I don't want to speak for LL on this, but IMO, there is no "win" in the situation he describes. The more he gets involved, the more he loses face, standing, political clout, and so on. The "winning" strategy is do nothing.

The peer reviews from what I understand are meant to be read by the manager and the manager has to be the one who summarizes all of them and gives it to the person as constructive feedback. So yea I’m not going to blow of steam but rather take an approach of “what could this person do better”. I just have to be careful with my words and how I write it.

I'm having difficulty understanding the peer review now.

Is this just some exercise you all do once every month for whoever is in the hot seat?

Is this the first time you've done this, and the Sr dev is first-up?

I did so many things previously to this campaign to try and get this employee both the support they said they needed and their attitude improved. It had been a long term situation (12+ months).

You may be right, the correct answer is probably that there are times to do the campaign, and times when you should just walk away.

I am definitely going to be much more careful of when I choose the first though.

It worked on my dad there at least once.

In his view, and risk-tolerance, he saw taking a new position and everything that comes with it as difficult to justify compared to staying in the exact same role for the same amount.

He of course didn't love the idea he had been working for less than he should, but I mean you are working for Larry's company so I feel like expecting anything less would be delusional. This is the company that frequently sues their customers for outstanding payments for non-functioning software, and their own sales people after finding ridiculous reasons to not pay them compensation.

If there is a single company on earth to not take it personal and just understand it is part of the company's cut-throat profit-driven mentality, it is that one.

Programming wise it was just too boring. I'd take the new gig every time.

Also thank you for confirming you are not THAT Larry. I was getting suspicious

It’s funny, I’ve heard the exact opposite rule more often now. Coming with a competing offer is the one time you have no chance of getting a raise / comp increase.

Probably both rules are dumb in the absolute. But I lean more towards just letting someone go (positively) if they have a better offer elsewhere. Assuming that you’re being proactive and fair with their career development and compensation.

I've never heard if this. In most big tech companies a counter offer is the only way to get a significant pay increase. I recently got a counter offer and stayed. They matched my very good external offers and gave another promotion (approx 50% raise in yearly comp). No way I'm every getting close to that without a counter.

I think I'd be too suspicious to take the offer. I feel like they'd be looking for your replacement once they found out you'd intended to leave. But that's probably just my own paranoia.

Nah. Not worried that since 1/4 if the people don't even do anything at the company and I have so much domain knowledge working built in the area I'm working (which still has years of work left to do). It also seems strange they would give me such a generous stock bonus (vesting over 4 years) if they wanted to replace me.

It’s every 6 months as part of our performance reviews. You choose up to 15 of your peers to review you. And that senior dev selected me as a reviewer.

Hah I would think that with vest, they just figure out a way to replace you before the vesting occurs.

If they could hire someone as good as him, they would have done so already.

I don’t think this is true for ‘most’. But like most things we talk about here hard to know since we each have our own little slice of experience.

There are pretty obvious problems with only giving people meaningful raises after they’ve tried to leave.

They didn't need to, they already have him, plus he'd been willing to accept 2/3 wages until he went looking for another job.

Now they have an incentive to look for his replacement - possibly someone who they can reset the salary back to the previous level

Also, he's demonstrated an interest in other jobs. They have temporarily wooed him back, but if he might still jump ship (esp using his new salary as a bargaining chip for a new job) then they'll need his replacement.

I don't know **** about managing people, but I kinda think in similar conditions I'd think, at the very least, I need a backup for this guy, maybe a replacement.

My head is spinning thinking about the political dynamics of this one.

It's kind of confusing. You have a Sr dev who shows no signs that she is a Sr dev, yet managed to keep her job for more than a few weeks (I know that many Sr devs suck, but talking idealistically here), and now they let her stack this to her advantage.

The conflict is that you either have to defend the company from a waste of space, or you have to continue along as if there is nothing to see here, all while under the knowledge that she knows exactly who is leaving feedback.

Once again, this is just bad management through and through, and it comes down to your personal ethics on how you decide to respond. Personally, I default to protecting the company and making it better, but at the same time, it's not my job to decide the future of an employee. If your manager has even minimal interaction with the crew and their code, he is aware there are issues. I would just tell the manager they need to keep a closer eye on her and leave it at that. It's up to him to decide if she needs more training and mentoring, a downgrade in position, etc.

On the other hand, the company he was jumping ship to is possibly a competitor, and if they really cared, they would given him an offer he couldn't refuse and / or an offer his current job wouldn't match. In this case, the other company had no problems sticking their competitor with a higher price tag to keep him around.

I agree it's a bad practice but these big companies are restricted by beauracracy and inefficiency. The way budgets are done, there is a much larger slice of the pie allocated to new hires compared to retention.

The market in the bay area is so hot/on bubble right now that companies don't have time to worry about proactively replacing people that *might leave, when they can't even manage to replace people that actually leave. For example the only remaining principal level guy in our team left recently for Netflix. So it's a good environment right now. Obviously this might be a different story during a recession.

I don’t think this is true of most big tech companies either.

This is poor strategy (and why I don’t think it’s as common as you think it is). Retaining a person is WAY easier than replacing a person that leaves. And it’s not at all hard (relatively) to make sure people are compensated appropriately.

And in implementation it can be even easier to retain than hire because you can often have direct influence on how your reports are being compensated while for hiring someone new you have to deal with a totally different recruiting team (with sometimes poorly aligned incentives).

The crazy tech job market is a big incentive to be proactive and ensure your good people aren’t going to be poached.

Just re-read and realized I totally missed the context in my previously reply.

I’m considered a junior dev so no way I am going to stick my neck out and call out that this senior dev as being lackluster. Also what if my assessment is wrong? I’ll look like an a-hole if so.

Anyways, this person started in September, so I’ll give them a benefit of the doubt. It could be that this person ramps up at a slower pace but will perform at a senior level when the time comes. Also I’ll admit that we don’t have a Netflix or Amazon culture where engineer standards are high and we Fire underperformers quick. So if it does turn out this person is underperforming, I imagine that they will be here for a while. Though I’m basing this off of nothing.

This is a reasonable position, which is why I gave my original advice on giving her a 5-star + excellence.

Oh well, lesson learned, life goes on, you'll be a better man in your 30s, making mistakes is part of life, deal with it, forget it, move on, etc etc etc.

I've never ever had a good coworker or employee who didn't know how to to type well and didn't know how to use their tools effectively. I've had a few slow typists, but they could use their tools very well.

Disregarding the fact that they display absolutely zero interest in learning the fundamental of their work (typing and using an IDE is fundamental), people who struggle with the fundamentals struggle with deleting and editing their work.

They put so many hours and brain-thought into getting something (anything) done, that once they are done, they are wholly committed to keeping it that way. A person who is solid on their fundamental will rewrite an email 50 times to get it perfect, redo a bad page of work, will say "**** it" and delete an entire day's of work because they didn't have to commit so much mental and physical energy into it, they have incredibly high standards, and they know damn well they can do more work in one day than another person can do in a week. The effort is focused on the output, not on the input. When the struggle is at typing, using tools, and so on, the output is secondary.

While a Sr programmer who can't type, can't use an IDE, can't understand code, and needs a 6 month ramp up is a "strong indicator," you are correct, it doesn't mean she's incapable of doing her job.

Rusty + all other lefty guitarist:



I own a Washburn. They are amazing.

WTF did they switch players midway through? From about 1:27 on it sounds like a right handed guitarist trying to play a left handed guitar. Or possibly he's just faking it on the first half of the video (which seems likely because it sounds like 2-3 overdubs)

I'm sure it's nice but it's not really my thing

He's a right-handed guitarist, and considered one of the best metal guitarists in the world.

You can see him struggle, especially with picking technique and the fact that he's playing single notes at the beginning, but it keeps going downhill. Knowing / hoping that was bound to go horribly wrong just makes it all the more funny.

Maybe a joke that needs to be explained isn't funny at all. I guess outside of context, it isn't nearly as funny as I thought it was.