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Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

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Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#201

Post by ben509 »

gowld wrote: post #181
hrktb wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good people will recognize that their work is not valued and quit. The value employees add is Pareto distributed, so you can lose only a handful of people but be crippled nevertheless.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#202

Post by citrablue »

dredmorbius wrote: post #153
jessriedel wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to frame this: new technical or social methods for enhancing/extending trust mechanism in large organizations would have massive societal benefits. I wish more people explicitly thought about and experimented with this.

A problem I'm noting is that information technology seems to have corrosive effects on interpersonal trust. That's not a solid conviction, but it's how I'm leaning.

Subtle adjustment, I think the real cause is scaling human relationships. IT enables this scaling. So if interpersonal trust scales sub-linearly with number of connections, it's not really IT corroding trust, it's what IT enables.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#203

Post by markbnj »

cornholio wrote: post #165
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 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 whether your people can be trusted or not, so you need formalized checks and balances. People come into positions of authority for very varied reasons. Some might be very technically apt, others might have earned the trust of the fo…

As I said, I get why this might in fact be necessary. I simply find it dehumanizing and arbitrary and so I choose to avoid such situations. At the hospital where my wife works their review categories are graded from 1 - 3. So yeah you have a paper trail, but how useful can it honestly be? For a manager who is interested in knowing an employee's real strengths and weaknesses it's nearly useless. For a manager who just needs to fill in an upstream form, or quickly find a numeric justification for a decision, maybe these numbers make sense and are useful... but how would you feel if a decision on promoting you were made on such a basis, or if it went against you because someone graded you a 2 and another person a 3 in some category?

And for what it's worth performance reviews are not a remedy for cases like Balwani's. Anything like that which said something different from what the CEO wished the perception to be would simply have been rewritten/squashed/ignored. At least in a small company you can get a clear perception that this kind of thing is going on and get out, or make a conscious decision to stay because you think you'll be showered in filthy lucre or whatever.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#204

Post by lljk_kennedy »

gowld wrote: post #181
hrktb wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Budgets, I guess.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#205

Post by djsumdog »

> Yet, I’ve worked on and with many teams filled with growth-mindset people, and universally the response to HR-driven reviews has been a collective groan. People on the team find it awkward, uncomfortable, and a distraction from their work.

What? A performance review is never something I've dreaded. They're just a regular, mundane, thing that happens. They tell you 'good job' give you your raise, which is sometimes just cost of living, sometimes it's $3 to $5k, and then you go back to your desk and go back to work.

It just feels like it's a standard in place to make sure people get income bumps every years. I don't think it's as big a deal as the author is claiming.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#206

Post by s73v3r_ »

laythea wrote: post #149
CameronBanga wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key in the OP's sentence is "who are otherwise unencumbered". There's a significant amount of privilege in our society for white males, which makes it much easier for the group to offer their employer long hours with initially less pay, etc.

"There's a significant amount of privilege in our society for white males" I think comments like this are part of the problem.

If you can't recognize that one group does have more privilege than others, you can't work to rectify the problem.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#207

Post by djsumdog »

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…

And you need it for labour law reasons. If someone claims unemployment, and you have one of those companies that doesn't like to pay, your lawyers are going to need those reviews. If they were truly a bad employee, specific things in the reviews help if you go to court.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#208

Post by dfxm12 »

iamcasen wrote: post #177
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…

They rely on the word on their direct reports, who presumably have had training in how to judge their direct reports. Of course, the people filling out these reviews are also judged on their performance as well.

The only way to judge someone is to work with them closely for months/years.

I disagree here. At some point, you're going to have to delegate and give up in micromanaging this process. There's no way Satya Nadella has worked with each Microsoft VP for years or fills openings just with his intuition.

If mostly every manager Python Pat worked for said they were head and shoulders above their peers and has an executive position in their future, then are you going to just ignore their feedback? Career advancement certainly shouldn't be a matter of being lucky enough to have enough face time with the people who make hiring decisions... I guess at the core of this process is trust, trust that the folks filing the review paperwork are doing so correctly, but if you can't trust your managers, you're problems are larger than a review process.

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#209

Post by [deleted] »

greggman wrote: post #170
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…

what bugs me about performance reviews is feeling like I'm a copywriter writing ad copy for products. I have to try to come up with flowery text about the 5-10 major things I did rather than just "did x" which is already known. the only part of perf atbmy last job I thought was useful was ranking my peers. I'm not saying my ranking was correct but I'm just guessing those ranked high or low more often probably deserve…

[deleted]

Re: Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time

#210

Post by s73v3r_ »

bitL wrote: post #47
kyriakos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone has the skills to run their own business. Some people prefer to be part of a team and not at the top of the pyramid. They get satisfaction by contributing.

It's in their best interest to acquire those skills, or keep being taken advantage of. A binary choice - that's the world we are living in right now.

Uh, no. I have no desire to start my own business, mainly because I value my off work time.
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