Coffee Break

Context: Calibrations is a place to discuss promotions and bonuses. Engineering Managers goes into various meetings to fight for their team members. As promotions and bonuses is budget based, these meetings are often longer to complete to agree based on some consensus decision taking on ranking certain employees.

Employees are placed into buckets.

• Below expectations
• Meets expectations
• Above expectations
• Standout / star

Buckets can be defined/undefined prior to meeting. In my previous experience, the buckets were a mix of my current job title expectations and regional budget.

Calibrations Levels are done based on finance budgeting and seniority of the role. If local team is too small, it gets put into regional level and the budget is merged.

• Local
  • If the team is big enough, local calibration is done. Usually 50 people.
  • Chaired by Senior Managers
• Regional
  • SWE1,2,Senior. Sometimes Staff Engineers.
  • Chaired by Director or Sr. Director.
• Top level
  • Chaired by VP level
  • Budget almost always enforced, will not go over. If a director is pushing hard, likely a reduction is needed on another team’s allocation
• CTO-level
  • VPs report to CTO. Calibration on VPs
  • CTO and their directs calibration
• C-Level and Board Sign off
  • C Level executives calibration
  • Special decision making whether to approve over spend.

Once calibration is done, Finance team crunch the number and finally approved.

Engineering Manager’s POV:

• Light weight performance review before the big calibration to size up employees which bucket they fall in.
• Brush up expectations with employees.
  • What was the person’s impact during cycle
  • Did they grow or fall behind compared to before?
  • What are their strengths and weakness?
  • If they’re doing well, challenge them. If they’re not doing well, support them.
• Make a list of their accomplishments
• Take a look at the code commit volume.
• Find other searchable artifacts such as design documents, metrics, data. These data can be gamed but useful during calibration discussions.
• Give low performers heads up they’re not doing well.
• Compare notes with other managers, figure out how they do calibrations and see if your methodology is correct.
• This helps for the bucketing later on preventing from going to deadlocks situation
• During Calibrations, as all managers are competing for the budget, it can be where some drama occurs.

Inside Calibrations

• Everyone has to be in some kind of buckets, but only selected few can go into the top buckets.
• Top performers should never be in bottom bucket.
• Bottom bucket sometimes require people to be in it as middle bucket might be full.
• Deadlocks occurs in the top bucket as managers need to negotiate hard who should take it and get the promotion.
• Deadlocks are comparing apples to oranges, team members with different responsibilities and different job roles are compared.
• When dead lock occurs after comparing achievements, can use below facts to move out of deadlocks:
  • Tenure
  • Time since last promotion
  • Diversity
  • The needs of the company or organisation
• Gaming the deadlocks:
  • Flight risk – employee might leave if they don’t get promoted
  • Voting democratically who gets the promotion

Strategies

“Sacrifice”

• Either manager sacrifices their employee from the top bucket and indirectly assume in the next tie breaker, the other manager will concede the same way.

• There may be rational reasons for a manager to sacrifice one of their directs. For example if a report is in process of leaving the company.

“Santa Clause”

• Giving high ratings to everyone on your team and nominating them for the highest buckets. You don’t challenges other’s nominations unless they challenge yours.
• Creates deadlocks often.
• Tackling this strategy,
  • other managers should ask in detail the specific results and efforts why certain candidates are in the top buckets.
  • Ask how they would rank people in their team in order of performance. Surely not everyone is performing at the same level.

A bad calibration is when your top candidates get pushed into the wrong bucket and you don’t know why or can’t give a feedback to the employee what they’re lacking on. Make sure this is decided in the meeting.

• I’m only comfortable with this allocation if we can summarize the delta between my report and people in the higher bucket. It is not fair to move on before we get more clarity.

A good outcome is understanding why your directs are in the buckets that they are.

Advice for managers

• The easiest way to get more support for your directs is to have them work with other teams.
• Still calibration is not about getting your directs to be put into the best buckets possible, it is about getting them in to the right one realistically and rightfully.
• Encourage cross functional collaboration
• Encourage to work with other managers directly
• Encourage mentoring scenarios
• Delegating directs to represent your team.

Advice for ICs:

• A written work log document to capture the work you do and its impact
• A summary of your results and achievements for the period
• Use numbers and objective facts
• Talk through the calibrations ahead of time.
• Share these information ahead of time before the actual big calibration meetings.
• Don’t need to limit communicating your wins and achievements once or twice a year or saving it up. Do some PR for yourself ahead of time so other managers and engineers are also aware. Words may spread.

Ref: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/performance-calibrations-part-2