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Ask HN: Do you feel recognized at work?

29 points by axg11 ↗ HN
I have the thesis that companies across all industries under-recognize their employees achievements. The nature of modern work is complex, almost always involves multiple parties/stakeholders with unclear contributions. Due to that, achievements often go under the radar, particularly if an accomplishment can't be easily measured.

In tech, I've observed that the most common recognition results from a feature launch that contributes to revenue or another metric, e.g. A/B test launch.

For those who _do_ feel recognized at work, what are the ways/processes that your employer recognizes you? What are forms of recognition that _don't_ work?

38 comments

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swjinx
First up I do feel recognized.

What happens at my workplace is: we have a weekly status meeting and as annoying as it can be to listen to the same stories over and over my boss takes notice what we can easily achieve and where we struggle. Then when one hits a roadblock our boss asks the person if they want or need help and when help is wished for or the time pressure to ship a feature is too imminent he assigns a person to help. That person almost always is the perfect one for the task at hand.

And that is something I find very rewarding and definetly makes me feel recognized for my skills.

axg11
Sounds like a healthy culture. Am I right in understand that it is mostly your boss that does the recognition? And it is their responsibility to ensure everyone feels recognized?
swjinx
For the most part yes. I think the boss is critical in showing recognition but we as colleagues also learn where each other's strengths are through ourself but also our boss. That is something that I think helps us as a team immensely.
ridiculous_fish
A simple tip, maybe too obvious to even say, is for you to recognize your peers, as well as your reports and manager. Even a simple offhand remark ("great job running that meeting!") can go a long ways.
godisdad
I think constructive recognition can take two forms: criticism and complement. Personally, I think I mostly get the later and not enough of the former. If you get neither, you wonder why you’re even there
axg11
Great point that I did not consider the importance of. Company cultures that are low on recognition are probably also low on constructive criticism.
sebastien_b
We use Slack extensively at work (all remote company), and we have a dedicated channel for "Props", where we can call anyone out on doing a good job, being helpful, going above, etc. especially on stuff related to our Core Values.

This gives visibility to everyone in the company, and is also highlighted in our monthly email newsletter, as well as during our monthly all-hands.

axg11
Do you keep track of who is being recognised? Presumably the “props” aren’t evenly distributed, which is natural. I wonder whether certain people are under recognised.
doktorhladnjak
Where I work there is a bot (that must be custom code) where you can leave these props in any channel. It sends out a summary email to whoever received the praise and their manager containing everything they got that week.
sebastien_b
Yes it's kept track of (for that newsletter I mentioned, among other things); and yes it's naturally a bit unevenly distributed - I myself probably don't give as many 'props' as I should, and probably don't receive as many either (not that I mind, as I'm not "seeking" specific acknowledgement/recognition anyways, having been there over a decade now).

It's not the only way we do recognition of course (there's the normal management/review thing) - this is just one of the more open, visible ways to do it for us.

cameronfraser
there's always people working behind the scenes that are under recognized by people in those types of channels, I think people who work at integration points between departments usually get the most props
Mandatum
I always end up muting those channels. Works in offices less than 50, but anything beyond that..
throwaway675309
Honestly I prefer companies that don't do any recognition at all rather than ones that play lipservice to the idea. It's just entirely too cringe and sort of weirdly reminds me of high school prep rallies.

In all likelihood your job just revolves around some meaningless CRUD application for some equally meaningless commerce application, zero of my self-worth is tied into my job and I'm constantly baffled by people on the other end of the spectrum.

lnxg33k1
Yes I have quite a personalised face
emerged
The cycle usually goes:

1) Recognition 2) Identified as threat 3) Political subterfuge

So I prefer to avoid #1 if possible, especially when remote working with in-house coworkers. You often don’t even get to /see/ #3 happening until it’s too late.

glouwbug
The first law is to never surpass the master
axg11
Do promotions not occur at your company?
dominotw
that usually has nothing to do with 1
incomingpain
I am fully work from home now. I went into the office briefly and front desk person stopped me and didn't recognize me. Had a whole conversation and update about how I was breaking rules by wearing only a 2 ply mask. That i should be wearing 3 ply or more. Hadn't seen them in 2 years because of covid. They had no idea who I was.

In terms of my work being recognized? Also a big no.

tjr
Maybe they would have recognized you had you been wearing a 3-ply mask.
digisign
When/where were "plys" a factor?
incomingpain
It was never made a requirement by the government. Some employers, like mine, made it a requirement after the government recommended.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7441131/coronavirus-three-layer-f...

Ironically, this was the third time i got ejected for bad masking procedure.

Early on before masks were required. I 3d printed the prusa headband and used a 2L bottle as the shield. I only ever used it once to walmart and then put it aside. Then they came out with rules for masking. I wore that as it was explicitly defined as allowed. The admin staff took exception because I wasn't wearing a regular mask in addition to the plastic face shield but I was also already leaving and they demanded I leave.

The next time was mid wave, needed to go into the office datacenter for literally a second. I wore my mando helmet, but what i didnt notice was the carpet came up on top of the feet dust sticker and jammed the door open. Alarms went off... of course the mando helmet triggered people bigtime. They demanded I take it off... They demanded to see ID which i provided. But they never wrote anything down. Then they explicitly banned 'alien headwear' as not qualifying for the mask rules. Even though clearly it does.

Took them week and half to find out it was me. apparently they had to go far up the chain of command in order to punish me and that person overruled them saying what I did was immature and irresponsible but no punishment is necessary because the rules did allow it.

On a side note, why was covid response so tyrannical in Canada? Our healthcare system collapsed. Quebec and Ontario nurses are literally enslaved. Quebec nurse union literally went to the united nations to complain about slavery. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/nurses-union-submits...

They cant strike or do anything about it. Nurses are literally forced to work 80 hour weeks or more. Meanwhile... the government is also firing all antivaxxer nurses.

thenerdhead
They do under-recognize. Not on purpose, but because corporate America is a hivemind of busyness. They are too busy to care. To navigate the corporate world, you need to vouch and promote yourself a hell of a lot more than you think.

The sad reality is that nobody is going to do that for you. You might get a great boss, a sponsor, or even a leader who gets wind of what you're doing and you get lucky. In reality though, most people do not have that and you should just create your own luck by being annoying as hell about your accomplishments. That's the easiest way to get noticed.

The other side is that you have to navigate the people who see you as a threat because of this. It's a whole different game that nobody talks about. It's the "leaders" who will throw you under the bus. It's the bosses who try to sabotage you by giving you impossible jobs. There's much more going on here that's usually explained by people's insecurity. Great leaders and bosses would encourage you to surpass them. Sadly we live in the real world where most people at this layer are narcissists and nepotists.

One of the best things you can do is to collect "wins" in a local database application. These are proven things that give you a track record when performance reviews come around and you can hold your boss accountable when they try to lie to your face.

dominotw
> hese are proven things that give you a track record when performance reviews come around and you can hold your boss accountable when they try to lie to your face.

But your boss has no obligation to you to give you straight answers. You can do nothing about it and no real way to hold that person accountable.

Most bosses deny promotions using performance ladder as excuse and tell you that one needs to be already performing at that level for you to get promoted.

lifeplusplus
Not at all. You have to be on business side
axg11
Why do you think there is nobody recognizing your work? Out of interesting - do you make an attempt to recognize others?
lifeplusplus
when people say recognition they are talking about recognition from upper management so they can get promoted and be considered important to the company. While recognition from interns would be encouraging it's not going to get you 'awarded' for your work. So the point of recognizing others is much or less irrelevant if you have no direct reports.
fancyfish
No, and I am actively interviewing to leave. I treat interviewing like a chance to “re-level” myself with a sorta-objective third party, and I am getting offers for 10-20%+ higher comp.

The fundamental issue is that optimizing things, paying down tech debt, maintenance, etc just don’t get nearly the same fanfare as new features or product launches. I don’t blame people, because the latter is flashier, and more understood by nontechnical folks in the business.

For people like me who work behind the scenes, you need a trusted manager who understands the importance of your work and will go to bat for you, and/or you need to regularly publicize your accomplishments in a measurable, easily understood way. For me, that means posting a tidbit in Slack whenever I make a noteworthy change.

I wish my sort of work was respected inline with its business impact, but alas, it’s harder to measure or communicate things like “developer time saved” vs “feature X bumped sales by y%.”

axg11
Great perspective that interviewing is "re-leveling" and seeking recognition elsewhere. Ultimately, good work that improves technical debt and maintenance should be recognized if you have a good manager. I think a lot of issues arise from the fact that a manager is a single point of failure. There should be a fallback in case they are bad at the recognition side of their role.
doktorhladnjak
Not really. I try to not let it bother me because it's been this way most anywhere I've worked. I did once have a manager who was very good at this. I was surprised how positive it made me feel.
axg11
Do you think being recognized made you stay in that role any longer? Or did it solely contribute to making it a more positive place to work?
linspace
I don't know the parent but people definitely stay longer when recognized, and even more important, they do a better job
doktorhladnjak
I'd say it didn't make me stay longer. I never thought to myself "wow, they recognize the job I'm doing here so I'm going to stay". BUT, now that I think back on it, I spent 4 years on that one team, which is the longest I've spent on any team in my ~20 year career. There were lots of reasons I stayed though: friendly coworkers (with low turnover too), more autonomy than I've had at any other job (small team where I was only 1 of 3 backend engineers on an entire set of products), learned a ton (this was when cloud was just becoming big, and we migrated everything to Azure).

I've stayed as little as 6 months in a team before moving, but average has been around 1-3 years. I've stayed in companies longer (9 years, 4 years, been at my current place for 2 years), but have moved to different teams internally.

raincom
Here is how people get recognized: (a) don't fix the existing stuff (b) write a new tool to solve some problems, but not all problems (c) get promoted, collect bonus (d) Don't stay no more than two years, and jump to another company or another group in the same company; that way, you don't need to clean out the mess created by both (a) and (b) (e) the people who end up maintaining (a) and (b) won't get rewarded.

Rinse and repeat.

bingo-bongo
> ..and that when we fixate on the people who build systems and forget those who maintain, moderate, and use — or, in this case, exploit — those systems, we’re missing the messy realities of how technology actually evolves.

(Somewhat out of the original context, but this really stuck with me)

the_only_law
Not really actually. My team sits in this weird position on the org chart where I feel like other teams in the same department have the most visible celebrations/successes.

It’s a little more than that, but I don’t feel like elaborating on it. I don’t get my current job any more or less than any other job, I just think the way this company is organized, my team is doing a lot of background work for efforts of the teams that do get recognized.

linspace
You are asking for the holy grail: aligning individual objectives with corporate objectives. The company that manages to do that will eat the world. It would be bigger than nuclear fussion or solving P vs NP.

The first thing to ask is how you measure recognition. Because there are plenty of people that get recognition but not a lot of pay. What you get paid depends more on what other companies are willing to pay you.

The second thing to ask is by whom do you want to get recognized? It's much easier to get recognition by your peers: they spend much more time with you and have the technical knowledge to appreciate your work, and get impacted by your work too. Getting recognized by your peers is important, mostly for your own happiness and sometimes it also permeates upwards (just a little).

I bet that you mean: getting recognized by your manager and getting more pay. Regarding the pay: statistically your are not going to accumulate raises every year. It's unmaintainable. Of course some people manage to do that but you need to be extremely lucky and work very hard. Switching companies is the best way of getting raises.

Regarding getting recognized by your manager: that depends a lot on your manager. Do you give your manager recognition? If the answer is no then it may be because you know little about her work or maybe she is a horrible manager. In the later case screw everything and switch companies, don't bother, run, run fast, life is too short and the job market is great. In the first case communicate more with your manager and understand her problems. Solving her problems is the best way to get recognition. Even trying to solve them and failing will get you recognition. If you are doing something that you think is impressive communicate with your manager and explain why is important. So to summarize my advice is: align your objectives with your manager and super-manager objectives.