Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I futilely attempted to get reassigned to something close to field D (really, B, C, E, or F would have been just peachy) and that seemingly got me flagged as trouble internally.

"Meets Expectations" ranges from 3.0 to 3.4, and employees in this range have no idea where in that interval they landed, even the career effects of the numbers are dramatically different. 3.4 is above average, while 3.0 is fatal to transfer and promotion, even years later, but unlikely to get someone actually fired. There are several managers who've been caught using 3.0-3.1 to keep people captive but unaware of the fact that they've been internally blacklisted. It's disgusting but it happens.

Whoever came up with the "innovation" of making review history part of a transfer packet (and that has nothing to do with Google; it pre-dates it) is a domestic terrorist and should get the same treatment that all the other terrorists get. It's a horrible system that eats companies from the inside. Enron's cultural decline (leading in macroscopic ethical lapses and bankruptcy) has been established to be a direct result of its globally-visible, mobility-destroying review system.

Google's Perf is a play-for-play copy of Enron's PRC, but Google probably won't go the way of Enron for extrinsic reasons. A lot of Enron employees had nowhere to go (for geographical and specialty reasons) and had to make ethical compromises to beat PRC, whereas a lot Googlers leave for greener pastures when that happens.

WAT? Enron was a scam from the very highest levels of the corporation. Unless you're suggesting that Kenneth Lay got a 3.0 from his board of directors and reacted accordingly, this is a ridiculous comparison.

Apologies in advance for the Gladwell link, but he's likely referring to Enron's "star system": http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

I'm not disputing that there were silly McKinsey-ite management practices in place at Enron. I'm disputing the idea that those practices had anything to do with Enron's failure. The reason 'michaelochurch invoked Enron in his comment was to link Google with Enron, as if to imply that Google's internal management practices would eventually result in a similar comeuppance. That's an absurd connection to make.

The reason 'michaelochurch invoked Enron in his comment was to link Google with Enron

This is pretty much it. The companies have diametrically opposite reputations, so it arouses not a small chuckle that their performance review systems are almost identical.

as if to imply that Google's internal management practices would eventually result in a similar comeuppance.

Unlikely, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Enron's executives were criminals. I think that Google's top guys are decent but unseasoned judges of character, which is how stuff like Perf gets through. Companies like Google have an unusually high rate of decent people getting the top jobs, but said decent people are generally terrible at telling when their underlings are lying to them (which, if you're high enough up, is almost always).

Why apologize for a Gladwell link?

Gladwell writes a lot of anecdotes which are then taken as pseudoscience, and unfortunately get repeated as science because of his popularity.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/18.html

> Michiko Kakutani reviews Malcolm Gladwell's latest book in the New York Times: “Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme: the reader has no idea how representative such examples are, or how reliable — or dated — any particular study might be.”

>

> This review captures what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works. Whether it's Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me.

>or utterly lunatic theories on experts

I've read (and enjoyed) all of Gladwell's books. Outliers' theme revolved around the idea that in order to be good at anything you need to practice. It popularized the "10,000 hours" principle. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "lunatic".

This is pop-media, not academic research; it's a good "jumping off" point. God forbid someone tries to be entertaining with their non-fiction. But, last time I checked Gladwell had 3 titles on the NY Times best sellers list, so he probably doesn't care what any of us think.

The problem with the "10,000 hours" principle is may be you will be immensely successful following it. But don't be surprised if you don't.

For you to be successful "10,000 hours" might be one of the many thing that need to fall in place. In many cases it might not even matter, to give you a simple example- If you are born in a society full of tribal wars in some poor country in Africa. I seriously doubt merely putting in 10,000 hours of work will help you out of the situation. The fact is luck, opportunity, being at the right place all matter.

i doubt anyone is claiming that having 10,000 hours put into a skill/craft is going to make you successful. It's merely a pre-requisite, and not the only one at that.

Look at Mozart, for instance. He'd put in his ten thousand hours by the time he was like three.

>"But don't be surprised if you don't."

Necessary, but not sufficient.

>"The fact is luck, opportunity, being at the right place all matter."

True, this was also a theme of the book.

He's in the pocket of big tobacco, wall street and the health insurance industry, for one thing. http://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm-gladwell-2/

That link certainly seems reliable, well-researched, and unbiased.

There's a general "smear" feel to Project Shame. YMMV. I don't find the information at the link compelling.

He has been criticized for a lack of rigor in his assertions.

It's not academic research. The guys is primarily an author selling books, and rigorous academic treatises tend to end up in journals nobody reads.

It's not black and white like that, and the marketplace means that there is a meeting in the middle when assertions are presented scientifically enough for a layperson to ascribe authority to them.

Exactly - I feel guilty citing Gladwell on a forum because it smells factual when in reality it's merely persuasive.

Well, sure, but the problem is the more scientific you get the smaller your readership is. It might not matter so much to you as the author, but your book can't become an object of discussion if it isn't widely read.

It was actually Skilling, at least as much as Lay, who was responsible, but you're right that the corruption existed mostly at the executive levels.

It's probably more likely that Enron's management practices were a symptom rather than a cause of moral depravity, but I tend to think of such things as self-perpetuating. PRC probably didn't do any cultural harm that wasn't already there, but it did no good.

"A lot of Enron employees had nowhere to go (for geographical and specialty reasons) and had to make ethical compromises"

You're not seriously blaming Enron on your average grunt, are you?

If you've heard the recording of the Enron traders joking about the California power crisis you know that some of those grunts were pretty unethical.

No doubt. I'm was implying that the fraud was pervasive in all of the company's strata, that it was not the invention of your average low-level employee and manager.

No, of course not, but it wasn't only grunts who were subjected to PRC.

> Enron's PRC

Tried looking this up on Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure you don't mean "People's Republic of China". Or any of the other disambiguations on the page I ended up on. So even though I'd like to read up on whatever it is you're talking about, I find myself without a clue.

Performance Review Committee. The inspiration for Google's Perf system. (Otherwise, the companies are very different, but they have very similar review systems.)

Are you referring to Enron's stacked ranking practice? I don't think Google does anything approaching that.

At Google, "Perv" history is part of the transfer packet, which means that people with average political-success (sorry, I mean "performance") histories become immobile, creating a low-morale underclass that is good for mailing-list drama but bad for the company. It turns average employees and no-fault lack-of-fit cases into problem employees who have to be pushed out. It's disgusting, and people who believe this is okay shouldn't be allowed to make decisions that affect other people. Or drive. Or breathe.

I know that practice is now typical in companies, but it's morally indefensible. Having "Don't Be Evil" as a motto is no excuse. I think Google is a great company in many ways and I have a lot of respect for the engineers I met there, but the people who designed "Perf" belong in jail for the billions of dollars of shareholder value that they torched for no good reason.

This happens at Microsoft, too.

Have a bad year, get "underperformed". (I dare anyone to have a long career without having a bad year at some point).

Ding! Now it's really hard to move until you've scorched that badness from your record. Your mission is to get a bunch of good reviews, or get promoted, or find a sympathetic ex-manager who's willing to hire you anyway (this is why you need a network, and one reason why the "patron" mechanism emerged -- the patron model compensates for a broken review system and a bunch of busted policies that surround it).

I've been in the software biz 30+ years and I've had really horrible reviews 3-4 times. It can be devastating if you're in an organization run by robotic principles. [btw, I'm not a bozo. You only have my word for that, I know . . . but I'm not :-) ]

I believe you. Bad reviews have a lot more to do with politics than anything "performance" related.

Making the review part of the transfer packet is one of the worst corporate "innovations" designed. It's not just mean-spirited and immoral (because it gives managers a way to keep people captive). It also makes the review process totally pointless. An honest review needs to be between the manager and employee. Here's what you did right, here's what you did wrong. If it starts having long-term effects on the employee's career, then you can no longer have an honest review process because the stakes are too high. There are two options. (1) Give everyone high ratings they don't deserve, so your employees still like you, making the "review" pointless. (2) Give a few bad ratings, and turn no-fault lack-of-fit cases that would usually be resolved with transfer into outright wars that burn up a lot of time and energy and generally hurt the company.

What is wrong with a manager who is considering bringing you onto their team wanting to know about your past performance at the company? I bet that happens at EVERY company. It certainly did at Microsoft.

Because software development is not the 100 metres. You could spend weeks on a particularly elusive and obscure bug and change one line of code. While you were doing that, your colleague built 2 new 'oh wow' features, banging out hundreds of lines. There is no standardised measurement for 'performance' that can rank those two achievements objectively, so to assess performance, it comes down to the subjective opinion, motivations and political goals of the 'assessor'.

More to the point, if the subjective performance metric rewards the latter and punishes the former, the net result is more features AND more bugs.

In other words, it's crap wherever it occurs.

Of course, the manager is going to want to know. People would rather have information than not have it, even if it's wildly inappropriate.

Microsoft was destroyed by stack-ranking and the global visibility of political-success review (I mean, "performance review") history. Are you seriously trying to use Microsoft to make a case?

"Perv" history? They can see what you search for in incognito mode? :-O

Typo for "Perf" - or maybe you are making a joke I didn't get.

Intentional typo. A lot of people call it Perv, as in perversion of justice.

A lot of people call it Perv

This is the first time I've heard that term.

Yes, I was making a joke you didn't get.

> belong in jail for the billions of dollars of shareholder value that they torched for no good reason.

Wait, isn't it the shareholders' risk of investing in a company that torches money for no good reason?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com