[HN Gopher] Writing good performance self reviews
___________________________________________________________________
Writing good performance self reviews
Author : ahuth
Score : 71 points
Date : 2022-12-16 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andrewhuth.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (andrewhuth.substack.com)
| mkl95 wrote:
| I would happily review my performance if my employer lent me the
| money and time to continuously improve my skills. At the moment
| that budget is nonexistent, so I don't really owe them this kind
| of thing.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| I've been doing these for almost 2 decades and regardless of the
| amount of rationalization and propaganda thrown at me, I still
| believe they are worthless and a tool of corporate oppression.
| These ideas have been borrowed from something everyone should be
| able to hate equally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
| criticism_(Marxism%E2%80%....
|
| It doesn't really matter what you write there, as long as it's
| not negative. If it's negative, it can be used against you. If
| it's not negative, it can be spun as negative when the external
| reviewer of the self review adds their comments. It's a tedious
| exercise with little to no benefit for the employee.
| mhss wrote:
| They're a communication tool, and as such, can be used for good
| or bad purposes. If you already distrust your manager and
| organization to a large degree, yeah you won't ever see any
| value on them, but the problem is the inherent distrust and
| antagonism.
|
| I've had plenty of good career dev chats with my manager (and
| my reports once I became a manager) following a review. This
| should be happening all around in 1:1s, but the semester or
| yearly review is a larger retrospective summary of the work we
| do, what we're proud of and what we feel could have gone
| better. If there's no trust however, this exercise is moot.
|
| Even if my manager did not read it, writing about it has been
| valuable to me and makes me realize more clearly what I've
| done, whether I feel I'm being valued or not, and if it's time
| for me to move on.
| eschneider wrote:
| Yeah, the process is _mostly_ useless, but a 'good' self-review
| is a handy cheat sheet your your manager and is worth doing
| well. At the margins, you're "helping them help you."
| rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote:
| Of course, the classic corporate oppression of "hi we're paying
| you $200,000/yr to write code... could you list out your
| contributions for the past quarter so we can evaluate your
| performance?".
|
| I find it hard to believe you have 20 years of experience but
| don't see the point of performance evaluations. Imo it's part
| of being a professional to be able to answer the question "what
| are you working on"
|
| It's very simple. They pay you, you do work. If they _stopped_
| paying you, you 'd probably stop working.
|
| Why would you expect that if you stop working, they won't stop
| paying you?
| phailhaus wrote:
| > Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer
| the question "what are you working on".
|
| If they need an end-of-year self review to determine that,
| something has gone horribly wrong. They already know what I'm
| working on: they're the ones that assigned me to it, and I
| report on it regularly in standups. So what's the point of
| the review? If they don't already know what value I'm
| bringing, that's a red flag.
| rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote:
| Why would you hire someone who refuses to summarize for
| you, _once or twice a year_ , just at a high level, what
| they accomplished.
|
| Suppose you hired a plumber who refused out of principle to
| tell you whether or not they fixed your toilet.
|
| That's what I mean by it's professionalism.
| stcroixx wrote:
| Since I gave them the work, I don't need them to
| summarize what I already know. Waste of time. I'd rather
| they continue working on their assigned tasks.
| eppp wrote:
| I suppose if I hire someone that I would know why I hired
| them and I would check the toilet to see if it worked,
| regardless of what the plumber said.
| rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote:
| At what frequency would you check? Is polling the toilet
| really more efficient than receiving a "plumbing
| complete" event from the plumber?
| kqr wrote:
| Sure it is. As long as the toilet works when you need it,
| you (a) don't actually have to check, and (b) the plumber
| is free to sequence their tasks in an optimal fashion.
|
| The message from the plumber is based on the assumption
| that the default state of things is that the plumber has
| not done their job and things don't work. If you feel
| like that's the default state of things, you should
| choose a different plumber, not ask for notifications
| about which things don't work.
| rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote:
| 1. Current (default) state: toilet broke.
|
| 2. I call plumber.
|
| 3. Plumber fix.
|
| 4. New state: toilet work.
|
| kqr: "Hi Mr. Plumber, could you let me know when 3-->4
| happens. I need to use it once you're done, but I'm busy
| and don't have time to micromanage or continuously
| observe your work on the toilet."
|
| (plumber's gaze narrows) "No. Fuck you, _kqr_. Fuck you,
| I 'm not telling you jack shit. I have rights and dignity
| as a professional."
|
| kqr: Wow, what a great plumber. I'd hire that person
| again.
| sarchertech wrote:
| >kqr: "Hi Mr. Plumber, could you let me know when 3-->4
| happens. I need to use it once you're done, but I'm busy
| and don't have time to micromanage or continuously
| observe your work on the toilet."
|
| plumber: Done sir! Your new toilets ready to go.
|
| (6 months pass during which time the plumber completed
| some other work that was done satisfactorily and approved
| by the client)
|
| kqr: I'm trying to decide whether I should keep using you
| Mr. Plumber. Please write me a few pages summarizing all
| the work you've done for me over the past 6 months. Make
| sure you emphasize how it has helped me move my KPIs, and
| how it helped me look good to my wife. Make sure talk
| about how the work you did contributed to our objectives
| as a family. Also make sure to add a bit about how you
| have developed as a plumber over the last 6 months and
| how you plan to continue to develop over the next.
| [deleted]
| mhss wrote:
| See my answer above. You're assuming is easy for management
| to know exactly what you're doing. This will vary from org
| to org and how many reports do they have, how complex the
| work is, how much autonomy everyone has, etc;
|
| Sure, you can take the stance "they should know", but then
| don't complain when even well-intentioned managers can lose
| perspective or miss some of your accomplishments when is
| time to recognize your efforts (promo, raises, etc).
|
| I consider myself a "well intentioned" manager, I care
| about my team and their work, try to keep up with the
| details, etc; but there's just too much going on at a large
| organization and I'm fallible. I may forget, or fail to see
| the complexity and value of something someone did (even my
| own accomplishments). There's nothing wrong with advocating
| for yourself and making your manager aware of your stance.
| If there's disagreement about how valuable something I did
| is I'd rather know when having that conversation. I may
| learn my manager cares more about x/y/z and not something I
| thought it was valuable but turns out is not important for
| the org or my manager for some reason I wasn't aware of.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer
| the question "what are you working on"
|
| I do that almost every day during standups and every week
| during 1:1s. I have no problem with it. What I do have a
| problem with, is when I'm forced into making judgements about
| my work. That's for someone who gets paid more than me to do
| in the corporate context. My opinion about my work and all
| the other self-reflection stays with me. I don't want to
| bootstrap their work by coming up with all sorts of ways of
| rewriting history to match some artificial and arbitrary
| expectations which are anyway outside of my control. And so
| is the performance review itself, in the end. Some places
| even allow you to review what your boss said about your
| performance review and even 'contest' it. You know what
| happened when you did that? Literally nothing, except for a
| checked box saying that the employee disagrees. It's all
| pretend.
| mrrsm wrote:
| > Why would you expect that if you stop working they won't
| stop paying you? They aren't going to rely on someones self-
| written review to notice you haven't been working.
|
| Chances are your manager could fill this out for you most of
| the time as they should have a good grasp of what you have
| been doing in your day to day.
|
| Most of the time I can generate a list of what I have worked
| on via commit messages or ticket names to get a high level
| idea of what I have been doing. I still feel like my manager
| may have a better idea of what impact my changes have had
| then I do in some cases.
| walls wrote:
| What are these managers getting 400k/year to do if they can't
| list the accomplishments of their subordinates?
| rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote:
| Well, they can list the accomplishments just fine for their
| other subordinates, who submitted a non-blank performance
| review.
|
| Just not you.
| icedchai wrote:
| Going to meetings?
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I've started to just write "thanks" in my self review. Patting
| myself on the back feels slimy especially as I get more
| experience
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I don't fill these by policy anymore, and when an employer
| requests that I do them, I tell them by default I fill my perf
| sheets with whatever their maximum evaluation is.
|
| If I am employed to perform a service, I am going to provide the
| best service that I can, that one has paid for. If my service is
| not satisfactory to you, fire me.
|
| Performance reviews are a weird unnecessarily subservient
| exercise in corporate dance.
| mrbabbage wrote:
| They feel like Churchill's quip about democracy: self-evals are
| the worst system, except all the others that have been tried.
|
| Ultimately, employers and employees need a way to ensure pay
| tracks employee value to company. At hiring time, it's easy:
| the employee presumably got multiple offers and so there's a
| quasi-market for that employee.
|
| Later, what do you do, especially if the employee is otherwise
| happy at the employer? The employee can go out and periodically
| solicit competitive job offers to hold the employer accountable
| and ensure their pay keeps up with their skills. But this is
| super inefficient: even one interview loop costs the employee
| much more time more than the self-eval process. And this would
| impose a huge cost on employers, if a huge fraction of their
| candidates don't intend to ever convert and are just using the
| job offer as negotiation leverage.
|
| Like, I hate doing performance evals as much as everyone else,
| but I'm not yet convinced there's a better system for solving
| the core problem of ensuring people's pay tracks their market
| value.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Hmm, I am trying to picture how it would be different to
| pretend to solicit my honest opinion of my work for the last
| year, versus my managers' doing even the most rudimentary
| sort of pass/fail appraisal. It all requires a lot of
| earnestly looking the other way - did I do some good work,
| sure; some clever things, yes, here and there; did I also
| slog through mountains of work that seemed obviously
| dumb/wrongheaded/not-long-for-this-world? Did I ever, but we
| won't talk about that. Even if I try to think of my best-ever
| 'save the day' moments, or the biggest screwups I've made,
| none of that really makes it into the reviews, or if it does,
| it doesn't seem to change the outcome. It'd be sort of nice
| to have simple points-based scoring, doing the basics gets
| you X, doing something excellent/hard/very profitable adds a
| few points, making a colossal screwup costs you some points,
| raises and/or bonuses doled out accordingly.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Yes, such a dumb exercise. People have and do, as their primary
| purpose, game it and raise the ranks.
| avg_dev wrote:
| This is a total tangent but I wonder if there is something like a
| bookmark on HN. I would like to save this link so I can read it
| later. I could upvote it which seems wrong as it has a social
| component but then I could see it in my upvotes later. I could
| favorite it but then it would appear to someone else looking at
| my favorites that I really loved the article when I haven't even
| read it yet. I will take that option so I can see it later
| because it seems like the lesser of two evils. But I would love
| to see a reading list or something. (I am the kind of guy who was
| 500 browser tabs open at a time lol)
| [deleted]
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| I just use favorites as saved articles. Who cares what anyone
| thinks?
| avg_dev wrote:
| But, but, all three people who look at my favorites will
| misunderstand me!
| ddelt wrote:
| If you use an iPhone, explore the "Hacker Feed" app, which
| gives you this exact feature
| avg_dev wrote:
| Thanks - I do!
| fleddr wrote:
| I'm going to go against the grain here. Yes, I believe self-
| reviews are stupid. Frankly they indeed serve as a cheat-sheet
| for your manager, which is a sign that they are so disengaged
| that they don't even know what you're doing.
|
| Don't fight the game though, play it to win. Throughout the year,
| I keep a single note open "Accomplishments 2022". I simply add my
| accomplishments to it, typically as a weekly summary. Plus
| anything notable, process improvements, innovations, overtime,
| compliments from peers, the like.
|
| All of this adds up into a war chest. During the actual
| performance review meeting I come armed to the teeth. This is how
| you flip the script. I don't need to explain that I deserve a
| great review, my manager needs to explain the opposite in the
| face of a mountain of evidence.
|
| The individual accomplishments don't even have to be earth
| shattering, just document them consistently. The total amount of
| them will be so overwhelming that nobody is going to bother
| taking them apart.
|
| Learn to write corporate speak: "Improved automated test coverage
| by 40% to support our _do more with less_ corporate goal, freeing
| up resources to work on value-adding services ". Whilst this was
| just me editing a file for 20 minutes.
|
| You want red tape? I'll bury you in it.
|
| Mix it with psychology. Act modest and humble despite the boat
| load of evidence of good performance. As if it "was the least you
| could do", radiating supreme loyalty. A minority of eager
| managers might still throw in a point of critique, feeling they
| need to do their job in providing some balance to this review.
|
| As the critique hit, look down and pause for a few seconds, make
| it awkwardly long as if the air is sucked out of the room. In
| this period, the manager is going to feel awful, thinking they
| just deeply hurt a great worker. Then, respond with "I hadn't
| though of that. That's very insightful and something I surely
| will integrate into my work to do EVEN better, going forward".
| The word "even" is important here, as well as "going forward".
| Managers love going forward.
|
| The manager is now relieved that the air is cleared, plus feels
| very smart. Be sure to already open a new note "accomplishments
| 2023" and at the top, in bold and red write the critique. Then,
| in next year's review start the session with "Really loved the
| suggestion made last year and here's how...blah blah".
|
| It wasn't even a serious remark, they just wanted to say
| something. They forgot all about it. But here you are fully
| remembering it and acting upon it, which is somebody nobody does.
|
| And this is how you corner your manager.
| stcroixx wrote:
| I really do appreciate that my current employer doesn't do this
| crap. I haven't done one of these in close to 10 years now.
| iuafhiuah wrote:
| I've been doing these for the best part of a decade and it was
| only in the last couple of years I realised completing a
| performance review (for me) has been the same as updating your CV
| - the same advice applies.
|
| Just submit a list of single sentences that say things like
| "Designed and implemented a doodad that saved n hours per day and
| enabled $BUZZWORD". List the outcomes of things you did this
| year, use STAR, whatever you prefer.
|
| The best part of doing it this way - if they don't give you a
| nice bonus/raise, you've just updated your CV ready for your next
| place of work!
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Pro tip if you just can't be bothered with this shit - my
| friend's wife recently asked chatgpt to generate a glowing
| performance review covering four required areas. What it
| generated was according to her better than what she usually
| wrote. She copied and pasted it almost verbatim and the job was
| done in 5 minutes.
| cableshaft wrote:
| ... You aren't kidding. I fed it my title, what type of job I
| did, a couple things I did this year, and each of the prompts,
| and it generated something better than I submitted, after I
| spent almost two whole days on it. In only a couple of minutes.
|
| Totally doing this next time.
| eppp wrote:
| As near as I can tell, I could write literally anything on a self
| review and it would make no difference to anyone in any way. My
| first item has been 'stop doing performance reviews' on the 'what
| can we do to help you' section for years.
|
| This is a useless exercise, raises come or not regardless of what
| is said or done.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| This is not universally true, and if you're somewhere like
| this, you can and probably should move if you value being
| valued.
|
| As someone who's in the room when we go over these, if you
| write "stop doing performance reviews" the whole room rolls
| their eyes, and is not very kind.
|
| Maybe stop shooting yourself in the foot? Give it a shot, for
| like 5 years, see how it goes. It's about an hour of your time
| annually, so if even at a 20% chance of success that feels like
| a wise investment.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| It's never only been an hour of my time anywhere I've worked.
| At minimum one day but if you are provided feedback with back
| and forth (and most of my managers have done that) and you
| meet about it at least twice a year you're looking at 2+ days
| worth of your time.
|
| Are sure it only takes your subordinates an hour?
| TexanFeller wrote:
| > It's about an hour of your time annually, so if even at a
| 20% chance of success that feels like a wise investment.
|
| At my place of work it is common for people to spend multiple
| days on these things, with some people on my team spending a
| whole week. I'm told the process was substantially more heavy
| weight before I got here. Maybe you are just blissfully
| unaware of the true costs? I would give your right arm to
| waste only an hour every review cycle on this
| counterproductive insanity! I would happily accept no
| promotions or raises above inflation to not go through this
| were it an option.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| Where, on the spectrum of time spent per year, do you think
| your company lies with regard to writing annual self
| evaluations as compared to other companies?
| TexanFeller wrote:
| People that come from big tech companies seem to have no
| problem with it, and many people I talk to are thrilled
| with the process so we must be in a somewhat normal
| ranges. I think I have quite different goals. They are
| happy to play games and burn a week because it often
| results in raises and promotions. I'm intrinsically
| motivated and value happiness, and lack of games and
| politics above maximizing pay so to me it's misery.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| Okay so you think "spend a week, doing nothing else, on
| your annual performance review" is a normal way of
| operating at a tech company?
|
| Cool, no more questions, thanks for your time.
| icedchai wrote:
| They're not very kind because someone actually told the
| truth. Many of us roll our eyes when asked to fill out these
| ridiculous forms. One previous company had everyone rate
| themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 for various aspects of the
| corporate culture. How did _you_ drive innovation to achieve
| corporate synergies over the past 6 months?
|
| Most reviews are finely crafted BS. And it generally takes
| much more than an hour annually. If you have to do a full
| blown "360 peer review" process (which is very common) it can
| take at least a day+.
| andelink wrote:
| An hour of my time? I wish. The fact that the work you've
| done in the cycle is finished regardless, but depending on
| how you write about it can impact your rating and
| compensation going forward really stresses me out.
| zie wrote:
| I just copy and paste from the previous year.
| icedchai wrote:
| This is my experience as well. In 20+ years of employment, in
| both small and large companies, with positions from junior
| developer to startup CTO, I've never been anywhere where
| performance reviews weren't a complete waste of time.
| pcurve wrote:
| It's only useless if you do it at the end of the year like the
| author is suggesting. It's fairly useful to keep track of
| throughout throughout the year, including communicating to
| others assuming you're a above average performer.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| I was rolling my eyes going into the article, but it was
| actually useful. Your perspective is kind of the starting point
| for the author- Analyze how the self-review is actually used.
| eppp wrote:
| I definitely read it. I have never worked at a place where it
| mattered. Maybe it would be interesting to work at a place
| where it did.
| luckycharms810 wrote:
| Articles like this make me think about how the software community
| has chronically under-invested in developing managers. It is not
| crazy to think that a manager could actually -
|
| * Have the time to know what you are working on
|
| * Set aside time to talk to you about your career development
| goals
|
| * Help you work and progress towards them - with a plan that is
| personalized for you.
| ahuth wrote:
| You're totally right. Companies should invest more in
| developing managers.
|
| I didn't talk about this in the article, but (right, wrong, or
| indifferent) I find it helpful to think about how to help my
| manager help me.
| [deleted]
| gizmodo59 wrote:
| We have this ridiculous app called CultureAmp. Every quarter we
| get emails and slacks from HR and managers asking us to complete
| it. It's an absolute waste of time and no one really values it
| and yet you need to fill it out. This did not exist when the
| company was small. When you hire more people there are jobs that
| exist just to organize these things. To make things worse there
| is not a single question that asks "What the company can do
| better".
| icedchai wrote:
| I had to use that at a previous company! I'm having flash
| backs...
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| gah, I knew I should have pushed out doing mine one more day so I
| could have read this first. I guess there's always next year!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-16 23:00 UTC)