[Arainach]

What does "actually contributed" mean?

Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B. Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit really mean?

Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare *that*.

[devsda]

Still it is a faulty metric.

200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.

[Arainach]

Then what's your proposal?

People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.

[ipdashc]

> People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you.

Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it. Not without flaws, of course, but preferable to chasing a made-up metric. It's arguably the entire point of a manager, to know what their employees are doing at a high level. We managed to do this for hundreds of years without needing shiny dashboards and counting every meeting attended.

Metrics have their place as well, of course, but they should be one data point, and should not be chased after so religiously that recording the metrics becomes significant work on its own.

[Arainach]

>Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it

"My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?"

"My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"

"My manager keeps hiring only people of their race and playing favorites with them, what do I do?"

"Coworker X gave me a bad review because I wouldn't go on a date with them"

Even in the best case it biases heavily towards the people most enthusiastic about selling an image of themselves rather than those who are necessarily contributing.

Relying on someone's perception/vouching for you rather than performance metrics can be an absolute disaster - for the people involved and for the company if it turns into a lawsuit.

[devsda]

> My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?

> My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"

There may be legitimate cases but if someone runs into these issues often, may be its just excuses for bad performance. If the issue is genuine, find out what your specific organization can do about the situation and resolve it within that framework or find a better manager.

No amount of metrics are gonna help if you are going against a hostile manager, team or leadership.

[ipdashc]

These are all pretty extreme cases that apply if your managers/coworkers are horrible people. Most people are thankfully, as a rule, pretty normal.

Obviously discrimination exists, which is why metrics should still be used (as data points) and why larger companies need an oversight process.

Turning ourselves into automatons, promoting and praising people exclusively based on some arbitrary set of numbers, just to try and make it fairer, won't lead to a happier or genuinely fairer workplace. At the end of the day, most jobs relevant to HN are complicated and explicitly involve a lot of human interaction. You need humans to judge performance in human-interaction jobs.

[Arainach]

"most people" doesn't scale to hundreds of thousands of employees. It's not particularly reliable in groups of dozens.

[palata]

> Then what's your proposal?

Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them.

"What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.

[Arainach]

"What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful griping.

Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them.

"All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.

[palata]

> if you don't have a better option

My whole point here is that "doing whatever bullshit makes you feel good" is not necessarily the better option. Either you can prove that it's worth something, in which case you will not have to ask "What's your proposal?" because people won't complain about it, or you're just doing something for the sake of doing something, and your only recourse when people show you that it's bullshit is to get defensive.

> If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave.

And if you don't identify good performers properly and don't reward them, they will leave as well.

A pragmatic approach is to reward your team, as a team. If you go with "we fire the lowest 10% every year because there have to be low performers", you're creating an adversarial situation. Wanna know what happens if you're my manager in an adversarial context? Easy: I will be an adversary. How constructive is that? Not my problem, I did not make the rules.

[tester756]

>Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.

In general you pick companies, products, teams, initiatives, tasks that you're interested about, so it's not like it is purely dependent on luck

If you have skills and see opportunity then going for that may result in nice outcomes :)

[tester756]

> One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare that.

Try to assign money/revenue/PR to that and you'll have decent proxy for impact.

[Arainach]

Again: what money is attributable to each feature? Are subscriptions up 2% because of the new payment flow or because it's tax refund season? Are they down because of the new UI or because of tariffs? It's not realistic to tell them apart most of the time.

[tester756]

If you show X users old payment flow and X users new payment flow, then you can definitely try to draw reasonable conclusions