
Atlassian ditches ‘brilliant jerks’ in performance review overhaul - yusufaytas
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/atlassian-ditches-brilliant-jerks-in-performance-review-overhaul/news-story/82a5e2abba1939f51d68ae81db8f05bd
======
Traster
>The $47 billion Australian software company, which was founded in Sydney in
2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every
performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.

>Instead, equal weighting will be given to how each of its 3000 employees
impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values.
Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring
their whole self to work”.

For a company that seems to be catching on to the idea that working at a
company might involve being good at working as part of a time, I can't help
feel describing that as "having nothing to do with job skills" is probably not
the right way of looking at it.

In fact, there are some really funny points in this article that point to the
bias that this is being met with

>Asked if it would be possible for someone who did well in their role to be
outscored by someone who did poorly but was more likeable

For gods' sakes it is not about being likeable, it's about being able to work
productively in a team environment. You aren't going to get a good review by
being useless but really good at small talk in the kitcken. It's about being
able to perform at the company in a way that positively impacts others whilst
getting your own work done. Is is easier to work with someone if they're
likeable? Probably. If someone is difficult to work with are they dislikeable?
Sure. But stop talking about the side-effects and talk about the actual thing
that's important - ability to add value to the company.

~~~
always4getpass
I think the truth is somewhere in between.

I'd much rather work on a company that has a pleasant atmosphere but not
insane growth than on a shitty environment grinding my ass off.

But ignoring performance completely, that is nuts. Because output and success
also bring joy and enhance the atmosphere of teams.

------
achow
On the other hand:

Many former employees blamed [Facebook's] cult-like atmosphere partly on
Facebook’s performance review system, which requires employees to get reviews
from approximately five of their peers twice a year. This peer review system
pressures employees to forge friendships with colleagues at every possible
opportunity, whether it be going to lunch together each day or hanging out
after work.

“It’s a little bit of a popularity contest,” said one manager who left the
company in 2017. “You can cherry-pick the people who like you — maybe throw in
one bad apple to equalize it.”

 _Inside Facebook’s ‘cult-like’ workplace, where dissent is discouraged and
employees pretend to be happy all the time_

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-
perfor...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-performance-
review-process-blamed.html)

~~~
m0zg
The opposite side of this particular spectrum is Microsoft in 00's, where it
was very clear to everyone that fixed sized pie is being divvided up, and
people would wait for the smallest missteps by their peers, and CC their
manager, and their manager's manager to make sure they know someone fucked up
and their rating is lower at review time. Since there was a curve, one's own
rating could then be higher, assuming they don't screw up likewise. Whether
you're helping others didn't matter one iota.

Personally, I prefer peer reviews, even though they do often lead to likeable
no-ops being promoted, and introverts being passed over for a promotion.

At least in "peer review" companies I never felt like my peers are trying to
stab me in the back all the time.

~~~
arethuza
I knew people who had worked at a company where it was pretty standard for
people to leave their "360 reviews" in tears as extreme levels of self-
criticism were expected. Their company culture apparently encouraged this
level save "radical honesty".

------
bengale
Sounds like Atlassian have reached the size where enough incompetents have
been hired that they try to drive out the useful people because they make them
look bad.

~~~
cryptica
I wonder what 'brilliant jerk' means? For me the worst kind of jerk is a 'fool
with authority'.

I'd much rather work under a brilliant jerk than a hypocritical fool.

~~~
sgift
> I'd much rather work under a brilliant jerk than a hypocritical fool.

Good news: There are people who are neither. I prefer to work for competent
non-jerks. A team of good people will always outperform a brilliant jerk that
drives everyone else away.

~~~
cryptica
>> Good news: There are people who are neither.

True, but from my experience, companies are shockingly terrible at identifying
and promoting those. Instead, they tend to promote the foolish but politically
correct loud mouths.

High intelligence which is unrewarded tends to leave signs of trauma in a
person. So they might seem like greedy selfish jerks, but in fact, they're
frustrated for good reasons and we should listen to them and tolerate their
harsh but accurate views about reality.

Jerks are fine so long as they're not afraid to criticize you to your face and
give you a chance to improve. Not all jerks are sociopaths. For example, Linus
Torvalds has described himself as a jerk - I'd be honored to work for such
person. Altruism is about actions, not about choice of words or tone of
speech.

------
lmm
And somehow, as if by magic, anyone from a working-class background will turn
out to have been a "jerk", and those who went to the right schools and are
friends with the right people will turn out to have been "living our values".
And one more slice of that pesky social mobility will go away.

~~~
jacques_chester
There are no brilliant jerks in the upper class?

I dunno about that. Sometimes I run into folks who went to "a small school
outside of Boston", and well...

~~~
lmm
You'd think that. But somehow these subjective assessment criteria always turn
into a way to include the upper class and push out the riff-raff. (Of course
it's probably mostly a question of what class the person doing the assessing
is from).

------
code4tee
The spirit of this is in the right direction but the details are in the
implementation. I’ve seen this sort of thing backfire big time as it basically
encourages cliques of people that “like” each other and then shun others.

If not done properly the whole company starts to feel like high school
politics all over again as it loses track of what it’s actually accomplishing
or not accomplishing and focuses too much on poorly implemented soft metrics.
I’ve seen excellent managers that drive high performing teams get dinged by
under-performers on those teams who say said manager is hard to work with.
Sure they’d be much happier with a manager that let them slack off but that’s
not going to help the company.

~~~
dlkf
Nailed it. There are some very good points made in the article. Atlassian is a
smart org and I suspect they're doing it well, but the article doesn't go into
enough depth to let us look at it with a critical eye. There is a real danger
that these policies will treat symptoms rather than causes.

I think that people often take an extremely puerile view as to how exclusion
and bullying manifest. I once saw an HN commenter suggest that the solution
was to ban profanity. Now, obviously you shouldn't be screaming "fuck you" at
your colleagues, but removing certain means won't fundamentally change
behaviour if the ends remain the same. It's important to think about the
incentives you've set up for your workforce. Are they playing a zero sum game?
Does an assist count for as many points as a goal?

> I’ve seen excellent managers get dinged in such a System because a few poor
> performers just mark the manager as difficult to work with to cover for
> their own underperformance.

Which raises another question - why are these discussions always centred
around "brilliant jerks" and not just, you know, "jerks" ? Is there any actual
evidence that being a jerk correlates with being a good engineer? Or that
brilliant jerks are harder to fire than incompetent jerks?

~~~
ryandrake
Yea, most of the jerks I've worked with in the past have not been brilliant.
They were just jerks.

The "My company was acquired and I got a management position out of it, so
nothing I say is wrong" jerk.

The "I've been successful here by not collaborating, so I don't have to
collaborate with you either" jerk.

The "I'm to busy to even acknowledge your E-mail" jerk.

And all the many, many "Taking credit for other people's work" jerks.

None of them were particularly brilliant or productive. Just jerks who
flourished in environments where jerky behavior was either not punished, or
got you promoted.

------
ps101
Instead of either their old or their new approach:

1\. Don't tolerate jerks regardless of their level of "brilliant". And simply
not being likeable isn't enough to categorise someone as a jerk.

2\. Give your employees honest reviews focusing on their actual skills,
performance and impact. Don't come up with artificially soft language and
treat them like children who need to tiptoed around.

~~~
gurkendoktor
But who gets to define the "jerk"? What if 9 people in the room decide to bet
the company/project on blockchain vaporware, and you are fervently opposed?
Many people will come across as obnoxious when they have to stand their ground
vs the majority. You have to find a balance, otherwise you'll incentivize
friendly groupthink.

~~~
Aeolun
You are only a jerk if you keep opposing (or sabotaging) the project after it
has been decided to do it.

~~~
fhy45678
I agree. But is this enshrined in some constitution that everybody reads and
adheres to?

------
jillesvangurp
The weakness in this model is that technically people calling other people
jerks, tend to be jerks. Especially when there's some negative consequence for
that person in the form of less favorable reviews it would be kind of nasty to
do this on the record. So, the people doing this the most would in my book be
the actual jerks. This thing gets super political and in politics, the
charismatic sociopaths end up leading.

I'd advertise a different model where who works for whom is strictly
voluntary. Somebody wants something done and needs somebody else to work with
them; that other person needs to agree to work with that person and should
have the option to join another team instead of being assigned to a group of
people. Nobody likes working for jerks and the whole thing will sort itself
out in no-time. Team players joining forces together will produce great
results and you can then simply judge the output.

You'll get certain people having a hard time getting a team together or
finding a team that will have them because they are jerks, that would be a
reason for them to get a bad review (because they don't deliver). People
voting with their feet is a more honest model than people whining to their
managers. Empower people to vote with their feet. Small teams, empowered to do
what needs doing, with people committed to working with each other can get
things done.

You'll get all your performers joining forces and you can expect great
results. Everybody else ends up stuck with each other and it should show in
whatever teams results you get from that. Some people get a lot of stuff done
by themselves and that might still be positive. Linus Torvalds is a jerk, I
wouldn't want him on my team but I use Linux and Git on a daily basis and I'm
glad he's working on that.

~~~
euroclydon
That could be okay, if it’s done slowly and discreetly by upper management.
Otherwise their are all kinds of hazards around recruiting like in the NCAA.

------
logicchains
"rather than a score, they either get an “exceptional year”, a “great year” or
an “off year”." \- I wonder if that means an average year counts as an "off
year"?

~~~
jakobegger
I assumed that "great" means average. If you ask someone, "How are you" and
they say "Great!" it just means "Not significantly worse than usual".

I also like the implication that there's nothing wrong with a couple of
"great" years in a row, while a couple of "average" years in a row would at
some point be pretty demotivating.

~~~
logicchains
Consider the context. If someone asks you "how did X on your team perform",
and X's performance was average, not bad but nothing special, would you use
the word "great"?

The last place I worked with levels like that used "met expectations" for the
average, which seems more accurate, and isn't something to be ashamed of.

------
majkinetor
Unless the jerk part is extreme, this is totally inappropriate. Extreme
brilliant jerks are rare in my experience. Funny/tolerable brilliant jerks are
the norm in jerk world.

This is babysitting of adult people.

Any kid must tolerate/live-with way more insulting behavior every freaking day
without anything in return like regular pocket money.

Somebody think your code is shitty, you smell funny, you have weird glasses,
you talk to quite, wow, lets immediately make a drama.

World of adults has become inferior to the world of kids.

------
patientplatypus
Good.

I turned down a job this week because it became clear that the CEO couldn't
handle any non-positive feedback and took it as a personal criticism.

Hey dude, if you have a redux reducer file that's over 11k+ lines long that
doesn't mean that I'm "not smart enough to understand your code" it means you
haven't bothered to keep basic code hygiene and break up your files.

It was a shame too - cool industry and tech stack and an odious toxic suck-bro
culture. /smh

~~~
gridlockd
> Hey dude, if you have a redux reducer file that's over 11k+ lines long that
> doesn't mean that I'm "not smart enough to understand your code" it means
> you haven't bothered to keep basic code hygiene and break up your files.

While I haven't seen the code, this belief that large files are bad "by
default" to me is a clear sign of an developer who puts superficialities
before more important work.

In any event, any significantly evolved system has lots of sore spots that are
nevertheless not the most pressing issue at any particular moment. This is the
nature of things. Learning to accept that and still getting things done is
valuable.

~~~
patientplatypus
Nah man, I didn't make it black and white like that. It was more along the
lines of "why is this reducer so big? it seems like that's a major red flag to
me because that usually means its difficult to debug" and the guy went
bananas. I almost never make bold "it must always be so" statements, as only
the Sith deal in absolutes.

------
forgottenpass
>Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring
their whole self to work”.

They don't want people to bring their whole selves to work; nobody actually
wants that. Lies like this cast immediate doubt onto everything else they're
saying about the workplace environment.

------
SanchoPanda
If they stick to it, it could be helpful in hiring as well. They need reverse
inquiry from really smart kids (and it is mainly kids in all likelihood) who
were not the standard candidate from years past.

------
TickleSteve
So... no job at Atlassian for Torvalds??

------
fhy45678
1 Apple in 10 lemons is a culture misfit and can be labelled as a brilliant
jerk.

------
gridlockd
> Atlassian employees can receive one of three grading levels on each element,
> based on “growth mindset language” — rather than a score, they either get an
> “exceptional year”, a “great year” or an “off year”.

...and right there flips the Bozo Bit.

~~~
albandread
The truly brilliant will just win at the new soft skills game as well; and
just adapt their behaviour. They are very used to hiding among us.

The description brilliant jerks; does come over as despising of talent.

~~~
gridlockd
If you're a truly brilliant person and you're _still_ working at Atlassian,
you should be on your way out anyway. Atlassian clearly has jumped the shark.

I don't actually have an issue with getting rid of people that really are a
drag on team morale with their antics, even when they're highly productive.
Perhaps you can find another spot for them, otherwise let them go their merry
way and have them be brilliant elsewhere.

Having said that, there's a lot of people "on the spectrum" that are jerks not
out of arrogance, but because their brain happens to make them essentially
tone deaf. With all this talk about "diversity", I hope Atlassian doesn't
forget about _neurodiversity_.

