Opinions wanted on career-limiting moves (<g>)

And an old tire to make a swing, right?

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany
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Not quite what I had in mind.

Reply to
larwe

Sounds good to me, I'd just reality check the offer and make sure it's not a hospital pass ;)

ie have you dealt with this department from the other side of the fence already ? If not, find someone who used to work there.

What are the intra department politics like - marketing can pay better, but can also be full of over-inflated egos, so you need a higher tolerance level....

-jg

Reply to
-jg

On Apr 15, 2:45=A0am, Grant Edwards

That's where more than one job title can be useful, it can give the illusion of two resume's ;)

-jg

Reply to
-jg

Depends what kind of hospital you mean :) The job will be extremely high-stress, with the added bonus of travel requirements. A mental hospital - either the hard kind with iron bars, or the soft kind with a wooden bar and many stools - is certainly not out of the question.

I've been dealing with the department ever since I started working here. I know most if not all of the people in the department, many of them quite well on a first-name basis, and I have several friends at various levels, and no active enemies there (though I'm sure some people will not approve of choosing me).

Chuckle. There are plenty of egos on all sides of every fence around here. However, the workforce here is so static (there are people around here who've been in their current job for 10-15-20 years) that I would say pretty much everybody knows everybody else's foibles and hot-button topics. Certainly anyone who has worked as an engineering project lead for any length of time knows the major personalities on the other side of the fence, and how best to interact with them.

As for pay, I suspect I'll be taking a cut to do this move, so I'd be happy just to keep things where they are. Even if there is a higher payscale, though, company policy prevents me from getting a significant increase - internal transfers have a cap on the salary delta. The structure over there is different, though - engineers don't get any kind of bonus, whereas everyone in marketing does (in years where there is a bonus offered, anyway).

Reply to
larwe

When I worked for various firms, that sort of bonus structure always used to irk me. The commonly related justification was that the sales (or marketing) people "needed it". This always seemed insulting to engineers who surely also "need it", particularly if they have to clear up after the said sales or marketing folk!

Andrew

Reply to
Andrew Jackson

I think this is one of those self-fulfilling prophecy sort of things - the reason they "need it" is because everyone else is offering that benefit to their marketing employees because they "need it", hence everybody needs to keep offering it otherwise the entire department will jump ship :)

I haven't really looked into it, I have no idea if such bonuses are $5 or $5,000,000 - free money is nice but not worth arguing for as I step from one lily pad to another.

Reply to
larwe
[...]

A bonus or commission is, as far as I know, intended as a way of reinforcing Good Behavior ("That was very helpful. Do more of it!").

If one believes that generating revenue is Good Behavior, and an employee is in a position to directly affect a company's income in an easily measurable way, then doesn't it make sense to base that bonus or commission on the revenue that employee "generates"?

For persons in a clerical or technical area the effect on company revenue is usually much more indirect; often they can cause losses without being able to directly cause gains (other than by finding ways to cut costs). That doesn't mean that they don't contribute to the company's well-being, and it doesn't mean that they are not essential to the company, but it's much easier to reward someone in Sales (or even Marketing) based on how much of Product X they sold than it is to reward even the V.P. of Accounting or Product Design on the same basis.

And, once you accept that you want your Sales guys Selling, then you both want to encourage them to Sell More, and you go looking for guys who will respond well to your incentive program. I'm not sure if it's a _completely_ self-fulfilling prophecy, but I do think that there is a loop and some feedback in it.

Or did I miss your point? Feedback... er, "comments" welcomed.

Frank McKenney

--
   "Nothing is a waste of time, if you use the experience wisely."
                                         -- Rodin
Reply to
Frnak McKenney

OTOH, bonuses based on revenue, without looking at the long term effects of the sales methods used, can be very self defeating.

Bonuses will encourage the sales guy to sell the customer more stuff, and more expensive stuff, than the customer way want. With a smart customer, this will lead to resentment and fewer sales later.

Bonuses based on the gross price of the sale, yet that require expensive modifications to the product, will encourage sales folks to "sell anything", possibly leading to the company going into a "we lose money on each sale, but we'll make up for it in volume" death spiral.

At one point, my dad decided that he would give his piece-part production employees bonuses on a per-part basis. Production shot up! Woo-hoo! Rejects and customer returns shot up! Oops. He sorted it out (to everyone's benefit) by giving bonuses for parts _after_ they passed QA.

The point is that folks will follow the money, and giving bonuses can easily backfire. While they are a good tool to have in the box, you've got to be careful about what you use them on.

--
Tim Wescott
Control system and signal processing consulting
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

There are two *very* simple rules here:

1) People tend to repeat behaviors for which they're rewarded. 2) Any rigid structure of rules encourages people to avoid the bars and head for the loopholes, and the more complex the structure the more loopholes exist.

In other words, for any nontrivial analysis, tell me your metric and I'll make my numbers indicate I'm a golden god according to that metric(*). Anyone who works at a BigCorp becomes very good at this (or stays on the bottom rung, maybe on a PIP, for his whole life). We have this discussion every year at performance evaluation time, when clearly worthless employees are allowed to stay in the middle or upper tier, while people who aren't favored (or aren't sufficiently political players) are left on the bottom.

(*) Six sigma helps ;)

Reply to
larwe

[...]

Agreed, they _can_ be. But doesn't that same caveat apply to _any_ form of incentive? Conside the consequences of offering a HR staff member a bonus based solely on the number of new hires, or an assembly line worker rewarded for the number of cars rolled out.

Rewards and bonuses -- incentives -- tend to produce more of the same activity, just as penalties (and taxes ) tend to reduce it. If you make calculating them too difficult, you will lessen their impact, but if you don't make sure that the behavior that they actually reinforce is what you want you'll wind up with Unintended Consequences.

(Before we get too abstract, I'd like it clear that my original posting was intended to point out that there were valid reasons for offering incentives tied to revenue generated, not to argue that any specific program always worked as expected. )

Bonus plans _can_ have that effect.

Bonus plans _can_ have that effect.

So your father replaced a bonus plan that had unintended (and undesirable) consequences with one that reinforced behavior that had a positive effect on the company. Sounds good.

Agreed; you need to monitor your results to see if you're heading in the direction you originally intended. This applies to any form of incentive: bonuses, taxes, even "applied physical negative reinforement" and children.

Frank

--
                 A closed mouth gathers no feet.
Reply to
Frnak McKenney

Then there's "predictability". Offer me a bonus but let me get the impression that the rules for obtaining it might or might not apply come bonus time -- or that the bonus fund might dry up -- and it loses a lot of its impact.

And "consistency". If I think that the rules are vague and that a given bonus will be assigned based on favoritism or whim I may decide to adapt, or I may decide to ignore it.

(In his best Bill Cosby voice): Riiii-iight. _What_'s a PIP?

Hm. Are you saying that the incentive programs you've encountered fail massively to accomplish their stated goals, or that they have occasional misfires? (Or are you saying Something Completely Different? )

Incentive programs exist for the same reason bureaucracies come into existence: someone or some group comes to believe that a given behavior is Good or Bad, devises a rule or set of rules which will encourage or discourage (or mandate or prohibit) such behavior, and establishes a mechanism which will continue to apply such reinforcement in perpetuity (or until it gets changed). A CEO sees large numbers of manufacturing rejects and sets up a bonus plan to reward employees who have fewer of them; Congress sees problems in the nation's schools and we get a Department of Education and NCLB.

Can you offer any suggestons on how to design a more effective incentive program for, say, Product Managers? (Yes, there's an implied in there, but also a serious question.)

Frank

-- "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge." -- Daniel Boorstin

-- Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887 Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut mined spring dawt cahm (y'all)

Reply to
Frnak McKenney

That's potentially a bit backwards - look at classical operant conditioning research. Unpredictable rewards are actually better, because if you are 100% predictable, then the very first time you don't deliver (e.g. bad year's sales, etc) the conditioning takes a big hit. Better to reward randomly, so the rat keeps playing the slot machine even after it's been shocked, hoping that NEXT time will be the pellet.

Personal Improvement Plan, i.e. death row. PIP is the term used by most BigCorps for what happens to you between "pissed your boss off one time too many" and "security is at your desk with a box". Some companies have a different term for it, but whatever the name, it's essentially supervised pre-firing probation.

I'm saying that the organizational overcomplexity that leads to the formalization of such plans is a symptom that the structure is already so complicated that nobody's activities are directly linked (by a simple formula) to meaningful company goals, and so bonus levels (regardless of whatever rules are in place) are set mostly by how well the recipient can word his/her personal goal plan and how creative his/ her year-end wrap-up report can be. A few years at a BigCorp will make most people into accomplished weasels.

The only programmed incentive plans that really make sense in an R&D type organization are project-linked and cross-functional. I.e. the company decides to develop Widget X. There's a schedule, and a budget. If Widget X gets released within x% of on time, within y% of budget, and it works well enough that there are fewer than z% of returns in the first quarter of sales, then the whole team assigned to that project (marketing, engineering, SWQA, HWQA, regulatory compliance, etc) should get a bonus. Note that the bonus becomes part of the budget for Widget X. The actual dollar amount to each person can be calculated using whatever weightings you'd like; number of hours spent on the project, current salary level, estimated market value of Widget X, first quarter's sales numbers for Widget X, ...

For products that aren't under active development, no bonus is deserved because they're "just" being manufactured. If some unusual effort is taken by (say) a Product Manager to raise sales of a product, or Engineering does some unusual work to fix a production problem or value-engineer the design, there are ad-hoc incentive programs in place to reward that sort of thing.

The actual bonus programs that are in place for Marketing and Sales in many (maybe not most) BigCorps are rewarding behaviors like "being a nice guy," "filling out one's paperwork neatly using the correct company font," and "twisting words like a greased weasel riding a motorized pipe snake".

The exact same sequence of events leads to stultification of an entire company by means of process. The process becomes the product, and any actual end-user product that accidentally escapes the process factory is an epiphenomenon. I am way too familiar with this end result...

Reply to
larwe

Thanks for the reminder, though as I recall you do need a period of regular rewards befoe you start going random. In any case, I wonder if this applies to a human being making conscious decisions and with the full knowledge that the universe is imperfect, that other people make statements which may turn out to be inaccurate. I don't mean just lying, I mean people changing their minds or just being... wrong.

For your example, for those employees who are strongly motivated by money (the ones we started off discussing), do you think that one bad year of sales and no bonus will significantly reduce the lure, the motivational force of next year's sales target? After all, one bad year _is_ sort of a randomization.

Or, looking at it from a different angle, and for the employees I'm describing here, which do you think would have a stronger "deconditioning" effect: a year of bad sales (inconsistent environment), or a last-minute cap on the size of a bonus because the company didn't want one salesman "making too much money" (inconsistent policy)?

Ah. Thanks. Where would we be without euphemisms?

Ah (again). It seems to be the range of the phrase "such plans" that I'm getting hung up on. My own experience is mostly limited to one small (under 100) company and consulting; while I've seen incentive plans with problems, I have to be cautious about extrapolating that limited experience out to cover all businesses.

But isn't even this structure subject to your concern regarding "gaming the system"? Doesn't it offer a perverse incentive for a manager to (a) overestimate the budget, (b) pad the schedule, and (c) ensure that problems don't come to light for the first sales quarter?

It gets tricky on the "upper management" side, too. If one forces a product manager to accept what that manager considers unrealistic goals, won't that be a disincentive for the entire team? (Which is an incentive for the team to back up their manager's extimates.)

And then there's the confusion generated by Reality(tm) in the form of Murphy and the 90/90 rule of project management ("The first half of the project takes 90% of the project's resources; the second half takes the other 90%").

I can see that it's a messy situation, just as taxation-as-incentive can be messy when you have to use a surrogate (e.g. sales) instead of what you really want to measure (e.g. company gain). But does that imply that the task is impossible (no bonuses should be given out, or if given, they should be based on a manager's opinion)? Or just difficult and not likely to be solved in a one-size-fits-all fashion?

"Incentive programs" but not "bonuses"? That is, non-financial rewards?

D**n. I _knew_ that those silly Calculus and Physics clases were a waste of time; I should have been spending my time on Underwater Basket Weaving.

But do you see this as inevitable? Or do you think that the symptoms can be recognized before the "Medusa effect" becomes permanent, and perhaps the process slowed or even reversed?

By the way: My nephew David at RPI mentioned Ricardo ("Maverick") Semler's book "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works" to me a few weeks back. I think David may have misinterpreted the title, but the book itself offers a radically different way of organizing a business that might appeal to you.

Frank

-- A very common attitude among scientists (and to be fair, most people) is that those who disagree with their judgments lack the knowledge to make the correct choice. -- Pete Shanks / Human Genetic Engineering

-- Frank McKenney, McKenney Associates Richmond, Virginia / (804) 320-4887 Munged E-mail: frank uscore mckenney ayut mined spring dawt cahm (y'all)

Reply to
Frnak McKenney

Rationally, I can calculate the odds of winning a lottery or coming out ahead when I sit down in front of a slot machine. But I still enjoy going to casinos once in a while :) As far as guiding one's actions goes, I think people ascribe far too much meaning to intelligence and nowhere near enough to the "eat, fight, mate, avoid being decapitated by saber-toothed tiger" aspect of human motivation. People think it's maybe 75/25. I think it's more like 20/80, and half of that 20 is just thinking up "logical" rationalizations for why they went with their instincts.

There's a good body of research to bear this out.

In summary: despite all your rage, you are still just a rat in a cage. Run, squeak, press bar, get pellet.

Having seen both of these happen, I would say the latter, but apparently not for the reason you think: the reason seems to be that the bad sales were predictable (you can see the bucket of money filling up over the year, and you can know way ahead of time if it's not going to fill up to the quota mark), whereas a capricious decision at the last moment is more of a shock.

Oh, it gets better. For example, my BigCorp has a field at the end of the annual performance review where a standard phrase has to be selected; these are, for example, words to the effect of "promote this guy ASAP" or "develop in place". The code for "get rid of this one" used to be "Outplacement Opportunity". It has now been revised even more humorously as "Expatriate Assignment", which conjures up visions of my convict ancestors being shipped off to Botany Bay.

I have more experience with the BigCorp side of these things. At smaller companies, the effort-to-results links are stronger and more visible, so the problem might not even exist there (or at least if it does exist it's easy to see if one looks). At BigCorps, you can take it as a fairly universal truth that the machine is so complex you can only measure it by "unit testing", so to speak - you can only measure the direct output of your snippet of the process, and there is [intentionally!] no equation that will let you understand how that affects the whole.

Absolutely. It's like democracy - it's been proven not to work, but it's less unworkable than the next most palatable alternative.

It is - again, personal experience speaking there.

Don't get me started. I have worked for companies (making everything from bags of wood screws to jet aircraft components) where a Golden Standard Project Length has been set - say 300 days. Doesn't matter if you're making a moon lander from scratch or redesigning the packaging of a tub of margarine - you shall take no more than 300 days. And the number is reduced every year, too.

The way this lunatic sort of system gets gamed is that projects aren't officially started until they're nearly complete; they're kept as skunkworks projects until they're close enough to completion that they MIGHT meet that arbitrary deadline. Of course that means the project didn't get real resources from other departments, and there was no official spec for it, so the project just kind of grows.

In general, I am terribly suspicious of one-size-fits-all policies, because I think every single one I've come across has caused logical insanities. I'm not a big fan of Kant's philosophies, either - more a J.S. Mill guy - for the same reason.

Jargon issue here. "Bonus" has a specific technical meaning, which is why for instance when I get a cash payout for filing a patent, it's listed on my paycheck as "technical award", not "bonus". "Incentive programs" are not "bonus", which is an annual payment considered part of one's compensation package as opposed to incentives, which are one- time events. I was in fact referring to cash incentives there.

Yeah, think how I feel working a fulltime week and sitting in five classes (15 credits) of control systems theory and Fourier transforms, never sleeping, always in exam mode...

It is somewhat avoidable, but only if guided from the very top of the organization by someone who understands the danger and is competent to evaluate (and explain to shareholders) why it doesn't make long-term financial sense to the company to use process tools in R&D roles. Google is an example of a company that's doing it right so far, although it's a bit young to be sure how long that's going to last.

Also, for any large diversified company, it must be recognized that a single process often cannot sensibly be applied to every branch of the company. If it was possible to make a Grand Unified Process that works for any branch of a diversified company, then by the same logic it would be possible to make a Grand Unified Process that would allow any bicycle workshop to be an aircraft manufacturer, or vice versa. Part of the difficulty at some of these ossified BigCorps is that military/ aerospace processes are being applied across the board to (for example) disposable consumer electronics products. For some spaces, ad hoc "processes" are in fact the ideal. Google's 20% time perk is a great example of how to avoid this kind of trap.

Reply to
larwe

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