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by deegles
2784 days ago
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"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." In this case, the measure is your position on the career ladder, not e.g. the success/failure of your product or company as a whole (unless that is required to advance). I feel that because of this, performance management at big companies leads to unnecessary product churn. Think about how many messaging apps Google has released, or how every product seems to get a top-to-bottom redesign every year or two... having been on the inside, I think this is definitely a symptom of employees optimizing for climbing the career ladder. Promotion Driven Development is a real phenomenon and is in the long-term detrimental to everyone. I don't know an easy solution to it, since bigger and bigger projects are required to "prove" that you should be promoted. Maybe in a few years people will have experienced this enough to think of a better way. |
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First the role descriptions & leveling guidelines have deemphasized complexity. Words like complex, large, feature, or new have been reduced or replaced where possible.
Second there an emphasis on (business) value delivered. Fixing a broken system can provide as much or more long term value than building an additional or replacement system. Building a baroque ivory tower is actually a negative. This also ties back to point one.
Third all senior role promotions include target level peer review, alongside the manager/candidate “promo doc.” The candidates potential peers perform an assessment of the body of work, leadership contributions, and results delivered. This is not limited to the most recent delivery/project/team. There are typically two assessors; one organizationally “near” the candidate and one “far.” For senior staff/principal/distinguished engineer positions theres also a mandatory peer review board.