[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.

[ipdashc]

If there's one person in a team discriminating unfairly, that should be pretty obvious if they're the only one objecting while everyone else thinks an employee is doing a fine job.

If the entire team is discriminatory, then as the sibling comment said, metrics aren't really going to save you either, they will find a way to push their will through. And that is probably a horrible place to work that won't be made more palatable by being promoted.

Again, I'm not saying these aren't real issues, but relying solely on metrics is not the solution. You need both qualitative and quantitative data for a healthy environment and to make good decisions. Just because some humans are bad people doesn't mean the solution is to become inhuman altogether.

[Arainach]

"everybody else" doesn't scale. If you have 10 people, that's 90 reviews to be written. No one's going to go into much detail, and in general you get a culture of only saying nice things so that others only say nice things about them.

[ipdashc]

Seems like a skill issue, my friend, not sure what to say.

Again, we managed to do this for literal centuries without needing to turn workplaces into metrics-obsessed assembly lines. A manager should know what's going on in their team and should know who's doing well. It's kind of the whole point of being a manager.

[Arainach]

For most of human history we didn't have organizations of hundreds, much less tens of thousands. When we did they were rife with nepotism, classism, brownnosing, racism, and more. We aim to do better these days, which is a hard problem.