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HR started doing surveys polling stuff like how well we're following company slogans (values), trust in leadership etc. They do not seem to grasp the concept of averages, margin of error nor that it's a really bad idea to average over a tiny number. Our small group gave 5~8 fairly negative "trust in leadership" responses (no fault of our direct manager). It caused a red flag to be raised, that caused a chain reaction through the management hierarchy with a ton of meetings and 1-on-1 with higher management to figure out what is going on. I am sure the irony is utterly lost on them.
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May 6, 2020 14:34
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:How do you develop people? What even is personal development? I can’t say I ever got any useful goals or advice from a manager, and my experience has been that good programmers continue being good and bad programmers rarely improve. The whole management and development thing is, as far as I understand, really just a necessary bit of paperwork so when you want to fire someone you can say you tried to help them.
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May 6, 2020 15:02
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the talent deficit posted:ageism isn't really that big a deal in my experience. not keeping up with trends and tech is really harmful to your career tho. always be learning
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May 6, 2020 15:07
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When it comes to older programmers, I’ve noticed three facts: 1) They’re heavily protective of their personal time. It’s strictly 9-5. 2) They always have two towers at their desk. 3) They run Unix, but never a normal one. It's always something like SUSE.
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May 6, 2020 15:32
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lifg posted:When it comes to older programmers, I’ve noticed three facts: Hell, I do the first one and also run Linux and I'm only 37!
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May 6, 2020 15:33
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CPColin posted:Hell, I do the first one and also run Linux and I'm only 37! The first one should be the rule not the exception.
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May 6, 2020 15:38
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Slimy Hog posted:The first one should be the rule not the exception. For sure. My previous boss is retiring and their replacement sent out an email saying, "I don't expect you to reply to anything outside of business hours; I just tend to catch up on emails in the evenings." which is an unexpectedly huge relief. My previous boss would never make it clear that we were not expected to work at all hours. Now if the new boss can get the one sysadmin to quit working on weekends...
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May 6, 2020 15:46
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:How do you develop people? What even is personal development? I can’t say I ever got any useful goals or advice from a manager, and my experience has been that good programmers continue being good and bad programmers rarely improve. The whole management and development thing is, as far as I understand, really just a necessary bit of paperwork so when you want to fire someone you can say you tried to help them. Developing people is pretty easy, at least in theory: you find out where they should be improving (either because they need to do a current job better, or they're interested in picking up/improving skills), then you get them work that lets them practice those skills and get feedback on how they're doing as they learn. The hard part is balancing the fact that someone who's new at some skill is going to be slower and give you lower-quality output than the veteran who can do it in their sleep with the expectation that your team is still on the hook to quickly deliver high-quality output. Most managerial work is easy in isolation; the hard part is balancing priorities and keeping all the plates spinning. Peer reviews are useful for development when you're in an environment that cares about giving useful feedback rather than paperwork and liability coverage. When people are doing new things, they need to understand what they're doing well and could be doing better. There are some important caveats, though. All the feedback should go through some central person - probably your manager - and there shouldn't be direct quotes in what you finally end up seeing. The point is to build a complete picture of how you're doing, not just unfiltered whining about one tiny point or generic "well, they're doing OK in the 30 minutes a day where we actually interact, I guess" white noise. And, more importantly, there needs to be a culture of regular feedback outside the formal process. You might get a PDF once a year that sums up what people have said about you in the past 12 months, and compiling that doc can be a useful checkpoint for recurring issues or a way to reflect on past wins around raise time, but nothing in it should be a real surprise. Feedback loops when you're learning should be somewhere between hours and weeks, not once per year. But, done right, it's useful and even rewarding for everybody involved. If you can't even see how on-the-job development might work and be useful, your work environment is probably more toxic than you realize.
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May 6, 2020 15:56
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lifg posted:I’ve worked with programmers in their fifties or sixties (I don’t ask) in literally every job I’ve had over the last 15 years, except at that 2-person web dev company. But I’m not in Silicon Valley or at a FAANG. ChickenWing posted:y'all need to find some less toxic companies, peer review is great if your workplace isn't a toxic hellhole. honestly progressive JPEG's anecdote doesn't even say it was a toxic place before the budget troubles led to layoffs. like are you 100% certain this gold standard of peer review wouldn't bite you in the future if the top-down direction of the company changed? how would you feel if your fair critical feedback was in someone's COVID-19 layoff notes?
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May 6, 2020 16:12
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i directly ask peers what they want put in their review notes and if you don't you're a narc
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May 6, 2020 16:14
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JawnV6 posted:i directly ask peers what they want put in their review notes and if you don't you're a narc I'm glad I don't work with you.
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May 6, 2020 16:15
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JawnV6 posted:i directly ask peers what they want put in their review notes and if you don't you're a narc Always say positive things unless they're genuinely poo poo at their job. People have enough poo poo to worry about without adding overly negative peer reviews to the pile. You don't have to gush for paragraphs, you can keep it short, simple and vague.
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May 6, 2020 16:31
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I have a lot of complaints about “career goals” and associated crud because my career goals are “work as few hours as possible doing mostly rote work for the inflated salary programmers currently enjoy.” If I want to learn something new I’ll change jobs to do it, since that’s far more effective and will also give me a payrise. Since I can’t be honest about this, I have to waste my time coming up with mandatory but completely irrelevant and fake goals for myself and then pretending to care about logging and achieving them. Apparently not everyone is doing this. Also, “peer review” aka people giving you some tips and advice is fine. Going to your manager for a chat about a coworker you’re having trouble with is also fine. But why on gods green earth do we need a formal written paper trail of this? The only reason is to give higher management more oversight of employees’ goings-on, and I don’t think that’s a great idea regardless of how “non-toxic” your environment appears.
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May 6, 2020 16:49
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:I have a lot of complaints about “career goals” and associated crud because my career goals are “work as few hours as possible doing mostly rote work for the inflated salary programmers currently enjoy.” If I want to learn something new I’ll change jobs to do it, since that’s far more effective and will also give me a payrise. Since I can’t be honest about this, I have to waste my time coming up with mandatory but completely irrelevant and fake goals for myself and then pretending to care about logging and achieving them. Apparently not everyone is doing this. you sound delightful to work with
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May 6, 2020 17:00
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Also, “peer review” aka people giving you some tips and advice is fine. Going to your manager for a chat about a coworker you’re having trouble with is also fine. But why on gods green earth do we need a formal written paper trail of this? The only reason is to give higher management more oversight of employees’ goings-on, and I don’t think that’s a great idea regardless of how “non-toxic” your environment appears. This. Everything that's written down is a paper trail that can be used to justify a firing.
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May 6, 2020 17:01
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Slimy Hog posted:I'm glad I don't work with you.
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May 6, 2020 17:29
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JawnV6 posted:didn't mention your age, your area of SW expertise, and eliminated all of 5 companies and 7,000 square miles. again, I don't find this anecdote all that data-backed or terribly useful, but maybe there's folks out there champing at the bit for this? It is anecdotal. All personal answers you get to any question on this forum is going to be anecdotal. That's just what a conversation is. Are you regularly in jobs with no programmer coworkers over 50?
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May 6, 2020 17:41
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One time I put a bit of negative commentary in a peer review and the manager who was doing it pasted it verbatim into the employee's file. From context, it was obvious who had written the commentary and my coworker emailed me asking if we could chat about it. I said I felt that would be inappropriate, then turned around and blasted the manager for not ensuring my comments were obfuscated. I then, of course, never provided honest (or negative) feedback in a peer review again. Lesson learned!
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May 6, 2020 18:37
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ultrafilter posted:This. Everything that's written down is a paper trail that can be used to justify a firing. In the happy case having informal feedback processes is good for your own development, but they're also much harder to use to argue for raises.
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May 6, 2020 18:42
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I honestly welcome constructive negative feedback, since it not only gives me something to focus on improving but provides a nice data point for "can self improve when shown a personal deficiency" I mean, the self improvement part doesn't work as well for me but I know what to work on!
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May 6, 2020 18:54
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JawnV6 posted:"less toxic" great, imma just bring up my all_companies.xlsx and sort by toxicity. wait, wait, gotta filter by local managers toxicity too, is that a pivot table or If your go-to burn is "how can workplace culture and feedback even exist if I can't put them into an excel pivot table" then you might. just. be. part. of. the. problem. ultrafilter posted:This. Everything that's written down is a paper trail that can be used to justify a firing. If management wants to fire someone, your peer assessment email that says "Joe's a technically solid developer who has excelled under high-pressure situations, but I'd appreciate it if he works on providing more descriptive code review feedback" is not going to meaningfully tip the balance.
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May 6, 2020 18:57
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Any tool that is useful to a supportive manager is, trivially, also useful to an adversarial manager. If management isn't trustworthy then employees will naturally learn to sabotage them in order to protect themselves from harm.
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May 6, 2020 19:01
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JawnV6 posted:i directly ask peers what they want put in their review notes and if you don't you're a narc This is correct, as long as you also offer feedback on how to improve further/in other ways. Otherwise you are just circumventing one of the most important processes for growth and development.
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May 8, 2020 01:33
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Boy this thread really split up into work-likers and work-dislikers Personally I hope to go the rest of my career never working at a company big enough to have management culture ever again.
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May 8, 2020 04:27
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"Management culture"? Lmfao
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May 8, 2020 05:54
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Pie Colony posted:"Management culture"? Lmfao 
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May 8, 2020 06:13
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My workplace literally made wallpaper with the company values on and covered the office in it. Big management culture
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May 8, 2020 07:56
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The 'company values' thing is the most managerial culture thing I can imagine. Why fix systemic issues in the company if we can shout enough slogans at the employees during quarterly meetings and measure how well the values are followed with surveys! It's the equivalent of "Dan dreamed of making vodka since he was 6, and ..." at the back of a bottle. Talk is cheap. I honestly cannot tell if it comes from a sincere place or from pure undiluted cynicism (aka shareholders).
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May 8, 2020 08:21
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Beef posted:The 'company values' thing is the most managerial culture thing I can imagine. Why fix systemic issues in the company if we can shout enough slogans at the employees during quarterly meetings and measure how well the values are followed with surveys! It's the equivalent of "Dan dreamed of making vodka since he was 6, and ..." at the back of a bottle. Talk is cheap. Honest question: how do you fix systemic issues without broadcasting what you intend to fix, why it's important to fix it, and ensuring you have buy in?
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May 8, 2020 11:19
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Beef posted:The 'company values' thing is the most managerial culture thing I can imagine. Why fix systemic issues in the company if we can shout enough slogans at the employees during quarterly meetings and measure how well the values are followed with surveys! It's the equivalent of "Dan dreamed of making vodka since he was 6, and ..." at the back of a bottle. Talk is cheap. My way to avoid being so harassed has been to tell them that every time I need to give them a status update I lose my context and it takes longer, so by asking for constant status updates you slow down my work, which you presumably want to be done ASAP (otherwise why are you asking for constant status updates). Really they do a lot of this poo poo and I'm glad I'm getting out soon.
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May 8, 2020 14:57
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Frankly my plan is to save up as much money as possible, get a nice cozy house somewhere that isn’t a hellhole, then live on the savings while never working in this industry again.
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May 8, 2020 15:27
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Blinkz0rz posted:Honest question: how do you fix systemic issues without broadcasting what you intend to fix, why it's important to fix it, and ensuring you have buy in? I mean it’s one thing to actually take care of the problem and another to just say you represent those values and the company ‘is listening’ etc etc. I’m getting visions of those Facebook/Uber/Wells Fargo ads on TV saying they’re sorry for being fuckups and committed to fixing their problems, where the only real fix is to send upper management to the labor camps and shut them down as failed experiments.
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May 8, 2020 15:38
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The key difference between "words to placate the masses" and "pursuing meaningful change" is action and involving employees. I was a whole lot less cynical about my management following their "company values" when a genuine problem came up and the CEO had an open-house sit down about it which was immediately followed up with emails and action.
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May 8, 2020 15:50
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Blinkz0rz posted:Honest question: how do you fix systemic issues without broadcasting what you intend to fix, why it's important to fix it, and ensuring you have buy in? Interesting thought exercise. However, I was pointing to corporate-speak communication without any follow-up rule changes to the system causing the problems. For example, will someone in R&D suddenly produce more patents if his lock screen just shows INNOVATE? Can you just plaster "Unity!" on walls everywhere, shout it as a slogan at quarterly meetings and expect anything in your giant corporation to change by magic of words alone? If managers each rule over their private fief where headcount is the measure of success, where the corporation is split into groups or units that could as well be different corporate entities, etc. the day-to-day decisions are still going to be following the incentives put in place by the system.
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May 8, 2020 15:57
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Beef posted:Talk is cheap.
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May 8, 2020 16:28
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Space Gopher posted:If your go-to burn is "how can workplace culture and feedback even exist if I can't put them into an excel pivot table" then you might. just. be. part. of. the. problem. Space Gopher posted:If management wants to fire someone, your peer assessment email that says "Joe's a technically solid developer who has excelled under high-pressure situations, but I'd appreciate it if he works on providing more descriptive code review feedback" is not going to meaningfully tip the balance.
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May 8, 2020 16:41
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May 9, 2020 01:55
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Blinkz0rz posted:Honest question: how do you fix systemic issues without broadcasting what you intend to fix, why it's important to fix it, and ensuring you have buy in? flippantly, you manage not so flippantly, there's a whole field called process control that studies exactly this question. the answer turns out to be: change the things you are doing that are bad to things that are less bad, iteratively, until you are doing mostly good things
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May 9, 2020 03:00
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JawnV6 posted:hi thank u for sharing ur understanding of my joke The more you post the happier I am that I don't work with you.
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May 9, 2020 03:22
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Space Gopher posted:Developing people is pretty easy, at least in theory: you find out where they should be improving (either because they need to do a current job better, or they're interested in picking up/improving skills), then you get them work that lets them practice those skills and get feedback on how they're doing as they learn. The hard part is balancing the fact that someone who's new at some skill is going to be slower and give you lower-quality output than the veteran who can do it in their sleep with the expectation that your team is still on the hook to quickly deliver high-quality output. Most managerial work is easy in isolation; the hard part is balancing priorities and keeping all the plates spinning. Prism Mirror Lens posted:I have a lot of complaints about “career goals” and associated crud because my career goals are “work as few hours as possible doing mostly rote work for the inflated salary programmers currently enjoy.” If I want to learn something new I’ll change jobs to do it, since that’s far more effective and will also give me a payrise. Since I can’t be honest about this, I have to waste my time coming up with mandatory but completely irrelevant and fake goals for myself and then pretending to care about logging and achieving them. Apparently not everyone is doing this. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 04:41 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 04:37
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