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Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

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Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

#51

Post by dboreham »

mabbo wrote: post #47
dboreham wrote: post #35

We stopped doing them a number of years ago after a discussion between management and HR where we all came to the conclusion they were not beneficial.

So how do you decide on promotions, bonuses, raises, etc? All of that has to happen via some process. If you're not doing any kind of performance reviews then you're allowing managers to do it arbitrarily.

There is a process, driven by actual reality rather than the (in my experience) highly artificial formal performance review process. fwiw when I worked as a manager in big companies, HR always told us that raises didn't depend on performance reviews...

Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

#52

Post by humanrebar »

jonnathanson wrote: post #28
auxym wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I work in a big, non-software-focused, multinational company, in a mechanical engineer role. Your post describes our exact review process. What more, it seems managers always set the expectation high, or vague, that way everyone always get 3/5 (meets expectations). By now I'm almost 100% convinced that there is an official HR guideline that they are not allowed to give higher than 3/5 overall rating.

In my experience at huge companies, getting a 4 or a 5 is largely a paper-trail formality that managers bestow on people they are grooming for promotion. It's a political gift and a retention mechanism. Everyone else always gets a 3, whether they've been kicking ass or competently coasting. Systems like these create strong disincentives to focus on job performance above and beyond a certain baseline, and strong incen…

"We only hire the best."

"You can't all get 5's!"

Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

#54

Post by softawre »

humanrebar wrote: post #48
baldfat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know many people who worked for Microsoft? They would let go the bottom 10% of their staff every year. "Best to Worst Ranking" is the most toxic and destructive environments. Manu Cornet famous organization chart is the best example of this. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/%22Org_c...

I was under the impression that those rankings were created through a series of let's-sort-everyone meetings rather a pedantic application of metrics.

Yes they are, you are right. My company does them too, somewhat.

If you have to let go 20% of your staff, how do you do it? You have to rank people...

Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

#55

Post by softawre »

sawmurai wrote: post #26

Medium sized company (just shy of 20 devs) plus a lot of sales and other roles. We don't have specific performance reviews, only 1on1s where it's more about identifying personal pain points and defining goals. I think the lack of pressure is the reason why this company is the market leader in its niche, has very low fluctuation and a very high quality code base. I used to work in a sweat shop where we had to justify…

Do you get yearly merit raises? Cost of living?

Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

#56

Post by Blackstone4 »

mabbo wrote: post #44

The media have been very critical of Amazon's review process, partially fairly, but mostly not. At the end of every year, I picked 5-10 people I wanted feedback from- teammates, people I've worked closely with, or people I genuinely wanted to get opinions from. They'd each receive an email that I'd requested their feedback and I'd receive around 10 requests for feedback from everyone who asked for mine. The only mand…

Ctl-V from above:

I know someone who works at Amazon just out of college.... out of 50 that started in June 17, they have 7 left... every week, people get rated and given a score out of 100%....every so often people are let go

Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

#57

Post by sidlls »

tboyd47 wrote: post #43
rorykoehler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is time online big (assuming more means better)? I do remote too and I would never consider that to be important as long as the work gets done.

If you're employed full-time, the expectation is that you're giving your employer roughly 40 hours a week. Nobody can code continuously for 8 hours a day and be productive, but just being available is the bare minimum you can do to be considered "working." I've never heard anyone get cool points at our company for being online more than 8 hours a day, but being online less than that (without reason) is definitely fro…

I don't see the point: it seems like the company you're at is more or less putting the infrastructure cost (rent, internet) on its employees and otherwise treating them as though they ought to be working as if on-premises in a "butts in the seat" style.

Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

#58

Post by softawre »

dboreham wrote: post #51
mabbo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you decide on promotions, bonuses, raises, etc? All of that has to happen via some process. If you're not doing any kind of performance reviews then you're allowing managers to do it arbitrarily.

There is a process, driven by actual reality rather than the (in my experience) highly artificial formal performance review process. fwiw when I worked as a manager in big companies, HR always told us that raises didn't depend on performance reviews...

So what is the process? That's the crux of this question.

Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?

#60

Post by sawmurai »

softawre wrote: post #55
sawmurai wrote: post #26

Medium sized company (just shy of 20 devs) plus a lot of sales and other roles. We don't have specific performance reviews, only 1on1s where it's more about identifying personal pain points and defining goals. I think the lack of pressure is the reason why this company is the market leader in its niche, has very low fluctuation and a very high quality code base. I used to work in a sweat shop where we had to justify…

Do you get yearly merit raises? Cost of living?

Can't really tell as I have only been on the team for about a year now, but I have been told that you get raises if you ask for them and have enough arguments to justify a raise. What about costs of living? We're based in Zurich, CH.
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