The guy was attributing statements to me, from the conversation we were having in that moment, that i had never said. He would even say "what you said, or what you were going to say..."

I found it extremely bizarre. I am a pretty precise person, and I wanted to correct him but i realized it is pointless. the lesson i take away was powerful - if people "like" you there is almost no level they won't go to make it work out.

one thing we can do about this is cry about it. the other thing we can do is to figure out how to "hack" likability. i think my mother taught me most of the basics already.

of course - much easier to do this for one hour in an interview, than for an entire year at a job. but there is something to be said for smiling, a few kind words, and then ... graceful evasion of everything else when you want to do real work.

Actually, the key to life is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

People's ideals generally move into conformity with their actions, not the other way round. That's one of the myriad reasons being a spy sucks. If anyone reading was following the police infiltration of left wing groups scandal in the UK, with added sex and dead babies identities the unit involved had a policy of only using married men after one guy never came back. Probably gone native.

You seem to know a lot about psychology. What do you call someone who doesn't recognize jokes?

If someone's social behavior jeopardizes the success of projects they work on, then perhaps it doesn't matter how technically competent they are.

As a counterexample to yours, what if someone is very friendly, witty, and amicable, but is severely lacking in technical skills? Perhas they are not even remotely pulling their weight in projects, resulting in friendly coworkers essentially doing their work for them and covering for them? In such a case you'll want to know that their technical skills are below what they should be.

It's very possible to have a bad stack ranking but excellent peer feedback.

With this system, someone who delivers very well, but undermines other people or projects they work on would likely receive a high stack ranking, but poor peer feedback resulting in private discussions. People in charge of managing said employee may ignore the problem, attempt to place the employee under people who will help them address social problems, or quietly find a way to move them to a different org. It's quite likely none of this shows up in stack ranking.

You're basically saying that those who worked daily in close interaction with the 10x developer and had to work with the code that developer produced, had lower regard for his technical ability than a manager who presumably is further removed?

You can't ignore the social aspect. A team with social frictions isn't going to work as well as a team that enjoys working together. Obviously just being social isn't enough but a strong team needs a combination of the social and technical aspects. Also 360 should mean going beyond the team, so the manager should be evaluated by his peers, his managers and his team and technical people on the team should be evaluated by members of other teams they work with.

In the situations I indicated I was also a developer on the team so I knew how productive and skilled the 10x prickly developer was. His peers ranked him high on technical skills but only as high as more amicable and lessor skilled peers.

I'm not saying I ignored the social aspect, in fact that is why I called him "prickly". I'm just saying that, while his teamwork related areas were properly low, his technical areas were improperly low because of this halo effect.

I swiped the Roman Evaluation Method from Luke Hohmann. During interviews, a No from one is a No from all. Self selecting teams is one of those agile advices.

If your prickly superstar was chosen collectively, he would have been given a lot of latitude. Eyes wide open kinda thing.

The only sticky interpersonal problems I've had is when some higher ranking genius assigns people to my teams, mostly unwanted and unwelcome.

And sometimes just plan bad soup. People good individually, bad together. Like when the boss assigned an outspoken Lebonese and an outspoken Israeli to my team. They got along as well as peanut butter and lug nuts.

Next thing that happens is people start choosing members based on how much comfortable they are (which doesn't translate into technical skills and delivering stuff) or start talking to each other, trying to convince people.. this sucks!

While it might work for small companies with not much variation in technical skills and sociability between employees.. for anything else it's kinda hard.

Plus, that initial list of 2-3 employees that start talking and picking others was selected by someone, wasn't it? And the list that they can pick from was also selected, no?

I think if you need a team of 10 and you have 30 possibly good candidates within your company (and they are all available to move to your team).. sure, why not. You as a manager already pre-selects a bunch of people and then let your team members filter it even further.

But putting that responsibility from the beginning solely on the team members.. I guess that's risky. But anyway, how often does that happen?

If we are talking about selecting 1-2 people for a already formed team than fine.. of course other team members should do it (but that's mostly the norm in a lot of companies.. the manager/tech lead runs the resumes through people he/she trusts, ask them to participate in interviews.. no big difference there).

How? What makes you so sure you weren't biased?

How? He wrote a ton of great code in a short period of time that worked amazingly well. How else would you tell somebody was productive and skilled?

But, think whatever you want!

At the finale, 5 people were doing nothing but fixing bugs in the "stars" previous projects. That's when senior management finally clued in to the problem and fired both the manager and the "super star".

edit: and I don't ask this to be insulting, but judging performance is a very difficult task and I've never seen a reliable methodology for doing it. Thus, I'm naturally extremely skeptical when someone claims that they can do it better than others. Especially so when it includes broad generalizations about a group of people.

People who think judging performance is hard have a broken development methodology or no technical chops.

That's also why I included the comment on my own rankings; I have some pretty serious weaknesses that were ranked as areas of strengths by my peers and reports.

And this is exactly why I asked the question. Here you have judged me, since I said judging performance was hard, on both my development methodology and technical chops. Yet you know nothing about me at all.

The problem of evaluation is an important one, and one I'm always interested in reading more on. Unfortunately the strategy of taking one's self as a gold standard isn't exactly what I was looking for. It does seem obvious that being an expert in your domain is a necessary trait to be able to evaluate others, but it's not at all obvious that it is a sufficient trait.

The idea of multi-source feedback seems intuitively good, despite the conflicting research on it. That more input will expose biases or inaccuracies is a decent hypothesis. On the other hand, judgment from a single person seems highly error prone. Whatever faults that one person has will never be exposed and reviews seem almost guaranteed to have bias.

In the end, I'm left with no idea why you so quickly discard the reports of your peers.

I've never had a problem judging performance when I was doing my job right. Any time I've been unsure it's because I was either not managing the team properly or did not have enough technical knowledge to evaluate the estimates and claims (e.g. this took longer because of X and Y).

I know you can manage performance in a way that allows evaluation even if you don't have the technical chops to evaluate it technically, because I have seen technically weak peers do a good job of it.

I didn't discard the reports of my peers. I noticed a trend of the peers who liked me rating me higher in areas of weakness (as perceived by both myself and my boss) than my skills deserved.

Data that contains some bias is not useless if you can adjust for the bias.

I'm especially skeptical of managers who evaluate themselves as having above average technical ability after they have asserted how poorly most people evaluate their peers. The necessary conclusion of such an assertion is that people therefore haven't a rational basis on which to judge their own skills relative to others.

It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just ain't so.

I suggest you reflect on this. It seems to me that you've convinced yourself that you are good at certain things but there isn't really any evidence supporting your beliefs.

When I was younger, I actually used to think like you - that perf evaluation is easy and a good engineer (e.g. me) would be able to evaluate others easily. Over time, I've realized this is an incredibly complex and nuanced issue because everyone's strengths and weaknesses are so very multifaceted. I am more or less convinced that people who think they have all the right answers simply have a lot of blindspots.

Performance analysis is incredibly complex and nuanced. Judging if somebody is performing poorly because they are unskilled or not managed properly or having marital problems is hard. Improving performance is even more difficult because it requires the analysis and a remediation plan.

And I don't know your scale of 'good' programmer either: What do you mean by that? Are you saying you are as good as Linus Torvalds or are you saying you are better than your current peers? I am assuming it is the latter - which probably means zilch in a site like this. Many folks here receive that recognition and over time they come to a conclusion that it doesn't mean much. Which is why you get a lot of naysayers. They aren't doubting you, they are just doubting the general feeling as been there, done that.

Look at this thread, there are several who are very explicitly doubting me in no uncertain terms. Even doubting the idea that I'm good compared to my current peers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

The reason you do 360's is that you have to take every individual review with a grain of salt. When you have 7-10 reviews the biases start to average out.

One thing that is true, is often times the manager has more information about the various reasons for certain choices and goings on in the business, and thus is in a better position to evaluate people.

The question then is just, how do you make sure that manager do not discriminate based on soft indicators (personalities match / clashes / favouritism etc.).