8 ms·

No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing, document when those workers don't meet the standards of performance, and reference

• stogot 2y ago
  What makes you think they don’t have that?
  • quandrum 2y ago
    Because the union is striking over it
    • stogot 2y ago
      That conclusion does not explain your arguments. The place is over 100 years old and surely have HR processes. This is more likely about the union trying to prevent layoffs
• cmptrnerd6 2y ago
  I have never seen such a system that I thought worked or wasn't just gamed into uselessness. Do you have any examples of systems that worked well?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• leereeves 2y ago
  > I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing You're asking them to solve a problem people have been working on for decades without success. How can they measure productivity of tech workers?
• bko 2y ago
  This sounds good, but in my experience bad employees were known to everyone. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly why they were bad or toxic, but pretty much everyone agreed. If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so. So creating a documentation trail is difficult, especially if its based on people saying they don't think he does good work or people don't want to work with him. This is where I break with the "pro worker" dialog you hear online a lot. In my experience, competent employees are incredible difficult to come by. Recruiters are paid a few months salary just to get someone through the door. To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true. I'd prefer the quick to hire, quick to fire economy. Especially since employers would be much less likely to take a chance if they know there are a lot of hoops they'd have to jump through if it didn't work out
  • axus 2y ago
    It's like the unpopular, friendless kids in high school, you just know. And there's nothing they can do to change it.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Less negativity and more listening by everyone can be a place to start.
      • MichaelZuo 2y ago
        With what time? Middle managers don’t suddenly get 28 hours in a day after someone offers this suggestion. Their schedules are already maxed out, so every extra minute of focused attention needed is literally coming from someone else’s (or some other department’s) budget.
      • ars 2y ago
        I tried that with someone once, I got an enormous list of complaints about all the wrong things everyone else was doing wrong. And utterly zero awareness of what they themselves were doing wrong. Attempting to explain it to them was a complete failure.
• kjksf 2y ago
  That might by what YOU want or what you hallucinate the demand is but most reasonable interpretation of what we know is that they in fact want to prevent being fired for low performance. if you can be fired "only for misconduct" and low performance doesn't count as misconduct means that you cannot be fired for low performance. Granted, the actual demand might be more nuanced but going only by what was reported, they don't want to be fired for low performance.
  • Timon3 2y ago
    No, what's reported is that the tech workers are asking for a "just cause" provision. This is a well-established legal concept that explicitly includes what GP posted. The reporting you're reading that fails to mention this happens to be from the New York Times. Can you guess why they don't mention this?
    • JamesBarney 2y ago
      In theory that's how it works. In practice the amount of documentation is onerous enough most managers just decide it's not worth the effort.
      • Timon3 2y ago
        Seems like those managers should be replaced with ones willing to properly do their job.
• Vaslo 2y ago
  Due process from a union definition is often ridiculous and protects the members beyond what a reasonable customer/employer should expect.
  • throw4847285 2y ago
    Amazing. That's what negotiating is for. The union gives the maximal version of what they want, the bosses counter, everybody celebrates the results.
• platz 2y ago
  Isn't employment in the US At-Will anyways?
  • brewdad 2y ago
    Yes in absence of an employment contract that says otherwise. One of the primary objectives of any US union is to establish guidelines for dismissal of employee members that override at-will.
• School-Cotton 2y ago
  > I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing Nobody has ever invented a working system for objectively rating software engineers. I really doubt NYT will be the ones to do so!
• kccqzy 2y ago
  Requiring management to document these decisions is already itself placing low trust in management. I do not want to work at any workplace where trust in management is so low that low performance needs to be documented with a paper trail. I'd rather work at a workplace where the management is consistently competent and people place high trust in the management; so that when management fires someone everyone else agrees without having a need for documentation to prove low performance. Disclaimer: this is only my opinion on where to work. I'm fully aware there are many other good reasons why management needs to document low performance.
  • trinsic2 2y ago
    I'm genuinely curious, are there any employees that work with a company that has good managers? I have heard so many bad stories of poisonous corporate culture its hard for me to see how there would be good managers. I haven't worked as an employee since the early 2000's.
    • School-Cotton 2y ago
      Nearly all the managers I’ve had throughout my career have been good. Of course people in a bad situation are more likely to complain about it, so the impression you might get from reading a forum like this is heavily biased.
    • JamesBarney 2y ago
      I worked lots of places. Never worked for a manager I didn't trust to fire me. Most managers are pretty good but organizing lots of a people is really hard. And there is something like a leaky abstraction for every level of the organization as goals and context and understanding get filtered and warped as information travels up and down the org chart. You're manager is your closely interface to the insanity of distributed human decision making, so they usually are seen as bad and are blamed for all of the dysfunction of the organization when they're trying to make the best of an imperfect situation.
  • lmm 2y ago
    Most NYT-sized companies won't let you deploy a bugfix without a documented rationale and a second person's signoff. It's far from an unreasonable requirement for firing someone.
• senko 2y ago
  Hello from Europe. Tried that, didn't work. It's incredibly hard to quantify "low-performing" for white-collar workers, because any measure is either easily gamed, actually creates roadblocks and bad incentives, or both. Now companies are wary of hiring people because it's harder to fire.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    > companies are wary of hiring people because it's harder to fire This is another one of those obvious "unintended" consequences. The harder it is to fire someone, the correspondingly harder it will be to get hired. Companies will be unwilling to "take a chance" on someone.
    • BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      That is why trial periods exist, with much more flexible firing/resigning terms.
  • makeitdouble 2y ago
    On the hiring side, I felt US and Asian companies were a lot more wary and had tougher "on the paper" requirements to enter. For comparison most French companies I've seen can hire an engineer within 3 interviews. I entered a company in the past in a single interview. In comparison talking with an US company's HR, the plan was 4 rounds with a coding test, for an average of about a month to go through the whole process and there's still a probation period.
• ramblenode 2y ago
  > No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing The system here is going to be something like LoC or tickets answered, things that are objective and easy to measure. We know these don't reflect real productivity, but because they are objective, that's what will be used in promotion and firing decisions. Anything subjective, even if it's the opinions of peers or experts, will be contestable in due process hearings, creating risk for the employer, and will be deemphasized or eliminated. One reason why the US government and European software companies are relatively uncompetitive in hiring is because of the difficulties created by due process in firing bad employees and promoting good ones.
  • araes 2y ago
    > We know these don't reflect real productivity Mild issue with this. Mostly, cause it's a one size fits all. There's a certain kind of productivity worker that actually responds relatively well to that type of metric. That vagueness results in stagnation and analysis paralysis. Those workers tend to actually respond better to what the game community almost considers the grind mindset. Give us a well defined hallway, with well defined tasks, and then we'll walk down the well defined hallway. It may not be "super creative" productivity, yet it's a "form" or "type" of productivity. Part of the issue also, is a lot of the time, people seem to always want to be the Einstein of the company, and nobody really wants to deal with the day-to-day shit. It's simply not status enough, or management visible enough, or high-level content enough, or similar.
• pc86 2y ago
  It's not "just asking for due process." Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement where they can continue getting taxpayer money for doing nothing. Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen. This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers. If I have to try to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement, not start a six month process of paperwork, meetings, and HR CYA bullshit with the sole purpose of avoiding some bogus NLRB complaint.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    I read a statistic some years ago that public school teachers have the lowest rate of firing of any profession. The union has been successful in instituting a "process" for firing a teacher that is so onerous, time consuming, and complicated that it never happens. The only way a teacher can get fired these days is for showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student. (And yes, in spite of this, there are some gems of teachers.)
    • inhumantsar 2y ago
      > showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student having worked in a school district and staying in touch with colleagues afterward, I can honestly say that most people would be surprised at the number of teachers aren't fired for misconduct like that, particularly showing up drunk or high. it seems that getting shuffled into an administrative role or a year of paid leave are the goto solutions whenever an incident can be handled quietly. back in my grade school days, there was one teacher who would routinely lose her shit and scream at people. when it inevitably escalated beyond that (usually throwing objects.. chalkboard erasers, garbage cans, even the occasional chair), she would simply end up teaching at a different school in the same district. they managed to keep that game going for over twenty years.
      • WalterBright 2y ago
        I suppose it's worse than I thought! I read that teachers are fired at a lesser rate than doctors having their medical license revoked.
• WalterBright 2y ago
  > It's just asking for due process. The problem with that is it's a subjective decision, not an objective one. In every workplace I've been in, it was obvious to everyone who the low performers were. But it's nearly impossible to prove it. Even if they could document it, it would take a year to document it, costing the company another $100,000 just to replace them.
• lodger 2y ago
  [dead]
• _bin_ 2y ago
  Except there are people who are extremely good at passive-aggressively dragging their feet specifically such that it's hard to quantify. Metrics are entirely gameable and people know this. In development, this could be the guy who always somehow grabs the easy tickets then says "Hey I closed like 3 tickets yesterday I'm performing." Or he consistently overestimates his stuff - how much time should a busy manager spend assigning everyone's story points just in case they have to build a case to fire someone later? There are also people who are technically performing but in practice but are jerks. And please don't start with "that's what HR is for" because I have never - not once - seen HR solve, or even significantly help, this sort of problem. Plus everybody hates dealing with them. Just let people fire lousy workers man. This isn't that hard. Or, employees should push for employment contracts where the commitment is reciprocal: employers promise to keep them on for a few years and they promise to stay on for a few years.