So I found out that I have a great boss. (whatever)
submitted by totes_magotes to whatever 2.7 years ago
35 comments
TL;DR: My is primed to fuck top level execs up if they pull shit again at end of year bonus reviews (which is a main perk of the employer).
My boss has regular meetings with top execs to discuss our team's performance metrics. To summarize our team: We work on the company's flagship product so we are *always* in the direct eye of top level execs. They scrutinize our performance and results every fuckin' day. Work on the flagship product can't be off-shored for legal and security reasons and it's in a niche but core technology (WPF, VB6 with managed COM wrappers so the new tech in .Net can talk to the old tech in VB6 and the reverse) so the difficulty level is insane. Not just anyone can do it but those who can and can cut it have insane job security.
Two days ago, he had one such meeting. He then offered anyone on the team to meet and discuss our performance as a kind of impromptu evaluation. I took him up on that offer.
The short of my performance, because I wanna toot my own whistle a little here, is that my work efficiency is 206%. During the highlight time period (slated at 120 hours time span - so basically a month), I took on 250 hours worth of work and completed it in about 53ish hours) with a 100% completion rate. To break this into a single example, a lot of work I took on was slated to take 16 work hours per task to complete but I was finishing it in like 2 hours. I've mentioned this disparity to him in the past and it's not a problem of grooming estimates because it's what we all agree on. I'm just managing to prioritize and work tasks in tandem because of similarity and other processes which allow me to eliminate nearly all wait times (code reviews, build success, and so on).
For comparison, at this same time last year, my work efficiency was around 40% largely due to a lack of mastery on an insanely large codebase with a lot of legacy code. Increasing familiarity with WPF, the codebase, and generally finding my grove has changed my performance levels. To drive the point home, software development is a thinking job. You can only think so fast and you can only do it for so many hours per day before you get so mentally exhausted you have difficulty even finding the right words in a conversation near the end of the day.
Although he tried to hide the metrics of other team members, the screen share technology glitched and I saw metrics for everyone else on the team. He doesn't know this because all he saw was his window resizing and text resizing. I rank in the top three in the team, likely the entire company (I got to see summary stats on other teams and they weren't even close to us). Some of these people have been with the company 20+ years so these guys don't even have to think or do much analysis when it comes to making code changes whereas newer people can expect to spend a day or two on analysis and research before writing a single line of code.
Now that the background is set up, the meat and potatoes:
Last year, execs announced changes to our annual bonus incentives. No longer would there be a flat 10% bonus. If you were in a "senior" level, you stayed at your 10% (that includes me) and a new lower tier bumped down to 4%. A new 35% tier was introduced for those who "exceeded expectations." To put this in perspective, most of us make 6 figures. If we take a flat amount of $100K per year, that's $35,000 bonus for exceeding expectations. No matter how much you make, that's a life changing amount.
Also last year, there was someone in HR who said "No, your team can't all be meeting or exceeding expectations. You need to curve your stats to something like 20-60-20" where it's 20% needs improvement, 60% meets expectations, 20% exceeds. In other words, they demanded that he lie about performance in order to fuck his employees out of hard earned money.
My boss went off on execs over this so hard that they had to actually pull him out of the meeting and calm him down. The problem is that he inherited the metrics tracking system that previous management of the team had so he didn't have details to back up his objections other than just a couple of columns in a spreadsheet. It's now insanely detailed.
Although he wasn't able to change the decision of the execs on that last year, he did manage to get that HR fool and her assistant fired. They didn't even try to make excuses to keep her. The bonuses went out and they dumped her ass on the curb.
So he spent 3 months of the last year creating a highly detailed metrics system that tracks details including team workload as a percent of capacity, how fucked we were when story grooming (task approval and details) were fucking us, if we were affected by other teams fucking up the repo (the source library for our code for you non-tech types and if they fuck it up it fucks all of us because we're working from the same codebase). Basically the math is there and links to our official task history and the hours we spent on things. He now has the ammunition to show that we do better work, more work when we're left alone, assigned work under our capacity, allowed to voluntarily take on more work, and not fucked with. I have a feeling that with these statistics that we'll have plenty of reason to slow down work if they try to fuck us on bonuses again which I will absolutely do. Again, for reference, our work sprints are two weeks and I regularly finish all of my sprint work within the first two days.
Oh, and just because, they're not even trying to get us to come back into office. They're spending $10,000 per month on our office building and instead of insisting that we come back in, they're talking about ways to try to make money from the office space. So it looks like I have a permanent work from home job so hell yeah.
