<story><title>Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?</title><url>http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tensafefrogs</author><text>No, Google uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system to track performance. You set goals with measurable results, and you grade them every quarter.&lt;p&gt;That way you aren&amp;#x27;t evaluated so much on when&amp;#x2F;how you work, but on what you accomplish.&lt;p&gt;(I should also include a note here about how you are evaluated by your peers at Google, which has its own set of benefits and downsides, but OKRs are meant to be a somewhat objective measure of output)</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>FWIW, Google tried to avoid this scenario with &amp;#x27;snippets&amp;#x27; which everyone was supposed to do every day. Basically you posted a snippet of what you were thinking about &amp;#x2F; working on that day which gave folks evaluating you some idea of what was going on in your head at any given time. (note that snippets were world readable)&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, when I was there, there wasn&amp;#x27;t a lot of protection from the conflict created by your snippets, so if you wrote &amp;quot;tried again to convince team X to let me fix their code, they brought up objection a, b, c. Still no clarity from them on what they really want.&amp;quot; In your snippet it would make Team X look bad, and at some point it could come back to them that you were bitching about them in your snippets (even if you were doing what you were told to do) and then they would counter-attack in their snippets, and a little sub-surface adhominem would go on for a while. Moderating your snippets made you look non-productive. It was an epic failure in leadership.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>Gaming &amp;quot;Objectives and Key Results&amp;quot; type evaluations is far older than Google. It&amp;#x27;s not remotely an objective measure unless you have an organization that has &lt;i&gt;extensive&lt;/i&gt; knowledge of how to accurately assess effort based on set objectives.&lt;p&gt;From what I&amp;#x27;ve seen, many organizations that try to formalize evaluations this way are easier to game, because the very idea that there are somewhat reliable metrics makes it easier to justify not following up as closely.&lt;p&gt;(I&amp;#x27;m not saying it &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; happen, but I&amp;#x27;ve seen it far more often than I care to; including once having a manager that didn&amp;#x27;t even inquire about what my team had done lately for &lt;i&gt;three years&lt;/i&gt; - I didn&amp;#x27;t mind, I delivered what I should to other parts of the business, but he should have: he had no effective oversight over a team officially reporting to him that handled tens of millions in revenue; if I &lt;i&gt;had&lt;/i&gt; messed up, his head would&amp;#x27;ve been on the chopping block next to mine)</text></comment>
<story><title>Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?</title><url>http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tensafefrogs</author><text>No, Google uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system to track performance. You set goals with measurable results, and you grade them every quarter.&lt;p&gt;That way you aren&amp;#x27;t evaluated so much on when&amp;#x2F;how you work, but on what you accomplish.&lt;p&gt;(I should also include a note here about how you are evaluated by your peers at Google, which has its own set of benefits and downsides, but OKRs are meant to be a somewhat objective measure of output)</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>FWIW, Google tried to avoid this scenario with &amp;#x27;snippets&amp;#x27; which everyone was supposed to do every day. Basically you posted a snippet of what you were thinking about &amp;#x2F; working on that day which gave folks evaluating you some idea of what was going on in your head at any given time. (note that snippets were world readable)&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, when I was there, there wasn&amp;#x27;t a lot of protection from the conflict created by your snippets, so if you wrote &amp;quot;tried again to convince team X to let me fix their code, they brought up objection a, b, c. Still no clarity from them on what they really want.&amp;quot; In your snippet it would make Team X look bad, and at some point it could come back to them that you were bitching about them in your snippets (even if you were doing what you were told to do) and then they would counter-attack in their snippets, and a little sub-surface adhominem would go on for a while. Moderating your snippets made you look non-productive. It was an epic failure in leadership.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>Everything about your post is correct except the &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot;. Googlers have both OKRs and snippets.</text></comment>