Who gets to have it all?

what's so bad about most anyway

It’s already happening. One dispatch down and I’m freezing up a little, sitting down to write and immediately getting too serious or wondering how the hell to begin. The thing I like about newsletters and blogs is that, in theory, I can stay looser and freer. In practice it turns out that’s harder to do. Shocker. I’m trying to move away from my Deep & Meaningful voice, the one I tended to fall into in my personal essays and old columns. I don’t talk like that very often, but why does it end up as my go-to when I sit down to write?

What’s interesting is that at Instagram (aka IG), I didn’t do that so much. I wrote a bunch of notes there on Workplace (Facebook for work) that people loved, in part because they were smart but in part because they had a clear, strong, and funny voice. That’s the voice I want to access more. No shade to you, D&M voice, but it’s time to cede the spotlight for a bit.

Speaking of IG, I promised to tell you where the title of this newsletter came from. Well, buckle up.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT!!! Before anyone at IG or Meta gets mad at me: While the details may differ, what I am about to say below is about my experience at IG, but also at almost every tech job I’ve had. None of what I’m writing here is really about IG. It’s about the tech industry more broadly and how it treats and values many of its employees. Cool?

IMPORTANT CAVEAT 2: If you are a potential employer who reads this one day, just skim down to the part where I am instrumental in one of IG’s biggest product launches of the past few years. Thanks!!

So at IG, as at many companies, there are performance reviews. But at IG, unlike every other company I have personally worked for, the performance review process is, in a phrase, fucking nuts. It is referred to as PSC, which stands for performance summary cycle, and just as an FYI I had to google what it stands for because even after almost three years there, I could never remember.

O, PSC! It loomed large, like an angry god. During my time at IG, I did not forget about its presence for one moment. All of us were always looking to appease our god, gathering offerings, preparing for the biannual ritual sacrifice. But gods are capricious: You can do everything right and they still might turn you into an earwig for sport.

Because I want to hold your interest but do not have imagery for some of these pieces, I’m going to keep using the AI image generator in Substack. I got this one by typing in “angry greek god sacrifice” and to be honest it’s a good representation of how PSC felt.

Some quick facts.

1. I was an independent contributor, also known as an IC.

2. I was an IC6, which is a senior level but not the most senior level - there are at least two above it, maybe three depending on discipline. Many coworkers were shocked to discover I was not an IC7. This is my newsletter, here I will toot my own horn as I please.

3. There are big matrices of expectations for all roles and all levels. You gotta do all of it but for PSC, what matters most is impact. Impact impact, the almighty impact. After working at IG, I am certain I will only say this word more times in a single year if I am one day cast in a movie about a meteor hurtling toward earth.

4. Your level - in my case 6 - is one of the three factors in determining your bonus.**

5. A second factor is your rating, which we will discuss below because that’s the point of this particular missive.

6. A third factor is the company multiplier. If the company does well, the multiplier is good, and if the company does not do well, the multiplier is not so good. As anyone who has experienced such a bonus in any industry can tell you, this is frustrating in times when the company doesn’t do well and it’s kinda due to senior leadership’s decisions that you played no part in. Sure, that’s the game, it’s how it works, but I’m mentioning it because of the final fact.***

7. In this game, as in all others, the house always wins.

Ok, finally we have arrived. As most of you know, when you do your performance review, the two things you have to do are write your own self-review (uggghhhh the worst) and also write reviews for your colleagues (less awful if you do what I do: bullet points and timebox it for 30 minutes max). You basically prepare your case for how well you did during the past X months, and then your manager takes that to a meeting with other managers and they all decide who gets what ratings.

You, who do not work in tech and perhaps do not even work at a corporate job, are probably sitting there thinking “I’m sure this process will be very meritocratic! Tech, after all, prides itself on being a meritocracy.”

[pause for laughter]

This is not to cast aspersions on managers. Managers have a hard job and honestly not a ton of power, although they do have more than they think – some managers are more skilled at promoting their direct reports than others, and that is a form of power. But this process is like any process that exists at scale: It requires everyone to get squeezed into boxes as well a particular distribution of where those people fall on the not good to very good scale. It is hopefully designed with the intent of being fair, but in practice it doesn’t end up being fair for everyone. That’s how large systems like these work!

A quick shoutout who whoever had to read my entries every time I responded to internal surveys and requests for feedback by saying “Please stop hiring smart people with different ways of working and different strengths, and then judging them against a set of expectations that describes one particular type of person.”

When I went through PSC, doing your job well meant your rating was “Meets All Expectations.” Like, good work, you did your job as described, here’s all of your bonus. Then ratings and multipliers can go up – exceeds, greatly exceeds, redefines. They can also go down. The more senior you get, the more you hear that the baseline for your job is already so high that to “Meet Expectations” is like, really good, wow. I obviously had opinions about this.

To put it in perspective, here is an example. In 2021, IG launched a sticker called Add Yours. If you do not use IG, you may not know, but this launch ended up being a big, big deal. Add Yours was a massive runaway hit. People loved it. People still love it! Tiktok copied it. It created countless workstreams across all of Meta and still gets talked about. A little fun fact is that Add Yours was based in large part on an idea I had in a brainstorm and was, at its inception, totally informed by my insights. I was also instrumental in advocating for it with leadership and it making sure it got to a public test.

For the half of 2021 when Add Yours launched, I got Exceeds Expectations. It’s the highest rating I ever got. I might have gotten higher if I had done more of the things in the matrix, but I did not.

Here’s one of the options I got for “participation ribbon”

By now I hope it is obvious what I am leading up to.

In 2022, a very difficult year for me health-wise as many of you know, I helped create and prioritize another feature that was a big deal launch: IG Notes. (If you don’t like Notes, I don’t want to hear about it, and also chances are you are not the audience we designed it for.) I did a lot of other stuff too, but not all of the things the matrix expected me to do, and I had more impact in the half I worked on Notes than in the other half. I personally think it’s notable that for two years in a row, I was the insights person behind two of IG’s biggest sharing launches of the last few years.

But you know, I’m not in charge. So for 2022, my rating was Meets Most.

Now look. Lots of people have gotten Meets Most. Lots of people more senior than I, more tenured than I. Some of them deserved it and some of them didn’t. It’s part of the way things go. And I’m not writing this to complain about my rating! Because you know what’s funny? I was more upset when I got Exceeds than when I got Meets Most. I was upset then because I felt I’d done more with Add Yours than exceed: I’d basically done something no other UX Researcher had done at the company, even if I hadn’t done all the things that are expected of a UXR at my level. Even so, in my mind that was “redefining.” We were told to have impact, and what’s more impactful than helping create a hit feature so good that it’s still featured in all-hands meetings, two years after you tested it? Man was I frustrated.

But Meets Most? Meets Most was freeing. Freeing! Meets Most was the moment I knew emotionally what I’d sort of figured out intellectually: the system of performance reviews was not designed to approve of me and the kind of work I do. I do something different than almost all other researchers do – and before you think I’m being an overconfident asshole, you should know that engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists, and other researchers have told me this at IG, Spotify, and Slack. I hear it all the time.

Now, in any system you have four choices:

• Submit to the system and hope it rewards you

• Game the system

• Make peace with the system

• Fuck the system

For so long, for decades of my life, I chose the first option. There’s something I really want to write about here but I’ll save it for another time, maybe next week, since this is long enough. But it played into this choice, over and over. I kept wanting approval from this system and systems like it, and I never got it. Ever. I told myself I was the common denominator, so clearly I was the problem. If I just tried harder or reined in this one troublesome part of my personality or got better at this particular thing. If I stopped doing the thing I’m good at and instead focused more on these other things the system says is important, well then surely everything will work out.

You know what that’s a recipe for? Fucking MISERY.

Someone once said to me: “Leah, you prioritize for product impact. I prioritize for PSC.” I truly respected that. They gamed the system! They figured it out! I was the dummy who sat there helping the company make millions and waited for it to pat me on the head.

The challenge for me is that I will always care. Period. Usually I will care way too much. It is why I have never been and will never be cool. God, do I care. God, do I want to make products better for the people who use them. God, do I want people to like me and think I did a good job. God, am I such a sucker. I don’t know how to not care or to game the system. I don’t think I want to know. I want to be okay with doing what I do, even if the system says “you didn’t do it all.” But let’s talk about that another time.

So for now, here’s what I think about Meets Most: I think MOST is great. If you got most of what you wished for in life, how happy would you be? (A special thanks to my therapist for that realization.) If you make a to do list and get most of it done, how pleased are you? I want to reframe how we feel about most. Let’s stop thinking it’s so bad. Let’s celebrate meeting most. Honestly?

All doesn’t even exist.

See you next time,

Lxx

*Maybe that wasn’t always the case. I assume not, as there had to be a time Before PSC, and I have been told by a reputable source that there was a time when PSC was slightly more chill (I trust this source, although I literally cannot imagine this being possible).

**This doesn’t always work in your favor though, because the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to do, and the harder it is to get a high rating. For some people, IC5 is career level. They can keep performing exceptionally well *for their level* and thus receive more money than performing baseline or below as an IC6.

***And yes, I do know: Much of the world does not even receive a bonus. I am absolutely saying this from a vantage point of that privilege, but it is worth discussing so here we are.

****

Three recommendations from me, if recommendations are your thing:

1. Joan Armatrading’s Show Some Emotion

2. Which I have had on repeat since it was on an episode of Somebody Somewhere, which is such a lovely show.

3. Make your own cold brew at home with Cafe du Monde coffee, the kind that comes in the can. I do a 10:1 ration of 1000 ml of cold water to 100g of coffee in one of these, but you can use less coffee if you don’t want to be punched in the face. Mix it with oat milk and it tastes almost fudgy, plus it will save you a ton of money this summer, you’re welcome.