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I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

Comments
  • 1
    What tracking metrics are you talking about?
  • 14
    Either John is stupid or he plays stupid. A company wouldn't intentionally pay more than the value of an employee. If it's worth retaining the employee, the value is matched.
  • 1
    @b2plane any indicator of performance. I really don’t know. Maybe https://datapad.io/blog/....
  • 1
    @UnicornPoo that’s what I’m doing since they wanted me to move to management.

    Seems like good advice. Thank you.
  • 2
    @nanobot maybe you need to start boasting about how amazing job the employees are doing and how important they are just to fuck with him
  • 1
    Keep that resume polished... just in case. I am not sure that CEO respects his employees at all, he only want to rake in money but has fuckall an idea of what he is doing.
  • 1
    The only hard measurable metric for the common profit-is-everything business is actual profit after costs. Even if the main product actually is software, it normally is really hard to derive a single dev's performance from that metric.

    In practice, it is all gut feeling and most key performance indicators measure the wrong thing just for the sake of having a measurement of something.
  • 0
    @fruitfcker It is a software development company.
  • 0
    @PepeTheFrog I agree that the resume needs to be polished (I brought back my old pet project from the grave, and hoping that this time I won't abandon it for corporate pennies).

    But the guy has built and sold two different companies for millions in the past before this one, so I think he knows exactly what he is doing - scaring people away from asking for raises.
  • 0
  • 0
    @Oktokolo But how does the world actually work on gut feelings like this? Isn't there a fair chance of someone's gut feeling being "wrong" about someone they never met?
  • 0
    @nanobot Sure, the gut feelings are wrong pretty much all the time. But human societies are pretty resilient. And the competition makes the same mistakes...
  • 1
    @Oktokolo I’m thinking of starting a tea stall.
  • 3
    418 I'm a teapot
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