Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 170 posts

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#31

Post by brightball »

cbanek wrote: post #24

It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues. Really I thi…

If you’re ever in a SAFe team, one of the tenants is that annual reviews are useless. It pushes for doing constructive reviews every PI (approximately quarterly).

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#32

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

elwell wrote: post #27
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Slightly off center from your question, but: 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!)…

> I review Github repository activity for my development teams Would be interested to hear more details about your thoughts on this. Do you look at # of commits, lines added/subtracted?

1. Conversation around issues. I look for engagement with other devs, suggestions, solutions.

2. Commits over 2-4 weeks. I expect commit gaps that can last up to 2 weeks given some of the problems and constraints unique to us.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#33

Post by cbanek »

onion2k wrote: post #16
sushshshsh wrote: post #12

Thankfully, there is none. What a blessing.

It's not a blessing. As bad as performance management, goal setting, and OKRs can be when it's done badly, working for a company that isn't engaged with helping you to improve is far worse. Even if you're motivated to improve on your own you'll be working with people who aren't and that's more stressful and annoying than any number of performance measurement systems.

> working for a company that isn't engaged with helping you to improve is far worse

I agree completely, however that is usually far different than "goal setting" in my experience. It's far more about opportunity, which unfortunately is also handed out by management.

> Even if you're motivated to improve on your own you'll be working with people who aren't and that's more stressful and annoying than any number of performance measurement systems.

Welcome to corporate life. I've worked with a lot of people who could care less about doing better, and sometimes that's right (hey, some of those people even have kids, which I would say is a better use of time!). I'd say performance reviews add more stress and strife than remove it.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#34

Post by runbsd »

onion2k wrote: post #16
sushshshsh wrote: post #12

Thankfully, there is none. What a blessing.

It's not a blessing. As bad as performance management, goal setting, and OKRs can be when it's done badly, working for a company that isn't engaged with helping you to improve is far worse. Even if you're motivated to improve on your own you'll be working with people who aren't and that's more stressful and annoying than any number of performance measurement systems.

Indeed, it breeds apathy. After a while you literally give up on making improvements because nobody else cares to do so, and you just hit massive walls every time you attempt to make change. The best thing you can do is find a different place to work, or start your own business.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#35

Post by BrianOnHN »

argiopetech wrote: post #20
BrianOnHN wrote: post #7

What size is your company/team? Different strategies perform well depending on size. For example, most of the time I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team. Have you identified KPIs? What are they? "What's measured is managed," said Drucker. Personally, finding what exactly to measure is difficult. So don't be afraid to spend a lot of time figuring this out. When you do, all the other performance management st…

Drucker never actually said that, though it's been attributed to him frequently. I found this blog interesting, and they link to the Drucker Institute if you'd like something more authoritative. https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-gets-measur... Similar quotes are often attributed to Deming. He never make this claim either.

I suppose I confused this with "Know Thy Time" in Effective Executive. Thanks for clarifying, I'm sure I've incorrectly made this attribution before.

Edit: typo

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#36

Post by brtkdotse »

brightball wrote: post #31
cbanek wrote: post #24

It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues. Really I thi…

If you’re ever in a SAFe team, one of the tenants is that annual reviews are useless. It pushes for doing constructive reviews every PI (approximately quarterly).

On the other hand, you’re in a company doing SAFe so you have plenty of opportunity to stare at a wall.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#37

Post by pc86 »

brightball wrote: post #31
cbanek wrote: post #24

It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues. Really I thi…

If you’re ever in a SAFe team, one of the tenants is that annual reviews are useless. It pushes for doing constructive reviews every PI (approximately quarterly).

I've never been on a SAFe team so maybe this is addressed in that methodology, but I think annual reviews are more a tool to pass your performance up to higher levels in a structured manner as opposed to letting you or your boss know how you're doing. Like the GP said, the manager and their direct typically know exactly how they're doing, or at least more or less where they fall on the spectrum of the team. Ideally stand ups should give daily feedback to everyone when someone starts to fall behind, and managers should be giving their directs feedback often (not necessarily daily).

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#38

Post by supernovae »

onion2k wrote: post #16
sushshshsh wrote: post #12

Thankfully, there is none. What a blessing.

It's not a blessing. As bad as performance management, goal setting, and OKRs can be when it's done badly, working for a company that isn't engaged with helping you to improve is far worse. Even if you're motivated to improve on your own you'll be working with people who aren't and that's more stressful and annoying than any number of performance measurement systems.

Why concern yourself with everyone having to be like you?

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#39

Post by sleepysysadmin »

It has been known for nearly 100 years that you can never criticize your staff.

“I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of everybody.”

― Benjamin Franklin

Last job, my last performance review. There was literally only 1 complaint against me. I was late >40 times. My boss told me he was disappointed in me. I was upset because I was never ever late to work; I was always early.

I asked him to tell me when I was late. He pulled it up. Everytime I worked the weekend because I was oncall 24x7; I would swipe in and because I swipped in after 8am or whatever it was considered a late.

So not only was I going above and beyond helping people afterhours, I was taking a hit in my performance review because of it. Dont care how stoic you are, that hurts.

Re: Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

#40

Post by sidlls »

brightball wrote: post #31
cbanek wrote: post #24

It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing bad, and know it, and that is either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues. Really I thi…

If you’re ever in a SAFe team, one of the tenants is that annual reviews are useless. It pushes for doing constructive reviews every PI (approximately quarterly).

If I'm ever again in a SAFe team, something has gone terribly wrong. I won't join a company that uses this practice unless I'm very desperate. If a company I'm at adopts it after I've joined I will immediately begin looking elsewhere.
Post reply on HN