[thehardsphere]

This one way street also extends to the way Coraline's accomplishments at GitHub are presented in the article.

There's all of this talk about all of the code she pushed and all of the popular features she wrote, but there's no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured, e.g. what her management was expecting her to do. So when the negative review is mentioned, we're supposed to be shocked by it. Certainly she is shocked by it. That doesn't mean she should have been.

[joatmon-snoo]

> [My manager] went back to the issue of my lack of empathy in communications and collaboration. I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count. She went on to say that I was not fulfilling my responsibilities as an engineer because for the first month after a new developer was added to our team, I had not done any code reviews for her. I told my manager that I only participated in code reviews to which I was invited, in large part because of my experience at the beginning with drive-by reviews, and that the new developer hadn't started requesting reviews from me until February. Again, the facts didn't seem to matter.

> My overall review was a "Does Not Meet Expectations." I was shocked and upset. A bad review out of the blue was not something that I had experienced before. I thought I had good rapport with my manager, and that if there was a problem that we would have been addressing it at our weekly meetings. In my mind this was a serious management failure, but there was apparently nothing I could do about it.

Emphasis on "addressing it at our weekly meetings".

This seems to be far more of a management failure than Coraline's failure.

[thehardsphere]

As I pointed out earlier, her boss addressed the weekly meeting thing directly, and Coraline mentions it:

> I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count.

So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period.

Re-reading it again, I'm not convinced that this is a management failure either. The section titled Empathy starts with:

> Starting in December, in my weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager, we would review all of my written communication (issues, pull requests, code reviews, and Slack messages) to talk about how I could improve. It felt ridiculous but I went along with it, and did my best to address my manager's feedback and concerns.

One way to read that is that her manager was trying to address these problems, but Coraline didn't understand how serious they were, because she dismissed them as "ridiculous."

[bartread]

On the face of it your point seems to be entirely reasonable. The problem is that we only have one side of the story here, and it's extremely unlikely we'll ever hear or read the other side. Clearly there have been some pretty serious problems but I don't feel comfortable root-causing them based off an account from a single individual.

[minusSeven]

you will likely never know the whole story. Its entirely up to you to believe what you want.

[pyre]

You're saying:

> no context as to whether or not those things were the metrics by which her performance was being measured

But per the blog post:

> Based on the positive feedback from my one-on-ones and how well I was tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level, I was hopeful of getting a promotion and a raise.

I'm confused as to how one could be "tracking against the goals set for the next engineering level" but not be measured by those metrics.

[eqdw]

I'm reading between the lines a lot, and therefore am probably wrong, but I suspect what happened was one of the two following scenarios:

1. (Less likely) She did a lot of work, but it was not high priority work. It was good engineering but on things that the company did not consider important. She was given this freedom and then, in the company's eyes (fairly or unfairly) considered to have wasted it.

2. (More likely) She had good technical skills and bad social skills. When she was able to go heads-down and crank out PRs and tickets, everyone was happy, but she was socially abrasive and alienated her coworkers. This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone, generally.

I suspect (2) played a big part, mostly because I've seen this same dynamic play out at other places before. As a borderline autist, I'm highly sympathetic to people in that position, and generally believe that it's better for everyone involved if management can find a way to work to their strengths. However, drastic differences in interaction style are what they are, and at the end of the day, your employer's priority is their productivity, not your happiness. Sometimes these things happen. They suck. At least we're fortunate enough to work in an industry where we have half a dozen other options for work at any time

[pyre]

  > This could be because she is an unpleasant person, or because they are
  > unpleasant people, or it could be an honest misunderstanding or personality
  > conflict, but in every case it detracts from the productivity of everyone,
  > generally.

This could also become a "Tyranny of the Majority" type situation though. If all of the other people are unpleasant, and they are being unpleasant because the new hire is a minority, then the company's easiest course of action (i.e. fire the one person rather than fire the many) becomes oppressive and enabling.

I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but the behaviour of "well let's just fire this one person, no matter who was in the wrong" is only good from a "anything for the company's bottomline" perspective.

[eqdw]

This is a good point, and one I didn't consider.

But

> I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but the behaviour of "well let's just fire this one person, no matter who was in the wrong" is only good from a "anything for the company's bottomline" perspective.

Regardless of one's opinions on ethics, this is the attitude your employer _will_ take and it will _never_ change unless they are forced to do so. Tech companies are the shepherds of billions of dollars worth of assets, and they are going to protect those assets over you, when push comes to shove. Consequently, it is important to always keep this in mind, to expect it, and to proceed accordingly. Ignoring this doesn't make it untrue

[erikpukinskis]

No, not all companies put their bottom line above their principles.

In fact, some people coming consider it an inalienable part of their masculinity, personality, religion, etc, that they will put their principles above their checkbook.

In fact, some people start companies specifically because they want to put their principles above their paycheck.

[thehardsphere]

That's addressed later by her boss:

> I brought up the fact that we had been actively working on improving that over the past several months and that I had been tracking well against the goals we agreed to, but she said that the review period was only through January so that progress didn't count.

So, the "tracking well" was in a 4 month span not in the review period.

Here's another question: Why were weekly one-on-one meetings happening to discuss these issues? Are weekly one-on-ones typical at GitHub?

[bartread]

This sort of bugged me as well. Why was the review done in April but the review period ended in January?

Whilst the article is (as I've pointed out elsewhere) only one side of the story, GitHub isn't that big a company, so how crap do your management processes have to be that you only get around to reviewing somebody 3 months after the review period ended? It doesn't sound like the scheduling of the review was a surprise to Coraline: she saw it coming, it wasn't late, etc. So why didn't it cover the period up to the date of the review?

Bashing somebody with months old feedback when they've been working with you to improve against goals that you've both agreed specifically related to that feedback is an extremely poor way to operate, and obviously hugely demotivating to the reviewee.

Problem is, as I've already said, we've only read one side of the story.

[mercutio2]

Do you work at a big company? If you do, take a look at your last review, comparing when you received it to the period it technically applies to.

In my experience, both as a manager and an individual contributor, the periods will be offset by 2-4 months. The delivery of the review, while it feels like the start of something to the recipient, is the end of what's often a long and stressful period of planning, writing, and distributing reviews that lead to raises, bonuses, and promotions.

So nothing seems odd about that timeline to me, unless her manager failed to explain "this is a review that applies to the period before you made marked improvement".

[bartread]

The last time I had to worry about this I worked for a 300-ish person company, so a little under half the size of GitHub.

We used to do 6 monthly reviews but scrapped them in favour of more regular meetings every 4 - 8 weeks, largely for the reasons you've stated. That being said, in my experience reviews are one of those tasks that take up as much time as you give them. If you only give yourself a month to gather feedback and prepare them you'll find a way to get it done, and I always wanted to work off the most current information available when meeting with members of my teams, hence doing the prep as late as possible.

As I said, GitHub is not a large company at around 700 employees, so I'm not really sure what their excuse is. The largest company I've worked for, as a contractor this time, was around 400k employees, and they seem to have much better processes around this with regular one-to-ones in the place of annual reviews, at least for permanent tech staff.

[pyre]

I guess the other issue is why was the review happening 4 months after the period ended, especially if they had started working on improvements in the meantime. What was the point of all that work / those improvements, if they were just going to ignore it because it wasn't in the "correct period?"

Shouldn't the review have happened closer to the end of the period, so that all of that progress could be part of improvement?

[hosh]

There's a book (I can't recall the name) written by a former HR professional on the actual function of HR in a corporation: a way to mitigate liability when firing people. That seems like the most plausible scenario given what I am reading from this blog post. If you were going to fire a well-known activist and you did not want to give away any ammunition for getting sued, there's a whole song and dance to make sure it happens. This way, you can be fired for legal reasons rather than the real reason.

I'm obviously taking a cynical take on this -- there are lots of organizations that try to use performance reviews to help an employee's career, and HR that is there to help the employees, not to bail the company out of litigation.

[pmiller2]

I believe the book you're referring to is called _Corporate Confidential_. People think I'm cynical when I talk about that book, but I've seen the scenarios you mention play out word for word multiple times.

[fsloth]

Corporate confidential is fantastic. Everyone employed should read it. It's not about cynicism, it's about understanding the typical incentives and expectations driving the operations of a function affecting everyone in a typicsl large corp. I think the legal environment in US ups the ante thus incentivizing for wily maneuvers.

[sqldba]

Sounds like it'd be great on Audible but it's not there. Shame.

[noufalibrahim]

That sounds like an interesting book. I'd appreciate if you could let me know if you recollect the name.

As someone who has poohpoohed the idea of a human resources department in a large company, I've almost done a 180 on it now that I have a small company of my own and I'd be very interested in reading some good books on the utility and function of the organisation in a large company.

[mistermann]

In case you don't see, someone said "Corporate Confidential".

[thehardsphere]

Those are good questions. I guess I didn't find it implausible on its face, because I've never known any company to do reviews in a prompt and timely fashion.

It would help if we had an inside perspective on how their reviews work from someone who isn't invested in this specific story.

[angelbob]

Weekly one-on-ones are pretty common in companies I've been part of, and GitHub has a lot of remote workers. Weekly one-on-ones seem more likely than not, in general.