YOU GUYS LET'S TAKE THIS TO BRANCH.

I don't object to the idea of needing to quantify what can be a really fuzzy, amorphous thing (And then end up in lawsuits later! Yay!), but it just seems a bit ridiculous to reduce 365 days of work into a 4-point scale.

Re: Ian's expectation setting - I hear you on this, but how does that even need a number scale? "You need to more effectively manage your time while balancing multiple projects if you want to [be a 3 and] get a promotion."

Two more perspectives. Added Ryan here, too.

So at Twitter I saw us go through a bunch of different systems to do this type of thing. And everyone was initially really against the whole "number" system (which is a version of what we ended up going with). I think the sentiment of "I am more than a number!" is a valid one, and a company needs to be really explicit about what this is for. The point is that if everyone isn't judged by the same criteria then some people will be "favorites" and some people will be skipped over. Also once you have an org of 500+ you need a clear common vocabulary to talk about this type of stuff.

I think it was less painful for an engineering organization, because often people can be happy with the level of "responsibility" they have (in eng orgs unfortunately often the easiest way to climb the ladder is to do less actual engineering and more personel shit). So this conversation was framed in the way of "if you want to move up the ladder, here is the number you are currently at, and here is what is expected of people who are at the rung above you." Otherwise it is ambiguous about what you need to do to get a promotion, and what the company values in people.

Regardless what is important is if these systems are designed well, not if they use numbers or grades or gold stars or whatever.

Exactly, putting some process and definition around what is a 3 vs what is a 4 seems like an attempt to avoid the biases we all have towards other people affect promotions.