Would be interested to know what software people use for peer reviews?
Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
21–30 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#22My company uses quarterly reviews. Here are the metrics my company uses to review each developer: 1. We have an in-house developed tool that tracks git and mercurial commits and calculates the test coverage and code quality for each individual developer. 2. We use jira to track the number of points each developer burns (points are shared between developer, reviewer and QA). We also track the number of bugs each devel…
I don't think that is a useful way to measure developer productivity. GitLab offers contribution analytics to get a good overview https://gitlab.com/help/analytics/contribution_analytics.md We find it a useful tool to have a data driven conversation between a manager and a report. But it should not form the basis of the performance review. That is why everyone should report to exactly one manager who understands what they do.
The Gitlab performance review process is described on https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/performa... (it is over 100 lines so I won't paste it here).
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#23My company uses quarterly reviews. Here are the metrics my company uses to review each developer: 1. We have an in-house developed tool that tracks git and mercurial commits and calculates the test coverage and code quality for each individual developer. 2. We use jira to track the number of points each developer burns (points are shared between developer, reviewer and QA). We also track the number of bugs each devel…
May I ask the company name?
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#24Oh don't get me started. Fairly big (>1000 devs) company. Performance reviews are twice a year. In theory: before each cycle, an employee and a manager meet to discuss manager's expectations. If an employee "exceeds expectations" he or she gets a good rating. The rating is then approved and bonus and compensation is determined. In practice: the rating is kind of determined by how employee's work contributed towards "…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#25I recently moved from a large (40k employees) company to a small one (600).
Performance reviews at the large company always involve a lot of paperwork, self reviews, and hoping that your manager gives you good feedback. Reviews are rated from 1-5 where 3 is the midpoint and is considered 'acceptable'. Tbh, I started as an intern there, and I can recall three or four times someone scored 4+ off the top of my head. Getting a 3 was so trivially easy it was almost insulting. Getting a 5 once required a lot of work outside of the office and usually meant you wouldn't be able to get it again the following cycle.
Most of these incentive systems are just focused around being the best personal brand manager anyway, because they incentivize employees to sign up for the shittiest projects and then make a lot of noise and throw around a lot of money and bullshit to make sure everyone knows that they're singlehandedly saving the company.
At the small company, we mostly do small one on ones, and you set some yearly goals for each fiscal year that you get evaluated against. There aren't any 'metrics' involved, and it seems mostly like it's aggregation of subjective reviews from superiors and coworkers. This approach seems to work well for everyone. We have a really technical developer who doesn't really do the social game (and he's remote) and he does excellent every year. I'm more of a mix (I like to communicate with endusers and so on) and I did well this year too.
Frankly, I think the biggest thing is just getting out of big corporate environments. They're tough for mental health, and they're tough to get ahead in.
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#26Medium 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 every 15 minutes spent (via time tracking) ... never. Again.
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#27My company uses quarterly reviews. Here are the metrics my company uses to review each developer: 1. We have an in-house developed tool that tracks git and mercurial commits and calculates the test coverage and code quality for each individual developer. 2. We use jira to track the number of points each developer burns (points are shared between developer, reviewer and QA). We also track the number of bugs each devel…
After reading points 1 and 2, I thought your post was satire. This sounds awful.
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#28Oh don't get me started. Fairly big (>1000 devs) company. Performance reviews are twice a year. In theory: before each cycle, an employee and a manager meet to discuss manager's expectations. If an employee "exceeds expectations" he or she gets a good rating. The rating is then approved and bonus and compensation is determined. In practice: the rating is kind of determined by how employee's work contributed towards "…
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 incentives to focus on self-promotion, politics, and lobbying for sexy projects and allocations. Especially true when there is a forced curve or stack ranking involved. (Spoiler alert: there is almost always a curve, whether formally mandated by process, or informally expected by leadership.)
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#29Large company. Performance reviews always come with a non-negotiable raise. The raise + budget issues result in 2-5 year gaps between employees getting them.
Re: Ask HN: How does your company do performance reviews?
#30My company uses quarterly reviews. Here are the metrics my company uses to review each developer: 1. We have an in-house developed tool that tracks git and mercurial commits and calculates the test coverage and code quality for each individual developer. 2. We use jira to track the number of points each developer burns (points are shared between developer, reviewer and QA). We also track the number of bugs each devel…
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