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Coinbase Tests App for Employees To Grade Each Other During Meetings (theinformation.com) 42

Coinbase is testing a practice where it asks employees to frequently rate each other. Some employees at the company have been using a real-time evaluation app invented by Bridgewater Associates, the well-known hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio, which helped enforce a culture of "radical transparency" that encourages blunt honesty, The Information reported Monday, citing two people with direct knowledge. From the report: The app, Dot Collector, is sold by Principles, a company Dalio founded. Coinbase's version lets employees evaluate co-workers, including their managers, on how well they exemplify the crypto firm's 10 cultural tenets -- which include clear communication, efficient execution and positive energy -- during meetings and other interactions, these people said. After an interaction, an employee can give their colleague a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or neutral rating.
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Coinbase Tests App for Employees To Grade Each Other During Meetings

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  • by dbrueck ( 1872018 ) on Monday May 23, 2022 @03:18PM (#62559382)

    LOL, there is absolutely no way this cannot end badly.

    • LOL, there is absolutely no way this cannot end badly.

      Agreed. Although the goal is "blunt honesty," I don't see how a faint hope for honesty begins to counteract the much stronger motivation to give ratings that improve one's own personal position, even if that requires downgrading coworkers through selective evaluations or outright lies.

    • Before I retired I worked for a reasonably large outfit (20k + employees). HR and the executives tried out several of these employee engagement/evaluation/peer2peer criticism software applications. None of them were successful to any degree and all were either abject failures or complete disasters.

      These things are a substitute for real human interaction and HR sees the value in removing the unpredictable human element that is an integral part of first level or line management. The execs never had to u

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      One change will make it effective. Only evaluate those above you in the org chart. There is no reason to create discord among equals. Evaluting those you supervise should have a more formal process, and those you donâ(TM)t arenâ(TM)t any your business.
      • by taustin ( 171655 )

        Only evaluate those above you in the org chart.

        That's a good way to entrench a cabal of lazy, incompetent workers who no longer have to tolerate a competent, effective boss.

        • by fermion ( 181285 )
          If you allow workers to evaluate each other, you end up with a lazy incompetent cabal of popular yet dumb workers who protect each other. If management is competent, they can shift the evaluation of superiors for useful information that will otherwise be unavailable. It either case there will be no useful information of job performance, as workers only are experts in their jobs and at best can only complain about others they feel make their jobs more complicated. But there are ways to infer bad mangers from
    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      Anybody who believes this is a good idea was likely one of "the popular kids" in high school, and only learned how to be popular with the other popular kids, and how to bully smart kinds into doing their homework for them.

      In short, parasites with no self esteem who can only feel less like a loser by continuing be popular with the other popular parasites, and bully the smart kids into doing their work for them.

      If you don't know who I'm talking about, you are who I'm talking about.

      Peer review is the cornersto

    • Last year a recruiter approached me for a position at a fintech outfit in CT that does this. The more I looked into it the more I was horrified. There was significant evidence that it exacerbated the bullying and contempt for diversity that already plague tech.
  • Now my co-workers and I can get this worthless manager fired!
    • by splutty ( 43475 )

      Heh. Most likely you'll get downvoted for uttering warnings about the stupid ideas of said manager :D

      Even anonymously people tend to prefer their head up someone's ass.

    • by I75BJC ( 4590021 )
      I doubt that will happen!
      More likely, "contentious" employees will be fired through the long process of manager's reviews. I have seen these solicitations from employees end up hurting both the employee who said anything as a critique of another employee ("contentious' label" and the employee who was critiqued ("all your co-workers complain about you").
      This is another case of Managers too lazy or too incompetent to do their own jobs and forcing non-managers/employees to do supervisory work without superv
      • Employee must resist the urge to "play manager" without the pay!

        Warning I did this and was fired. Manager left to a new org. I was most senior and going on the fourth time this happened. Each time I played manager and got rave reviews from teammates but second and third level managers rejected that on my perf review. So fourth time around I said nope gonna keep engineering. Instead we got a director playing first level manager and had no clue NO CLUE what we were building. He was woefully unprepared and und

  • "...a real-time evaluation app invented by Bridgewater Associates, the well-known hedge fund...which helped enforce a culture of "radical transparency" that encourages blunt honesty..."

    Blunt honesty? Since when is THAT welcomed in society today? A woman cannot define what a "woman" is anymore, and yet you expect the hedge fund org who are literal experts at betting against success to help you succeed in the workplace with this app crap?

    I wish you and your fellow narcissists the best of luck. Hope the co-worker sniping goes well. May the Farce be with you.

    • If I were working there, I would be bluntly honest by spreading information to my coworkers on the best way to find other jobs.

  • One day they will come for you too.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/ar... [spectator.co.uk]

  • by Jahta ( 1141213 ) on Monday May 23, 2022 @03:30PM (#62559432)
    I can see this turning into The Simpsons doing Electric Shock Aversion Therapy [youtube.com]!
  • Black Mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by nwaack ( 3482871 ) on Monday May 23, 2022 @03:34PM (#62559446)
    I remember seeing something like this on a more grand scale in Black Mirror. It didn't end well.
  • "radical transparency" in theory only. In reality, I think it would actually cause massive conformity due to people going with their feelings. Most employees would just give everybody 3 (assuming the rating is out of 5) for everything in order to not cause unnecessary conflict and/or just not giving a shit. Or employees would be downvoted by coworkers they don't like or don't agree with and upvote those they like. Very rarely would employees use the system how it is intended, by rating on the quality of

    • I worked for a place that has a system like this. Every month, we were asked to rate each employee every quarter. We all rated each other five stars because if we did three stars, HR would come in and ask why people are not being rated 100% positively. Overall, it was worthless.

  • And apparently, people in charge don't know that.

    I would be very interested in seeing what happen when the CEO gets a majority of thumbs down.

    No matter how "radically transparent" you want to be, the problem is that radical transparency collides with someone else viewpoint and/or "peculiarities".

    Also transparent about what ?

    This whole idea is such a shitshow. people will be honest with you IF they respect you AND if they think you will in turn be honest with them, you know, that trust thing. Trust takes t

  • A corporate gestapo is great for employee morale, loyalty, and trust.

    Posted under the watch of my fellow patriot and colleague.

  • by peterofoz ( 1038508 ) on Monday May 23, 2022 @03:42PM (#62559472) Homepage Journal
    Black Mirror has a good episode of a dystopian society where people continuously social score each other. The result is that people start living for the social score to the exclusion of everything else.

    Curiously China is doing something similar. Is this the beginning of the end for Coinbase?

    https://nationalpost.com/enter... [nationalpost.com]

    • Also in an episode of The Orville and Sliders I believe.

      • Also in an episode of The Orville and Sliders I believe.

        I was thinking that Sliders had an episode about that. Was a long time ago now.

    • That's nothing, the USA now has government controlled by one party this is too busy getting their Woke Score maxed than to work together and do anything useful for the citizens.

    • Is this the beginning of the end for Coinbase?

      What if the Titanic had implemented this before hitting the iceberg?

      (ship hits iceberg, something clearly wrong)
      ship's-person 1: "i'm afraid to report this ship is sinking"
      ship's-person 2: "i'm tired of your negativity" (gives bad rating to ship's-person 1)
      (ship's-person 2 gets out a secret life boat)
      ship's-person 1: "hey, let me on"
      ship's-person 2: "i don't want that kind of negativity on this lifeboat" (gives another bad rating to ship's person 1 for demanding tone)

    • Also the MeowMeowBeenz episode of Community, where real-time ratings lead to a dystopian caste system. They cram a lot into a 22-minute episode. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3... [imdb.com]
  • by Echoez ( 562950 ) * on Monday May 23, 2022 @03:44PM (#62559486)

    One of Community's funniest episodes involved the social networking app MeowMeowBeanz that allowed everyone to rate everyone else. I won't spoil it, but it completely revamps the entire culture.

  • A) On his laptop (the last 10 working years)
    B) counting holes in the ceiling tiles
    C) reading a magazine (the early days, before I learned that was A Bad Look (tm)
    D) snoring
    E) contributing, usually because I called the meeting and had a good reason for doing so

    Over 40 years I'm guessing the number of useful meetings I was in was well under 10% Worst were the weekly staff meetings, where 5 minutes of information took 60 minutes to exchange.

    Actually, the worst was the time I had daily meetings.
  • There is already so much back biting and nonsense going on that is completely independent of actual job performance in work places. Sometimes it calls in to question whether employees are making any meaningful contributions to the companies outside of participating in Lord of the Flies/ Survivor type social experiments.
  • 10 cultural tenets -- which include clear communication, efficient execution and positive energy

    This app killed any clear communication and positive energy that might happen.

    • Dystopian
    • Misanthropic
    • F**ked up
    • Childish

    Evidently, someone has been watching too much Survivor during COVID.

  • Bridgewater Associates approached me several years ago about a job. I had a few calls and met the internal recruiter for lunch. And dug into the whole Principles method of working during my lunch. I stopped the interview process halfway through lunch. I see the value in that level of data collection, and it might work great, but it is not how I work. I will never work for a company that practices the Principles. It is just still too intrusive into everyday work.
  • At face value this will inherently discriminate against autistics who are allegedly a protected class, but Coinbase already knows that the Americans With Disabilities Act has no force or effect and also that the government overtly sanctions the redlining of autistics.

  • Not surprised this is coming out of a company founded on assigning a numerical value to things that don't exist.

    "When a metric becomes a target, it is no longer a useful metric."

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