Fanatics

My co-workers were great: kind, smart, and hard-working.

A clean code-base that hasn't yet had time to accumulate cruft.

A young and dynamic company that could be on its way to #1 in the US Sportsbook and online gambling market.

Top-notch business leadership.

FBG has copied Amazon's policy of giving managers a quota of 10% of their reports that should be "missing expectations".

So my manager (who has never been a Software Engineer) was monitoring every individual's performance to be able to decide who had to be "missing expectations". My team was high performing and almost always finished our projects early.

Of course, the evaluation metric my manager used is simplistic and easy to game; if you know what's going on!

In my case, the metric seemed to be "Jira points" finished. So people who cut corners to go faster are rewarded, and people who are thorough are penalized.

As one successful staff engineer told me after I decided to leave: "If the solution isn't obviously terrible; I go for it!"

Worst of all, I did not receive any feedback or guidance from my manager until it was too late. I was just told "you're missing expectations"; but I couldn't do anything about it! This happened to me on both of my performance evaluations!

After a miserable year at FBG, I decided to make it easier on everyone and chose a "voluntary" exit program, which will give me back my happiness.

Make sure your middle managers are actually giving timely and actionable written feedback to their reports in Lattice. My manager did not do this. They should be "missing expectations" for failing at one of their most important tasks. But it's the opposite; this manager is regarded as one of the top performers!