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Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

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Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#181

Post by gowld »

hrktb wrote: post #178
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…

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.

> You can’t just promote everyone the same

Why?

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#182

Post by elipsey »

Harvey-Specter wrote: post #176
elipsey wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I understand either of those, but not the case where an exec picks out some employee they don't know anything about and insists that they be either fired or promoted right just now.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#183

Post by mathattack »

As an employee I ask for quarterly feedback independent of the formal cycle. I get disappointed if it’s just “you’re doing great” because I like to show improvement by saying “You told me to improve at X so I did Y.”

On the flip side, I find very few of my reports want to hear negative feedback. It takes a while to build the trust to enable it.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#184

Post by iamcasen »

koolba wrote: post #26

Performance reviews are important as they provide a means for companies to document negatives about workers they eventually want to get rid of. It's like the secret police building a dossier that they could pull out at any time to use against you: " Well according to our files you've been 'underperforming' for the past four reviews. In light of that we'll be letting you go. " If you want constructive feedback to buil…

"Performance reviews are important as they provide a means for companies to document negatives about workers they eventually want to get rid of"

That's true, and it's horrible. That's why the whole thing is a joke. You can be a GREAT employee, but managers can just ding you on this or that simply because they want to or don't like you, and then you get fired as a result. It's ridiculous to wrap that up in the lie that it is a meritocracy.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#185

Post by aassddffasdf »

Harvey-Specter wrote: post #176
elipsey wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I think the more likely scenario is that:

a) the company is growing by leaps and bounds and would rather promote internally X% of existing employees. --or- b) the company is facing a downturn and would like to get rid of X% of existing employees.

In neither case does it have much to do with the actual people falling into or out of that X% (unless a perfectly just system is in place [and it isn't]).

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#186

Post by majormajor »

elipsey wrote: post #182
Harvey-Specter wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I understand either of those, but not the case where an exec picks out some employee they don't know anything about and insists that they be either fired or promoted right just now.

You misread.

You're being asked to imagine yourself as the executive - you're the person with firing authority.

A manager who works for you asks you to fire someone on their team. There are a hundred people on various teams in your group, you don't have first-hand knowledge of all of their performance. You want to have a system in place for making sure this is a fair request, vs "we argued a few times the last week" or, in the really bad sorts of cases, something like "we had an affair and it ended badly and I'm trying to clean up the mess by firing them."

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#187

Post by iamcasen »

emerged wrote: post #150

I made the mistake of giving an honest review for my teammates once. They apparently were given the results one way or another and have hated me ever since. Never again.

The only way this works is if EVERYONE is accountable, including the CEO herself. It's called radical transparency, and it's the best for everyone involved. Secrecy creates all kinds of issues because people aren't working with accurate information.

People need to hear when they are fucking up because if they don't hear it, they will never improve. That must be followed with a positive company culture that recognizes that rising tides life all ships. You can't have transparency in a company that is toxic, and encourages blaming and backstabbing. Instead, when someone fucks up, we should recognize their humanity and offer a helping hand. If they consistently fuck up, and are unwilling to receive help, then let them go. But don't make people live in constant fear of being fired for the slightest thing. We should feel empowered to push out of our comfort zone and try risky things.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#188

Post by Declanomous »

exelius wrote: post #173
bkirkby wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there are a lot of ways to make the rules explicit that don't require formal reviews. A formal review process can be equally biased by incentivizing people to game the system by targeting easy wins rather than tackling harder, more important problems.

For instance, tackling existing bugs or documenting code often seems to be undervalued compared with writing new code, when writing new code often just introduces new bugs and requires new documentation. If you start tracking bugs, people will benefit from creating and tackling easy bugs, while tackling harder bugs is effectively a punishment.

Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#189

Post by majormajor »

aassddffasdf wrote: post #185
Harvey-Specter wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the more likely scenario is that: a) the company is growing by leaps and bounds and would rather promote internally X% of existing employees. --or- b) the company is facing a downturn and would like to get rid of X% of existing employees. In neither case does it have much to do with the actual people falling into or out of that X% (unless a perfectly just system is in place [and it isn't]).

Most firings I've seen have much more to do with the people involved (harrasment, incompetence, interpersonal problems) than with wild changes in the company's trajectory, though I will admit that at early-stage companies this could be reversed since things are much more uncertain.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#190

Post by scarface74 »

mdip wrote: post #155
adrianmonk wrote: post #129

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. I…

> 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 --…

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.

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