Ask HN: Why do companies ask employees to set goals?

[wonderingdev]

Several companies I've worked for ask their employees to set annual/quarterly goals. In theory they should be measurable, they should be relevant for the growth of the company and the employee. Sometimes the SMART acronym is used to describe them, some others use a FAST approach, but the essence doesn't change: you have to come up with some tasks (on top of your "normal" duties), discuss them with your manager and execute them. In my current company, your bonus depends on the execution of such goals (which is measured in percentage). If you fail to execute them, you may be subject to disciplinary actions.

As a developer, I find the definition and execution of these goals very distracting, worthless and sometimes even stressful. (I work for a quite famous company in engineering.)

My question is: what's the ultimate purpose of these goals? Is there a scientific (or even psedo-scientific) proof that they work for both parties? Do people really believe that they help in some way?

EDIT: typos

[josephmosby]

Engineering manager here. I have recently set goals for people.

The best-case scenario is to align personal career growth goals (e.g., senior engineer wants to be a staff engineer, or engineer wants a big raise) with company objectives. Company objectives are typically realized on a longer-term time horizon, which could be several years long. Goals, in their best-case scenario, should be a contract between company and employee that says "if you change and grow in this way to help me, I'll help you back."

Ideally, a good manager should use their experience and vantage point in the business to help their team members set good goals that both align with the company's long-term growth plans and their employee's personal growth plans.

Where these things go sideways: * an manager-type has set goals for a team that are tied to their assigned goals from their manager, and they are hoping by setting goals with their employees to shift responsibility onto them. (example: if manager's boss wants the team to be proficient in Rust by end of year, that should be something that I as manager just assign out as tasks and give you time to do) * manager and employee don't effectively communicate on employee's growth plans, so the goals are lopsided. (example: employee is trying to spend more time with one-year-old daughter this year. Their personal goal is "leave office at 4:30PM every day." Manager ignoring this goal is bad.) * manager is not very good at handling differences between growth plans and fails to communicate those issues to employee. (example: employee wants to get better at a legacy language that is on its way out at the company, and employee also wants to get promoted. These two goals may be in conflict.)

Goals should be a way for employee and manager to align employee's personal desires with company's objectives. For many reasons - most due to questionable managers - this is often lost.

[TomVDB]

My manager got the message after I copied my personal growth and goals 3 years in a row from the previous self-review.

In my late forties, I know what I can do and I’m very good at it. I know what I can’t do well, and I avoid it and tell them to make sure things don’t go bad. (Mostly anything related to managing other people.)

I will learn new technical things on an as-needed basis if there’s a project that requires it, or if it tickles my personal interests. They know that, it won’t change.

I don’t need personal career growth plans. I have no interest in being anything more than a principal engineer. I don’t need goals. Give me a complex technical task and it will get done.

It’s been 8 years now since I rejected to fill in a self-review, and things couldn’t have been better.

Every year, I get a nice bonus, a boat load of RSUs, and an above average salary increase. They seem to be happy with my work.

I hope you as a manager would respect a goal of “I want things to stay the way they are, and that’s the end of it.”

[dwhitney]

sounds like you have a good manager. you should take a moment and feel happy about that :)

[TomVDB]

I have had a lot of very good managers over the years!

And when I didn’t, I fixed it one way or the other.

[dbancajas]

> isappointed. If that happens often enough, the system falls apart since any promises of "career growth if you meet these goals" will no longer be trusted.

Can you share specifics of "boat loads of RSUs" (100-200K/yr 3-yr vesting?) and "above average increase" (5%)? Just want to have a figure I can shoot for.

[WJW]

I agree that what you describe would be termed the "happy path" of goal setting. It's important to recognize the edge cases though:

- First off the whole setup only really works if the employee has goals that are approximately aligned with the company. Someone who dreams of maximum money for minimum effort will need "creative" managing to make it work for both the employee and the company. (Maybe something in automation though?) Employees whose life goals reside outside the default company promotion track cannot really be motivated with "career growth" and often the manager has no means to accommodate growth in the desired direction.

- Both manager, employee and company need to be in a position to actually provide. The easiest example is probably promotions: if a manager has only one senior position available and multiple candidates available, some candidates will be disappointed. If that happens often enough, the system falls apart since any promises of "career growth if you meet these goals" will no longer be trusted.

[analog31]

Indeed, to the second point, the system falls apart because neither the worker nor the manager believes the promises, and so goal-setting becomes a pro forma exercise on both parts.

For this reason, ultimately, the only way to make this work is to visibly deliver on the growth at a level consistent with messaging.

[scottLobster]

I would note that all of that is based on an extremely trusting relationship with one's manager, and that the employee's input actually matters to company leadership.

Given my experience at my current MegaCorp, being honest as an engineer got me precisely nowhere even with all the diplomacy in the world, same story for many of my coworkers. It's less malice and more neglect, you make the case for X with all the calm, professional argumentation you can muster, point out how it's a win-win for all involved, and you get patiently listened to followed by radio silence even with followups. In the meantime you just put all your cards on the table, the people with power know exactly what you want and if it's contrary to their desires you'll be first in line for layoffs if they happen, or otherwise sidelined. Not just talking my experience either, witnessed this with multiple co-workers.

So you have to play the game.

Our "goals" that we have to fill out every year are some variation on the "keep doing what we're doing but better-er" BS, and keep your actual goals close to the vest until you can make the right contacts to carry them out, if you can. Seems to me goals are a very lopsided, very risky information exchange that leaves the manager holding even more cards then they already do. A manager can fire me at will and nothing really changes for them, I can potentially leave a manager for another job but only after doing a lot of groundwork with zero guarantees of a smooth transition and/or throwing my life into chaos. Why make the power dynamic even more lopsided?

I've had one manager out of four so far who actually did right by us and earned our trust, that was a nice couple of years, we got what we needed and performed accordingly. The rest have just been leveraging us for their next promotion, and one of them even gas-lit us with false deadlines (thankfully he didn't last long). So long as that's the typical experience, "goals" are just a Venus Flytrap for developers. It may sound trite and obvious, but trust must first be established, and it often isn't.

[savrajsingh]

You’re right. Also your example of “employee growth”might shock most people — setting a goal to leave the office at 4:30p early would simply raise eyebrows at most companies.

[josephmosby]

I have worked at companies where there was an expectation that you sign on at 9:00AM and leave at 9:00PM. And I have worked at some where my boss regularly took us out for burgers and beers for lunch on Friday if the weather was nice and then sent us all home for the day. And sometimes, those were the same company, with different managers.

I have had really amazing growth with managers who worked my butt off with some unreasonable hours. And I've had some managers who really encouraged me to take more time off. At different phases in your life you might want one or the other. Aligning company, manager, and where you are and what you want in life is a super important thing that should be done with a lot of intentionality. (And regularly re-assessed)

[sudhirj]

Similar experience here. People want "growth", but that's an abstract word. In the context of a employer-employee relationship, that usually means growth in compensation and rank from the employer, and the enablement of some kind of valuable work from the employee.

Managers need to align the two, if that's not done well most of these goals become nonsensical. As one example someone had ML as a goal despite it not being used in the company, so I found one part of the system where it would be useful and put them on that part time. Product got better with an ML component, senior management was impressed with the result and new capabilities, employee got to learn the new hotness, also got promoted.

Doesn't always have to be so much win-win-win all around, definitely needs effort put into alignment.

[kop316]

To tack on to this, I have seen and I like seeing set a 5/10 year career plan and from that, back out a six month and one year plan.

Why? Because I want to make sure that I know what that person's career aspirations are and I want to help them! Some folks want to stay a line engineer and do bench work, some want to grow into manager positions, some want to go back to school to get a Masters/PhD. Sitting down with someone to show the steps they need to take and what to do to reach that goal helps them.

Additionally, sometimes opportunities pop up short notice (like a scholarship in my company pops up to go back to school, but is a short notice turn around time), I already know if this is something an individual is interested in or not.

[wonderingdev]

I get your point. So the premise is that employee's personal desires and company's objectives don't usually tend to align themselves naturally, right? If there were no goals in place, would that be bad? How bad?

[josephmosby]

I think the first step - independent of company goals - is to know yourself and your own goals. Maybe your goal is "make more money." Maybe your goal is "take a class in art history, because I'm curious about it." Maybe it's "read more books" or "connect more with nature through hikes." Know yourself first. Avoid the temptation to succumb to pressure to force-align yourself with company goals, and just get a good understanding of yourself first. I believe this is important for all of us to do just as humans - even though I'm a manager, I have my own personal goals. One of those for me right now is running a 5K at under 20 minutes, because I like running and like the challenge of getting faster. To achieve that goal, I need to leave the "office" at a suitable time to catch daylight for a run.

Knowing yourself and what you want is very important. If your job just poofed out of existence today, but you still made the same salary - what would you want to do with your time?

Once you have that firmly entrenched in your head, then you can begin the negotiation with your manager and your company on how to align your personal wants with the company's wants.

I think it's bad when you-and-company don't have that alignment, because it means one (or both) of you hasn't truly thought about what you want and aren't communicating your desires well.

The endgame in all of this is an agreed-upon social contract between you, your manager, and your employer. You agree to provide a certain amount of work in exchange for compensation, which might include money, learning opportunities, pleasant coworkers, an easy commute, etc. Proper goal-setting, at its best, should be just ironing out line items in that contract.

[wonderingdev]

And that's a great explanation of the theory behind that :) and it delights me, every time. But the question, alas, remains unanswered: "would everything work well anyway without such a framework?"

Basically I'm curious about this: we're all applying this framework, taking it for granted. It was there, we accepted it. But I wonder: what if it wasn't there?

I'm building a machine, I know the minimum requirements to make it work. I build it like that and then I think: should I also add to it this other cog as well? Would it improve _somehow_ the machine? Well, the other folks are doing it, heck, I'll do it as well!

Now you have a heavier, more complex, machine, with one more cog, and you don't even know if you really need it.

Sorry for the brutally simple example, but I'm still missing an evidence we really need these frameworks.

[josephmosby]

If you accept these postulates as true: * on a long enough time horizon, companies must either adapt to their environment by changing their product, or they must cease to exist. * a changing product means changing the abilities required to deliver that product at some level * changing the abilities required to deliver that product means the humans must change as well

then you have to conclude: On a long enough time horizon, the humans must change their own abilities to match the changing requirements of the product, or the company will go bankrupt.

Now, given that conclusion: you are correct, goal-setting is not required. And we have evidence that it is not required in companies that mostly outsource technical labor on an as-needed basis rather than set goals to continually realign employees with company objectives.

In some way, you have to choose an approach for calibrating changing employees and changing company objectives. Goal-setting is a low friction approach for calibration when the company prefers employees with internal domain knowledge over time. There are plenty of other approaches for aligning needs and available labor as well, but they are generally not preferred by both companies and individuals which is why you see the prevalence of this approach.

[wonderingdev]

On such a long term horizon, you should consider staff turnover, which is never zero. So, no, what you're inferring from those "postulates" is incorrect.

I worked for a big dotcom company in the past and

1) there was a cap on headcount (as it's usually the case), so a lot gets outsourced

2) they don't care about internal domain knowledge: everybody should be replaceable at any time, ramp up costs are not even taken into account. Companies that wants employees to set goals usually are big and usually can afford to lose people with "internal domain knowledge". Even if, of course, they'll try not to do that, but it's still not that big of a deal.

While I really like philosophy (really, I do!), I'm a very practical guy and I'm still missing the evidence that I'm looking for. And I'm pretty sure it won't come in the form of a syllogism :)

[dwhitney]

A good friend of mine once told me, "I often feel like my purpose as an engineer is to give business dudes a reason to have meetings."

That statement always rings true to me during performance review and goal setting seasons. This stuff is mostly bullsh*t. "Goals" - as described by OP - don't exist at small startups. It's clear what the goal is: build a product, get customers, grow revenue, etc. The goals of a FAANG company aren't different. If "goals" were actually important, they'd exist ate startups too. Because they don't, it's pretty clear that the pessimistic comments in this thread are correct: they give HR a concrete way to avoid legal liability when it comes to raises/bonuses/promotions/terminations.

It's totally frustrating. I understand OPs sentiment. Unfortunately, the only way to avoid this red-tape nonsense is to join a startup.

[pxue]

Goals absolutely exist at startups. In fact I'd argue it's MORE important to have OKRs at small companies that reflect how each person contributes toward companies KPI.

Leadership's job is to help employees do the best work that aligns with the company goal. If devs don't understand what long term goal they should set to help a company grow, that's a huge red flag.

[wonderingdev]

How would that help precisely? You should put more effort in hiring, if you're worried about developers not understanding how to help a company grow. In the past I worked for startups and very small startups. The wannabe-corp ones have goals, the real ones don't. They want to stay afloat and grow as well, but transparency is enough motivation for devs to do their job: we need the MVP or we sink, all of us.

Genuine question: do you have experience in management with OKRs? Do you have some examples proving they helped in your career? Even made-up examples, just to understand what people expect from OKRs.

[dwhitney]

If only Tom had implemented a good set of 360 performance reviews and growth plans, then we wouldn't even know who Zuckerberg is.

[dwhitney]

90% of startups fail. OP is talking about annual 360 performance reviews. If your company may not exist next year, why would you do this? I say this as someone who has sold a startup.

OP is not talking about the "goals" I mentioned a startup having: revenue growth, customer growth, product development. These are things that startup leadership should keep track of and communicate regularly. OP's definition of "goals" are more akin to "take a Coursera course on machine learning". These are the "goals" that employees create for themselves with a manager when that company has gotten somewhat large. They are BS goals, that people who want career growth should be doing anyway.

[ghaff]

"Take a relevant MOOC course" actually seems like the perfect sort of thing to put in a 90-day (or whatever) work plan. It communicates to your manager that you want to spend some time on professional development and your manager may even that, if you like, they're happy to pay for a course somewhere.

In general, I sort of like having a somewhat informal workplan like that. And it's perfectly fine if, over the course of the quarter unplanned projects come in, you just document that. It's useful documentation, not much work, and you should probably have at least a vague mental plan anyway.

[dwhitney]

The issue I'd take with "take a relevant MOOC course" is, what if actual work picks up and you need to drop the course to meet some deadlines? You've failed to meet your "goals" by focusing on the company's "goals", and that red mark may stand in the way of you getting that raise/promotion. The incentives are misaligned.

As I've said, I totally get OPs frustration. We were hired to achieve a "goal". Why are we inventing other "goals" that are often misaligned?

[_y5hn]

Useful to whom? Who reads that fluff?

Sorry, but unless there's a larger multi-year strategy, which would be ill-suited for ICs, this is just HR incompetence at work.

[davidn20]

If you're a manager, managing 50 people. You don't want to come up with goals for all of them. So, you let the employees do it themselves.

The purpose of these goals is similar to any goal, to give you direction. Ideally, these goals are not distraction but things you're already doing that the company find valuable. I mean, you get to set the goals. Don't set goals you think are distractions, set goals you actually want to achieve.

[gambiting]

>>If you're a manager, managing 50 people.

How does that even happen? I work at a large corporation and our goal is to never ever have teams larger than 8, with 6 being the optimal size. I'm currently managing 5 people and it's already hard work, I can't imagine managing 50.

[ebiester]

It often means that your manager is doing nothing but the administration around management, and your team leads are pseudo-managers.

There are three forms of management: The team lead as manager, the manager that has 2-4 teams and is responsible for communication flow in the system, and the pure administrative manager overseeing a community of developers that are self-managing.

I hate the pure administrative manager model.

[tjalfi]

Sometimes it's a deliberate policy; Engines of Democracy[0] is about an aircraft engine plant with 170 employees and 1 manager.

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy

[gilbetron]

It could be that the original poster was literal, but more likely it is that the person has 50 people total under them. So there are 8 teams of 5 people, each with their own manager, and while the managers are direct reports, likely all of them are considered to be managed by the original poster. A good higher-level manager likes to maintain contact and stay involved with everyone underneath them, probably weighted by the seniority of the individuals.

[Aeolun]

> How does that even happen?

Very badly

[wonderingdev]

So you value them, right? You must have evidence that they work obviously, would you mind sharing some examples of that? If your company didn't have this policy on goals, would you introduce one?

[xtracto]

I hate them as a head of Engineering at 2 startups that scaled until the moment when the CEO decided that we needed to set OKRs for people.

Software eng. Teams objectives are basically to build the stuff that goes in the backlog. If it's not in the backlog, it wont happen. Developers are always in a rush to finalize whatever is in the backlog so theres seldomly time to pay the technical debt required to "improve " So the OKRs y started using was: we are going to build the shit that product throws at us plus the fires that Customer support throws at us plus whatever stupid thing Sales promised to the next large customer to close the deal.

Whenever business things that performance, security or availability are features that need to be improved, they'll put it in the backlog.

Sorry, I'm bitter.

[jghn]

I've always had the same problem. I'd say it's even worse. Suppose I set as a goal that I want to add a hypermegaML module to the production system to increase company profits 1000%. As you say, that only works if it gets into the backlog. BUT how the heck do I know I'll be the one who picks up the requisite tickets? It's a scrum team, we all pick up the next ticket. Work isn't dedicated for one person or another.

So now my teammates bob and Joanna are the ones who executed the hypermegaML module that increased company profits.

[ghaff]

And there should be some degree of flexibility. If a new unplanned but important project comes up, you don't want to say "Nope, can't help it's not on the list" even if everyone else agree this should be your priority. (Or you're told to do it and then are dinged because you didn't meet your goals.)

In general, having a set of agreed-upon goals/priorities works for me so long as they're not being rigidly followed past the point where they make sense.

[mason55]

Yeah this is why we end up setting goals for our teams that are generic, like “respond to production issues within one business day”.

Not the dev’s fault if the big Q3 feature they were supposed to work on gets deprioritized in Q2 or some important customer cancels for an unrelated reason and their goal was to get the customer live.

Yes, you can redefine goals as things change, but at a certain point it adds a lot of overhead and the goals just turn in to “your job”.

[ghaff]

There’s probably some happy medium between super-generic and super-specific in many cases.

[qovt]

A company cannot fire you just like that. It should to motivate its decision. Setting goals and evaluating them is an HR way to artificially build a case against people the company wants to fire. That's the primary goal.

It's common that managers receive instructions: one good evaluation, one bad (even if no-one deserves it), and all the rest ok/average.

Usage of this can be broader. For example only the "good" evaluation might be eligible for a raise.

As long as your goals are broad and evasive, you're safe. When they starts to be precise, that's the alarm signal.

[jxf]

> A company cannot fire you just like that.

In most of the US, they absolutely can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

[danjac]

There's reasons beyond just legality. If you are in a company which has a culture of firing people at any moment for no (obvious)reason, you're going to see high turnover and low morale as nobody wants to work with an axe over their heads, particularly in an industry where it's hard to replace people.

[jxf]

Sure, but that doesn't mean that any one person is protected from, say, a capricious and arbitrary manager — and it's absolutely legal.

In any case, saying "a company cannot fire you just like that" is patently false in jurisdictions with at-will employment, which is what I was pointing out in the OP's comment.

[ojbyrne]

“As long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's race, religion or sexuality.)”

While the odds of someone sueing a company for that are very high, the costs are also extremely high. Companies do extensive performance evaluations, performance improvement plans etc, to minimize the potential for wrongful dismissal lawsuits.

[yawnxyz]

in Georgia they can just fire you for whatever or for no reasons! It's called "at will employment" here. It also means people can quit for whatever or no reasons without much paperwork

[wing-_-nuts]

I seriously doubt someone NOT in an at will state CAN'T quit a job as they please, otherwise it would be indentured servitude. I think the whole 'two way street' thing is corporate spin for a system that exclusively benefits them.

[xtracto]

Right, here in Mexico theres no "at will " employment (company has to pay 3 month salary when they fire someone) and any employee can quit on a whim. Otherwise it would be a type of slavery. I love Mexican worker laws

[mgsk]

Likewise California.

[jakub_g]

Have the same in $current_job and yeah it's annoying to come up with something that makes sense, is measurable and attainable but not too easy etc.

Part of the goals exercise is not the goals in themselves but to let you reflect "where do I want to go" and start the discussion with your manager because maybe they have no idea: do you want to become a staff engineer? A tech lead? Can they assign you more of certain type of work / expose you more to the upper mgmt to build the awareness of your work and help you get promoted?

Are there things that you're working on alone but are too complex for 1 person and you would like to have more people involved? Can you use that as an opportunity to mentor younger people in the team and grow soft skills? Etc etc

Another thing is to validate things you'd like to do: maybe you'd like to more of X but you're not sure if you're senior enough / will it be well perceived if you do it / is it valuable investment of your time. If you let your manager know and he approves, you can devote time to it with clear conscience when you notice an opportunity.

[wonderingdev]

My point is: do you need goals for that? People that want to grow into more senior roles just naturally do more.

It happened to me to have goals that were mere exercises: write a blog post, read that book, follow that course. I'd do those things anyway I really wanted. It doesn't make sense to push people to do that, IMO.

[pbronez]

If it's stuff you'd do anyway, then it benefits you by broadcasting that work to your management chain. Suddenly it becomes clear that you ARE doing that work... and perhaps other people aren't. Documenting that is good for you (because it advances your career) and good for your managers (because it helps them recognize your superior performance)

It also provides an opportunity for management to discuss the overall direction of these things. Maybe there's another book that would be more useful given how the business is expected to change that year. Maybe there's other people going to the same conference and you can get a bulk discount on tickets, etc.

[UncleMeat]

You don't need them. But they help. If I know that a report really wants to grow into a more senior position and an opportunity comes up that feels like it will give them a great stretch project, I'll let them know about it and see if they jump on it. Promotions are rarely about "doing more" but instead are about doing a different class of thing.

[wonderingdev]

In my company we have a different "trial period" for promotions and "role-shifting", outside the goals' framework. In my case that doesn't apply then, but I understand your point. You can as well put in place goals for the report in a private way (e.g.: discussions in 121s).

[buro9]

Simplified (not an essay) set of reasons:

1. Herding cats is hard, i.e. how to point them in the same direction (as the company strategy - a.k.a how do you communicate "this is what the company thinks is important")

2. How do you spot bad performers (those who are busy but never seem to ship / deliver)

3. How do you provide timely opportunities to learn / grow / improve

Is it the best system? Not by a significant margin, but all better systems have trade-offs or work great in theory but not in practise.

Is it misused / abused by some companies? Absolutely, this is true of all such systems and it's up to each company to seriously ask itself why it wants to do this and whether it does apply to everyone they want to apply it to.

In many ways it is a "least worst" option, whereby you have a degree of alignment around contributing towards the company strategy, are able to have a regular cadence to ask "did you complete that work when you said?", and a regular cadence for "how can the company help you?" (by lining up work that helps with growth, etc).

Is it scientific? Not really... there would have to be a universal scientific application of such processes for them to be comparable and companies will always apply things in a way that fits them.

Edit: I've seen this at my last few employers and I believe it is valuable, but really you get out what you put in. For those looking to advance their position, compensation, etc... this is a great opportunity (4 times per year!) to identify what the company thinks is important and to contribute to that work, and fit the narrative of your progression into the company one. No-one forces you to do this work, you can treat it as a paper-pushing exercise if you want but then it's a wasted opportunity for you to use it for your benefit (profit! including work/life balance, etc)

[_y5hn]

Being arbitrary, the goals have nothing to do with anything you state above. In most companies, nobody even reads them.

[LegitGandalf]

Quarterly and annual goals setting is all about telling a story to wall street. Executives are obsessed with chasing quarters because there are significant bonuses associated with meeting quarterly and annual targets, and so it is natural that goal setting permeates the whole company, because the C-Suite is in charge after all.

Quarterly and annual goals are largely irrelevant for staff who are engaged in creating new software because of the constant need to pivot as the market and solution are discovered via iterative attempts. That said, Wall Street is in love with MBOs/OKRs and companies would be dumb to not execute investor desired ceremonies.

My advice to software engineer ICs is to do the bare minimum workflow for MBOs/OKRs and try not to be discouraged by the obvious waste of time. Dev managers can best spend their time trying to keep the goals high level and achievable in a variety of ways so that distraction presented to the ICs is minimized.

Fundamentally the last thing you want is software engineers doing is screwing around trying to figure out how to shoe-horn some stupid MBO/OKR around the work they end up discovering, or even worse, the inverse.

[wonderingdev]

I'm not talking about company's goals, but those that some companies want ICs to set for themselves. Obviously companies must have some key objectives to present to the public.

[Dragony]

From my experience as participant in these kind of systems, this is what I think:

These systems have the goal to create buy-in from the employee to perform at a certain level. Since you create these goals yourself there are little excuses why you can't reach them. It creates an incentive for the employee to work hard all year long and lessens the burden on the company to continuously check if you're being productive.

I guess another way of saying it is: You define what you're getting paid for year over year. What value you're providing for the company.

[sideshowb]

Agree with your point on buy-in. I think these are largely a psychological tool to encourage people to take ownership of certain outcomes.

[wonderingdev]

And we need those tools for that purpose because? It's been proven that employees don't normally do that? Genuine question, looking for data here

[Dragony]

Think of it this way: It's a social contract between the company and the employee that you will spend your time on something valuable to both the company and you. In larger organisations it can also help to answer the question "What is your team working on?".

I have in fact experienced employees (peers) that will simply slack off and say they "weren't told what to do" when asked. It's infuriating to work with those kind of people. Those have been exceptions though.

[wonderingdev]

I might argue then that your company does a bad job at hiring :) Also, do you also ask yourself: what is my manager doing? I do and in good, healthy companies I can see that.

[sideshowb]

> It's been proven that employees don't normally do that?

I have no idea, but I think the psych literature (and common experience) does show that people will take stronger ownership of stuff they defined themselves in the first place (well, duh). If HR think they can get more buy-in for free then why would they not go for it.

[Traster]

In my experience (manager of teams 5-10 people) the purpose of the goals is to ensure that you're setting expectations between you and the company and holding you to what you agreed on in the first place. The key is that if you haven't agreed something up front, then when you come to review your performance there's a really high chance that you've focused on doing things that the company didn't want you to do or doesn't value.

Now, the most problematic issue with settings goals is timing. By tying your goals setting process to the financial year or to bonuses the result is that you have to set goals so far in advance you can't reasonably set them, and you're almost certainly going to review them at a point where it's unclear what the outcomes are. Which is why this is better done as a continuous process. Every month or so you should be looking at your goals saying "Is this still relevant", "what progress have I made towards this", and "What am I doing that is not captured by this goals". And by doign that and actually recording that throughout the year when it comes to annual review time you have relevant goals, you have clear record of progress towards them, and you aren't worried about things that are still in progress. Most importantly though - you play the recency bias lottery. In every company I've worked in a project delivered in the 3 months before review is worth 10x what a project delivered in the 3 months after review is worth, if you have written documentation throughout the year you can fight against this.

[OliverJones]

I think it's a mistake to think of these kinds of goals as an extra burden. Instead, they're a way to enlist your employer in the work of advancing your career. When you're writing down your goals, you're opening a negotiation about what you will do and what you will learn in the next few months.

If your basic idea of work is "you rent yourself, your time and energy to the employer, the employer pays you, and you're even" then asking you to set goals for yourself makes little sense. "Clean the coffee machine before you lock up" isn't really a negotiable goal.

But if you work to create intellectual and social capital for both yourself and your company, then it makes all the sense in the world to negotiate goals.

If you have the goal of learning new tech things, by all means tell your supervisor. They have the responsibility to help you with that. (Obviously they also have the responsibility to get the work done.)

"I want to get to the point where I am the go-to person on zumbiwidgets" is music to the ears of a supervisor. They can help you do that, with training, assignments, conferences, mentoring and the like. Or, they can say, "wait, wait, we're phasing out zumbiwidgets. How about working with acmewidgets instead?" In either case it's a way to get your supervisor on your side.

[_y5hn]

Sorry, but most managers have negative interest in you advancing your career.

[patatino]

I agree with you and also, my goals don’t have to be aligned with the company.

My career is way longer then the couple of years I’m gonna work for you. Do you want to know my goal? Learn, improve, move on. I don’t care about the company as long as I trade my hours for money.

[refurb]

As someone who has been in small to large organizations I have a new found appreciation for leadership, strategy and people management.

I worked at one place with 50 employees where it was basically 50 people all doing their own thing where not a whole lot got done or at least not done well. But everybody was busy!

Now, organizational planning is useful though hard. Some people want to push it all the way down to the individual employee where things often fall apart. There are plenty of jobs where what your goals were in January and not good goals in February. So to solve that the goals are made broad and fuzzy. At that point no one can tell if goals have been met or not.

So by end of year it pretty much comes down to how your manager feels about your work. You could have solved a really hard problem that made the company money, but if your manager doesn’t know about it, it didn’t happen.

[snarf21]

Part of it is checking the box but they can serve purpose. There is value in an employee taking a step back and thinking about goals for the next quarter or year. There is value in a (good) manager reading the goals and using that for discussions around personal and team development.

As you said, tying bonuses to this process in nonsense and if you have a good manager they will just hide this from you. Sadly, most managers are awful. The problem is that getting promoted into management is a career path and companies don't adequately train managers. Just because you are good at coding does not mean you can manage a team of coders.

Like a lot of things in life, you kinda get out what you put in. Remember, introspection is our one true superpower.

[sideshowb]

They can also serve as a bargaining chip for the employee, assuming they negotiated a choice of goals they actually want. E.g. you can say to your manager "I need you to approve this training budget for me to contribute towards this goal we agreed at my last review".

[cainxinth]

I’m sure some companies are doing actual science with the data they collect from employees. I’m sure some (but a smaller amount) are converting their analysis into “actionable insights.” And an even smaller amount is actually implementing those ideas.

But most are just doing it to do it, because they see others doing it, and so that they can have the marketing team write in glowing detail on their social media pages and in the annual report how they are an “analytically-driven organization that is passionate about optimizing the employee experience to promote greater productivity and collaboration, and to develop a sustainable pipeline for disruptive innovations.”

[suchire]

In addition to the manager-to-managee “contract”, there are two other reasons to have goal setting exercises:

- Setting goals rather than tasks can allow for less micromanagement, if used properly. You have a problem to solve, with some freedom to choose how - Measuring individual (or even team) software engineer productivity is super hard. Unexpected problems, necessary research, tech debt, changing requirements, support interrupts, life problems, etc make consistent progress hard to measure, and no one wants to be measured by lines of code or “points closed”. Setting pre-negotiated goals and then achieving them is a more humane alternative

[wonderingdev]

Why do you have to micromanage? Why do you have to measure productivity (especially if the team if productive as a whole - and that's always visible)? Genuinely asking

[jbarrs]

I am not a manager, so I am merely speculating here, but I suspect measuring productivity is important in determining which employees are of most value to the company (who is pulling their weight, so to speak), particularly for example in the cases of raises/promotions or redundancies. Also, different people will have different skills and preferences, so if a team member shows a particular aptitude for a set of tasks and is generally more productive at doing those, it may be better to give more tasks of that style to that team member to boost productivity.

[wonderingdev]

Not sure about that. Also I believe there are alternative to micromanagement for a similar purpose[1].

1. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-identity-manag...

[that_guy_iain]

Well the idea is to work on the personal development of the employees. They want their employees to improve. One poitn is it's a lot more cost effective if they improve their employees than it is to hire better employees. If they hire a so-so developer and spend two years turning them into a better developer, they now have a better developer at a so-so developer cost.

Another point is that they can show they invest in their employees and say to new recruits that working at their company will improve their abilities and obviously mean a higher paycheque down the line.

Another one is also to see how engaged the employee is. If the employee is like me and refuses to set goals. I was actually asked yesterday to set goals, I said I have no goals. My goal is to keep the system that is falling apart working. And there is no requirement for me to get better. With the strong legal job security along with the strong job security from being the only domain expert left in IT I can get away with that. It shows that I have zero interest in this company in the long haul. I'm literally not even willing to pretend to play their game. This should be a mark that HR needs to work on employee engagement heavily to try and turn me from an actively disengaged employee to an engaged employee. Which to be fair should have been obvious with the massive employee churn of "our best employees going to work for competitors." (word for word what management is saying) But if an employee gives really good achievable goals that align with the company they can measure that to be an engaged employee.

[bigpeopleareold]

It shouldn't be a distraction.

You should understand what you are working on, how it is progressing and what is the goal of certain things. You need to know how to align yourself with goals of your company and the impact of the products you are developing.

Honestly, I don't appreciate anyone not taking any stake in what they are working on. This transient attitude makes it hard to trust people to understand fully or even want to understand problems that need to be solved. I can understand if someone is new and doesn't know what to do for a product. Of course, in this case, your first goal is: learn and ask (good) questions. After that, I would not be happy to give you constantly basic advice on your own tasks.

So, this is not just a managerial problem. You get paid to work on problems, to develop an insight on those problems and to think independently on those problems.

With that out of the way, when the company itself is unsure what to do next, then it can become a distraction, because it could mean that even top management doesn't know what exactly to do. I've had this happen and that's frustrating. I can talk all day what I could do, but nothing can stick if you don't get a clear idea what top management wants to do.

[drewcoo]

What you're probably looking for is info about Drucker's "management by objectives," [1] which is the predecessor to most of those goal systems.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/management-by-objective...

[wonderingdev]

I'm familiar with it. Question remains: what's the strongest argument (with supporting data) that it improves something in the company? Anything, even the employee's mood, productivity, etc.

[randcraw]

Frankly I see little point in writing objectives. It's not a contract with your employer, since the objectives are written by you and at most it gets rubber stamped by your manager.

If you do or do not achieve your list of objectives, they have no impact on whether you were productive, made an impact, or you should be promoted. So what's the point?

[jnwatson]

In my experience, these are top-down directed management fads. For personal goals to work, the company must allocate some of your time to achieve them. When push comes to shove and it is work on your goals or your manager's/team's goals, the team's goals win.

[igetspam]

And that is how you measure whether or not the goal setting is valuable. The company I work with has found their way to the OKR model. Personally, I'm a fan, if they're used correctly. Objectives should be the thing that drives work. It's the "what" and often the "why" part of the equation. Key results are the "how" in "how are we going to achieve that objective?" and in "how do we know if we've succeeded?" If those objectives and key results aren't driving work and, more importantly, being used as a shield against unplanned work that isn't aligned, then they're not useful. I've seen both and I quickly stop participating when the model isn't used correctly. Models lime this are only valuable when they are part of the core of the org. When they're lip service, they're a major hit to both trust and morale.

[0xbadcafebee]

For one, if they don't meet their goals, you can fire them. It's a great tool to weed out the chaff. And it requires managers work with employees, and all of it gets read, so nobody in the organization can hide if somebody else didn't set goals. Basically it's a check to make sure half your company isn't totally out to lunch.

You can use it as a political tool. A senior exec can brag that their division consistently meets or exceeds their goals.

It's also a tool to encourage employees not to sit on their asses. You need employees to improve over time. One way is to encourage them to have goals which require them to make small improvements, whether that be in productivity, training, or moving the needle on some other company goal.

[swagtricker]

Joke answer: "Because like an adult asking a child, 'What do you want to be when they grow up?', they're actually looking for ideas because they don't know what the hell they're doing":)

[wonderingdev]

Should my boss answer like that, I would be very offended, since I'm a fairly senior developer who doesn't want to manage people and thinks he knows where he's going. If he said that referred to the HR intern, well, he could be right (still offensive, but sometimes right) :)

[tootie]

As someone who has been managing people a long time I can confirm they are useless. Company goals always supercede anything an individual wants. A lot of time, personal goals are things like upskilling or refactoring that are laudable but cost money that no one can guarantee will be available. As a manager I want my team to accomplish their goals but setting as a basis for advancement is the wrong approach. Your true goal is always "get all your work done and don't piss everyone off".

[_y5hn]

There are two obvious answers:

1) Companies wants work done for free and managers heard some rumor "setting goals is good". Anyway, there's no choice for every party involved: Mythical work gets added in addition to work where employee is supported. This lets employees that are already supported to have another bragging list, while employees who are not supported are held down by yet another instrument.

2) Managers never heard of or actually been part of agility and teamwork.

[Gravityloss]

If the employee attains the goals, the employee probably got better at their job. Both the company (more value created) and the employee (more salary, more meaningful work) benefited.

You could have an internal goal (learn Lua) but if you don't talk to your manager, it might be something that's not where the company is going.

If the goals feel like they are not reachable or that they don't create value, then such goals shouldn't be set.

[Trias11]

Upper management cannot focus and project their insecurities on employees.

Upper management policy to hire the cheapest employees backfire as these employees typically less productive, unwilling to learn and doing absolute minimum.

To compensate for that - management invent policies and procedures to defocus attention from their own inability to lead and inspire.

[pogorniy]

It's a tool to get more ROI per employee. Employees compete for promotion or bonus with their peers to appear better performer within given framework. And produce extra value for the shareholders. And this framework turns into a game which experienced people can play to get more benefits.

[wonderingdev]

Looks like a sick trick, doesn't it? :) I wouldn't want to work for a company that sees that this way.

[pogorniy]

> I wouldn't want to work for a company that sees that this way.

Don't choose corporation then

[pella]

> Is there a scientific (or even psedo-scientific) proof that they work for both parties?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy

[Apreche]

Our company does OKRs, which is also basically just measurable goal setting.

I feel like if I was in a decision-making position in the company, OKRs would make more sense. If I have that kind of power and responsibility of deciding what the company is going to do, then I also have to decide what we want to achieve.

But as a software engineer, I don't have any such responsibility. I make what I am told to make. My only goal is to do enough work well enough that the company thinks it is satisfactory. Beyond that I just want to do as little as possible in exchange for the most compensation possible. I also don't have any long term career goals other than to escape capitalism. Therefore when I'm asked to set goals, I find it exceedingly difficult.

[xtracto]

Believe me, I've been in the other side.

Initially I set all kinds of amazing OKRs for the tech team: decrease MTTF , MTTR; increase system performance, decrease bug reports, and a lot of other things that on an engineering paper would be great.

But then reality hits: next product feature has to be released NOW. Customer X is complaining because sales promised feature Y but we dont have it, Z provider decided to change from REST to SOAP and the reality is that your MVP code has rest tightly coupled. Oh and the engineers that knew about that code left when google/Facebook offered them 10x payment and free margaritas.

[wonderingdev]

Keep in mind that I'm referring to personal goals, set for each IC/employee in the company. In theory they should be aligned with company's goals.