventually end up at is some combination of the average of people's idea of how a 1-5 scale works, combined with their actual service level. Which is why it's a terrible choice of rating.

> And in this case, whether a driver ends up with a score above or below their peers will just reflect which customers they were fortunate or unfortunate enough to have.

Yes. But as a customer I also have no idea what these scores are for. I'm assuming that if someone gets a terrible rating their management will speak to them. But whether they have 2.5 or 4.99 won't matter. I mean how can it matter, when everyone grades them according to their own scale? Someone might have 1 as being pass and 2 being good and 3 being outstanding and 4 or 5 being basically impossible to achieve. Someone else might have 4 being disaster and 5 being pass. You can't know. So it's always about luck. I'm at least doing my best to use the only sensible grading which is "3 meets expectations". If someone else uses 5 as pass and 4 as fail it's really a problem that Bolt and Uber created for themselves.

At a prior job, our annual feedback sessions were rated on a scale of 1-5 on how great a place it was to work. Departments that scored lowly were to see significant headcount reductions.

The CEO stood up at the shareholders meeting and cited the results as an example of their success in turning around the culture and making this a place that people were proud to work at (and got paid a fat bonus).

They were asking the wrong questions. "Was your planning effective?"; that's a stupid question.

Instead ask the team: (1) Are you happy overall? (2) Are you happy with your manager? (3) How is the current big project progressing? (4) How is the quality of the work being done on the project?

The first 2 questions cover intra-team dynamics. If everyone is personally happy, and happy with the manager, who cares about planning efficiency?

The last 2 questions help the company judge the team as a whole. If a team always indicates good progress and high quality, but then delivers late and with poor quality, you can judge that the team is incompetent and hire/fire/train as needed. Judging the overall value of what the team produces is for the higher-ups at the company to judge.

I'm guessing you got asked 1000 times about planning efficiency, and, maybe like, 2 times about these other questions?

Pride myself on not keeping things to myself in personal and professional life.

Ive been in a prisoners dilemma situation where i followed protocol and stayed quiet, but the other narcd me out. We shared blame and they actually ended up with a harsher punishment because it was another incident in a series of issues.

A different time a coworker I told explicitly to consult me before pushing code to production ignored me and broke prod on a Monday after hours. The next day management grilled me and it was him or me. The truth is that its the whole team for not having a better system, and the business for not providing budget when we've requested budget to improve the system, but these non-technical managers didn't accept that. They clearly stated they wanted to find who was at fault. I pushed him under the bus.

Never felt worse about anything professionally. Sometimes jerk managers force situations where the one of two people will get blamed for a screw up and if the manager is unreasonable to a certain degree the practical option is to narc. Work sucks.

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