[jeffreyrogers]

The quoted material is accurate as far as I can tell, in that it really does say that stuff, but NR is interpreting it in an uncharitable way.

There was a test on the principles as part of the new hire orientation, but it didn't really matter how you did on it, and my manager didn't seem to place any weight on it, others might've been different. It is definitely not a daily thing that you're graded on. Dots is just an app you use to give feedback to people on how they are applying the principles, but it's mostly just used to rate if people did something well or poorly. Like if you shipped a feature on time or gave a good presentation on something you'd get a lot of positive dots and if you broke something in production you'd get a bunch of negative dots.

Other people at the company can see the feedback you got, that's part of what the baseball card is. It's really just a more transparent form of the evaluation system any company would have.

My criticism of the principles is that there are so many of them and some of them are contradictory (e.g. fight every battle vs choose your battles are two I remember) that people mostly just use them to justify what they were going to do anyways.

On the positive side, Ray and the other senior people really do care about the employees and Ray in particular is very generous towards them.