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>The $47 billion Australian software company, which was founded in Sydney in 2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.

>Instead, equal weighting will be given to how each of its 3000 employees impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values. Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work”.

For a company that seems to be catching on to the idea that working at a company might involve being good at working as part of a time, I can't help feel describing that as "having nothing to do with job skills" is probably not the right way of looking at it.

In fact, there are some really funny points in this article that point to the bias that this is being met with

>Asked if it would be possible for someone who did well in their role to be outscored by someone who did poorly but was more likeable

For gods' sakes it is not about being likeable, it's about being able to work productively in a team environment. You aren't going to get a good review by being useless but really good at small talk in the kitcken. It's about being able to perform at the company in a way that positively impacts others whilst getting your own work done. Is is easier to work with someone if they're likeable? Probably. If someone is difficult to work with are they dislikeable? Sure. But stop talking about the side-effects and talk about the actual thing that's important - ability to add value to the company.

I think the truth is somewhere in between.

I'd much rather work on a company that has a pleasant atmosphere but not insane growth than on a shitty environment grinding my ass off.

But ignoring performance completely, that is nuts. Because output and success also bring joy and enhance the atmosphere of teams.

> You aren't going to get a good review by being useless but really good at small talk in the kitcken

In reality though, this is exactly what happens, and this mindset is exactly what creates entire departments of incompetent but friendly, 'team oriented', well-meaning idiots. These kinds of people are fine for BAU operations (and to be fair that's pretty much all Atlassian now does) but not for outcome focused project driven work.

Eventually leadership catches on and creates a dedicated 'get things done' team where this friendly fishpond HR shit doesn't fly and people have to actually pull their weight again.

> says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.

I agree this is poorly worded on their behalf. A better approach would be to reframe team-player, and being somewhat likeable as job skills.

You seem to agree with implication that developer performance is measurable, when in fact these management driven annual reviews are a fantasy used to justify someone’s already planned agenda; raises and promotions for those in the in group for example.
>You aren't going to get a good review by being useless but really good at small talk in the kitcken.

You probably would if you talk to the right people. When performance criteria are not objective, it's easy to fire or retain people at will.

> I can't help feel describing that as "having nothing to do with job skills" is probably not the right way of looking at it.

You'll note those words are not a quotation. They're the journalist's phrasing.

On the other hand:

Many former employees blamed [Facebook's] cult-like atmosphere partly on Facebook’s performance review system, which requires employees to get reviews from approximately five of their peers twice a year. This peer review system pressures employees to forge friendships with colleagues at every possible opportunity, whether it be going to lunch together each day or hanging out after work.

“It’s a little bit of a popularity contest,” said one manager who left the company in 2017. “You can cherry-pick the people who like you — maybe throw in one bad apple to equalize it.”

Inside Facebook’s ‘cult-like’ workplace, where dissent is discouraged and employees pretend to be happy all the time

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-perfor...

The opposite side of this particular spectrum is Microsoft in 00's, where it was very clear to everyone that fixed sized pie is being divvided up, and people would wait for the smallest missteps by their peers, and CC their manager, and their manager's manager to make sure they know someone fucked up and their rating is lower at review time. Since there was a curve, one's own rating could then be higher, assuming they don't screw up likewise. Whether you're helping others didn't matter one iota.

Personally, I prefer peer reviews, even though they do often lead to likeable no-ops being promoted, and introverts being passed over for a promotion.

At least in "peer review" companies I never felt like my peers are trying to stab me in the back all the time.

I knew people who had worked at a company where it was pretty standard for people to leave their "360 reviews" in tears as extreme levels of self-criticism were expected. Their company culture apparently encouraged this level save "radical honesty".
This is quite a common approach in consulting companies too. It's not unique to FB.
tbf in many consulting companies, the ability to network with people over lunch is at a work task least as important as actual proficiency at producing deliverables, which may be Powerpoints presented live to clients you've cultivated via networking.

Not sure being an extrovert is quite so important to fixing bugs in the Facebook stack. (Maybe more so for the key account managers selling ads.)

Sounds like Atlassian have reached the size where enough incompetents have been hired that they try to drive out the useful people because they make them look bad.
I wonder what 'brilliant jerk' means? For me the worst kind of jerk is a 'fool with authority'.

I'd much rather work under a brilliant jerk than a hypocritical fool.

> I'd much rather work under a brilliant jerk than a hypocritical fool.

Good news: There are people who are neither. I prefer to work for competent non-jerks. A team of good people will always outperform a brilliant jerk that drives everyone else away.

Typically, it means anybody who has an iota of knowledge, cares about the product and company and is not like the benchwarmer whose claim to fame is B.S. and jargon. He is that stupid sincere guy in a tide of mediocrity. It is easy to cut and normalize one guy than bring up the level of the rest
From personal experience 'brilliant jerks' from articles like this and popular culture are people who are criticising everything and everyone as if they know better and are often seen as brilliant by less savvy colleagues (e.g., their managers) but have nothing to show for it and are often seen as impostors by their more savvy peers.

I personally know several truly brilliant people at what they do and none of them are jerks. I have yet to see this 'brilliant jerk' everyone seems to be taking about.

It means a person who is knowledgeable, experienced but can't work in a team without trashing someone other team or all members or need to vent often by humiliating one or another

I am pretty sure, Linus qualifies as one in past, not sure about the current developments there.

I think "brilliant jerk" is loaded with subtext that can only be detected by reading the rest of the justification. Everything Bek Chee says is illogical: is she really claiming Atlassian previously never cared about jerks? That's an astonishing claim that would require astonishing evidence, like the CEO having explicitly said "it's OK to be a jerk if you make us lots of money". No such evidence is provided.

Instead it's very clear this is the result of 'wokeness' winning a culture war inside Atlassian: a giant red flashing warning sign to not work there or use their products.

It starts with this phrase:

We recognise things are not the way they used to be, yet companies haven’t evolved (from) 30 years ago when they were primarily made up often of white men. Tech standards have evolved, we have new ways of working, new demographics and generational change.

There's a dead comment on this thread pointing out that Atlassian are engaging in blatant and shameful racism and sexism here. It's based in Australia, a country full of white people, and is a software company - developers are mostly men. Demographics haven't actually changed as any quick consultation of computer science courses will show, so this statement is not only racist and sexist but also a blatant lie.

What might motivate a change to ensure that 2/3rds of job performance is no longer defined by skills? The explanation is quite obvious - if jobs are allocated based on ability then Atlassian will always be dominated by white men, simply because that's overwhelmingly the Australian demographic that learns computer programming, the most relevant skill to a software company. There's simply no way around that.

But if performance is assessed based on "how they bring their whole self to work", "how they live the company values" and how they "impact others on their team" then suddenly anyone can be promoted, anyone can be hired, and most importantly anyone can be fired by random employees asserting that they're a "brilliant jerk". There's no defence against such an accusation - it's entirely subjective and arguing with it would require effectively saying, your emotional reaction to this person is invalid. That would itself be taken as evidence of jerkhood!

This change will allow the "millenials", as Chee puts it, to completely purge the company of anyone who isn't a fanatical hater of white men. After all, actually being good at your job is no longer a defence against a colleague who doesn't like your politics.

There's another important message being sent by this article - Atlassian no longer cares about their customers (like my firm). Customers don't care about how much of their own self Atlassian employees bring to work, or whether its employees live their company values. These things might matter to some of their employees or their HR team, but it's irrelevant to the users. What does matter to users is whether the software is any good i.e. if it was written by people who are "brilliant". If actual skill is only considered of 1/3rd importance relative to the feelings of their employees, it seems clear that Atlassian staff prioritise their own feelings more than the needs of the people who buy their products. Not a good sign!

To me it sounds like Atlassian is sick of people who behave like assholes and justify it with their belief that they are smarter than everyone else.
Sounds more like they are defining the extrovert as the ideal and the introvert to be shunned and fired.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Jira and Confluence. It seems rather inconsequential which people Atlassian chooses to employ at this point.
Australians tend to be very susceptible to sub-conscious application of the nations "tall poppy syndrome" cultural effect.

To me, this story just indicates that Atlassian is trying to be as "Australian" a company as it can be.

However, I may just be a small poppy in this thought. I'm willing to entertain the idea that I'm critical of Atlassian for their tall-poppy ideology simply because I am in fact a white male, however ..

Yep. The incompetents can now use "jerk" to paint anyone who GTD, while the second-stringers can ease-back and do a whole lot of nothing.
Atlassian has been writing bad software for years. I'm fine with them trying almost anything to turn the ship about.
And somehow, as if by magic, anyone from a working-class background will turn out to have been a "jerk", and those who went to the right schools and are friends with the right people will turn out to have been "living our values". And one more slice of that pesky social mobility will go away.
What are the values? How well are they defined? It's a popularity contest which just creates a new type of politics unless its super well defined and easily demonstrable and measurable.

This seems like a great way to push out your brilliant people who won't tolerate bullshit or sacrifice their point for the sake of social cohesion.

There are no brilliant jerks in the upper class?

I dunno about that. Sometimes I run into folks who went to "a small school outside of Boston", and well...

The spirit of this is in the right direction but the details are in the implementation. I’ve seen this sort of thing backfire big time as it basically encourages cliques of people that “like” each other and then shun others.

If not done properly the whole company starts to feel like high school politics all over again as it loses track of what it’s actually accomplishing or not accomplishing and focuses too much on poorly implemented soft metrics. I’ve seen excellent managers that drive high performing teams get dinged by under-performers on those teams who say said manager is hard to work with. Sure they’d be much happier with a manager that let them slack off but that’s not going to help the company.

Nailed it. There are some very good points made in the article. Atlassian is a smart org and I suspect they're doing it well, but the article doesn't go into enough depth to let us look at it with a critical eye. There is a real danger that these policies will treat symptoms rather than causes.

I think that people often take an extremely puerile view as to how exclusion and bullying manifest. I once saw an HN commenter suggest that the solution was to ban profanity. Now, obviously you shouldn't be screaming "fuck you" at your colleagues, but removing certain means won't fundamentally change behaviour if the ends remain the same. It's important to think about the incentives you've set up for your workforce. Are they playing a zero sum game? Does an assist count for as many points as a goal?

> I’ve seen excellent managers get dinged in such a System because a few poor performers just mark the manager as difficult to work with to cover for their own underperformance.

Which raises another question - why are these discussions always centred around "brilliant jerks" and not just, you know, "jerks" ? Is there any actual evidence that being a jerk correlates with being a good engineer? Or that brilliant jerks are harder to fire than incompetent jerks?

Yea, most of the jerks I've worked with in the past have not been brilliant. They were just jerks.

The "My company was acquired and I got a management position out of it, so nothing I say is wrong" jerk.

The "I've been successful here by not collaborating, so I don't have to collaborate with you either" jerk.

The "I'm to busy to even acknowledge your E-mail" jerk.

And all the many, many "Taking credit for other people's work" jerks.

None of them were particularly brilliant or productive. Just jerks who flourished in environments where jerky behavior was either not punished, or got you promoted.

Instead of either their old or their new approach:

1. Don't tolerate jerks regardless of their level of "brilliant". And simply not being likeable isn't enough to categorise someone as a jerk.

2. Give your employees honest reviews focusing on their actual skills, performance and impact. Don't come up with artificially soft language and treat them like children who need to tiptoed around.

But who gets to define the "jerk"? What if 9 people in the room decide to bet the company/project on blockchain vaporware, and you are fervently opposed? Many people will come across as obnoxious when they have to stand their ground vs the majority. You have to find a balance, otherwise you'll incentivize friendly groupthink.
> Don't come up with artificially soft language and treat them like children who need to tiptoed around.

This is often an issue in big corporations by my experience. People complain about others behind their back, but never in the face, feedback just doesn't get back to originators so little changes. Its all nice and quiet and then bam! and the person is fired. Or not.

The weakness in this model is that technically people calling other people jerks, tend to be jerks. Especially when there's some negative consequence for that person in the form of less favorable reviews it would be kind of nasty to do this on the record. So, the people doing this the most would in my book be the actual jerks. This thing gets super political and in politics, the charismatic sociopaths end up leading.

I'd advertise a different model where who works for whom is strictly voluntary. Somebody wants something done and needs somebody else to work with them; that other person needs to agree to work with that person and should have the option to join another team instead of being assigned to a group of people. Nobody likes working for jerks and the whole thing will sort itself out in no-time. Team players joining forces together will produce great results and you can then simply judge the output.

You'll get certain people having a hard time getting a team together or finding a team that will have them because they are jerks, that would be a reason for them to get a bad review (because they don't deliver). People voting with their feet is a more honest model than people whining to their managers. Empower people to vote with their feet. Small teams, empowered to do what needs doing, with people committed to working with each other can get things done.

You'll get all your performers joining forces and you can expect great results. Everybody else ends up stuck with each other and it should show in whatever teams results you get from that. Some people get a lot of stuff done by themselves and that might still be positive. Linus Torvalds is a jerk, I wouldn't want him on my team but I use Linux and Git on a daily basis and I'm glad he's working on that.

That could be okay, if it’s done slowly and discreetly by upper management. Otherwise their are all kinds of hazards around recruiting like in the NCAA.
"rather than a score, they either get an “exceptional year”, a “great year” or an “off year”." - I wonder if that means an average year counts as an "off year"?
That seems like a purposeful omission of the "average" level; this makes average performance fall on either "off" or "great" end, depending on essentially non-tracked, political considerations.

Not an improvement, IMO, and it also feels infantilizing. So Atlassian determined their workers are not adults but little children, who can't handle knowing whether their performance was better or worse than expected and how much, so instead they get gamified with a kindergarten-named, 1.3-bit scale?

I assumed that "great" means average. If you ask someone, "How are you" and they say "Great!" it just means "Not significantly worse than usual".

I also like the implication that there's nothing wrong with a couple of "great" years in a row, while a couple of "average" years in a row would at some point be pretty demotivating.

Unless the jerk part is extreme, this is totally inappropriate. Extreme brilliant jerks are rare in my experience. Funny/tolerable brilliant jerks are the norm in jerk world.

This is babysitting of adult people.

Any kid must tolerate/live-with way more insulting behavior every freaking day without anything in return like regular pocket money.

Somebody think your code is shitty, you smell funny, you have weird glasses, you talk to quite, wow, lets immediately make a drama.

World of adults has become inferior to the world of kids.

Good.

I turned down a job this week because it became clear that the CEO couldn't handle any non-positive feedback and took it as a personal criticism.

Hey dude, if you have a redux reducer file that's over 11k+ lines long that doesn't mean that I'm "not smart enough to understand your code" it means you haven't bothered to keep basic code hygiene and break up your files.

It was a shame too - cool industry and tech stack and an odious toxic suck-bro culture. /smh

> Hey dude, if you have a redux reducer file that's over 11k+ lines long that doesn't mean that I'm "not smart enough to understand your code" it means you haven't bothered to keep basic code hygiene and break up your files.

While I haven't seen the code, this belief that large files are bad "by default" to me is a clear sign of an developer who puts superficialities before more important work.

In any event, any significantly evolved system has lots of sore spots that are nevertheless not the most pressing issue at any particular moment. This is the nature of things. Learning to accept that and still getting things done is valuable.

>Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work”.

They don't want people to bring their whole selves to work; nobody actually wants that. Lies like this cast immediate doubt onto everything else they're saying about the workplace environment.

If they stick to it, it could be helpful in hiring as well. They need reverse inquiry from really smart kids (and it is mainly kids in all likelihood) who were not the standard candidate from years past.
So... no job at Atlassian for Torvalds??
1 Apple in 10 lemons is a culture misfit and can be labelled as a brilliant jerk.
> Atlassian employees can receive one of three grading levels on each element, based on “growth mindset language” — rather than a score, they either get an “exceptional year”, a “great year” or an “off year”.

...and right there flips the Bozo Bit.

The truly brilliant will just win at the new soft skills game as well; and just adapt their behaviour. They are very used to hiding among us.

The description brilliant jerks; does come over as despising of talent.