Comment by username223
15 days ago
Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.
Why do you think this is what performance review cycles are?
Because Amazon notoriously does "stack ranking". Also, I personally have been in a company going through mass layoffs and they totally use the EoY peer review as the metric to choose whose heads cut.
obligatory citation (this was on HN a little while back) https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/11/03/metrics/
Interesting. This is such an extremely toxic post.
Peer feedback is valuable, it is important, and it is expected of senior team members. I guess it is a fun game if you have a poor manager, but the whole argument around the strategy isn't even internally logical, and if you play it out it is a poor outcome:
1. Company expects Senior Engineers to provide input on their teammates. 2. Senior Engineer has a Bad Manager, and decides to intentionally withhold feedback because "that is their manager's job, and up the chain" 3. Senior Manager (skip-level of Senior Engineer) determines that their Manager is a Bad Manager, and replaces them. 4. Good Manager joins, determines who is performing, and asks "Why did none of the Senior Engineers identify this earlier?" 5. The supposedly competent, but intentionally malicious Senior Engineer in this hypothetical is (correctly) deemed either incompetent or not believable by the New Good Manager. 6. Good Manager finds a component Senior Engineer with any sense of character to replace them.
This post is such hogwash, it is so fully of toxicity, and it is a dumb strategy. When things "hit the fan" this person is being tossed out in the regime change as well.
I would truly hate my life if I worked with people even a fraction as toxic as this.
Indeed. When I'm in the office and keep my eyes and ears open, it is rather simple to pick out the ones who are slacking. Even moreso in meetings.
Slackers tend to repeat the same thing over and over in progress meetings... 'I am blocked because... <insert external cause>' or 'I helped that guy figuring out... they did not have a clue'
Vs the more curious, get it done attitude: 'I tried this and that and it still doesn't work, but I learned that... hence I will aproach it from following angle... '