[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 :)