Paraphrasing what a manager told me once: "If anything in your performance review is a surprise, then I have failed as a manager."
Coaching is not a purpose of a performance review. The coaching and communication should be an ongoing process that happens before the review. Problems should be brought up early enough that you have a chance to change or improve before it gets to the point of being written in a review. If this doesn't happen, it's a sign that the manager is either terrible at communication, not even trying to coach and improve their employees, or even sabotaging you on purpose.
Instead, the purpose of performance reviews is documentation. It can be for good or for bad, depending on the person's performance. It makes info available to others and preserves it in case you transfer departments, your manager leaves, etc. Like any other documentation, it creates overhead, but you have to weigh that against the value it provides, and IMHO that's what should determine whether you do it (and how often).
We have performance reviews not annually, but every few years.
My last review, the head of our division got really angry with me and gave me a very negative, punitive review.
What I am infuriated about is that never in that few years did I receive any negative feedback, and I tried to do exactly what our subdivision had decided as a group to do, and what the immediate superior had wanted. My last review was glowing, perfect. So I go from a perfect review to being treated like a failure, fireable, with no negative feedback in the interim.
Imagine if you in your area had discussed things, come to consensus decisions, you were willing to do everything asked of you, and then four years later someone higher up singles you out and yells at you for not doing what you're supposed to etc. As if you've been getting feedback that whole time.
The worst part of this is that I know someone in our area is close friends with this division head and basically complains about everyone except one person in our area.
So now I have this negative review, as if I were just being lazy, even impaired in my duties, and not doing my part when the whole time I just thought I was doing what we were supposed to.
I had something similar happen at my old company, an 8 person startup.
I was more or less asked to quit (coincidently I was planning to hand my notice in that day anyway) by the CEO. Never once had the CEO actually pulled me aside or talked to me about his perceived problems with me. He was perfectly happy with the quantity and quality of work I put out, but apparently there were cultural and attitude issues or something.
I was supposed to have a performance review/catchup every 3 months, I was very low contact with the CEO as he worked remotely and traveled a lot. I had never heard any problems from my supervisor before this final meeting with the CEO.
It was pretty shitty when he started bringing up things that he had problems with that happened 3 or 6 months ago. Things that I had never gotten more than a snarky slack message about.
Maybe if I had had those reviews, I would've worked on whatever issues he had, I may have been a happier employee and not wanted to quit, and he may have ended up with a nicer employee he didn't want to fire.
It really pissed me off and unfortunately (for both of us, really), I never got to tell him how I felt about the whole situation, as I wanted to get a good reference for my next job (which incidentally pays double what I was earning).
It could have been a positioning move to justify firing down the road. I freelance now but when I went through 9-5 I found the key to positive outcomes was always tied to confidence. The confidence I tried to harness cane in a form of acting like I was the boss with nobody above me. I found that my own bosses saw this as a strength and never questioned my judgement. Even when someone came back with logical counterpoints I'd stick up for my opinion very aggressively.
I can't imagine working in a place that yells at me - that would be the final nail in the coffin where I would that that person everything I think of them and their inaptitude to "manage". I guess that's why I no longer punch the clock.
"Review" sounds official and somehow based on a methodology, but in reality it's just the subjective feelings of some dude. A dude that often has to pretend that he/she understands the technology, what is difficult or not, and who is doing good work.
As you have noticed, you can output the same quality of work and it can be seen as very good or not so good at different times, or with different people, because feelings.
Sounds like it's time to move on. Every once in a while you'll run into some incompentent manager like that. The best thing to do is look for better opportunities elsewhere, move on and never look back.
That really sucks.
But also what's the point of even having reviews it if it's going to be years in between them? There doesn't seem to be any upside, but lots of downside
How long ago was this? You could take it up with someone higher up the food chain, providing you can demonstrate your successes and prove the review is unjust. A decent company doesn't want to lose talented, hard working employees through the malicious actions of middle managers.
Same thing has happened to me before. I was in a funk about it for a while, but it gets easier--especially if you polish the 'ole resume and start looking for alternatives.
An opposing viewpoint from Andy Grove's High Output Management:
Let's talk about surprises. If you have discharged supervisory responsibilities adequately throughout the year, holding regular one- on-one meetings and providing
guidance when needed, there should never be surprises at a performance, right? Wrong. When you are using the worksheet, sometimes you come up with a message that will startle you. So what do you do? You're faced with either delivering the message or not, but if the purpose of the review is to improve your subordinate's performance, you must deliver it. Preferably, a review should not contain any surprises, but if you uncover one, swallow hard and bring it up.
If a manager discovers a long-standing issue whilst preparing for the performance review, then yes, they absolutely must "swallow hard and bring it up".
But not having noticed or provided feedback about that issue at any point in the past is still a failure of management.
In my view, giving someone a negative review is only one among many options for dealing with a performance issue. You could always give a neutral review (in terms of the overall rating) and discuss the issue with them verbally, or pledge to resolve the issue in the next year.
If it means you have to let someone have a neutral review that they don't deserve... swallow hard, and start managing after the review is done.
Remember that your employees will be interpreting the review in light of the corporate culture, which they are fully aware of. They will also know whether the problem that you discovered is real or not.
The cost-benefit still doesn't make sense to me.
He's talking about doing a very expensive & generally counter-productive activity in the off chance that you might uncover some insight about your employee.
I usually tell people the first half of High Output Management is good, but to skip the second half...
That's an opposing viewpoint to "If anything in your performance review is a surprise, then I have failed as a manager" if and only if managers are infallible.
> If anything in your performance review is a surprise, then I have failed as a manager.
I hear that a lot and tend to agree with the statement. I even used to say it in the opposite "If I get a bad review, that's a signal that I need a new job, because I think I'm doing well and I must have a terrible manager if he'd wait a whole year to tell me otherwise".
And though I'm going to counter it, it's not inaccurate -- an employee shouldn't land in a review expecting that they've been doing wonderfully only to find out that they've been stinking up the place (or vice-versa), but the best manager that I have ever had, Lou, did surprise me at my first review. I wrote about it in another comment on this post so I won't rehash it, but I came to understand this as one of the benefits of performance review time.
Managers are rarely thinking about ways that a top-performing employee can improve, but everyone has something they can improve and a good manager will provide feedback to a staff member if there are areas that they, and others are noticing, that the employee may not be seeing. Because "top performers" don't require the attention that other staff might, a formal review may be the only time that a manager really takes the time to think about them in the context of "improvement". In addition, it's easier to bring up areas of improvement during this time, because it is set aside as one of the purposes of a formal review. In the couple of decades that I've been working, I've had two managers offer me anything in the way of "areas for improvement" -- both times were at reviews -- outside of a review it has never come up.
So yes, it is obscene for a manager to wait until review time to bring up a year's worth of failures, but being surprised by a bit of negative feedback -- provided it's not "Fix this or your getting a pink-slip" kind of feedback, isn't necessarily a management failure. It was quite helpful to me and I count Lou among about 3 people who I feel honored to have known[0] because their impact, caring and advice was life-changing for me.
[0] The other two were my HS programming teacher (who's class I enjoyed in Junior High), the late, great, Mr. Dzwonkiewicz who made me love writing software at a young age, and the woman who cured my social anxiety and made me enjoy public speaking -- the director of To Kill a Mockingbird that I performed in as a young teenager. Her name, though, escapes me. :)
If I get a bad review, that's a signal that I need a new job, because I think I'm doing well and I must have a terrible manager if he'd wait a whole year to tell me otherwise
This exactly. I've had two and half performance improvement plans in my 20 years.
1. My performance and attitude really did suck. I had been at a company too long (9 years), raises were anemic and the bonuses had gotten cut over the years to the point that in year 9 I only made $7K more than I did in year 2. My skillset had atrophied because I was both dealing with personal issues and concentrating on other "working hobbies" where I was making extra money. It was a horrible cycle. The further behind I fell salary wise, the worse my attitude got. I finally left 10 years ago and learned a lot from that mistake.
2. The second time (two jobs later, the company I worked for after the first event went out of business) wasn't because of performance but because I stepped on the wrong coworkers toes - a team lead that wasn't my manager. I learned this time around. I played the political game long enough after the PIP to get a set of skills I wanted (about three months) and left and got another job making 25K more. I did learn some political skills from that experience.
3. I went to another company where I was hired by a manager who was told by his manager to bring people in who could "affect change". The old guard won over, my manager's manager was laid off and my manager was forced out three months later. I got a bad review from my new manager - as did everyone my manager had hired - and we all left within 3 months. This time I left for $13k more and got a job as a team lead.
- I was now working for a company that wasn't a software company, I was brought in to create a modern software department and then we got acquired and the new edict was that they "didn't want to be a Software company". But they did need at least two major projects done that I was responsible for, but they would only let me hire contractors and the red tape to get anything done was ridiculous. After realizing I was going to be made the fall guy and getting a preview of what my review was going to be, I started looking for another job and had one in 10 days making $7K more with less official responsibility but more decision making ability and I'm able to get more done with no red tape (i.e. I'm admin for AWS)
My official PIP at job 2 happened about four years ago. Since then and three jobs later, I'm making 40K more and I am a lot smarter politically now.
I usually say this to my direct reports- "we have to do the review, but I promise there won't be any surprises!" And then I focus the review on how I value their contribution, how they positively influence their coworkers and clients. And if we are in-progress on improving something, we set those things as written goals for the next year.
This doesn't really work in organisationa with a high manager turnover. Where I work, I've had 12 managers in 15 years, so each manager doesn't really know me, or the 'goodwill' I have within our organisation and with our customers. They really are a waste of time at some orgs.
Performance reviews sound so cringey, I don't know how people can subject themselves to such practices. I guess it's one of those legacy practices to allow people to move up the ladder.
I was a young employee during a recession, and finding work was difficult. When I landed my first job I was I was grateful and focused on ways I might make my work contribute to the company's bottom line, by pushing the limits of my job description and tasks to ensure my role impacted revenue and value creation. I appreciated training and feedback, but forced myself to deliver results autonomously through self-teaching and long hours. Perhaps it was because I grew up as the son of a small business owner, or because I worked throughout high school and college, I was closely attuned to the businesses needs and I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations. How do I know? Because as I look back on what is now a long career I can't recall ever having a performance review, a counseling session, or retraining. I only remember anticipating needs and delivering results.
Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain.
No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that leads to workplace bias. Working styles like this tend to reinforce hiring single, young men who are otherwise unencumbered so they can work long hours and push the envelope of the job description. That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity.
Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues. Your experience with this working style has been positive, because you were born and raised speaking the jargon. If they come from a different background, they may not actually know what is important for the company because they haven’t spent their whole life interpreting these cultural cues.
This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work. I promise you it is not, and as a manager you should be doing more to communicate needs/value opportunities to your direct reports. Your view of what those are may be different from theirs.
He spoke about being a young man willing to put in the hours starting out to learn his craft. Yes, the young need to learn a lot after schooling just to keep up.
After that, he spoke about figuring out how to provide the most value for the business. I've had a 25+ year career and can verify that everyone should follow this advice.
Whatever hidden biases we are concerned about in the workplace, they all pale in comparison to the metric of fulfilling the purpose of the company. It took me a few years to realize that businesses were less interested in paying me because I was smart and could solve hard problems and more interested in how I could measure and move the purposes of the company.
The only direct value a manager provides to a company is a regular calibration of employee purpose with the purpose of the business. This is best done with regular 1-on-1s, not through semi-annual reviews.
There are other indirect things that a good manager brings to the table which mostly revolve around increasing employee happiness and satisfaction, but all of it pales in comparison to aligning employee and company purpose.
> That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity.
I am not sure this is true to the extent that people want it to be. You see the main benefits of diversity when groups of users use products in different ways depending on who they are. However, a large majority of products are used the same way by all people (almost all b2b products / services that I can think of and many if not most consumer products / services), so for those products I'm not sure it matters who your creators or developers are as long as they understand the industry they are making products for and they talk to users.
I can see the benefit in having a diverse workforce when it comes to discovering new markets or uses for technologies or products, but I think it would be far more important to shoot for having people from a variety of industries and backgrounds on your team to spot these opportunities as opposed to trying to preferentially hire minorities, women, parents, the elderly, lgbt, etc regardless of their backgrounds.
That being said, I do agree that communicating cultural values, mission, and expectations regularly is very, very important as many people have a suboptimal idea of how their work meshes with overall goals of the organization and what is expected of them. Regularly checking in with direct reports can help them internalize these ideas better.
> This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work.
After decades in the industry, I'm comfortable that my success is repeatable (as I have done) and is the most effective way to do the work. As if there's a debate, I'm really surprised by the endless process and bad management advice circulating on the web, among the good. "This hasn't killed my company yet and I'm happy with what we have" is the refrain from small and large companies wasting time and effort (with things like scheduled reviews). Talented Managers aren't supposed to be listeners, unless you're trapped in a byzantine/hobbesian org (these emerge in different tiers).
> Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues.
No, they aren't. They are important for you to set standards of accountability, at best...unless you really don't have power to do anything about it, which I've seen. You don't change their culture and they don't change yours, regardless of what you tell yourself. The job description and company-necessary responsibilities aren't changing based on the person. I'm not sure there's any value in going on about it, this kind of thinking is just madness.
It seems wholly unremarkable, to me, that people who work hard, try to anticipate the needs of their employers, keep the big picture in mind, and take initiative are more valuable employees. I wouldn't want to hire indolent and apathetic people, and neither should any business that either is successful or wants to be successful.
If you're worried about building products that appeal to the indolent and apathetic, just look at the entertainment industry, where actors and screenwriters work very very long hours to produce content that reliably keeps the indolent and apathetic entertained.
If you're just worried about diversity, I assure you that there are plenty of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and even single women, as well as both men and women of all ethnic and national backgrounds, who are diligent and conscientious.
Well, yours is another type of bias: that people are unable to have an honest and just view on their employees/applicants because they have a worls view.
I prefer dealing with people to dealing with black-boxes.
What? you are saying only young single men are willing to work hard and actually function autonomously? That is so offensive I can't fathom you actually believe that.
> I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find.
Anyone with your profile should run their own business. It's unrealistic to expect somebody to work long hours, over-deliver for "maybe someday"-promises. People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it.
Not everyone has the skills to run their own business. Some people prefer to be part of a team and not at the top of the pyramid. They get satisfaction by contributing.
Anecdotal but I feel like I'm that kind of person but absolutely don't want to run a business.
The worst case scenario of my own business is the whole thing crashing and me having to reorganize my life to accommodate whatever job I can find before my emergency fund runs out.
The worst case scenario for being an employee is getting fired. Pretty much the same outcome but much, much harder to hit.
If I want to start a family or just have a stable enough career to (essentially) never worry about going broke, I'll take the latter. That personality profile just makes keeping a job as simple as hitting the bare minimum requirements (which you habitually blaze past).
"People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it."
Those of us that are trying to build high-performing organizations will still avoid and remove those types of people. And we will continue to reward and not take advantage of our people to fill our end of the bargain.
Further, those of us that are also highly self-motivated will continue to leave bad situations, not become slackers in response to being taken advantage of.
That indicates to me that you're probably a bad manager
When I was broke and had no connections, I was willing to work the way you described.
Now that I have options, I'm not willing to expend that energy when I could save it for gym, girlfriend, self-education after hours, etc.
If I'm broke and need to switch to another industry or you're paying me multiple times my next best offer I'll do that.
Otherwise, no, my manager needs to do his job instead of asking me to do it for him
That said I'm now entering a graduate school and am willing to do that in this context because I'm intrinsically interested in learning the applied math I'll be working on
Software jobs, no
You would probably need to hire people who are interested in running their own business im a few years and mentor them towards that end to get that kind of commitment in my opinion
Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style.
If your organization gets large enough, then out of necessity, you will have many different managers with many different styles. That is usually the point when a performance review system needs to become more formalized - it's important to be sure that in some ways, all managers are treating their reports similarly, even if it means some of them changing their default management style.
What exactly is your management style then? A review doesn't need to be the typical corporate slog - it's simply feedback comparing reality with plans and execution. It let's you know if (a) your planning is any good and (b) your execution was successful.
Looking for someone to "anticipate the needs of my business" is great, but how do you respond to someone who makes a mistake or pursues a strategy different from your ideal? Do you fire them on the spot like the emperor or learn from it. If it's the later, I got news for you; you're doing reviews.
"I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations."
Gee - wouldn't it be nice to know this without waiting 20+ years to look back and assess the entire composition of your career? It's also super handy to self-assess with the eroding benefit of time. The most brutal performance assessment I ever had radically changed the trajectory of my life, and looking back on others who stayed the same path shows it was ultimately net-positive for me. You seem pretty satisfied with how things have turned out, but just imagine what you could have accomplished with a little feedback, such a waste of potential...
>It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain.
Blame the economic cycle. I would assume, your company is self-funded, profitable and being run with efficiency in mind. Unfortunately, in the current economy you just can't compete salary-wise with companies that focus on raising, bloating the headcount, raising more, playing hocus-pocus with the "cost of revenue" line and doing a spectacular exit. And as an employee, if playing a hipster infant who loves his boss and depends on him pays 2x more than hard work and initiative, well, I'm sorry to say that, but I'll go where the money is.
That said, you might be able to find that type if you offer more equity or some revenue-based incentives or look into partnering with other small business owners rather than trying to find someone to work under you.
It's not surprising it's hard to find. I think it helps if you are working in a place that rewards such initiative. In my experience, it is not always the case. How do you even screen someone for self-teaching and self-motivation by the way?
Self-teaching can be measured through asking probing questions about what the candidate does to keep up with new developments in their field. Self-motivation is harder to get at, but sometimes it helps to ask about what the candidate looks for in a role.
It sounds like you want an employee to take on the responsibilities of a company owner without actually making them an owner, giving them stock, or giving them proper incentives. The problem is not with the labor market, it's with your sense of entitlement to your employee's skills. Employees no longer act the way they used to because modern companies more regularly dispose of employees when it suits them.
If you want employees to act the way you want, either give them stock, pay them significantly more, or give them long term, multi-year employment contracts. If you expect to get something (employees going above and beyond) for nothing, you are entitled.
I empathize with a lot of this, but man...you gotta tell people when they do a good job. By "good job" I mean that they did work that furthered the goals of the people who lead the company (since companies per se don't have goals).
Not the Op but I hire the same way and there is some questions I like to ask to gauge people's interest in "getting things done".
I like to ask about their passions outside of work. Video games? Sports? Communities they may be a part of?
I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself. Does this person like to dig into the details and figure out how something works and how they can make it better or do they just like something and not show much deeper interest? Do they tinker or try to make things better on the things they are passionate about? Do they even have things they are passionate about? (You'd be surprised how many people can't really answer this question, even in casual conversation.)
It's not full proof, but I've found that people that go the extra mile, people that are passionate and inquisitive and not always happy with the status quo, are people that are more likely to take the initiative when working on a project for me. At that point, it's my job to spark their interest in the product so they will (hopefully) apply that passion in the same way.
It may be increasingly hard to find because employees see things differently now.
It's a job market. My employer wants me to put in overtime and go out of my way to improve the company? Great, let's go. But I demand appropriate compensation.
I think that's a reasonable position. My company treats me as a human resource, I treat my company like my client who writes checks for the work I put in.
> Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person.
You're getting a lot of crap for this statement ranging from it being a bias dog-whistle to it being an indicator that you're expecting too much.
I didn't find either to be the case in reading what you wrote. My dad, too, was a business owner and growing up he pushed the same kinds of values onto me. He married my mom at 19, moved out of a two-bedroom house with 7 siblings (he never had his own room, slept on the living room couch), took a job as a union construction worker out of high-school, attended college up to his senior year but didn't graduate and ended up starting a manufacturing business supporting the automotive industry in Detroit. He's wealthy and retired, now.
I started a few businesses, but decided against them over time and realized that I really didn't like the whole "running a business". I like to write software and learning about technology and programming. Anything that takes me away from that makes me less happy. The ancillary (taxes, accounting, management, etc) that owning a business entails wasn't for me. I "put in long hours"[0], but I like to spend those hours doing the one specific thing that I love doing and I'm paid well enough that I have no desire to strike out on my own in the hopes that I can make buckets more (but in the greater likelihood that I'll have less reliable income).
As for the bias dog-whistle of these sorts of traits belonging only to white, young, men ... I find those statements to be curiously biased, as well. I have worked at several different companies on teams with women and men of both races and ages ranging from around 25 to around 57 -- yes, in tech, in Detroit. I haven't found that these traits vary based on race, gender or even age. The hardest working manager (which I wrote about in my last comment on this post) was almost 60, the guy I routinely went to when I desperately needed something to actually get "done" was a soft-spoken PoC gentleman of around 30 and when a technical project manager was forced upon me, I begged for a very overworked black woman on the PM team[1]. Anecdotal as my experiences are even social class wasn't a particular limiting factor -- I used to get advice from the "soft-spoken gentleman"[2] about kids and he revealed to me that he was the only of his brothers and sisters to go to college, that he's been pushing that on his kids and that his parents and his family ridiculed (and still ridicule) him for choosing to seek higher education.
Sure, there's no denying that women (of a certain age) get pregnant and that this is a problem for some business owners. It's never been a problem at any of the places that I have worked, personally, but I can imagine it does happen despite it being both illegal (and morally wrong IMHO). Outside of that, I often wonder if the over-sensitivity to "bias" ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My dad's company was interesting -- they were often the coordinator among several small business to outfit a large manufacturing operation. As a result, during my childhood, I spent a lot of time around a lot of small business owners. Every one of my father's many friends was a business contact and owner of some other outfit. Many of them were old enough to have grown up at a time when casual racism and sexism was normal, my father in particular. My parents raised us in a manner that when I first entered the real world, I was surprised that there were still people out there who thought that way. Growing up around these business owners I knew one thing about hiring, the concerns "Can the person do the job to the level I expect and at a price I can afford to pay them?" and "Good God, payroll taxes are expensive!" Of the business owners, only one had hiring practices that were unusual, and possibly illegal -- this was a manufacturer who had only women working at his plant. I'm not sure if it was intentional or it just worked out that way, but I do know that he synchronized schedules with the elementary, junior and high schools, the work was light-weight assembly, paid minimum wage, and AFAIK, all of his employees were former stay-at-home moms.
[0] I do that a lot less, now, but that's mainly because the job that I have doesn't require that of me. That doesn't necessarily mean I don't put in long hours, I just put those extra hours into projects that I want to work on instead of projects that my job wants me to work on.
[1] So did everyone else, which was why she was so over worked.
[2] I know he reads HN so I'm avoiding his name on purpose -- he's still a friend and I don't have permission to tell this story. The "soft-spoken" bit comes from a conversation I had with him about being more assertive. He'll know who he is and can out himself if he wants to.
The best/worst advice I ever received was "you're doing a great job of what I ask you to, now I need you to do what I don't ask you to" -- at the time, it made no sense. Now, it's a core part of my work style. Developing autonomy is a very valuable skill, and I think that's what OP is driving at. It's also not something that'd been developed during my education.
I agree that performance reviews aren't particularly helpful because feedback should be delivered as you go, in the moment, with actionable and relevant examples.
It's not about reading minds, it's about taking the initiative to make things better or get things done without specifically being told what to do.
And there is a big difference between people that can and people that can't.
If your significant other reminded you to go to the grocery store, would you get a general idea of what she wanted and go get a bunch of stuff you know y'all need, even if it isn't on the list? Or would you only get the exact things she wrote on the list and nothing else, even though if you applied some initiative you'd realize that she wanted to make pancakes and she forgot to put milk on the list so you go ahead and grab the milk also.
It seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people stick exactly to the list and don't take that initiative.
What's the alternative, exactly? You still need some way to tell people whether they are promoted or how big a bonus they get and why it happened that way. Whether you call that communication a "performance review" or not seems like an irrelevant detail.
This article is a nice example of quality clickbait. Title: 'Performance Reviews Are A Waste Of Time', ooh contentious. The lede, 'formal performance reviews are a waste of time...', switched 'performance review' for 'formal performance review' while you weren't looking. Now he's set up a new context for his answer - 'a different type of performance review' (where the process starts with a self-assessment)! Lovely.
Bonus points if the author runs a consulting company specializing in alternative performance reviews or a SAAS startup building software to facilitate them. :-)
> You still need some way to tell people whether they are promoted or how big a bonus they get and why it happened that way.
If you've been giving them actionable feedback throughout the year, then it should be as simple as "here is your new salary and your new title" and no one should be surprised about anything.
When that works, it works well. When that fails (e.g. people disagree as to how they performed relative to their peers), it fails badly. Performance reviews (if done well) lower the risk of system breakdown.
(Not to defend performance reviews explicitly--there may be a much better approach that accomplishes the same goal)
Yeah, and so it's very easy a lot of times. But you still need some formal paper trail, if for no other purpose than getting that salary into the HR system.
IME reviews are like icebergs: the conversation is the easy part and pretty small. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes throughout the year, and it's useful to have a process to base that off of. For instance, someone has to balance your recommendation for your employee's new salary and title against your peer's recommendation for their employee's new salary and title. And so your performance review information has to be sufficient to make that case to your management.
Sure. That's still a performance review. Performance reviews are usually unstressful and simple if you and your manager have had good communication for a while. That is the goal to aim for whether you call it a "performance review" or not.
I love when it happens like that, but many companies have managers rotating very quickly. So you are left in the dust. Its only fair for the previous manager to formalize their thinking and position on how they felt about your performance. So that the next manager can see that and you're not ending back to square one.
Most performance reviews are basically convoluted ways to say: "Do I like you?". Actual performance has miniscule effect on the rating, maybe only in a decision if one should be let go or not, but even excellent results won't save one if they aren't liked. I have seen many top performers single-handedly building branches of business being let go when they finished and somebody wanted to claim credit or push their friends once profit foundation was laid.
God this is so true it hurts. It's what I've always hated about performance reviews. It feels like an attack on my personally because it's never about my work, it's about my clothes or my face. One memorable experience was when my boss came out of no where and said "You don't seem happy here. You don't smile enough. You're now on probation until you get your act together."
Not one sentence about my work as a software engineer; not one sentence about specific interactions that were problematic, or whether or not I had been reported for anything. Just vague as can be.
Why do raises and bonuses have to match up with yearly performance reviews? Why not make them more immediate. Great launch everyone here’s a bonus. You went above and beyond for this release so we’d like to give you this bonus. You’ve been working very hard the last while and we think you deserve a raise. Nothing says it has to be at specific times.
As an alternative to jedberg's "you know why not trying talking to them more than once a year/quarter". A fixed pay schedule: transparent, easy to plan around, easy to know if you should stay or go if you get an offer somewhere else.
If the company is giving individual bonuses they can and should be tied to tangible outcomes anyway or it's just going to be a source of even more office politicking (i mean it's inescapable either way but it's a more vs less thing).
Performance reviews are a form of legal ass coverage for companies. Their purpose is to re-enforce the notion that there are rules and that everybody is treated equally and have a paper trail to back that up. This paper trail may be used for defending choices for promoting certain people and not promoting, or worse firing, certain other people. They are a formality if nothing is wrong but in case something is wrong, it can be key in e.g. lawsuits or other forms of conflicts. Of course the sad reality is still that e.g. women get treated unfairly in a lot of places and that your mamager's bias or their relation with their peers play no small part in how you get treated. It's far from perfect as a system.
The bigger the company the more likely it is to have very elaborate ass coverage when it comes to these things. So, keep in mind that it might be less about you and more about them when you are having that conversation. They are required to have that conversation with you. It's not optional; it's a box that must be ticked.
However, performance reviews are not necessarily a bad thing and I've had some great managers give me great advice. I would just add that a good manager would not wait until the review if things aren't going great and some of the best managers I worked with made a point out of doing regular one on ones. Coaching happens outside of performance reviews. Performance reviews are also your opportunity to speak up. I once pointed out that I had nothing but good reviews but no recent raise. It went up the chain, they checked their records, and I got my raise. It was a modest one but it felt important to me. These things work both ways.
I disagree with this dudes blog. I love my reviews. I seek criticism so that I can improve and like the positive feedback because it helps motivate. But maybe I am an outlier. And as a person who has to give reviews, I want to tell people where they need to work on and praise their strengths.
I tend to work with people from East Coast finance world, and they not too keen on the touchy feely story telling stuff. Its sort of expected that you have to have thick skin and get to the point.
My concern (which I think is at least partially shared by this blogger) is the rigidness of formal annual reviews. A formal review should contain no surprises—if a formal review is the first time you've heard a certain piece of feedback (especially negative), then your management is shirking one of their primary responsibilities. Given an environment where feedback is frequent and useful, the formal annual review becomes a tool that only satisfies the larger enterprise machine—it's of little value to the manager or the employee.
When feedback is continuous and healthy throughout the year, I think the review itself acts just as an amplifier. It lets you really praise someone officially in a big way for good work. If someone has been seriously troublesome, it should never be the first time that has come up, but it lets you magnify how important it is that their performance issues get resolved. In that sense, it can serve a dual role as a sort of PIP. The review is also an opportunity for the manager to sift through all that continuous feedback over the entire past year and condense the important stuff down into some easy-to-understand big picture ideas.
Reviews can also be an opportunity for the direct report to get career plans in writing from their boss. For instance, if you want a promotion to X, the result of the review may be a written plan by your boss on how you can achieve that promotion.
Completely agree on "no surprises", but the annual review process provides a way to frame progress that the manager and employee can work within. When folks stayed at one company for their whole career it was a permanent record of progress that could be referenced. Moving companies is the norm now in tech, but when your are working in an enterprise having this record will benefit you when you want to move up or around in the organization.
I like criticism in the moment because I can directly link it back to my actions and contemplate improvement. I don't find it helpful during a summative "review" session when the details of what I did (or should do differently) have been lost. When you say you seek criticism, I'm wondering if you're doing it frequently enough that it's more like the former and less like the latter.
To be perfectly honest, if you use the phrase "touchy feely story telling stuff" I'm going to probably disregard your opinion on management. Management is first and foremost about people, and people are first and foremost about feelings... If we're not starting from that point, there's some problems (and probably huge misconceptions about the nature of work) that need to be addressed before we can even start to talk about management, let alone performance reviews.
Otherwise, I'd love some examples of what is discussed in your performance reviews.
I seek criticism so that I can improve and like the positive feedback because it helps motivate.
Why do you need a formal, periodic review process for this? If you seek feedback, you're asking for it regularly, right? If you have feedback for someone, you just tell them, no?
This is what the dude was saying: We have teams of creative people who crave feedback, of people who want to learn and grow. Let’s not stifle them with bureaucracy.
Yes, it's good if it's done right. When it's done poorly it's not. Let's say you've independently identified a systemic problem, report it, fight to fix it, and fix it all with quantitative numbers to show a large, direct benefit to the bottom line. You'd think that would be a pretty big deal to a company. If you got an average review because, "well that's your job, isn't it?" it's fairly demotivating.
Defending performance reviews is like cheerleading taxes -- automatic way to accrue downvotes here, but bear with me.
I've lived through unfair, biased and unhelpful perf reviews, I know what it's like to have this sky beam open up out of nowhere and vaporize you over absurd nonsense, but in a company of > 100 people you need a paper record of performance.
If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?
Unfair performance reviews are usually a byproduct of bad managers. For ex: I knew fellow managers who never told reports what they were doing wrong, they'd wait til the end-of-the-year review and write vicious stuff. Why? It was hard to say face-to-face.
That's cowardly and not good mgt: you meet weekly or biweekly to discuss all issues, a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year.
This author suggests that employees present managers "handwritten notes" of their performance "in a notebook every 6-12 months." Guess what-- that's a performance review! As if the problem w/perf reviews was the formality of the process and not the human judgment being applied.
Again, I get it: performance reviews suck. But I think it's not the paperwork or the process, it's that management can be very inept at evaluating talent periodically, regardless of how that process is run.
Unfortunately, it's hard to run a company of > 100 people without written records of performance (especially if someone sues).
> If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?
This is why I don't work for large orgs anymore. If you can't trust the manager's recommendation then why is that person a manager, in a position of power over people's lives? It's almost like acknowledging that you're too big to know whether your people can be trusted or not, so you need formalized checks and balances. I get that this in fact may be reality, and I also get that we need big companies to create many of these cool things modernity has given us, but man I have no desire at all to be part of such a thing.
> If you can't trust the manager's recommendation then why is that person a manager, in a position of power over people's lives? It's almost like acknowledging that you're too big to know whether your people can be trusted or not, so you need formalized checks and balances.
People come into positions of authority for very varied reasons. Some might be very technically apt, others might have earned the trust of the founders or some were simply the only people available in a period of rapid growth. You absolutely cannot trust human nature, abuse and incompetence is always a risk and startups are not magically immune.
What might happen in a small company is that a bad manager is so obviously inadequate and has such a significant relative impact over the company that it's easily spotted and fixed without a formal system. But there are no guarantees, see for example the case of Sunny Balwani, a painfully incompetent software guy running the engineering department of a biotech startup, simply because he was the boyfriend of the CEO. He clung on as Theranos valuation balloned to a $10 billion and only got out after the company failed for essentially tech reasons.
Another way to frame this: new technical or social methods for enhancing/extending trust mechanism in large organizations would have massive societal benefits. I wish more people explicitly thought about and experimented with this.
The more common case is 5 managers coming to you to pitch their managees for promotion. You can’t just promote everyone the same, and hopefully the managers are pretty happy with their managees.
That’s where paper trail, or anything mildly objective is precious to adjust what needs to be done.
> If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?"
Why would anyone suggest such a thing?
Absent new information shouldn't the default action be to humanely leave person X alone so they can keep doing work and paying their bills without costing the company more?
I must be very naive in the ways of management...
EDIT: This is a real question; what's with the down votes? Should I expect to be treated like this at work?
> a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year.
Agreed. This is my experience at my current job, the first place I've ever worked for which runs reviews like you describe. Yes, we have boring and poorly done tools to "automate" reviews or whatever, pushed by clueless HR people, but the actual review is done constantly by your team leader. You -- and your direct boss -- mostly know what's going on and how your review is going to go, no bullshit or last minute surprises.
Unfortunately, my current workplace is the exception. Most other places I've worked for either had no formal reviews at all -- which may initially sound ok, except you get the nasty last minute surprises anyway -- or it was endless red tape.
what bugs me about performance reviews is feeling like I'm a copywriter writing ad copy for products. I have to try to come up with flowery text about the 5-10 major things I did rather than just "did x" which is already known.
the only part of perf atbmy last job I thought was useful was ranking my peers. I'm not saying my ranking was correct but I'm just guessing those ranked high or low more often probably deserve a look?
And you need it for labour law reasons. If someone claims unemployment, and you have one of those companies that doesn't like to pay, your lawyers are going to need those reviews. If they were truly a bad employee, specific things in the reviews help if you go to court.
I've been working professionally for over a decade, and it never occurred to me that performance reviews were meant to provide career advice. I thought they were meant to help you understand if your are meeting the expectations for your current capacity. For example, as an engineer at company X, is my development-time vs customer-support-time supposed to be 50/50, 80/20, 20/80, etc.. and how well am I aligning with those specific expectations. I consider this separate from "career advice".
In fact, they're mostly meant as a way for HR to have a paper trail to fire people. That's the only real reason for them to exist, and any good that managers do with them is incidental.
Such a paper trail can be useful in more situations than just firing someone. For example, consider the values of performance reviews in aggregate.
I can think of many reasons why upper management may want to analyze aggregate trends of performance reviews throughout the company, broken down by team, department, manager etc. They can use those trends as data-driven feedback on policy and personnel changes. That is, they can answer questions like “how has our re-org affected overall performance YTD?” Or, “has changing our interviewing methods resulted in higher quality performance reviews of newer employee cohorts?”
Ideally, that should be tracked in near-real-time—either through reporting from a time tracking or project management system, or maintained manually by management. If you're only getting that feedback on an annual basis, it's going to be tough for you to adapt.
I always understood the performance review, at least in large corporations (not small companies or startups), not just to judge you individually, but more importantly to judge you against your peers.
In the context of judging us against our peers, it is isn't for us (so of course it's a waste of time for us), or our direct managers, but for upper management. The value there depends on the quality and candidness of feedback. Can this information be totally gleaned from task or ticket tracking systems? I don't think that tells the whole picture.
OK, so is it necessary for upper management to have this data? In a perfect world, this feedback data finds employees with great potential, ASAP and tracks their growth over time, from manager to manager and team to team, but since I'm a lowly professional and not upper management, I have no insight into how this is actually used.
This is so inhuman though, it seems obvious why it is a shitty process. How do you acquire data points about a person? Sure it's easy if their job is to produce MAX WIDGETS/HR, but what if they are a designer, or a software engineer?
The only way to judge someone is to work with them closely for months/years. Translating that into data points to hand off to a series of managers will never ever work. Especially if it is for higher managers who actually don't know you, and have never worked for you. How can they be the judge of your abilities?
They rely on the word on their direct reports, who presumably have had training in how to judge their direct reports. Of course, the people filling out these reviews are also judged on their performance as well.
The only way to judge someone is to work with them closely for months/years.
I disagree here. At some point, you're going to have to delegate and give up in micromanaging this process. There's no way Satya Nadella has worked with each Microsoft VP for years or fills openings just with his intuition.
If mostly every manager Python Pat worked for said they were head and shoulders above their peers and has an executive position in their future, then are you going to just ignore their feedback? Career advancement certainly shouldn't be a matter of being lucky enough to have enough face time with the people who make hiring decisions... I guess at the core of this process is trust, trust that the folks filing the review paperwork are doing so correctly, but if you can't trust your managers, you're problems are larger than a review process.
Readit News
Coaching is not a purpose of a performance review. The coaching and communication should be an ongoing process that happens before the review. Problems should be brought up early enough that you have a chance to change or improve before it gets to the point of being written in a review. If this doesn't happen, it's a sign that the manager is either terrible at communication, not even trying to coach and improve their employees, or even sabotaging you on purpose.
Instead, the purpose of performance reviews is documentation. It can be for good or for bad, depending on the person's performance. It makes info available to others and preserves it in case you transfer departments, your manager leaves, etc. Like any other documentation, it creates overhead, but you have to weigh that against the value it provides, and IMHO that's what should determine whether you do it (and how often).
My last review, the head of our division got really angry with me and gave me a very negative, punitive review.
What I am infuriated about is that never in that few years did I receive any negative feedback, and I tried to do exactly what our subdivision had decided as a group to do, and what the immediate superior had wanted. My last review was glowing, perfect. So I go from a perfect review to being treated like a failure, fireable, with no negative feedback in the interim.
Imagine if you in your area had discussed things, come to consensus decisions, you were willing to do everything asked of you, and then four years later someone higher up singles you out and yells at you for not doing what you're supposed to etc. As if you've been getting feedback that whole time.
The worst part of this is that I know someone in our area is close friends with this division head and basically complains about everyone except one person in our area.
So now I have this negative review, as if I were just being lazy, even impaired in my duties, and not doing my part when the whole time I just thought I was doing what we were supposed to.
It's depressing as hell to me, and also angering.
I was more or less asked to quit (coincidently I was planning to hand my notice in that day anyway) by the CEO. Never once had the CEO actually pulled me aside or talked to me about his perceived problems with me. He was perfectly happy with the quantity and quality of work I put out, but apparently there were cultural and attitude issues or something.
I was supposed to have a performance review/catchup every 3 months, I was very low contact with the CEO as he worked remotely and traveled a lot. I had never heard any problems from my supervisor before this final meeting with the CEO.
It was pretty shitty when he started bringing up things that he had problems with that happened 3 or 6 months ago. Things that I had never gotten more than a snarky slack message about.
Maybe if I had had those reviews, I would've worked on whatever issues he had, I may have been a happier employee and not wanted to quit, and he may have ended up with a nicer employee he didn't want to fire.
It really pissed me off and unfortunately (for both of us, really), I never got to tell him how I felt about the whole situation, as I wanted to get a good reference for my next job (which incidentally pays double what I was earning).
I can't imagine working in a place that yells at me - that would be the final nail in the coffin where I would that that person everything I think of them and their inaptitude to "manage". I guess that's why I no longer punch the clock.
As you have noticed, you can output the same quality of work and it can be seen as very good or not so good at different times, or with different people, because feelings.
Let's talk about surprises. If you have discharged supervisory responsibilities adequately throughout the year, holding regular one- on-one meetings and providing guidance when needed, there should never be surprises at a performance, right? Wrong. When you are using the worksheet, sometimes you come up with a message that will startle you. So what do you do? You're faced with either delivering the message or not, but if the purpose of the review is to improve your subordinate's performance, you must deliver it. Preferably, a review should not contain any surprises, but if you uncover one, swallow hard and bring it up.
If a manager discovers a long-standing issue whilst preparing for the performance review, then yes, they absolutely must "swallow hard and bring it up".
But not having noticed or provided feedback about that issue at any point in the past is still a failure of management.
If it means you have to let someone have a neutral review that they don't deserve... swallow hard, and start managing after the review is done.
Remember that your employees will be interpreting the review in light of the corporate culture, which they are fully aware of. They will also know whether the problem that you discovered is real or not.
I think that's the moment the "failure" is realized.
I hear that a lot and tend to agree with the statement. I even used to say it in the opposite "If I get a bad review, that's a signal that I need a new job, because I think I'm doing well and I must have a terrible manager if he'd wait a whole year to tell me otherwise".
And though I'm going to counter it, it's not inaccurate -- an employee shouldn't land in a review expecting that they've been doing wonderfully only to find out that they've been stinking up the place (or vice-versa), but the best manager that I have ever had, Lou, did surprise me at my first review. I wrote about it in another comment on this post so I won't rehash it, but I came to understand this as one of the benefits of performance review time.
Managers are rarely thinking about ways that a top-performing employee can improve, but everyone has something they can improve and a good manager will provide feedback to a staff member if there are areas that they, and others are noticing, that the employee may not be seeing. Because "top performers" don't require the attention that other staff might, a formal review may be the only time that a manager really takes the time to think about them in the context of "improvement". In addition, it's easier to bring up areas of improvement during this time, because it is set aside as one of the purposes of a formal review. In the couple of decades that I've been working, I've had two managers offer me anything in the way of "areas for improvement" -- both times were at reviews -- outside of a review it has never come up.
So yes, it is obscene for a manager to wait until review time to bring up a year's worth of failures, but being surprised by a bit of negative feedback -- provided it's not "Fix this or your getting a pink-slip" kind of feedback, isn't necessarily a management failure. It was quite helpful to me and I count Lou among about 3 people who I feel honored to have known[0] because their impact, caring and advice was life-changing for me.
[0] The other two were my HS programming teacher (who's class I enjoyed in Junior High), the late, great, Mr. Dzwonkiewicz who made me love writing software at a young age, and the woman who cured my social anxiety and made me enjoy public speaking -- the director of To Kill a Mockingbird that I performed in as a young teenager. Her name, though, escapes me. :)
This exactly. I've had two and half performance improvement plans in my 20 years.
1. My performance and attitude really did suck. I had been at a company too long (9 years), raises were anemic and the bonuses had gotten cut over the years to the point that in year 9 I only made $7K more than I did in year 2. My skillset had atrophied because I was both dealing with personal issues and concentrating on other "working hobbies" where I was making extra money. It was a horrible cycle. The further behind I fell salary wise, the worse my attitude got. I finally left 10 years ago and learned a lot from that mistake.
2. The second time (two jobs later, the company I worked for after the first event went out of business) wasn't because of performance but because I stepped on the wrong coworkers toes - a team lead that wasn't my manager. I learned this time around. I played the political game long enough after the PIP to get a set of skills I wanted (about three months) and left and got another job making 25K more. I did learn some political skills from that experience.
3. I went to another company where I was hired by a manager who was told by his manager to bring people in who could "affect change". The old guard won over, my manager's manager was laid off and my manager was forced out three months later. I got a bad review from my new manager - as did everyone my manager had hired - and we all left within 3 months. This time I left for $13k more and got a job as a team lead.
- I was now working for a company that wasn't a software company, I was brought in to create a modern software department and then we got acquired and the new edict was that they "didn't want to be a Software company". But they did need at least two major projects done that I was responsible for, but they would only let me hire contractors and the red tape to get anything done was ridiculous. After realizing I was going to be made the fall guy and getting a preview of what my review was going to be, I started looking for another job and had one in 10 days making $7K more with less official responsibility but more decision making ability and I'm able to get more done with no red tape (i.e. I'm admin for AWS)
My official PIP at job 2 happened about four years ago. Since then and three jobs later, I'm making 40K more and I am a lot smarter politically now.
You don't just staple your semester of class notes together and hand that in as your final paper.
A good performance review will identify trends, make recommendations, and use examples while still separating the signal from the noise.
Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain.
Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues. Your experience with this working style has been positive, because you were born and raised speaking the jargon. If they come from a different background, they may not actually know what is important for the company because they haven’t spent their whole life interpreting these cultural cues.
This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work. I promise you it is not, and as a manager you should be doing more to communicate needs/value opportunities to your direct reports. Your view of what those are may be different from theirs.
After that, he spoke about figuring out how to provide the most value for the business. I've had a 25+ year career and can verify that everyone should follow this advice.
Whatever hidden biases we are concerned about in the workplace, they all pale in comparison to the metric of fulfilling the purpose of the company. It took me a few years to realize that businesses were less interested in paying me because I was smart and could solve hard problems and more interested in how I could measure and move the purposes of the company.
The only direct value a manager provides to a company is a regular calibration of employee purpose with the purpose of the business. This is best done with regular 1-on-1s, not through semi-annual reviews.
There are other indirect things that a good manager brings to the table which mostly revolve around increasing employee happiness and satisfaction, but all of it pales in comparison to aligning employee and company purpose.
I am not sure this is true to the extent that people want it to be. You see the main benefits of diversity when groups of users use products in different ways depending on who they are. However, a large majority of products are used the same way by all people (almost all b2b products / services that I can think of and many if not most consumer products / services), so for those products I'm not sure it matters who your creators or developers are as long as they understand the industry they are making products for and they talk to users.
I can see the benefit in having a diverse workforce when it comes to discovering new markets or uses for technologies or products, but I think it would be far more important to shoot for having people from a variety of industries and backgrounds on your team to spot these opportunities as opposed to trying to preferentially hire minorities, women, parents, the elderly, lgbt, etc regardless of their backgrounds.
That being said, I do agree that communicating cultural values, mission, and expectations regularly is very, very important as many people have a suboptimal idea of how their work meshes with overall goals of the organization and what is expected of them. Regularly checking in with direct reports can help them internalize these ideas better.
After decades in the industry, I'm comfortable that my success is repeatable (as I have done) and is the most effective way to do the work. As if there's a debate, I'm really surprised by the endless process and bad management advice circulating on the web, among the good. "This hasn't killed my company yet and I'm happy with what we have" is the refrain from small and large companies wasting time and effort (with things like scheduled reviews). Talented Managers aren't supposed to be listeners, unless you're trapped in a byzantine/hobbesian org (these emerge in different tiers).
> Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues.
No, they aren't. They are important for you to set standards of accountability, at best...unless you really don't have power to do anything about it, which I've seen. You don't change their culture and they don't change yours, regardless of what you tell yourself. The job description and company-necessary responsibilities aren't changing based on the person. I'm not sure there's any value in going on about it, this kind of thinking is just madness.
If you're worried about building products that appeal to the indolent and apathetic, just look at the entertainment industry, where actors and screenwriters work very very long hours to produce content that reliably keeps the indolent and apathetic entertained.
If you're just worried about diversity, I assure you that there are plenty of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and even single women, as well as both men and women of all ethnic and national backgrounds, who are diligent and conscientious.
I prefer dealing with people to dealing with black-boxes.
Anyone with your profile should run their own business. It's unrealistic to expect somebody to work long hours, over-deliver for "maybe someday"-promises. People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it.
The worst case scenario of my own business is the whole thing crashing and me having to reorganize my life to accommodate whatever job I can find before my emergency fund runs out.
The worst case scenario for being an employee is getting fired. Pretty much the same outcome but much, much harder to hit.
If I want to start a family or just have a stable enough career to (essentially) never worry about going broke, I'll take the latter. That personality profile just makes keeping a job as simple as hitting the bare minimum requirements (which you habitually blaze past).
Those of us that are trying to build high-performing organizations will still avoid and remove those types of people. And we will continue to reward and not take advantage of our people to fill our end of the bargain.
Further, those of us that are also highly self-motivated will continue to leave bad situations, not become slackers in response to being taken advantage of.
When I was broke and had no connections, I was willing to work the way you described.
Now that I have options, I'm not willing to expend that energy when I could save it for gym, girlfriend, self-education after hours, etc.
If I'm broke and need to switch to another industry or you're paying me multiple times my next best offer I'll do that.
Otherwise, no, my manager needs to do his job instead of asking me to do it for him
That said I'm now entering a graduate school and am willing to do that in this context because I'm intrinsically interested in learning the applied math I'll be working on
Software jobs, no
You would probably need to hire people who are interested in running their own business im a few years and mentor them towards that end to get that kind of commitment in my opinion
If your organization gets large enough, then out of necessity, you will have many different managers with many different styles. That is usually the point when a performance review system needs to become more formalized - it's important to be sure that in some ways, all managers are treating their reports similarly, even if it means some of them changing their default management style.
Looking for someone to "anticipate the needs of my business" is great, but how do you respond to someone who makes a mistake or pursues a strategy different from your ideal? Do you fire them on the spot like the emperor or learn from it. If it's the later, I got news for you; you're doing reviews.
"I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations." Gee - wouldn't it be nice to know this without waiting 20+ years to look back and assess the entire composition of your career? It's also super handy to self-assess with the eroding benefit of time. The most brutal performance assessment I ever had radically changed the trajectory of my life, and looking back on others who stayed the same path shows it was ultimately net-positive for me. You seem pretty satisfied with how things have turned out, but just imagine what you could have accomplished with a little feedback, such a waste of potential...
Blame the economic cycle. I would assume, your company is self-funded, profitable and being run with efficiency in mind. Unfortunately, in the current economy you just can't compete salary-wise with companies that focus on raising, bloating the headcount, raising more, playing hocus-pocus with the "cost of revenue" line and doing a spectacular exit. And as an employee, if playing a hipster infant who loves his boss and depends on him pays 2x more than hard work and initiative, well, I'm sorry to say that, but I'll go where the money is.
That said, you might be able to find that type if you offer more equity or some revenue-based incentives or look into partnering with other small business owners rather than trying to find someone to work under you.
If the employer pays a generous salary for work done well, I don't see what the problem is.
Feedback is a gift. Without people around you to give honest, brutal feedback, you have no idea if you are really doing a good job or not.
There's a great podcast episode from Adam Grant's WorkLife about criticism that's worth listening to: https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_dear_bill...
If you want employees to act the way you want, either give them stock, pay them significantly more, or give them long term, multi-year employment contracts. If you expect to get something (employees going above and beyond) for nothing, you are entitled.
Only in an employee's market.
Are there any specific questions you ask?
I like to ask about their passions outside of work. Video games? Sports? Communities they may be a part of?
I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself. Does this person like to dig into the details and figure out how something works and how they can make it better or do they just like something and not show much deeper interest? Do they tinker or try to make things better on the things they are passionate about? Do they even have things they are passionate about? (You'd be surprised how many people can't really answer this question, even in casual conversation.)
It's not full proof, but I've found that people that go the extra mile, people that are passionate and inquisitive and not always happy with the status quo, are people that are more likely to take the initiative when working on a project for me. At that point, it's my job to spark their interest in the product so they will (hopefully) apply that passion in the same way.
I think that's a reasonable position. My company treats me as a human resource, I treat my company like my client who writes checks for the work I put in.
You're getting a lot of crap for this statement ranging from it being a bias dog-whistle to it being an indicator that you're expecting too much.
I didn't find either to be the case in reading what you wrote. My dad, too, was a business owner and growing up he pushed the same kinds of values onto me. He married my mom at 19, moved out of a two-bedroom house with 7 siblings (he never had his own room, slept on the living room couch), took a job as a union construction worker out of high-school, attended college up to his senior year but didn't graduate and ended up starting a manufacturing business supporting the automotive industry in Detroit. He's wealthy and retired, now.
I started a few businesses, but decided against them over time and realized that I really didn't like the whole "running a business". I like to write software and learning about technology and programming. Anything that takes me away from that makes me less happy. The ancillary (taxes, accounting, management, etc) that owning a business entails wasn't for me. I "put in long hours"[0], but I like to spend those hours doing the one specific thing that I love doing and I'm paid well enough that I have no desire to strike out on my own in the hopes that I can make buckets more (but in the greater likelihood that I'll have less reliable income).
As for the bias dog-whistle of these sorts of traits belonging only to white, young, men ... I find those statements to be curiously biased, as well. I have worked at several different companies on teams with women and men of both races and ages ranging from around 25 to around 57 -- yes, in tech, in Detroit. I haven't found that these traits vary based on race, gender or even age. The hardest working manager (which I wrote about in my last comment on this post) was almost 60, the guy I routinely went to when I desperately needed something to actually get "done" was a soft-spoken PoC gentleman of around 30 and when a technical project manager was forced upon me, I begged for a very overworked black woman on the PM team[1]. Anecdotal as my experiences are even social class wasn't a particular limiting factor -- I used to get advice from the "soft-spoken gentleman"[2] about kids and he revealed to me that he was the only of his brothers and sisters to go to college, that he's been pushing that on his kids and that his parents and his family ridiculed (and still ridicule) him for choosing to seek higher education.
Sure, there's no denying that women (of a certain age) get pregnant and that this is a problem for some business owners. It's never been a problem at any of the places that I have worked, personally, but I can imagine it does happen despite it being both illegal (and morally wrong IMHO). Outside of that, I often wonder if the over-sensitivity to "bias" ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My dad's company was interesting -- they were often the coordinator among several small business to outfit a large manufacturing operation. As a result, during my childhood, I spent a lot of time around a lot of small business owners. Every one of my father's many friends was a business contact and owner of some other outfit. Many of them were old enough to have grown up at a time when casual racism and sexism was normal, my father in particular. My parents raised us in a manner that when I first entered the real world, I was surprised that there were still people out there who thought that way. Growing up around these business owners I knew one thing about hiring, the concerns "Can the person do the job to the level I expect and at a price I can afford to pay them?" and "Good God, payroll taxes are expensive!" Of the business owners, only one had hiring practices that were unusual, and possibly illegal -- this was a manufacturer who had only women working at his plant. I'm not sure if it was intentional or it just worked out that way, but I do know that he synchronized schedules with the elementary, junior and high schools, the work was light-weight assembly, paid minimum wage, and AFAIK, all of his employees were former stay-at-home moms.
[0] I do that a lot less, now, but that's mainly because the job that I have doesn't require that of me. That doesn't necessarily mean I don't put in long hours, I just put those extra hours into projects that I want to work on instead of projects that my job wants me to work on.
[1] So did everyone else, which was why she was so over worked.
[2] I know he reads HN so I'm avoiding his name on purpose -- he's still a friend and I don't have permission to tell this story. The "soft-spoken" bit comes from a conversation I had with him about being more assertive. He'll know who he is and can out himself if he wants to.
I agree that performance reviews aren't particularly helpful because feedback should be delivered as you go, in the moment, with actionable and relevant examples.
And there is a big difference between people that can and people that can't.
If your significant other reminded you to go to the grocery store, would you get a general idea of what she wanted and go get a bunch of stuff you know y'all need, even if it isn't on the list? Or would you only get the exact things she wrote on the list and nothing else, even though if you applied some initiative you'd realize that she wanted to make pancakes and she forgot to put milk on the list so you go ahead and grab the milk also.
It seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people stick exactly to the list and don't take that initiative.
Alas it even caused me harm in college, teachers weren't very welcoming my enthusiasm.
If you've been giving them actionable feedback throughout the year, then it should be as simple as "here is your new salary and your new title" and no one should be surprised about anything.
(Not to defend performance reviews explicitly--there may be a much better approach that accomplishes the same goal)
IME reviews are like icebergs: the conversation is the easy part and pretty small. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes throughout the year, and it's useful to have a process to base that off of. For instance, someone has to balance your recommendation for your employee's new salary and title against your peer's recommendation for their employee's new salary and title. And so your performance review information has to be sufficient to make that case to your management.
Not one sentence about my work as a software engineer; not one sentence about specific interactions that were problematic, or whether or not I had been reported for anything. Just vague as can be.
Performance reviews, in my experience, have been very heavily weighted towards politics over underlying performance.
Companies are using performance reviews to try to tackle two things: Compensation (bonuses, promotions) & feedback.
Compensation and feedback should not be lumped into one event.
If the company is giving individual bonuses they can and should be tied to tangible outcomes anyway or it's just going to be a source of even more office politicking (i mean it's inescapable either way but it's a more vs less thing).
The bigger the company the more likely it is to have very elaborate ass coverage when it comes to these things. So, keep in mind that it might be less about you and more about them when you are having that conversation. They are required to have that conversation with you. It's not optional; it's a box that must be ticked.
However, performance reviews are not necessarily a bad thing and I've had some great managers give me great advice. I would just add that a good manager would not wait until the review if things aren't going great and some of the best managers I worked with made a point out of doing regular one on ones. Coaching happens outside of performance reviews. Performance reviews are also your opportunity to speak up. I once pointed out that I had nothing but good reviews but no recent raise. It went up the chain, they checked their records, and I got my raise. It was a modest one but it felt important to me. These things work both ways.
I tend to work with people from East Coast finance world, and they not too keen on the touchy feely story telling stuff. Its sort of expected that you have to have thick skin and get to the point.
Reviews can also be an opportunity for the direct report to get career plans in writing from their boss. For instance, if you want a promotion to X, the result of the review may be a written plan by your boss on how you can achieve that promotion.
Otherwise, I'd love some examples of what is discussed in your performance reviews.
Why do you need a formal, periodic review process for this? If you seek feedback, you're asking for it regularly, right? If you have feedback for someone, you just tell them, no?
This is what the dude was saying: We have teams of creative people who crave feedback, of people who want to learn and grow. Let’s not stifle them with bureaucracy.
I've lived through unfair, biased and unhelpful perf reviews, I know what it's like to have this sky beam open up out of nowhere and vaporize you over absurd nonsense, but in a company of > 100 people you need a paper record of performance.
If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?
Unfair performance reviews are usually a byproduct of bad managers. For ex: I knew fellow managers who never told reports what they were doing wrong, they'd wait til the end-of-the-year review and write vicious stuff. Why? It was hard to say face-to-face.
That's cowardly and not good mgt: you meet weekly or biweekly to discuss all issues, a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year.
This author suggests that employees present managers "handwritten notes" of their performance "in a notebook every 6-12 months." Guess what-- that's a performance review! As if the problem w/perf reviews was the formality of the process and not the human judgment being applied.
Again, I get it: performance reviews suck. But I think it's not the paperwork or the process, it's that management can be very inept at evaluating talent periodically, regardless of how that process is run.
Unfortunately, it's hard to run a company of > 100 people without written records of performance (especially if someone sues).
This is why I don't work for large orgs anymore. If you can't trust the manager's recommendation then why is that person a manager, in a position of power over people's lives? It's almost like acknowledging that you're too big to know whether your people can be trusted or not, so you need formalized checks and balances. I get that this in fact may be reality, and I also get that we need big companies to create many of these cool things modernity has given us, but man I have no desire at all to be part of such a thing.
People come into positions of authority for very varied reasons. Some might be very technically apt, others might have earned the trust of the founders or some were simply the only people available in a period of rapid growth. You absolutely cannot trust human nature, abuse and incompetence is always a risk and startups are not magically immune.
What might happen in a small company is that a bad manager is so obviously inadequate and has such a significant relative impact over the company that it's easily spotted and fixed without a formal system. But there are no guarantees, see for example the case of Sunny Balwani, a painfully incompetent software guy running the engineering department of a biotech startup, simply because he was the boyfriend of the CEO. He clung on as Theranos valuation balloned to a $10 billion and only got out after the company failed for essentially tech reasons.
That’s where paper trail, or anything mildly objective is precious to adjust what needs to be done.
Why would anyone suggest such a thing?
Absent new information shouldn't the default action be to humanely leave person X alone so they can keep doing work and paying their bills without costing the company more?
I must be very naive in the ways of management...
EDIT: This is a real question; what's with the down votes? Should I expect to be treated like this at work?
Agreed. This is my experience at my current job, the first place I've ever worked for which runs reviews like you describe. Yes, we have boring and poorly done tools to "automate" reviews or whatever, pushed by clueless HR people, but the actual review is done constantly by your team leader. You -- and your direct boss -- mostly know what's going on and how your review is going to go, no bullshit or last minute surprises.
Unfortunately, my current workplace is the exception. Most other places I've worked for either had no formal reviews at all -- which may initially sound ok, except you get the nasty last minute surprises anyway -- or it was endless red tape.
the only part of perf atbmy last job I thought was useful was ranking my peers. I'm not saying my ranking was correct but I'm just guessing those ranked high or low more often probably deserve a look?
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But a perf review is just a manager's recommendation.
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I can think of many reasons why upper management may want to analyze aggregate trends of performance reviews throughout the company, broken down by team, department, manager etc. They can use those trends as data-driven feedback on policy and personnel changes. That is, they can answer questions like “how has our re-org affected overall performance YTD?” Or, “has changing our interviewing methods resulted in higher quality performance reviews of newer employee cohorts?”
In the context of judging us against our peers, it is isn't for us (so of course it's a waste of time for us), or our direct managers, but for upper management. The value there depends on the quality and candidness of feedback. Can this information be totally gleaned from task or ticket tracking systems? I don't think that tells the whole picture.
OK, so is it necessary for upper management to have this data? In a perfect world, this feedback data finds employees with great potential, ASAP and tracks their growth over time, from manager to manager and team to team, but since I'm a lowly professional and not upper management, I have no insight into how this is actually used.
The only way to judge someone is to work with them closely for months/years. Translating that into data points to hand off to a series of managers will never ever work. Especially if it is for higher managers who actually don't know you, and have never worked for you. How can they be the judge of your abilities?
The only way to judge someone is to work with them closely for months/years.
I disagree here. At some point, you're going to have to delegate and give up in micromanaging this process. There's no way Satya Nadella has worked with each Microsoft VP for years or fills openings just with his intuition.
If mostly every manager Python Pat worked for said they were head and shoulders above their peers and has an executive position in their future, then are you going to just ignore their feedback? Career advancement certainly shouldn't be a matter of being lucky enough to have enough face time with the people who make hiring decisions... I guess at the core of this process is trust, trust that the folks filing the review paperwork are doing so correctly, but if you can't trust your managers, you're problems are larger than a review process.