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Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

blog.bradfieldcs.com

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171–180 of 342 posts

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#171

Post by iamcasen »

bitL wrote: post #44
lacker wrote: post #18

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.

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 fri…

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.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#172

Post by Shank »

The problem with direct peer feedback is that, when collected imprecisely, it can disproportionately affect the overall review structure. I've worked at a company where the review structure let employees pick who were going to give input on their reviews. This meant that, depending on how you selected your reviewers, you could just stack the system.

It doesn't seem like a good system if the person being reviewed can just select friends for reviews. Conversely, if you only sample a select group, you can surface grudges. An employee with a grudge can be "honest" in their feedback and completely turn a review.

It's just subjective all the way down. You could have managers "interpret" the results and compile them, but that leaves their own biases.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#173

Post by exelius »

bkirkby wrote: post #138
exelius wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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 compar…

It’s all virtue-signaling in the end, and a manager from the same background is going to be more receptive to virtue-signaling from their own cultural background than from someone with a different background.

Formal reviews distill virtue signaling into a standard process with explicit rules rather than an informal set of norms that individuals may or may not be aware of.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#174

Post by bitL »

kyriakos wrote: post #158
john_moscow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. Although you are getting your paycheck, it's extremely demotivating be the only person in a team who gives a damn about getting things done. It gets more demotivating with passive aggression from your coworkers that are afraid that your performance raises the bar for everyone. It gets even more demotivating to see others promoted behind your back because they were going to the bar with the boss while you…

If you are the only one giving a damn about getting things done then it means you are in the wrong team. All teams have their rock stars and their slower devs but if they are to be called a "team" then they should all care even if they can't contribute the same amount of quality or quantity of work.

Even if you are a rockstar, your pay might be only 20% higher than that of those "slackers", more often only 5-10% or even lower than them (seniority/friends/family etc.). So all you get is a sticker "rockstar" translating in time smoothly into "ninja" (=No Income, No Job or Assets) as you become burned out and slackers are promoted.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#175

Post by [deleted] »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #126

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 promo…

[deleted]

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#176

Post by Harvey-Specter »

elipsey wrote: post #157
markbnj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> 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 expec…

You seriously don't understand that sometimes people are promoted for being good at their job, and sometimes people are fired for being bad at their job?

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#177

Post by iamcasen »

dfxm12 wrote: post #64

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 f…

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?

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#178

Post by hrktb »

markbnj wrote: post #141
ordinaryperson wrote: post #126

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 promo…

> 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 w…

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.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#179

Post by the_af »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #126

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 promo…

> 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.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#180

Post by runevault »

srhngpr wrote: post #5

At my current employer, we completely reinvented our performance management [1] and it has worked out to be so much better. We spend less time on coming up with arbitrary goals and really focus on strengths and developmental needs. The overhead involved with spending a lot of unproductive hours on performance has been minimized. The conversations are really about what people have contributed, what their strengths are…

Thanks for linking this, it was a really interesting read. Sent it to my boss for him to look at.
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