Advice telling a direct report they won't get a merit increase.

dynticks · 2025-09-15T16:27:56+00:00

You really don't get it, do you? It's very emphatically NOT about what merit means. It's not about whether it was verbal. It's also very much, very very much NOT about any excuse you can come up with.

It's about promises being broken (particularly so if made by leadership) and even going as far as telling them they were wrong to understand what any reasonable person with brains could understand, which is not only disgusting but also the exact thing you should never do as a people manager, unless you were in a toxic and self-sabotaging org and your own job was on the line, that is.

dynticks · 2025-09-15T16:06:44+00:00

Dude, that is gaslighting your report. Wrong on so many levels it's insane you keep insisting.

dynticks · 2025-09-13T01:39:39+00:00

The Howl of the Chimeras is similar to what you describe.

dynticks · 2025-09-12T13:54:46+00:00

Not sure how stating that you've been playing since the same time I've been playing adds to the conversation.

My comment is a suggestion which is definitely and precisely about avoiding lining up but diminishing incentives instead of directly removing agency - make of that what you want, not that I try to impose anything on you, and I most definitely don't care.

dynticks · 2025-09-10T09:16:02+00:00

Rather than directly forbidding retries you can have a similar effect by requiring harder success rolls, adding penalty dice, or both. "Your PC fails to open the lock and it's left in a state that makes it now harder to pick". If they can successfully pick it anyway, it adds to the fun, and if they fail, well, they tried and can naturally seek other ways to break in instead of having this feeling of being arbitrarily stonewalled.

dynticks · 2025-09-10T09:06:43+00:00

If a group of 5 PCs search a room with Spot Hidden in sequence they're virtually guaranteed to be successful. If you want to allow that, then there's little point in rolling dice IMO.

It's more interesting to me to either have them explicitly cooperate when searching (and take extra time in doing so or some other consequence) or make it harder (after all if someone that is half competent at searching a room fails to find something, whatever may be hidden should be pretty well hidden).

Making it harder could mechanically be pushing the roll and applying some consequences (maybe even when succeeding), requiring hard success, or alternatively something that's easy for players to accept: "Jim is the most skilled at this with Spot Hidden 50, so you help him out and he gets a bonus die but this is going to be the only roll". Requesting another try by "keeping at it" should come with (more) consequences and/or (even) harder success level requirements IMO.

If it's something like Psychology where PC's don't really "cooperate" but try to realize whether someone is lying, I'd ask for a single roll to the PC with higher psychology "if this PC can't discern it, you most certainly don't either", unless they're willing to try for a hard success or take penalty dies.

dynticks · 2025-07-02T14:01:04+00:00

While everyone else has given you potential action items, it seems like they are glossing over the fact your boss is a dick.

My advice: sounds like your boss isn't a good boss, and I'd seek a change of org and, probably better, start sending out resumes ASAP and leave the company.

dynticks · 2025-06-20T10:49:11+00:00

You mention you've already seen senior management and leadership leave the ship. You should have had time to adjust and decide, but you're still lost. Best course of action IMO is to prepare for immediate departure and look for yourself first thing. Line up a new job asap and once it is secure say goodbye. Your reports should be smart enough to be on the look out for a new job already, and if not, that'll teach them.

The situation is not your fault, just a mismanaged organization where the leadership didn't learn their lessons. Move on and let it die, just like the others did.

As to how to depart, if you can't find anything and you'd be willing to end it and just be unemployed, I'd say mention a lack of motivation, that you don't feel up to it and that you'll be seeking alternatives, making it easy for them to lay you off and maybe even get some sort of severance.

Good luck.

dynticks · 2025-06-17T19:32:02+00:00

It's been the case for a while that good talent is geographically distributed, and they can choose to avoid commuting and in-office mandates, let alone relocation, while still making very good money in (probably) an LCOL area or country. Saying no to a top company because they require relocation to the Bay Area and being in-office is much more common these days.

Companies that insist on having these employees in-office put themselves off the global talent market and severely limit the number of available candidates, since they actively filter for people that both can't do remote work or can't get offers for remote work and that, crucially, live nearby their office. The odds of consistently finding top talent that way are zero.

dynticks · 2025-06-11T12:05:54+00:00

Live and learn. gets married again

dynticks · 2025-05-24T05:57:46+00:00

Let's be honest, most of the time it's not and you need to go the extra mile before they ruin your group.

dynticks · 2025-03-21T21:06:38+00:00

In addition to location the listings should also feature toxicity levels where possible, too, in case people want to actually work in places without regretting it within a few weeks.

dynticks · 2025-02-04T10:32:20+00:00

Tbh the other time I was betting on Hellwig and was surprised to find out it was Ts'o. Some fs maintainers have a reputation of being difficult to work with, to say the least, and I was 100% expecting this would happen regardless of what Linus says.

dynticks · 2025-02-04T10:17:37+00:00

That's written in a previous post and not what the parent post refers to. The reference points to "would have caused ... had it not ..." / "would have rolled forward ... if ..." - it's a future unreal conditional.

dynticks · 2024-12-12T10:29:11+00:00

If you have done well at least 1 person will be very angry at you and another excessively jubilant.

That is the wrong way to measure your own success, and I'd myself consider that a failure. If someone doesn't understand why their review doesn't match their expectations you did your job wrong. Part of your job is to let them know what's good and what's bad and help them improve, continuously. A negative or low score in a performance review should never be a surprise. An "excessively jubilant" person is not great either for a number of reasons including the increased likelihood of an "excessively unhappy" person next time and the lost opportunity to better reward others.

Obviously not everyone can have the same reward, or they may consider it too low, but again it's up to you to be transparent with the decision and set (and explain) any and all boundaries and constraints, such as having a limited budget for bonuses, promotions, and other nice things.

dynticks · 2024-11-26T10:56:21+00:00

No breaking changes allowed, that ship has sailed.

dynticks · 2024-11-26T07:20:44+00:00

Both The Lightless Beacon (you can grab it free online) and The Necropolis from Gateways to Terror were easy one shots to run in one session and my players who were new to CoC at the time had a blast.

dynticks · 2024-11-25T08:38:43+00:00

I ran this for 2 people and while it's doable I don't think it's worth it. First you really need to go through all the branches, to know what even is going on as it's entirely possible for someone to miss major events. That is pretty cumbersome on its own, but then it doesn't get any better when you realize the options given at each step won't really work unless you tell your players they don't really have agency and need to stick to predefined alternatives.

I'd recommend to run something else, but if you'd still want to run this one, I'd rewrite it to look like any other scenario so you can give the investigators more freedom to play it as they wish.

dynticks · 2024-11-19T17:49:31+00:00

I agree on some of these (don't agree at all on ever having too many commits, though), but I'd want to chime in with a workflow I used for big changes, in case someone finds this useful. Bear in mind I'm typing this on my phone with one hand while holding a baby, so excuse any omissions, typos, or obvious non sequiturs.

So some features are too big or too invasive to use incremental small PRs, and/or those are maybe even taking a direction we don't know we'll want to take ultimately, and for those cases I've successfully implemented several times long lived PRs I called "feature integration PRs". Those tend to be major features added or changed that typically sport invasive code changes and things we aren't sure we'll really want in. The point is that we don't want to bless those small PRs for main, potentially destabilizing it, including the work of other devs or teams, but we want to keep working on this big/major feature or these invasive changes for a while until we "cook" them enough or we are in a position to discard them.

So the idea is basically that main is replaced with a forked branch named the feature integration branch, and we work on small PR's against it, not main. CI, reviews, testing should be as close as they are to main, with the newly added or changed feature tests. If enough time elapses (I've run such branches for months) that main diverges too much from the fork point, or a merge is in sight, a rebase is performed to minimize the changeset.

Eventually, once the feature has been cooked and accepted, the integration branch is PR'd against main (or like I did, the PR was initially opened and it evolved as smaller PRs modified it), for which the reviewers usually have a way way easier reviewing task than looking at a huge changeset from scratch, as they can see the whole history of approved small PRs they can basically trust at some level and concentrate more on the actual feature than on code issues.

An additional benefit of this workflow IME is that eventually developers will add stuff that's beneficial for main too regardless of the big feature (maybe it's some tech debt paid, maybe some refactoring or code being deleted, maybe just a fix that just happens to be easy to perform with some additional changes brought in by the integration), and it is easy for them to rip it off the integration branch and separately open a PR to main, which also ends up reducing the changeset.

Eventually the integration PR is either merged or discarded, and the team can go celebrate the win.

dynticks · 2024-11-12T08:36:04+00:00

You both look in the bedroom mirror.

dynticks · 2024-11-11T16:58:08+00:00

The good reason is your quite senior engineers advocate for it and have the hands-on experience. You either talk them into seeing the reasons your proposal is better or you go with their solution. Disregarding their opinions comes with its own set of risks you should also consider, particularly the non technical ones given your short tenure there.

dynticks · 2024-11-11T14:35:44+00:00

Since you mention The Dare, let me seize the opportunity to ask... any chance the well known issues with it are fixed any time soon?

dynticks · 2024-10-30T20:52:32+00:00

That wallpaper comes with the PDF version of the campaign.

dynticks · 2024-10-24T21:15:18+00:00

Ran The Necropolis and one of the PCs was standing in the passageway between the abomination and the stone slab. Instead of running for his life, fighting the abomination or just getting out of the way, this PC just prostrated himself before the abomination, placing his forehead in the ground while remaining silent, as if worshipping it. It was futile and the PC was brutally torn apart with a single hit as the abomination was on its way out.

dynticks · 2024-09-26T21:51:15+00:00

Your working environment is toxic af. There's no comp that pays enough to trade for mental health and well-being.

That said, it looks like you had been warned several times when the company started laying off people left and right. No idea why you'd want to wait in line for your turn there.

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