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Atlassian ditches 'brilliant jerks' in performance review overhaul
Atlassian says it will no longer tolerate "brilliant jerks" who deliver results for the company but make life hell for their co-workers as part of a complete overhaul of how the tech firm conducts performance reviews.
The $47 billion Australian software company, which was founded in Sydney in 2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.
Instead, equal weighting will be given to how each of its 3000 employees impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values. Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work”.
“Basically over the last 18 to 24 months we have totally changed the way we do performance reviews at the company globally,” Atlassian global head of talent Bek Chee said.
“We recognise things are not the way they used to be, yet companies haven’t evolved (from) 30 years ago when they were primarily made up often of white men. Tech standards have evolved, we have new ways of working, new demographics and generational change.”
Ms Chee said most companies “haven’t looked at their performance systems in a new innovative way”. “We wanted to make sure we were rewarding the right behaviours,” she said.
“One of the things we wanted to make sure we accounted for was the ‘brilliant jerk’ — people who are extremely bright and talented with respect to the way they execute their role but aren’t necessarily concerned with the impact they have on others. We want to make sure our system prevented that.”
Ms Chee said it was “not about people being shuffled out” of the company, but “what it has allowed us to do is really de-bias the performance system” by taking into account an employee’s entire contribution.
[...] Ms Chee said appealing to the millennial and gen Y and Z crowd was “a huge part of this”. “We know the next generation are very socially conscious, they have a different set of expectations. They’re kind of no-bullshit. They don’t want to hear a company say, ‘You can bring your whole self to work, we’re diverse, we’re socially conscious’, and not have that backed up.”
But she stressed that it was not about coddling millennials with a participation-trophy mentality. “Fundamentally this does not change the way we think about high performers. Our top performers we know nail it in terms of living values and being part of the team and delivering in their role,” she said.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday July 19 2019, @05:26PM (12 children)
As somebody who has managed teams before: I've met a lot of people that think they're brilliant jerks. The vast majority of the time, when I examine their code (something many of their previous managers couldn't do because they weren't coders themselves), I find that they weren't in fact brilliant and often not even competent. They had played up the image of the socially awful but technically brilliant nerd-boy and fooled non-technical people in the organization for a long time, when the real truth of the matter was that their social failings helped to cover up the fact that their work was garbage, in part because nobody wanted to deal with them long enough to look at it. And nothing upped productivity of the team faster than firing them.
And of course there are some behaviors that are completely unacceptable in the workplace, regardless of how brilliant you are. If you're stealing from customers or the company, gone, and I'm also going to be chatting with the police. If you're sexually harassing someone, you're gone. If you're banging a subordinate in exchange for professional favors, gone. Because you may be smart, but you are not irreplaceable, and I know for a fact that I can find extremely smart people who are great to work with and in some cases check off demographic boxes, rather than finding myself in court defending my firm from thoroughly justified lawsuits.
If you're having those, and the short-term solution isn't along the lines of "engage backup systems that your admins had in place for just this kind of emergency", you're doing it wrong. And please tell me your stuff went through effective QA prior to being shipped. It did, right?
Oh, and as an added bonus, because everyone on my team isn't a jerk, they understand each other's work, which means they can all help fix it (either working together at the same time, or in shifts). Meanwhile, your firm is stuck waiting for that brilliant jerk to receive (or stop ignoring) your frantic phone and text messages while they're asleep or on vacation or immersed in a game or something, because that person has successfully kept anybody else from knowing what to do.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aiwarrior on Friday July 19 2019, @05:50PM (7 children)
I think some of the examples you gave go way beyond being a jerk and straight into criminal behavior. I think for that cases the law will apply and the firm will follow the law first and foremost.
Regarding the other aspects of your reasoning, I think you do not quite grasp the difficulty of finding very niche and specialized developer persons. The leaving of such persons can destroy whole businesses, because it will take years to get somebody knowledgeable about a custom SOC developed for you. You may want to get a backup very hard and you search you search, yet you do not find, or it's not worth compared to the jerk's babysitter. In the end you get what you have and pray to hell he-she does not leave. It actually becomes the role of the manager to make sure that this jerk can be productive. It's not pretty but as I said the bottom line trumps idealism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @06:05PM (1 child)
Sure there are some positions where the person's knowledge is almost irreplaceable, but those are few and far between. I think the general no-asshole rule is a solid plan that will hopefully help some of them get over themselves. I would imagine that a semi-competent manager would not fire an employee who is pivotal to the business.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @06:13PM
Cases like that, you've allowed the bus factor to drop too low anyways. What happens if this individual is hit by a bus? Jerk or not, if they're truly irreplaceable, then you've got a massive problem. People who aren't jerks prematurely keel over from a heart attack every day. If they're the true engine of the company's growth, you're screwed.
The usual problem with brilliant jerks is that the business environment tolerates or encourages bad behavior. Align the rewards in a way that encourages better behavior and you'll likely see the worst behavior become less common. Most bad behavior at the office is the result of either not knowing what proper behavior looks like or having bad behavior be encouraged. Individuals that are genuinely brilliant jerks usually have the knowledge and work ethic to be amazing, however, they might need to be handled differently from other employees and they may require more space to keep the disruptions to a minimum. Most of the time, the behavior isn't the real problem, the real problem is how and when they're allowed to interact with other employees.
Simply not hiring them may not be a viable strategy, particularly if you're in a competitive field.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday July 19 2019, @07:50PM (2 children)
That's because I consider such specialists made, not born.
Consider two managers trying to get something built for the Whizbang Embedded 3750.
A. Smith says to their company's HR department, who in turn says to their favorite headhunters, "We need a Whizbang Embedded 3750 developer. Ideally about 5 years of experience." Months go by. The headhunters aren't having much luck finding anyone locally, so now they're trying to fly people in and relocate them, but nobody really wants to move to Peoria just to work on this project. More months go by. You finally find one, but they're asking for $350K a year and seem like a real jerk, but you're out of options and they know it. You give them their task, and they produce a solution which only they understand because they're the only Whizbang Embedded 3750 developer on your staff and they're too mean to teach any of your other employees how it works. Things go swimmingly in testing, and you find you need to keep this jerk around to fix the problems that keep coming up. You're now stuck with a jerk in your company, a solution that only 1 person can fix or work on, and Smith is effectively held hostage by this 1 developer for the rest of their career.
B. Jones pokes around his company, finds 3 of the smartest and non-jerk developers they can, bumps them up to $100K each if they aren't pulling that already, people who are sick and tired of just shovelling data in and out of SAP and such, and says "This is a Whizbang Embedded 3750. I need it to do X. Now, I realize you haven't worked on this before, but here's a copy of the manual for Whizbang Embedded Assembler, and some resources on how to make C work with it, now see what you can make happen." Or, if there's a concern about redirecting said developers, they tell their HR department "We need to hire some good developers. I don't care about the keywords or specific languages, I just need about 5 years experience and a track-record of success." And then you give the new folks the same task. If need be, send them off to training to get them certified so you can check off the right bureaucratic checkbox. Things go swimmingly in testing, but collectively the Whizbang Embedded team muddles through, and by the time they're done there's now 3 people in your company who understand your solution, and are much more invested in the Whizbang Embedded project than what they were doing because business applications are boring, and Jones now has a team of very happy and loyal employees who are excited to work on the next project, whatever it is.
I'd much rather be Jones than Smith in that situation. Sure, it doesn't always work. There are no guarantees. But I'm firmly of the school of thought that says that nothing at all is gained by bowing before a jerk in a company, regardless of the position they're in.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @09:24PM (1 child)
"Jones, you can't have them. Their current manager won't let them off the SAP shoveling project, and he resents you trying to poach his employees. Train them, are you nuts? That skill is so in demand right now, they'll just take off as soon as they get the chance. Maybe you should see if you can find some guy on the open market in Peoria, someone who has a reason for being here already?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Friday July 19 2019, @11:05PM
In other words "the SAP shovelling project is SO IMPORTANT that we need to put the future of the company on a single and unstable point of failure instead."
And
means "we're such a crap company to work for they'll leave first chance they get."
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Friday July 19 2019, @10:57PM
Ftfy.
Any business without a succession plan for EVERY* position is mismanaged enough that it will fail anyway.
*For many positions "advertise for a replacement" is sufficient; for a few positions "arrange for understudies BEFORE production" is needed.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 19 2019, @11:48PM
I think that is kinda naive. Just one extremely high profile, very public example of a company NOT following the law? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/charter-gets-final-approval-to-stay-in-ny-despite-breaking-merger-promise/ [arstechnica.com]
Somewhat less recent, but even higher profile, was the banking meltdown with the housing bubble.
What we can assume, is that the firm will follow what they believe to be the most profitable course of action. Nothing more, and nothing less.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @10:23PM (1 child)
Then on top of that. Why would you want a 'brilliant jerk'. A 'brilliant jerk' will build a moat and suddenly bemoan to anyone near them how they are indispensable. Then berate anyone around them for not following their made up rules that no one else gets a say in.
You do not want jerks around. What you want is a 'brilliant nice guy'. Someone who is decent maybe even fun to be around. Helps others and makes sure everything is going better and faster. THAT is the kind of person you want. I have known maybe 2-3 total guys like that ever in my 25+ years. The 'brilliant jerks' a pox on them. They destroyed any teams that were near them.
I am currently in the 'indispensable' position. I am making sure *everyone* on my team knows how this shit works. ASAP. I do not like getting calls in the middle of the night. No one does. Misunderstandings cause most outages. Fix that, and pager duty is a big yawn. After last sundays outage (which caused no real damage). Monday morning was a whole heaping helping of making sure everyone is onboard with the 'you ignored this long enough', including you tech support. I did not mean to do it. It happened by accident though attrition. Which was a wiff on my part and my managers. I am fixing that. My goal at my job is to make sure everyone else can do my job. I *want* to be dispensable. I can then leave this job and not think about it again at some point. I made the point very clear at the start of the meeting 'what if I quit right now what would you do?'. The looks on the managers faces was enough for them to back me up very quickly on my quest for dispensablity.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 19 2019, @11:58PM
That, exactly. Those people who seem to like being indispensable probably don't have a life, and their existence revolves around the faux position they have created within the company. For my own part, whatever I might be doing on my personal time is at least as important, and almost always more important, than running in to work to fix some screw up. That became even more true when the company moved, doubling my travel distance to work. To be called in takes a minimum four hour bite out of my personal time. Don't call me, call anyone who lives closer, who can perform the same tasks, and only lose an hour or two out of their personal time!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bobthecimmerian on Friday July 19 2019, @11:28PM
Thank you. To add two points:
1. If your genius engineer makes something only they can understand, maintain, and fix, then they're actually not a genius. It takes more intelligence and more skill to build something that less intelligent people can understand and safely modify.
2. People skills are not less important than raw technical skills. The most productive engineer I've ever worked with is only very good at writing code, his superpower is negotiating clear specs with management and external customers. So 90% of the time he builds something, it's exactly what everyone expected. We have other people in the organization that can write code blisteringly fast - and then they have to tear it apart blisteringly fast, and start over blisteringly fast, because they misunderstood key aspects of what was needed and their whole target feature set was something nobody wanted. And then they deliver something that is different, but still wrong. We had our 'best' engineer spend two years building something nobody in our industry would buy.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday July 20 2019, @02:56PM
The other thing I've run into with brilliant jerks is that some of them are entirely ego driven. So yes, they may be very smart and have considerable technical knowledge, but their ego is always getting in the way. Someone may propose a solution, and it's the right thing to do and they know it, but they have to propose and push for something else because their inflated ego demands that the solution must their solution, and not just agree with what someone else proposes. In a decision making capacity, they'll can be quite contrarian - team proposes X, they'll say we're doing Y. Team proposes Y, they'll say we're doing X. Because their ego is more important that doing the right thing.
Ask them a question they doing know the answer to, and their ego demands that they must have an answer so they'll just blurt something out. They won't say "I don't know, let me find out for you" or "Let me think about it and get back to you" or "Person X would be a good person to ask". Of course, once they've done that, their ego won't let them go back and change their what they said, so they'll just dig their heels in and argue with anyone who tries to correct them.
This all really makes these kind of people really hard to work with, especially since they tend to take a view that anyone who doesn't agree with them as a personal attack. It's a bit of a shame because they can be brilliant, and quite often they can be completely correct, but it's the times where they are dead wrong but their ego can't and won't admit it and move on is where they do all the damage.