It’s more that it takes so long to get anything done, the effort and results need to be recorded because it most often won’t be obvious from the impact. It’s hard to make a splash on a production system maintained by 30 other people, but you can usually make things better, but it won’t always be obvious.
I guess they don’t know how or don’t bother to evaluate people on what they actually contribute? Just number of meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
Meetings by themselves are worthless. Similar to how having an idea for something isn't intrinsically valuable. I argue, meetings can't be actual contributions because the real state, the code/hardware/etc, of your project hasn't change. The result of the meeting, what people actually do afterwards due to what was discussed, is all that matters. In which case, it isn't the meeting that was the contribution, it was the artifacts that were created afterwards (documents, jira project tasks, code, etc) that are the contribution.
When we view meetings as actual contribution, we're really just valuing people doing effectively nothing. For example, anyone who's job is just to take meetings, and nothing else, is worthless IMO. You need to tangibly create something afterwards. This is a problem with big tech (which the company I work for is one of), it rewards people shuffling papers around, especially senior+ engineers, instead of valuing real work they should be doing.
Senior+ engineers have also deluded themselves into thinking that they shouldn't be coding, and rather their real work is creating endless amount of superfluous documents and creating as many cross team meetings as possible, rather than doing the hard work of creating an actual product.
Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B. Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit really mean?
Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare *that*.
200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.
People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.
> People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you.
Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it. Not without flaws, of course, but preferable to chasing a made-up metric. It's arguably the entire point of a manager, to know what their employees are doing at a high level. We managed to do this for hundreds of years without needing shiny dashboards and counting every meeting attended.
Metrics have their place as well, of course, but they should be one data point, and should not be chased after so religiously that recording the metrics becomes significant work on its own.
>Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it
"My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?"
"My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
"My manager keeps hiring only people of their race and playing favorites with them, what do I do?"
"Coworker X gave me a bad review because I wouldn't go on a date with them"
Even in the best case it biases heavily towards the people most enthusiastic about selling an image of themselves rather than those who are necessarily contributing.
Relying on someone's perception/vouching for you rather than performance metrics can be an absolute disaster - for the people involved and for the company if it turns into a lawsuit.
> My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
There may be legitimate cases but if someone runs into these issues often, may be its just excuses for bad performance. If the issue is genuine, find out what your specific organization can do about the situation and resolve it within that framework or find a better manager.
No amount of metrics are gonna help if you are going against a hostile manager, team or leadership.
These are all pretty extreme cases that apply if your managers/coworkers are horrible people. Most people are thankfully, as a rule, pretty normal.
Obviously discrimination exists, which is why metrics should still be used (as data points) and why larger companies need an oversight process.
Turning ourselves into automatons, promoting and praising people exclusively based on some arbitrary set of numbers, just to try and make it fairer, won't lead to a happier or genuinely fairer workplace. At the end of the day, most jobs relevant to HN are complicated and explicitly involve a lot of human interaction. You need humans to judge performance in human-interaction jobs.
Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them.
"What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.
"What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful griping.
Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them.
"All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.
My whole point here is that "doing whatever bullshit makes you feel good" is not necessarily the better option. Either you can prove that it's worth something, in which case you will not have to ask "What's your proposal?" because people won't complain about it, or you're just doing something for the sake of doing something, and your only recourse when people show you that it's bullshit is to get defensive.
> If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave.
And if you don't identify good performers properly and don't reward them, they will leave as well.
A pragmatic approach is to reward your team, as a team. If you go with "we fire the lowest 10% every year because there have to be low performers", you're creating an adversarial situation. Wanna know what happens if you're my manager in an adversarial context? Easy: I will be an adversary. How constructive is that? Not my problem, I did not make the rules.
> One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare that.
Try to assign money/revenue/PR to that and you'll have decent proxy for impact.
Again: what money is attributable to each feature? Are subscriptions up 2% because of the new payment flow or because it's tax refund season? Are they down because of the new UI or because of tariffs? It's not realistic to tell them apart most of the time.
Keeping track of actual value would require actually rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really care about how often you're on time or your meeting attendance record.
Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism.
Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?
Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!
I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
Agreed. There's the additional point that I think many people don't appreciate, which is that those managers and many people lower down in the org chart merely exist because somebody else needs to be responsible for a system or a liability regardless of whether they do anything measurably profitable, and aren't necessarily incentivized to do anything more productively; they're just there to take care of it or be blamed if it's not, and have a low ceiling for what that job can possibly be worth with no measurable way to argue for more, and so in the case of managers, try to invent clout-generators at any cost and with no connection to how the assignees might accomplish it.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
Suppose you have a thousand engineers and those thousand engineers generate ten billion dollars in annual profit. How much do they each get paid? They amount they're worth? Nope, the amount they'll accept.
If you live in the US and you have the wherewithal to be an engineer then you could also have been a doctor or a lawyer or some other high paying occupation. And many of those can't be fully remote because they have to see domestic patients or interact in person with local courts or clients. Which means that if you want someone in the US to be your engineer, you need to pay them an amount that makes them want to do that instead of choosing one of those other occupations. Whereas the one in Taiwan doesn't have the option to become a doctor in San Francisco and is therefore willing to accept less money.
So why don't companies just hire exclusively the people in Taiwan? There are all the usual reasons (time zones, language barriers, etc.), but a big one is that they need a thousand engineers. So they and their competitors hire every qualified engineer in Taiwan until Taiwanese engineers reach full employment, at which point the companies still don't have all the engineers they want. And when the average engineer is making the company ten million dollars, paying San Francisco salaries is better than not having enough talent.
So then why doesn't every smart person in Taiwan become an engineer? Because the companies hiring engineers there are only paying Taiwanese wages, and then they're not any better off to do that than to become a doctor or a lawyer in Taiwan. And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers, and then you would only get a modest increase in the number of engineers for a significant increase in compensation. Which is still what happens, but only slowly over time, until the wages in Taiwan ultimately increase enough to no longer be a competitive advantage. And companies don't want to make that happen faster because then they'd have to pay higher salaries in Taiwan.
Not everyone who can be an engineer can also become a doctor or a lawyer. Different requirements and tolls on your mind and work style that aren't interchangeable for everyone.
There are two reasons that doesn't matter. The first is that it's untrue more often than not; plenty of people could do both. And the second is that "doctors and lawyers" are just arbitrary stand ins for high paying domestic jobs. They could also become physicists, commercial airline pilots, Wall St. quants, actuaries, etc.
Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in the world for white collar professions, what other new information do you have that we don't already know?
There is a significant correlation between higher scores on one and higher scores on the other.
> Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
The barrier to either of those professions is getting good grades and then scoring well enough on a standardized test, and the entire premise is that the professions pay well which is how people pay back the loans.
> Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the sight of corpses or diseases.
Which only applies to a minority of people, and even that minority of people could still become an orthodontist. Likewise, if your SAT scores are 800 math and 450 verbal then that's quite uncommon and you probably shouldn't try to be a lawyer but you could still be a quant, and if you have certain medical conditions then you can't be a commercial airline pilot but you could still be a dermatologist.
It doesn't matter if every individual engineer has every individual option available to them when the overwhelming majority of engineers have a significant variety of alternatives.
> There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.
There is way more to performing in <anything> than <any individual thing>. But we use these things as proxies because they're designed and intended to be proxies and they're the thing for which data is available if data is the thing you want to inspect.
On your original post, you said they pay lower in other places because they can, which I agree with, of course companies will pay as little as they can, because margin on labor is the key profit margin that enables capitalism to function. But I disagree that this is due to efficient markets. Instead I believe it's because corporations can be sociopathic, whereas humans are humans, and come with feelings and flaws. A corporation can for example leverage the human desire for being a part of something larger, or local culture social pressure, to extract more hours of work out of someone than they're contractually obligated to give (see for example Japan or Taiwan working culture). Corporations are immune to these sorts of things so it's a one way, non-market-based street of exploitative behavior. Furthermore of course is the fact that corporations weild far more capital and thus power than individual workers, and will often collude with governments to prevent worker collective bargaining.
Furthermore, I believe your idea applies too much autonomy and collaboration between corporations. Example:
> . And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers
This seems to suggest that companies are colluding to prevent macroeconomic effects such as wage inflation. It's post ipso facto explanation, kind of like when make presumptions with evolutionary sociology: "ADHD people served an important role as guarding early human settlements. Their heightened deep focus and obsession with finding details in noise made them ideal to scan the horizon at night." Assuming evolution is an intelligent designer that made different sorts of humans for serving distinct purposes, rather than the reality that we have different sorts of humans because of entropy, and humans happen to be sentient and can leverage these sorts of diverse manifestations to their advantage sometimes - or perhaps, our society just was built in a way that reflects the reality of different sorts of people existing, either way, thus you have people misattributing purpose to chance.
I feel the same when I hear people make market-based justifications for some economic reality like geographic labor cost diversion. My confusion isn't around why it happens, it's why laborers tolerate it. The Invisible Hand of The Market isn't setting labor rates because it needs to maintain cross-role equilibrium between well defined roles, labor rates are simply, as low as a company can get away with.
Markets aren't efficient. A doctor in Taiwan must study for ten years longer than an engineer, in the USA the same is true but also the doctor must take on potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. In medical school a student must sacrifice both their mental health and social life and dedicate themselves entirely to completing the curriculum. If they fail they're saddled with debt they have no hope of paying (in the USA, Taiwan not so much), and even still, many fail. Then there's residency. Then in the USA you get a relatively high paid job, but also depending on your role, one of the highest stress, highest legal-exposure, highest-stakes jobs on the market. In Taiwan, same, except, the pay isn't even that good! And in the USA, because of the debt and the timeline before productivity, you'd be far better off simply immediately becoming a software engineer out of college and leveraging compound interest to come out at worst at retirement the same place the doctor does. In Taiwan, in the end the engineer will always come out ahead, and have a social life to boot.
In an efficient market, nobody would ever become a doctor. It's not like people determine whether to go through the hell of medical school based on whether they'd make more as an engineer, monitoring shifting salaries year on year as they come up through highschool.
The vast majority of people aren't making their career choice based on compensation. Compensation plays a role, but the vast majority are making choices based on interest, local availability, local culture, their personal experience (people who were strongly affected by a good teacher or therapist are more likely to become a teacher or therapist), and of course their personal capabilities. This is the sort of thing that's irrelevant to a corporation, and an efficient market hypothesis can't account for.
The market is skewed to protect profits since the market, analyzed in aggregate, represents the will of corporations to extract profit against the sloppiness of humans who are motivated by things other than money, and are also sometimes stupid and irrational, and often at a severe information disadvantage. Furthermore sometimes stupid people run corporations so the corps will behave irrationally rather than sociopathically profit driven like they're supposed to.
Rates are lower in Taiwan because it was basically a third world country living under military dictatorship 40 years ago where a ruling class was an invading military force that took land by force and then stumbled upon incredible profits by turning Taiwan into the chip manufacturing hub for the world. The amount of wealth flowing into Taiwan is astonishing but it's mostly captured by a small subset of chip industry founders, mostly all older than 50, and most of whom have some familial connection to the KMT that let them get government protection as well as having the capital to set up things like foundries. The little these companies pay out to their workers is recaptured by the same class, who own something like 80% of the land in Taiwan, in the form of rent or selling property at outrageously inflated rates.
So, wealth has clumped, and so has power, and so when google sets up an office in Taipei, they find out that engineers there get paid 30k to do a job an sf engineer would do for 120k, so they pay 30k. Or maybe 35 to get the really really good ones. Hell that might be why Google showed up at all.
One final aspect: Google can take advantage of geographic arbitrage, but an individual taiwanese engineer can't, because things like borders, visas, cost of moving, mental toll of leaving behind home, and familial responsibilities don't exist for Google, but they do for the Taiwanese engineer.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan, because of time zones.
I know some of them do this, but ours doesn't. There is a once yearly self-review, and as far as I can tell it has literally no impact on your actual performance review and compensation, which are basically entirely up to your manager's observations of you.
So it is important to keep your manager informally up to date on what you're doing, at least during the weeks they're thinking about performance.
