https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15660759
At Sun, during the dark days of Solaris, when everyone was depressed and wanted to quit, our manager sat down with each of us and asked: "I want to know your happiness index, a number from 1 to 10. You can use any algorithm you want to come up with it, just use the same algorithm each time so we can track how it changes over time."
I had a BS degree in Computer Science, but I was never taught an algorithm for calculating my happiness index, not even in my Artificial Intelligence class. So I had to wing it.
To protest, one of my cow-orkers made "rpc.happyd", a Sun RPC server whose function it was to track the happiness index of the team members over the network, and "HappyTool", a graphical user interface to rpc.happyd which drew a face for each team member, with a slider under your own face for adjusting the face from happy to sad.
Here's a demo of the HyperNeWS version of HappyTool, which I wrote in NeWS PostScript, and which lets you copy an encapsulated PostScript happy face to the clipboard that you can paste into other HyperNeWS applications (like pasting into the customizable clock face to make happy and sad clocks):
My experience has been if you voice displeasure it will be reflected in your performance review.
I had a role on a team once, I was doing great, getting work done and all my coworkers enjoyed working with me. Got along well with the team lead etc. However I was grossly mislead as to what the role was. I finally decided to talk to my manager about my displeasure with the role, naively thinking they might be interested in helping improve things.
The next week I was brought into a room with my manager and it was made very clear that I was going to be pip'd in the next review cycle. I was suddenly presented with a laundry list of goals I had to meet in the next 4 weeks and told that this was the minimum acceptable way to even remotely get a passing review. These were goals I had never seen or heard of in the previous 5 months of the review cycle.
I think this is more summed up as in the joking expression "the beatings will continue until morale improves". In my experience this is more common than not.
I do find a lot of these HN threads pretty fatalist, though, where there is seemingly no room for a mgr to do what they're paid to do and also care and try to help in a realistic way without being seen as overbearing and evil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
It’s a lot of gaslighting. This is why it’s a toxic work environment…
Can you explain how you were doing great (presumably at the role) but was grossly misled as to what the role was?
We'd already explained our complaints quite extensively in words. Asking for a number was an insult, and a way of brushing off all the words we'd already communicated. Especially as a substitute for acknowledging or doing anything about the words we'd already communicated.
I often find kpi is implemented with the messaging that it is to help managers understand the staff but once implemented this messaging is quickly replaced with the manager bitching that his staff have not met their happiness quota.
A) it's a strange request B) it's an imposition C) it implies a callous touch. why don't you care enough to check in directly? D) it wasn't clear what the data was actually used for. or if it was ever used.
(yes, I know, person upthread asking us not to analogize everything to TV shows, but that is how culture works and to a great extent what it's for)
Edit: what would you do with this information as a manager, anyway? At best, you know your employees are unhappy but not why. So you still have to sit down and talk with them. Which you should have been doing in the first place instead of wasting everyone's time with this happiness index crap.
I can recall situations where some of my reports were unhappy, which I knew about, but where the _magnitude_ of their unhappiness didn't come across, because for whatever reason, that's a thing people will often hide in conversation, at least for a while. Similarly, anybody who sees patients will admit to getting very different readings from different types of solicitations about their well-being. They become more useful in aggregate, and with experience.
Also, nothing prevents you from including a free text box to add context to a "happiness" rating.
The way one colleague bluntly explained it to a VP (in the context of Sun's DeskSet productivity suite "MailTool", "CalandarTool", "ClockTool", "CommandTool", "DBXTool", "XBugTool", and of course "TATool", "PizzaTool", and "HappyTool", etc) was that he was currently working on "ResumeTool".
This is the same management that banned the discussion of and spending work time on PizzaTool! (Which I ignored.)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...
And who required us all to use the horrible XBugTool, which got extremely angry if you used it to file bug reports against itself:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...
Instead of the standard way of killing the window system by typing "exit" to the first CommandTool console you brought up, I sarcastically suggested developing "ExitTool", an easy-to-use visual interface for exiting the OpenWindows X11/NeWS server, which would interoperate with "YesTool" and "NoTool", drag-and-drop user interfaces to the ever popular Unix "yes" utility:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.h...
>In other words, what are the problems people use xinit to solve, that make them need to use xinit instead of some other solution? I don't care so much about the particular solutions themselves. [Of course I'm not interested in anybody else's solution, because in my spare time, I'm developing ExitTool, a fully customizable point and click graphical user interface to exiting the window system, which has a special private interclient communication protocol to rendevous with other applications subscribing to compatible desktop metaphors, actually empowering the user to drag'n'drop from YesTool (a full featured graphical adaptation of the classic unix utility), and cut'n'paste from NoTool (actually implemented using trendy and powerful object oriented programming techniques as a subclass of YesTool!)]
(The whole "-Tool" naming scheme at Sun was such a sausage fest, from the early days when "SunView" was originally called "SunTools"!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView
https://web.archive.org/web/20120216050221/http://toastytech...
It was obvious that this happyness index ploy was upper management's passive-aggressive way of rubbing our noses in the fact that they refused to acknowledge or do anything about what we had already made concretely crystal clear to them quite directly and verbally, without playing silly abstract numeric scoring games.
And it goes without saying that they didn't change what they were doing or try to make us happier after we reported our low numeric happiness scores, which were really just their way of figuring out who to fire first.
- the manager and team lead actually take low happiness scores as a call to action to dig into what's going on and try to help address whatever is bringing on stress or sorrow
- the score is authentic--people feel safe enough to share grievances
- the score is only shared with the core team: HR and higher-ups don't see these (Lord knows what they'd do with it)
During stand-ups I'd ask "where's your thumb?" -- people would then either do thumbs-down or thumbs-up, but people quickly switched to analog--pointing their thumb somewhere between 6:30 and 11:30.
If people showed a low score, they could discuss it in the standup with the team, or follow-up in their one-on-one meeting that week, in private.
(I've done this at four companies--if the criteria can be met, it can really help avoid disconnects, unneeded stress, and esprit de corps).
Not sure if its a typo, but sure fits the theme.
Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.
The Day SunOS Died
"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
ATT System V has replaced BSD.
You can cling to the standards of the industry
But only if you pay the right fee --
Only if you pay the right fee . . ."
For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann
>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351695
There was a Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.) "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu
Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:
"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...
https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/
I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642203
The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186
That was a lot later. Michael wrote that story in the early 90's, probably 90 or 91 while I was working there, during the transition from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris, when they forced all the engineers to "upgrade". He and Gumby and John Gilmore founded Cygnus Support ("We make free software affordable") in '89, and Michael was consulting at Sun, working on supporting gcc as an alternative to the shitty AT&T C++ compiler. Remember that Sun unbundled the C compiler from Solaris and started charging for it, and AT&T charged for their shitty C++ compiler too.
Maybe Gumby can provide some more context!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665191
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190212235450/http://www.toad.c...
Free Software Report, Volume 1, Number 1, 1992
https://web.archive.org/web/20170331165815/http://www.toad.c...
The Free Software Community Puts A Free Compiler Back In Solaris 2
Sun Microsystems, Inc. decided to unbundle the C compiler from their latest operating system, Solaris 2. Sun users were extremely upset to lose what they saw as an essential component of the system software. Faced with dramatic increases in licensing fees, early Solaris 2 users turned to free software for a reasonable alternative.
Spearheading the effort to port the Free Software Foundation’s GNU C compiler was Palo Alto based Cygnus Support, a company that specializes in providing commercial support for free software. To fund the development effort, Cygnus appealed to the early adopters of Solaris 2. They offered a year of technical support for up to 5 users, and a commitment that the compiler would ship with Solaris 2, in return for a prepaid fee of $2,000.
To insure wide distribution of the free compiler and debugger, Cygnus negotiated with SunSoft, Inc. to make the GNU C development tools available on CDware. CDware is a free CD-ROM available from Sun and shipped at no cost to over 90,000 Sun users.
They didn't even have to actively collude; humans come with very sensitive popularity meters built-in, so they instinctively know where to place others, and it pretty much governs itself.
Just imagine if all companies were run like your high school social hierarchy, except that this also determined whether you kept your job or not.
I don't think you're wrong, but it's also a cynical interpretation.
Another way to look at it is that people who other people want to work with get high ratings. Is that bad? From a company culture standpoint, I'm not sure it is. In fact, I often see posts and comments on these very boards about the toxicity surrounding "really good programmers" who are jerks, but tolerated. That's not a great outcome, either.
Where is the middle ground?
Another way to look at [high school cliques] is that people who other people want to be around get high [social] ratings. Is that bad?
From experience: yes, it is. The fact that this criticism can be reframed in a way that hides the problem, that something we've all experienced becomes invisible, shows that it is a problem. There is a kind of problem with group social dynamics that can't be easily ironed out; the real experience of existing high school cliques is proof of this. Unsurprisingly, this same problem that comes up in high schools appears in workplaces also.
Depending on who is it that people do and don’t want to work with, we might call it “discrimination against a protected class”, which is at least bad enough that it’s illegal in many countries.
It is if there is no objectivity to it. It wouldn't be the first time I get a bad review because I do things slightly different.
That's how things work in the real world, but this kind of review system makes it MUCH easier to sabotage others when you have the clout to do so, because there's no manager to protect them from the bullshit anymore. It's basically inviting these sorts of shenanigans rather than forcing saboteurs to do a lot of extra work to get people fired.
Obviously I have no idea the circumstances of your experiences here, so don't take this personally, this is hypothetical: but what if "you" actually were the asshole here? Wouldn't you be saying the same thing? Maybe this incident made people realize that "you" weren't a good person to work with?
If you were on the other side, isn't that a good outcome?
If someone is friendly with you for months, years, and then suddenly becomes cold, that's not because you're an asshole - it's because of some incident that either they witnessed, or was gossiped to them.
When everyone around you reacts this way almost at once, you know for sure that it was gossip.
If I'd spoken to this person along the lines of "OMG WTF are you saying dude that's so stupid" rather than "Actually I think person X had a good point about trying this approach - it would solve X and Y and Z all at once", I'd be inclined to believe that it was just me.
Person X was actually the CTO, so I thought it was a safe topic, but I'd misunderstood the shadow power structure. It turned out the guy I was speaking to had more power (at least over me anyway), and was opposed to the CTO.
The dot system would probably *help" here, because a sudden drop in ratings right after the incident would merit an investigation.
Great insight! It's like an ouija board. It feels like you're making independent decisions and a gestalt outcome "appears", but it's much more social than we perceive.
Welcome to life. Human social hierarchies have always worked like this. The only thing this dot collector is doing is presenting it explicitly in a way even people with poor social acumen can easily see.
Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones. The quarterback’s popularity doesn’t rest on whether or not he’s pretty.
Whether or not the social dynamics of big established companies and high risk startups vary due to this is interesting to consider.
Sounds very defeatist to me. Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
> Interestingly male social spaces are actually less focused on appearance than female ones.
I think it’s telling that your example here is high school. IMO the focus is always on who has the most power. In high school, yes, the pretty girls have power, because of the way the boys treat them. I can’t say I’ve seen the same dynamic play out in adult workspaces.
Improve and do better for whom? Those of us with adequate social acumen can deal with human nature just fine.
It is observably true though that low status persons often fantasize about somehow overturn the social order such that when it all shakes out they come out on top. It’s so common that it’s a well-known and frankly overworked trope.
The world has seen plenty of revolutions and other social disruptions and every single time those with a good grasp of human nature come out on top. You can fight reality if you wish, but you can never beat it.
> Plenty of workplaces try a lot harder: setting specific goals to achieve in order to get promotions rather than relying on interpersonal relationships, for example.
And it’s telling how reliably chumps fall for that story. The process is observably no more than a fig leaf covering office politics except perhaps at the levels where nobody with influence gives a fig.
Most of what we did was Windows and Mac utility software, usually difficult or tricky stuff that messed heavily with system internals. The way we wrote most of this is that I would write the drivers or file system hooks or other kernel code we needed, and would also write the user mode code to support that, but not write a GUI for it or an installer. My user mode support code would either be an application that would provide a local network interface that a GUI could talk to, or a DLL that could be used by a GUI. For development I'd included a simple terminal emulator that just provided a glass TTY in a window in which I'd have a command line interface so I could develop and test my stuff without needing a GUI.
The founder went on a metrics kick and decided that the way the quarterly profit sharing should work is that everyone would be given a list of all the employees, and would have to assign to each either 2 points, 1 point, or 0 points, indicating whether they thought that employee deserved twice the average amount of profit sharing, just the average amount, or no profit sharing. You had to assign 2 points to 1/4 or the employees, 1 point to 1/2 the employees, and 0 points to 1/4 of the employees.
The points for each employee would be totaled, and the 1/4 with the highest points would get double profit sharing, the 1/4 with the lowest points would get nothing, and the rest would get regular profit sharing. Furthermore, the people with the 8 highest point totals would be on a committee for the next quarter that would largely choose the direction of the company (with the founder being able to override them).
His expectation was that I would be the top vote getter every quarter. After all, every product we currently sold and every product in development was at its core my code.
What actually happened was that everyone in engineering gave me 2 points. Everyone outside engineering gave me 0 or 1. Take the people in testing. They dealt with alpha, beta, and release candidates. They almost never dealt with me. So to them the people doing all the work on the products were the junior engineers who wrote the GUIs and those were who got the 2 point votes. Same with support. If they interacted with an engineer most of the time it was one of the junior engineers because most of the issues were with the GUI. If the underlying problem was with my code support would probably still talk to the junior engineer who write the GUI, who would be the one to determine it was actually a lower level problem and bring it up with me.
Another person who scored low who clearly should have been in the top quarter was our head IT guy. In many ways he was even less visible than me to most employees. There were also some people in operations that were critical to our success and would be hard to replace--surely that means they deserved double shares if anyone did.
This was exactly what I told the founder was going to happen and he had to quickly scrap that system.
Learning through others' mistakes instead of ones own :-)
Also, interesting to read
I wonder if these are the 10 core values, or Coinbase actually has 10 crore (100,000,000) values they want employees to think about... Doesn't seem impossible given some HR departments I've seen.
Even with slightly less snark: you try to come up with a list of ten "core values" and "positive energy" is one of them? Does anybody notice that "positive energy" is a completely empty shell of a phrase? It's "why are you sad? When I'm sad, I decide to be happy instead" in buzzword-form.
Then again, I sort-of get it: if Coinbase had "intellectual rigor" and "help society, and capitalism will reward you" as guiding principles, the cognitive dissonance could shatter a Tesla Cybertruck window at a distance. Better to just cut the chase and go with "for the lulz" and "privilege is our edge" from the get-go.
Edge cases exist, but when I’m sad, I just stop being sad at work, because it’s been clearly stated, from the first interview, that positivity was a requirement of performance.
One edge case: colleague lost her mother last year, of course we didn’t expect her to perform excruciating emotional work.
No one is positive and happy all the time and having to fake it "as a job requirement" sounds wrong on so many levels.
As an aside: I assume that you know this from your own life, and appreciate when people behave in a manner that cares for the emotional commons of wherever you are. Is your objection to it here the fact that it's a giant stupid company ostensibly trying to curate your feelings, and that's annoying and (probably) hypocritical? Or do you really object to the premise?
My proof that I did well at it was that management constantly told me I need to upsell more and tried to scare me into it, but at no point did they ever actually move to take me off the sales floor. They knew I did really well, even without their extra BS items to push.
I did not fake "happy happy joy joy," but I also did not allow self absorption to inject my mood into my business. My model is that sales is a career that involves having structured communications.
That was a lifesaver for me when feeling depressed, because I could focus on the structure of what needed to be accomplished rather than the unstructured touchy-feely business of "getting along with people."
I suggest that "YMMV." Salespeople are not all the same, and some break preconceptions and stereotypes hard while being successful at what they do.
We don't need you dragging yourself in to work after caring for your cancer patient family member or newborn.
Not sure what you are trying to mean.
First off: All dots are public. You know who is grading you well, who is grading you badly, and who is liked and disliked by each executive and manager you want. Imagine giving Ray Dalio a low score in Critical Thinking, one of the many categories. It's not going to be easy.
The dots are also put together to create a baseball card: An accumulation of what the company thinks of each person. And those scores are basically the review system, as you will be kicked out with a low enough average. You can, and should, look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly.
But the baseball card score is not just an average: Then two groups of people with different ideas of someone would give a middling score. Instead, scores are weighted with a sigmoid kernel. Said kernel takes, as its other parameter, the rater's score in that category. If the company believes that you are bad at something, your opinion doesn't matter. And since votes are public, you probably want to agree with the majority, as otherwise your lack of skill at evaluating that category could lead to people voting you lower in that category.
This mechanism is, as you might have noticed, pretty unstable. As my personal score changes the value of the dots I provided, every scoring iteration changes scores in ways that might never converge. Some people's scores would change wildly, as the people that rate them high, or low, had scores near the critical point of the sigmoid. Therefore, some determining mechanism was required to decide the final scores. Let's just say it stacks the deck in favor of executives.
So when you look at the Bridgewager version of this system, what you got was all kinds of little mechanisms that pushed really hard towards having the leadership being rated as the best at everything, and then having the leadership's rating be the most powerful force of them all. So every rating is performative, and you better be directionally agreeing with the top forces in the company. Rating honestly is something for only the naive and the politically powerful.
I wonder how far down this road Coinbase is going: Every little bit of the system matters to optimize for toxicity.
I don't understand -- what should I look for, how should I act (and why)?
(I've never been in such an environment)
Interesting to read about their system!
They're just big poker players and so looking like they're the smartest in the room is part of the bluff. Secrecy is way more important but that doesn't require PhDs.
This is why they're so culty, use various personality tests in hiring, and things like the rube goldberg 360 rating disaster described above.
A simpler example is Jane Street who went hard into OCAML for no reason whatsoever that had to do with their bottom line but made them look "smart" while money machine goes brrr.
Ray Dalio to me seems like a bright person, having glanced at:
There are famous examples of these kind of rating systems being negative in the real world in our very own sector. We don't need to use fiction.
There is so many things wrong with a system like this. It's asking coworkers to rat on each other. This is dystopian.
I prefer human feedback to be honest. And I've only ever given negative feedback on a direct co-worker once, who was a right smug prick.
Yeah, but why? Why would I even "rate" my coworkers? I would prefer not to. If someone is a prick, I talk to them first, and if it doesn't help and the case is serious, I go to the manager or file a formal complaint. What's the point of giving people thumbs up/down? Someone has a bad day, let's make it even worse by giving them a thumbs down, it's ridiculous.
So giving them a thumbs-down is bad, but filing a formal complaint is fine? That seems like an extreme escalation.
Maybe I'm far less cynical than others here, but as has been mentioned in other comments, I don't believe that people are going to down-rank people out of spite. And if you ask a broad question like, "Is this person a good teammate, yes/no?" and the person gets many no's...perhaps it's something to look into?
No, on the opposite. If a coworker is just a bit unpleasant but I'm forced to rate them, I'm more likely to rate them negatively for reasons I have no idea about (maybe their dog died or are taking new medicine or whatever).
If I'm not asked to rate them, I won't do anything, until it's grave enough I should intervene. In this case, I will contact them directly trying to understand them and solve the problem in an amicable way, without involving any external party. This helps in a vast majority of cases. Only in extremely rare cases, once in a few years, the problem becomes so grave that another person needs to be involved. In any case, giving anyone a thumbs down doesn't solve anything.
And of course that Black Mirror episode. Constantly evince a super positive energy or else.
A silly 10 question yes/no survey from HR is a step back towards sanity.
Perhaps it's a matter of perspective? Would you say e.g. James Damore was "cancelled", rather than being fired for discriminatory statements that an NLRB lawyer described as "so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected"?
Cancelling was never so straightforward as being fired. It was social ostracism and the soft understanding that no promotions were going to come their way, because the whole HR team was against it and their managers were never going to spend the social capital to fight that fight.
Their offense was objecting to a specific point being made in “implicit bias training”.
I was high enough in the org chart that I was privy to these conversations.
Perhaps coinbase doesn’t target employees like you. Maybe they like happy clappy medicinally-well-adjusted type employees?
I would like to say I occasionally write low quality comments to empirically test my personal self-judgement about my own metrics of reality.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-asking-staff-rate-e...
[1] https://qz.com/1071749/bridgewater-associates-ceo-ray-dalio-...
I shall check it out!
It indeed was hell.
The primary problem with it was that most people in my business unit (I don't remember the numbers, but the business unit was originally a large startup that got acquired and then multiplied 10x as similar work Deloitte already did got folded in) didn't operate like the rest of Deloitte. Our business unit performed more like a software consultancy than a management consultancy, so most people who weren't director level never interacted with anyone other than a core group of people and a single, direct manager. That manager was also responsible for your assignments, whereas the rest of Deloitte is much more unstructured, people move around on assignments and don't necessarily have a fixed management structure. On top of that, my particular group was in a very niche field, with only two other groups in the entirety of Deloitte doing similar work (one in Australia and another one in Chicago, I believe, whereas I live near DC), which compounded the "you only work with a small set of people and have no chance of escaping personality conflicts".
I got drummed out pretty fast by a boss who was pissed off that I was more internet-famous than him. Not that I'm actually internet-famous, but what little following I have on Twitter occasionally gets me invites to give talks at conferences. All of their marketing was centered around one person being the "genius" behind our group, and I wasn't that guy (hell, I never once met him in the year-and-a-half/6 projects I worked on while I was there), so I was accused of trying to undermine the org.
It ultimately worked out in the end. I got to milk the system a little bit. One of the only advantages of working in a gigantic corporation is that HR is systematized. If you have an issue that is strictly limited to yourself, and can figure out the right levers to pull, the machine will engage and you will eventually get what you want. You are entitled to your benefits. So I was able to take advantage of some very generous family leave and childcare benefits at a rough time in our lives. It also looked good on my resume, which helped me land my current role, which is the best job I've ever had.
Besides, even if I were at all competing with their marketing image, it still wouldn't have made sense. At least not business sense. Being petty doesn't make money.
In the old British Empire, the upper class learnt the classics (as in, ancient myths) and were packed off to go rule the world. It didn’t go so badly (for Britain).
Perhaps we can combine the two - managers to study human nature, and then study the problem, and then use regular brainpower to come up with good solutions.
BTw Kerala supposedly.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_combat
“ The Kerala practice was discontinued in the 19th century under the British Raj.”
But yeah that alone sounds like hell.
Also, Bridgewater associates were being paid ridiculous amounts (I think, haven't run specific nubmers on this) by someone widely regarded as a visionary, so they were much more incentivized to stay and deal with this stuff. I suspect that there wasn't a comparable job opportunity for them at the time, whereas with Coinbase in a market downturn...
Vision, Verve, Wit, Cheer, Humility, Benevolence, Nimbleness, Probity and Wiles.
Normally, I try not to value any principle over the others, but today, I'd have to say Cheer is my favorite.
This is an example of doing this for managers. A good, thoughtful manager wouldn't need to do this, but it's difficult to find such people, and they tend to be expensive.
For instance there are 10 people in a meeting and Person 1 is talking about the Bank of Japan effect on the EUR/USD. The other 9 would rate that person on this specific topic in terms of "credibility, experience, etc...". The results would then be displayed after all people talked and were given so the team could come to a consensus on correct action.
Brilliant if used correctly. Does not sound like it's being used as intended.
Ideally, you want to catch mistakes sooner rather than later. People don't want to admit they made a mistake; or people don't want to sincerely criticise others.
One way of fixing this is creating an environment where people feel safe about making mistakes.
AFAIU Bridgewater's approach is the opposite; everything gets exposed. e.g. Modelling different personalities that people have, or whatever, so that these can be taken into account. The upside is stuff like you can tell the CEO you think he did a bad job. The downside is just how exposed it feels compared to normal social/political interaction.
These happy clappy "systems" usually fail to take into account (almost biological) realities of how power structures work.
I'm not familiar with other companies that have the same reputation of using a system like this the same way Bridgewater does.
You have to remember you give real-time feedback during the meeting itself.
> happens all the time
Hmm how do the CEOs react to that? I imagine that the good ones are happy for feedback
The others though?
(I understand if you were exaggerating a bit, wrt "all the time")
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condimen...
The app is based on his philosophy https://www.principles.com/
But, like major thumbs down on their vibe. They need more positive vibes.
Sounds like standard corporate usistan.
Fair enough, but why single out Coinbase when the same kind of BS goes on in pretty much every large corp over there?
I was curious about that "Dot Collector":
Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite simple and efficient. It asks the user to rate the coworker or the manager on how well they demonstrate the 10 crore Values at coinbase. The values are not only limited to things like communications, but also include values like positive energy. The information about the co-worker can be shared by either giving a thumbs up or by giving a thumbs down. There is an option of giving neutral feedback for the co-workers in the application.
Sounds like hell.