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phdoofus t1_iws2yqd wrote

Nobody ever asks the workers which executives and senior managers are 'low performing'

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randomways t1_iwsc9qy wrote

It's weird. A professional team performs poorly and they fire the coach. Why doesn't this mentality expand to executives.

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DocPeacock t1_iwsh5w8 wrote

It kind of does. When they get fired, like coaches, they get an awesome severance to be released from their contract, then they will bounce around to another company/team and make even more money.

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theKetoBear t1_iws4v6i wrote

None of them obviously , that's why they're executives and managers we can just ASSUME they are good at their jobs because if we don't we get fired even when some of us do their jobs for them !

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RandomHB t1_iwsd74b wrote

My company let 13 mid level managers go recently and zero technical staff. I've never seen that before.

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euph-_-oric t1_iwslmth wrote

It's funny you say that because middle management is often the first to go. It's upper management that gets di w.e the fuck they want.

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WayneKrane t1_iwsmshu wrote

Yeah, middle management usually has a lot of bloated salaries and you can get by longer without them. The last company I was at did layoffs and it was exclusively mid level managers. It made sense to me because each of their salaries was equal to 2-3 employees or more. I knew I was safe because I was the lowest paid employee.

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davebowmanandhal t1_iwuqpdi wrote

I don’t work in tech, but I am a middle manager and I am not making a lot. It can be tough not having any real autonomy and still dealing with upper management and employees.

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MerlinsBeard t1_iwuk8g6 wrote

That's true when a company gets bought out. The technical staff is retained, the management get the boot.

Happens all the time in government contract rollovers also. Company A had contract but lost rebid so Company B basically buys out Company A's tech staff and brings in their management.

Then it's very clear if productivity goes down or up who the problem is.

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Utoko t1_iwsdolk wrote

See, can you really call CEO's like Sam Bankman underperformers when they can burn 30$Billion in 2 years. How many million underperforming worker you need to have to burn that much money?

CEO's are just made to perform

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jeffyoulose t1_iwspyy8 wrote

That's impact. Love the sound of that flesh spatter on concrete.

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[deleted] t1_iwsaoeu wrote

Amazon does in their distribution centers. You get a survey at regular intervals to rate your direct manager. Too low of a score and they get the axe.

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monsterosaleviosa t1_iwsf4ck wrote

Your direct manager in a distribution center is still just a workhorse like you to them, they’re not actually on a different level in the way that corporate leaders are.

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ironichaos t1_iwsdoef wrote

Yeah but that’s for middle management I doubt it effects senior level leaders that much.

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwtf8a2 wrote

My brother in law is a senior manager of some sort in corporate Amazon and gets these direct report performance reviews weekly. Once they dropped for him so he asked everyone what the problem was and they all said “no worries, great work boss” which is not unexpected. But what is the point of the system if there’s no context? What was HR thinking?

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dethb0y t1_iwtl39w wrote

That an anonymous vote is more honest than having your boss ask you "how am i doing as your boss"?

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwu9ed1 wrote

Sure. But in this case there was no j formation or context for my BIL to follow up on or improve. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember the specifics but when we talked, it was very much “someone is unhappy all of a sudden but I don’t know who and I don’t know why”

I understand why anonymous feedback exists but in my experience it is usually filtered through a third party to make sure it’s helpful.

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pnt510 t1_iwtm53d wrote

The problem is no one wants to give their boss honest feedback if it’s negative. There are too many potential downsides.

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwu94zq wrote

Yeah, that’s the point I was trying to make. Why even implement a feedback system like this when there is almost no way to reasonably follow up. It just makes people unhappy and stressed out for no reason. Maybe that’s why they do it.

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JoyousGamer t1_iwumlh5 wrote

Very well could be they are not approachable and encourage open communication.

Could as well be the current review format specific to their position is not correctly done.

Having it so it's not a trackable to the employee allows for a more open line of feedback.

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwvjp3d wrote

I understand why he didn’t get any feedback directly.

Im asking what the point of context free anonymous feedback is. Telling people “you are suddenly bad and not as appreciated by your team” and then not providing any information as to why will not help improve.

Since that context is not built into the feedback I question it’s utility.

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JoyousGamer t1_ixd3mix wrote

It is to encourage individuals to put their true feelings. Regarding context it should be provided to allow free text comments as well as enough variation on questions to piece together a possible issue. If that is not provided then the data collection is flawed not the format of it being anonymous.

As a good leader its your job to be able to have the trust of those working with you to gather that information. Also just because you are rated poorly doesn't mean you are bad at your job its possible that you are not the right fit for your specific team.

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Amigosito t1_iwsqjgn wrote

Amazon does this across-the-board for all employees. They call it “the bar”; if you’re below it, you’re being managed out. Every time they bringing a new employee who “raises the bar”, an existing employee falls “below the bar”. Or sometimes they will hire people “below the bar” just to fire them and set an “example.”

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LordTC t1_iwss7cv wrote

Amazon has stack ranking which requires managers to fire a certain percentage of their team each year (often 10%). Because of this if you are happy with your current team you hire people in order to fire them.

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SomeDudeNamedMark t1_iwsxl76 wrote

That is such an incredibly shitty thing to do.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by it, but damn...

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DaiTaHomer t1_iwt8rs5 wrote

What they do is game this system by hiring people for the express purpose of later firing to keep the moronic management that is Amazon from messing up their teams.

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SlowMotionPanic t1_iwt9hoq wrote

Stack ranking, aka forced distribution, should be illegal. Funny that the companies that pioneered it in America inevitably left it by the wayside after each lost massive class action suits against them for the practice.

Because of that, many of these companies will bend over backwards to avoid using the terms even though it is precisely descriptive.

The people who need to be managed out are all of upper management and their HR enablers. Workers should have a say in how their company is run but a lifetime of capital class propaganda has made people have automatic negative responses to things like that. Like Pavlov ringing a bell for his dogs.

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davebowmanandhal t1_iwuqzlq wrote

I thought this type of jack welch GE management nonsense was shown not to work all that well.

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Drakonx1 t1_iwv77pl wrote

It was, and they teach you that in business school, but that's basically immediately untaught when you get out into the world because execs don't care about data if it conflicts with their feelings.

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davebowmanandhal t1_iwvfl5h wrote

Lol this is absolutely true. They think they’re hard headed business people, but they have a porcelain ego.

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwtfbef wrote

My bro in law hires people just to protect his team. Nuts

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Amorougen t1_iwuko32 wrote

I've done this and hated it. Another example of forced ranking.

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catdog918 t1_iwsb1hs wrote

My company also has a rating for manager but they don’t just fire them for bad ratings. They do take the ratings seriously and I guess if it keeps coming back overwhelmingly negative then eventually they’d be let go or moved around the organization

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RLT79 t1_iwsuvni wrote

The last place I worked tried to do 360 reviews one year (I think that’s what they were called). They stopped doing them after 2 years. Apparently the admins got upset that they weren’t getting glowing reviews and stopped it, rather than actually try to do a better job. Meanwhile, we were still expected to do well on our performance reviews even though they cut all raises due to budget cuts.

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DrEnter t1_iwuvech wrote

It’s all just colorful names for a Vitality Curve. It helped destroy GE, and now you too can use it to destroy your corporation!

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RLT79 t1_iwvppds wrote

Ah... I'd heard of the 80-20 rule, but not this. Thanks!

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DrEnter t1_iwvuxjd wrote

The worst part is you can be a top performer and still be low-ranked because you have a poor manager or because they want to target a specific metric that doesn't apply to you.

The whole thing is almost always used to perform shadow layoffs: Basically a way to target a group you want to layoff, but then fire them "for cause" of low performance based on measures that may have little to do with their job. I had this happen to me at Yahoo after Melissa Meyer took over (another toxic billionaire that shouldn't run a company). I was a senior software developer, and was always a "top performer" in yearly reviews and raises, which meant after a few years I was very expensive. They introduced stack ranking and, while I knew what it was, I wasn't particularly worried as I was always ranking at the top. Then, a month before the reviews and ranking, two of us that were both "expensive" and over 40 were suddenly re-organized under a manager who managed a QA team, and we were then stack ranked against QA engineers based on QA metrics, which are very different from those used for software developers. Even though our reviews were also fantastic, we both fell in the bottom of the QA rankings because we weren't assigned to do QA work. Within a month we were both let go "for cause". As I still knew people there, I found out they repeated started doing ranking every quarter and repeated this process with a few different people each time, always using the same manager (fuck you Brad, you enablist PoS).

That's a classic example of how to use stack ranking to target older and more expensive employees and to get away with not having to do expensive layoffs and severance packages. Incidentally, it isn't always entirely legal: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/employment-law/pages/yahoo-forced-ranking.aspx

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JDizzle69 t1_iwsi9ew wrote

You’re joking right? Executives get fired all the time

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mr_mcpoogrundle t1_iwschzp wrote

Every organization I've been a part of does. Sometimes they are called 360 degree reviews.

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1tacoshort t1_iwtkcb3 wrote

Google does (or did, when I was there) have 360 reviews. I had a manager that left the company stemming from the reviews he got from his direct reports.

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homezlice t1_iwt0bab wrote

Eh. The other executives know. Mostly those people know also and eventually take other gigs.

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not_creative1 t1_iwtq4cv wrote

… this happens a lot.

Many companies have anonymous reporting system for your managers and I have seen managers get fired because of bad reviews from their employees

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5kM6v2FMKfN8WU6 t1_iwtw2sq wrote

Idk what reality this is in but executives/managers get fired all the time by THEIR managers. Any company with over 100 people has performance reviews

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JoyousGamer t1_iwulu0d wrote

Actually in various companies they do. There is reviews of managers, your managers direct superior, and those above them.

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phdoofus t1_iwv5oos wrote

IBM - nope

Intel - nope

HPE - nope

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JoyousGamer t1_ixd4hir wrote

Well sounds like they are broken then. Also various does not mean all as there are orgs out there poorly setup and poorly run.

If you go over to some of the workplace subs you will see plenty of companies that are run terribly.

In my career this has always been a standard I have run across and I work in tech. Heck where I started my career they only did company wide reviews of Sr Director and up otherwise how teams were run were left up to that specific manager/director decision.

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ShakaUVM t1_iwvw5oh wrote

>Nobody ever asks the workers which executives and senior managers are 'low performing'

Whenever there's budget cuts in the Navy it's never the admiral's yacht that is cut

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iws58iw wrote

You know you could have literally googled "do Google employees review their managers" before you just made up nonsense right? Is that really too much to ask?

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NoLogonServAvailable t1_iws6vj4 wrote

If it's anything like most manager reviews, your manager will find out from his manager that the "anonymous" bad review came from you. Hope you don't get PIPed shortly after that.. It's a big club and you ain't in it.

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iwsf8he wrote

I think you severely underestimate how employee friendly tech is. I’d be extremely surprised if giving your manager a bad review put you at serious risk of retaliation at Google or similar.

Anecdotally I do actually work in management at a small tech firm, and when I got a mediocre review for an area of my work, I just worked on getting better at that area instead of trying to retaliate, since that would be dumb and bad for everyone involved.

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rontrussler58 t1_iws8nub wrote

You know there are no laws saying a large corporation has to allow subordinates to do skip-level reviews. C-suite could just not do them if they didn’t value the data so doing them in such a way that causes retaliation and bad blood is extremely counterproductive. Not saying it never happens but I’ve been working for a fortune 50 tech company for almost a decade and have never heard of such a thing.

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NoLogonServAvailable t1_iwsdkxv wrote

>You know there are no laws saying a large corporation has to allow subordinates to do skip-level reviews.

So what is the point of this statement? No one was discussing laws we were discussing how employees won't give bad feedback for their managers because they risk getting fired when the manager finds out.

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>C-suite could just not do them if they didn’t value the data so doing them in such a way that causes retaliation and bad blood is extremely counterproductive.

They use the data to find out who to get rid of and what pay raises to give out for the year. Companies like Amazon are constantly hiring and firing people and they use this information for exactly that. See if you can grab some person that just got out of college and offer them a large paycheck and stock options (that take 4 years to fully vest) you can run them dry and burn them out after 2 years with a PIP and save the company a boatload of money from not having to give out the stocks year 3/4. Seen this happen sooo many times it wasn't funny how they play with peoples lives. Even Jeff Bezos thinks people are inherently lazy so they have policies in place to turn over people easily.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-bezos-belief-all-workers-are-lazy-2021-6

"He pointed to a short-term employment model and performance trackers to keep workers on their toes."

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>Not saying it never happens but I’ve been working for a fortune 50 tech company for almost a decade and have never heard of such a thing.

Good for your company, I've worked for a Fortune 5 tech company for 6 years and this is pretty common place and I have plenty of data points that show that this does happen. Just because you never heard it or never experienced it doesn't mean it doesn't happen and you don't get to tell other people their experiences don't matter...

I once had a manager ask me "If you walked into an elevator and Jeff Bezos was in it and he asked you What you did for the company this year? what would you say?" my response would be "Sorry I am currently on lunch break right now".

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DeusExMcKenna t1_iws8pip wrote

We’re gonna need to talk about your, checks notes, pieces of flair.

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phdoofus t1_iws72ro wrote

How many major companies have I worked for in 25 years? About 10-12. How many have asked me to review the executives and senior managers? None. There's some 'Evidence Based' information for you.

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iwsfkas wrote

Did you work at Google? The company this entire thread is about lmao.

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phdoofus t1_iwslal1 wrote

And I made a generic comment about companies. Read smarter not...whatever it is you're doing. When was the last time you got to put an executive on a PIP? Never? Yeah, thought so. If you're allowed to 'review' executives it's like 'student government'. It's there to give you the illusion that you have some say in what's going on.

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iwsrp5w wrote

I mean obviously you wouldn’t yourself be able to directly put them on a PIP, since at most companies it’s outside your jurisdiction.

But your review could prompt the people above them / the board to put them on a PIP or similar.

The board represents the people that own the company so obviously authority flows from there, but that doesn’t mean there is no upwards flow of feedback.

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palindrome_cardinal t1_iws7hnq wrote

This is fair I just can’t resist a dogpile of downvotes

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iwsfhqe wrote

Don’t worry I don’t mind. Going against populist drivel on 95% of subreddits is asking for it.

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