
People can read their manager's mind - dochtman
http://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind.html
======
pinkrooftop
My company has metrics and goals but rewards a limited pool of annual bonuses
based on all managers getting together and calibrating contributors on gut
feel. Rewards have literally been based on an outside managers opinion that
"my perception is your Apple doesn't really do work worthy of a bonus increase
this year, but my Orange does" we've lost a lot of good people over the years

~~~
sokoloff
IMO, you need a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures when
setting compensation. Pure qualitative and you encourage a lot of pointless
politicking. Pure quantitative and you encourage a lot of pointless gaming.

True story about gaming that I'll try to keep short: we had a promotion
process that was multi-dimensional and one dimension was "scope of impact"
(ie: how broad is your influence: self, team, group, organization, company,
world).

We literally had a director present a promotion case for a manager and the
scope element was assessed at "world" (several levels higher than needed to
qualify). When asked for supporting evidence, he regaled us with the tale that
the manager had taken initiative to place small cardboard boxes in each break
room to collect spent alkaline batteries for recycling. Because allowing the
batteries to be more effectively recycled helped the global environment, the
scope of impact was "world".

Whoosh...

~~~
yuhong
I think most things that are not manual labor should be more qualitative
though.

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andrewclunn
Nothing is worse than doing the unfun grunt work, that you know won't really
be appreciated, while somebody else gets to tackle the unique 'cool' stuff
that is seen as difficult. You'll get so much more done, but because, "anybody
could have done it," you're not valued, even though nobody wanted to do it.
Then you burn out, the other person is considered the "rock star," and now
you're pigeon-holed into more grunt work for the foreseeable future... This
article hit pretty close to home for me.

~~~
pacaro
This can also work the other way, you can be the person doing the unique
difficult stuff that nobody else on the team can do and be not recognized.

Being recognized by management as contributing is more a social issue than
anything else. I feel that you implicitly recognize this when you characterize
work as "'cool' stuff that is seen as difficult" \- the perception is more
important than the work or productivity.

A modicum of time spent communicating what you have gotten done can pay
dividends. A lesson I need to remember from time to time.

~~~
foobarian
On that note, I had a year where besides doing (and finishing) a bunch of
decent size projects that I thought my manager was going to highlight, I spent
like a day or two optimizing some daily batch process. All I did in the end
was change one line of code to enable batched inserts, which brought the
finish time from later afternoon to early AM hours. Come yearly review time,
one of the bullets high up on what the manager wrote was that particular
speedup, which surprised me given it was done just in passing and I forgot all
about it.

I guess you really never can tell what the other side is thinking. But at the
same time, in hindsight this was predictable since it impacted a bunch of
high-visibility reports and the manager probably got feedback from upstairs.

~~~
Swizec
As a corporately smart man once told me: Your job is to make your manager
happy.

This has more to do with making _their_ life easier and giving _them_ bragging
rights, than it does with anything else. If you can make your manager look
good in front of their manager, then good things will happen to you.

------
BerislavLopac
The first sentence of the article sums up the entirety of the human behaviour
pretty nicely: People generally don't do what they're told, but what they
expect to be rewarded for. Pretty much all of social history of the world can
be explained with that.

~~~
mannanj
Read about how this is actually harmful for long-term motivation though in a
book called 59 Seconds with latest psychological research.

Basically as kids we are rewarded for doing things like going to school. Good
effort on exam and learning = A+. But then carrying into real life that kills
our motivation for doing things without the reward (if we're not getting paid
for it we must not like it).

It also has the opposite affect, if we get a reward for something we don't
like doing it either. Maybe people would like doing things more if they got
paid less!

~~~
BerislavLopac
It might be harmful, but this is nevertheless the fact. And "rewarded" here
doesn't refer only to what is actively given to them as a reward, it applies
to all forms of motivation (e.g. not getting harmed, less work, more money
etc).

~~~
a3n
Even just eyeball to eyeball respect.

------
bhewes
In the HBO miniseries "Generation Kill" a sergeant would constantly be on the
Marines to be clean shaven. Shaving was beside the point and an activity that
the Marines could control unlike the battlefield. At the end he made clear
that constantly being on everyone's ass about shaving was to keep the Marines
moving forward through the battlefield.

KPIs and all are great, but matter little if a company is not making money for
shareholders it first and foremost goal.

~~~
knughit
How does shaving keep Marines moving forward?

~~~
sandworm101
Shaving is a luxury in the field, but it is a tell tale for essentials. Being
shaven means the soldiers have both the resources and time necessary to attend
their hygiene. A lack of hygiene is often far more dangerous than combat [1].
Shaving is also something many young soldiers do not feel strictly necessary.
They do it because they are told so to do. Therefore it is a mark of some
basic discipline.

Look at historic pictures of soldiers under continuous stress. Not shaving is
the first thing you'll notice.

[1] Up until the Korean conflict, far more soldiers were killed by disease
than contact with the enemy. That changed with anitbiotics and better field
medicine (think MASH) but disease remains a serious threat.

~~~
iSnow
Trying to enforce a proxy (shaving as a sign for a not over-stressed platoon)
instead of tacking real issues is exactly the kind of thinking that makes
working in enterprise so tedious.

I'd rather spend my time with soldiers practicing tactics or doing comms
training.

~~~
walshemj
I think looking after your feet /boots would be more useful - there's a great
scene in "when we where soldiers" where the CO points this out.

------
lifeisstillgood
tl;dr what managers say and what they reward can be different - what they
reward is what gets done. Even if that's to the detriment of all. There are no
clever hacks, just better managers.

Actually I think there are clever hacks - measure what you want, publish it.
Preferably measure outcomes and processes (number of outages, linting scores
of code base)

~~~
p4wnc6
Most managers won't agree to the types of metrics that you say. Yet most will
agree to more arbitrary metrics, like much of what makes up Agile/Scrum.

Many managers do this intentionally, because the greater degree of control
over metrics wielded by the manager, the greater degree of arbitrary political
manipulation which can be inserted, and the greater freedom to pretend after
the fact to have always supported only winning ideas and always opposed only
losing ideas all along. Real metrics force managers to be accountable for
their true beliefs, which is often what the company needs most and what
managers will avoid most.

~~~
karmelapple
What is a good metric? How can we come up with good metrics?

~~~
jdale27
_What is a good metric?_

My take: a good metric is one that is correlated with customer happiness and
can't be gamed by engineers.

~~~
kyllo
No such thing. You can game any metric.

~~~
malka
Only if you know that such a metric exists

~~~
kyllo
That's the whole point of the parent article. People are really good at
figuring out what the _real_ metrics are (even when management says
otherwise), by simply observing what gets rewarded and what doesn't.

------
hitekker
Not sure if the author is in this thread but your article was great in both
content and style. The point you were communicating was definitely not
trivial: I hadn't thought of "what was said" vs "what as valued" that way
before, or at least had not simplified that part of my mental model to see
that. The way you communicated with examples was also spot on: at no point did
I feel like I have to go back to read a certain part here or there to
understand.

Excellent show!

~~~
_yosefk
The author is lurking in this thread and says thanks :-)

------
yason
In other words: you will get what you pay for so think carefully that you pay
for what you want.

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thetruthseeker1
Yeah, I have seen this. I think the reason being, evaluation is not objective
or quantitative. I think it needs to be. If people game the system, then you
have to tweak redefine those criteria over iterations to get it right.

~~~
a3n
Evaluation is above all a people skill. While I agree that "objective"
quantitative data should be part of the evaluation, _where it is available and
relevant_ , too often managers with no people skills absolve themselves of
that responsibility and hide behind numbers.

