In this post, I stand unabashedly against stack ranking. Evaluate how employees perform, not how they compare. Is this really controversial? If you assign to teams or divisions a fixed budget for bonuses, promotions or stocks, you create de facto a zero-sum game. You need losers to have winners. From that point, you can make […]
All posts categorized in: Engineering Culture
IndeedEng Culture: Encourage Autonomy, Measure Impact
In the previous post, I wrote about innovation and consolidation and the importance of balancing the two. In this post, I write about how Indeed fosters initiative through autonomy. Most compensation systems reward for business impact Engineers get better bonuses when their impact on the business is greater. Fair, right? No, it is not. Engineers […]
IndeedEng Culture: Balance Innovation and Consolidation
In a previous post, I described the importance of keeping teams independent. Is there a downside to this approach? One drawback of fostering independent teams is that the product can look inconsistent or even somewhat messy to the end-user. It does not necessarily mean the product or feature will be of poor quality, but it […]