[HN Gopher] Unfortunate things about performance reviews (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
Unfortunate things about performance reviews (2021)
Author : zargon
Score : 125 points
Date : 2024-11-04 06:30 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| (2021) Small discussion at the time (49 points, 7 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197676
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| A few thoughts:
|
| 1. I have never really understood people that throw others under
| the bus. It seems like the wrong strategy to get people to like
| you.
|
| 2. Most people understand that these sorts of things aren't "the
| right way" to measure a peer. Fundamentally, I most remember how
| a person made me felt, not what they produced.
|
| 3. At a prior job, our weekly planning sessions were rated on a
| scale of 1-10 on how effective we thought the meeting was. After
| we found out that our manager was being evaluated on this score,
| we all started giving 10s no matter what.
| Kayou wrote:
| I have thrown people under the bus while under pressure from my
| manager to explain why reviewing a Pull Request takes me
| several hours or days while other members did it in a few
| minutes. It was the wrong thing to do but the pressure was
| unbearable.
| jajko wrote:
| I appreciate your honesty, that's not easy to admit even on
| anon forums. You seem to evaluate it correctly. Just one
| thing - if work is such shit ie due to manager, just leave,
| you don't own them nothing. First try to talk to manager that
| this doesn't work and what can be improved to bring out your
| potential, but in any case search of another job should run
| in parallel.
|
| I've seen _so_ many brilliant people stuck in jobs they didn
| 't like or even hated, when it would be trivial for them to
| stand up and go to next door. Yet they didn't. Don't be that
| guy.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Combine the current job market with, say, a work visa tied
| to the employer, and it turns out "just" in "just leave"
| does a lot of heavy lifting...
| euroderf wrote:
| > After we found out that our manager was being evaluated on
| this score, we all started giving 10s no matter what.
|
| Same with Uber and other "sharing" apps: If you can't give the
| highest score, it's a sort of death sentence, so don't.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| No it isn't. Users should rate in good faith, but honestly
| and correctly. The score will retain more value if they do.
| There is a lot that is commonly wrong with Uber drivers:
|
| 1. If they have a phone GPS, odds are 80% that it's mounted
| in a hazardous way or not at all.
|
| 2. They play hideous music and should just be silent instead.
|
| 3. They take non-urgent and prolonged calls while driving.
|
| 4. On rare occasions, some drive dangerously.
|
| All of these are good reasons to not give the highest score.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| You should remember drivers can rate you right back, and
| for both drivers and passengers alike, being rated below
| 4.90 is like being rated into negative stars, the way the
| current system works.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > being rated below 4.90 is like being rated into
| negative stars, the way the current system works.
|
| I do not believe this at all. Even if were to be true
| today, it will cease to be true once the ratings are more
| spread out.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| The issue is that the score is tied to someone's wellbeing
| and ability to earn an income in an unglamorous, insecure
| gig. Nothing besides actively putting me in harm's way
| would convince me to threaten the tenuous economic status
| of someone else.
|
| e.g. Often times if a man is on an extended call, it's his
| wife or child, and he apologizes to me. As if calling your
| family is ever something to apologize for. I'm constantly
| appalled at how asocial social norms have become.
| marssaxman wrote:
| When these five-star rating systems first came along, no
| rubric was provided: it seemed reasonable to me that the five
| stars ought to cover the range of possible experiences, from
| very bad to very good, and that the distribution would be
| Gaussian. I therefore rated everyone three stars, unless I
| had some reason to do otherwise.
|
| After learning how these numbers were actually being used,
| the whole lopsided mess bothered me so much that I have
| refused to rate anyone or anything ever since; nor do I pay
| any attention to the rating numbers, which are clearly
| insane.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Hot take: I dont care if _others_ think 5.0 is acceptable
| while 4.8 is disastrous. I'll rate 1-5 on a scale normalized
| at 3.0 and meaning "meets expectations". Luckily scores in
| Europe seem to be much less lopsided than in the US so giving
| 3's and 4's probably doesn't leave someone without food on
| the table.
|
| Really they should just stop having number scores and have
| ok/not ok and anyone with a significant number of not ok
| shouldn't get any more business. Beyond that they already
| have a metric: driver tips.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| They were asking the wrong questions. "Was your planning
| effective?"; that's a stupid question.
|
| Instead ask the team: (1) Are you happy overall? (2) Are you
| happy with your manager? (3) How is the current big project
| progressing? (4) How is the quality of the work being done on
| the project?
|
| The first 2 questions cover _intra_ -team dynamics. If everyone
| is personally happy, and happy with the manager, who cares
| about planning efficiency?
|
| The last 2 questions help the company judge the team as a
| whole. If a team always indicates good progress and high
| quality, but then delivers late and with poor quality, you can
| judge that the team is incompetent and hire/fire/train as
| needed. Judging the overall value of what the team produces is
| for the higher-ups at the company to judge.
|
| I'm guessing you got asked 1000 times about planning
| efficiency, and, maybe like, 2 times about these other
| questions?
| blitzar wrote:
| At a prior job, our annual feedback sessions were rated on a
| scale of 1-5 on how great a place it was to work. Departments
| that scored lowly were to see significant headcount reductions.
|
| The CEO stood up at the shareholders meeting and cited the
| results as an example of their success in turning around the
| culture and making this a place that people were proud to work
| at (and got paid a fat bonus).
| boogieknite wrote:
| Pride myself on not keeping things to myself in personal and
| professional life.
|
| Ive been in a prisoners dilemma situation where i followed
| protocol and stayed quiet, but the other narcd me out. We
| shared blame and they actually ended up with a harsher
| punishment because it was another incident in a series of
| issues.
|
| A different time a coworker I told explicitly to consult me
| before pushing code to production ignored me and broke prod on
| a Monday after hours. The next day management grilled me and it
| was him or me. The truth is that its the whole team for not
| having a better system, and the business for not providing
| budget when we've requested budget to improve the system, but
| these non-technical managers didn't accept that. They clearly
| stated they wanted to find who was at fault. I pushed him under
| the bus.
|
| Never felt worse about anything professionally. Sometimes jerk
| managers force situations where the one of two people will get
| blamed for a screw up and if the manager is unreasonable to a
| certain degree the practical option is to narc. Work sucks.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Performance reviews are incredibly toxic and do little more than
| to sideline anyone who is neurodivergent or has social anxiety of
| any kind.
|
| The author is correct: it's not about your quality or quantity of
| work. It's about how you make important people feel and that's
| simply vibes. You can take the same set of facts and argue they
| under-delivered or that there were a lot of learnings from the
| project that didn't launch.
|
| I also agree with not giving ammunition to use against other
| people. I'm surprised how many people don't get this. Your job,
| as an employere in a large organization, is to figure out who
| these people are and never give them ammunition. You certainly
| never tell them anything that they could use against you.
|
| Any large employer will have quotas on various ratings too so
| you're literally competing to be "Exceeds Expectations" with your
| coworkers. More toxicity. Some will end up using this fact to
| tank other people. It's even worse with the current state of
| tech: permanent layoff culture. 5-10% of the employees will have
| to get subpar ratings (by the quotas set) and they will either be
| forced out (with lower bonuses, withheld equity, PIPs, etc) or
| simply fired.
|
| Big Tech has gone 100% Corporate America at this point. Gone are
| the days when Google realized the most important factor in a
| team's success is psychological safety [1] as everything that now
| exists undermines that.
|
| And the vibes that make up performance reviews are going to be
| largely beyond your control. People who went to Stanford will
| tend to like other people who went to Stanford. Same for MIT,
| same for CMU, same for UWashington, same for Waterloo. You will
| have a harder time in your 40s if your team is all 20 somethings
| a few years out of college because your interests and life stage
| will just be different, most likely. A mainland Chinese person
| will have a harder time in a team of Oregonians. And vice versa.
|
| [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-
| lear...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Formal performance reviews are a modest corrective measure to a
| vibes-based approach, where managers give you a raise or fire
| you based on their informal assessments of you. Hardly any
| better for neurodivergent people. The only true _alternative_
| to performance review culture is a seniority system, where you
| 're an interchangeable cog paid whatever the manual says cogs
| your age deserve.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| The commenters here seem to forgot one very important thing about
| reviews, a legal CYA for when you have to fire someone. You can
| point to a document that shows that you talked about improving X,
| Y, and Z. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but there's a reason
| every company I've worked at that does reviews makes you sign
| them at the end to show you've read it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| They're also a legal CYA for layoffs. If a company does a mass
| layoff purportedly for financial reasons, they can take reviews
| into account and fire all those with low reviews, without that
| being considered legally quite the same as a firing of an
| individual.
| charles_f wrote:
| I don't think that's correct, or at least not everywhere.
| From what I get, when you're laying off people for economic
| reasons, you need to make vertical cuts of services or roles
| that underperform economically, but you can't use individual
| performance as the basis.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I've seen another loophole here. The pre-layoff
| restructuring that moves low performers into a restructured
| business vertical that is intentionally designed to look
| like it's all economics for this purpose but really
| functions as a purge.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Legal details and jurisdictions may vary, but as far as I
| know, you can absolutely cut _part_ of a group (or part of
| the entire company), not just entire groups /divisions/etc.
| And you can apply uniform company-wide criteria to select
| the subset of the group to lay off.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| All the performance reviews of my life were mostly a performative
| show and practically a likeability contest: How much does my
| manager like me? -which is somewhat tied to: How much do I
| improve his standing by being (perceived as!!!) a good performer?
| lars512 wrote:
| Reading between the lines of the post, performance reviews
| require a lot of trust between a person and their manager. I
| totally understand that in many workplaces that trust is not
| there, and you are forced to develop strategies for navigating
| those environments. High trust workplaces do also exist though,
| and they can be worth switching to or trying to foster.
| charles_f wrote:
| This should have a (2021) tag.
|
| Whatever system you create to make them semi-objective, managers
| will cut corners and just default back to taking the ranking they
| need to produce, put people in, then post-rationalize. I have
| been in enough of these in large companies with complicated
| frameworks to derive the conclusion that these frameworks are
| just a facade of fairness.
|
| Even the simplest scale saying "at this level you should XXX"
| where you're supposed to align examples is ignored. Let alone
| more complex things where you're supposed to compare impact with
| opportunity to kinda balance for people who work on less shiny
| projects.
|
| Sure, the odd manager will care, but the vast majority will just
| default back to a basic "did do big project I feel like
| important? Yes, then good boy/gal. Nah, then you should raise yar
| impact".
|
| Compose that with the fact that these are supposedly chaperoned
| by the top, which is traditionally filled with people who have
| been there since you were an infant and _definitely_ don 't want
| to change how they do things, and you create morose cultures
| where this will never change.
|
| On top of that, it's arguably very hard to follow the work and
| performance of 6-10 people, especially now that we're remote, and
| especially when every middle level manager is dawned in meetings
| rather than managing. If you mix this with a low level (or
| absence) of training, then it's impossible to produce something
| remotely fair.
|
| And finally, it's almost an impossible task to do. Rankings and
| evaluations by a single person are an extremely noisy process.
| Sure, sometimes there's someone with an obvious problem who
| doesn't do what they should, or a star who's carrying projects on
| their sole back (and yet again, are they really, or is that how
| it's seen). Most of the time, the distinction between abvo and
| below average is too fine to be reliably judged by a couple
| managers
| JohnFen wrote:
| Pretty much spot on. That's why I consider performance reviews to
| be mostly worthless bullshit. They're typically political
| exercises that have little to do with people's actual
| performance.
| gdiamos wrote:
| This is exactly right.
|
| " If you want them to MAYBE change, talk to them directly. If you
| want them to get stabbed by management, put it in their
| performance review.
|
| Anything you say can and will be used against... your co-
| workers."
|
| Doing this also creates a culture of fear.
|
| Live by the sword.
|
| Die by the sword.
| timssopomo wrote:
| I managed reviews like this as a team lead, manager, and director
| at three startups. There are a lot of misconceptions from
| employees about the process.
|
| It's true that managers have a lot of latitude to read self
| summaries and either amplify or disregard them. The #1 thing you
| can do to avoid problems with your own reviews is to actually
| understand what your manager's and the company's priorities are
| and align your work to them. I have given poor reviews to people
| who invested lots of time and energy in projects and probably
| even did good work on them, because they were _completely_ off
| strategy and completed before anyone who knew better could tell
| them they were a waste of time and energy.
|
| This isn't malevolent. It's because every manager is tasked with
| supporting the company's overall goals, frequently with very
| limited resources. Work that veers off into left field, even when
| perceived as valuable from the employee's or peer's perspective,
| is basically lost opportunity to do something more valuable. And
| that gets very expensive when trying to grow quickly.
|
| If you want to get ahead, you and your manager need to work
| together to make sure the work delivers results, is aligned with
| strategy, is timely, and is visible to other managers and execs.
| Hit all four, and the need for recognition is obvious. I've seen
| execs argue against managers that individuals deserve promotion.
| Miss one, and you're probably relying on your manager's good will
| and clout to make the case.
|
| If the work is not aligned with strategy or didn't deliver
| results but took a lot of time, your manager will look like a
| fool arguing that you deserve recognition for it.
|
| Also, re: exceeding expectations, this comes up in every org and
| with every team. Everyone is always graded on a curve, both
| within your individual team and across each exec's organization.
| This is because the budget for compensation is fixed ahead of
| time based on assumptions about the percentage of employees that
| will exceed expectations. As long as each exec gets roughly the
| expected number of employees exceeding and meeting expectations,
| their recommendations for promotions, bonuses, and comp
| adjustments will likely be approved.
|
| If the ratio for a given exec is out of whack, the only options
| are: 1) Get it back in line, 2) Take budget from someone else, or
| 3) Increase the compensation budget.
|
| (3) frequently can't be done without board approval, so is not
| really an option. (2) is going to start a knife fight between
| execs over whose employees deserve it more, which nobody wants.
| This leaves (1). This is why alignment and upward and outward
| visibility is so important - it banks you social capital with the
| people who have to allocate limited resources.
| AdamN wrote:
| > This leaves (1). This is why alignment and upward and outward
| visibility is so important - it banks you social capital with
| the people who have to allocate limited resources.
|
| The problem is that (1) means that exceptional people in one
| org miss out (and leave or become demotivated) because they're
| in a higher bar org and those with low potential/performance in
| another org are protected because the bar is lower in that one.
| This is not good for the organization as a whole and is an
| anti-pattern.
| brandall10 wrote:
| With all due respect, outside of staff+ levels, if your reports
| are off in the weeds being productive building the wrong
| things, isn't that more of a management problem? Even very
| persuasive reports should require sign-off on how they spend
| large chunks of time. It's a hallmark of good management to
| push back and regularly ensure goals are aligned. Empowering
| employees is important, but that should be for the 'how', not
| the 'what'.
|
| Your visibility is above theirs. You are regularly in meetings
| they are not. There is a distinct information asymmetry. It's
| your responsibility to convey what is important. Same with your
| manager to you, your skip to them, and all the way up the
| chain. No matter what the company's overarching goals are, at
| the IC level they may only have enough visibility to understand
| how valuable the business segment/team they're on is and read
| between the lines and move to another team.
|
| Yes, really good employees can learn and bubble things up from
| cross-functional work or skip meetings to cover their
| supervisor's blindspots, but that's not a good look and could
| be potentially harmful, ie. could damage relationships if not
| handled carefully.
|
| Being resource constrained is not an excuse. Hire or slow down.
| Business can't support it? Well, it's not a great business.
| Inmates running the asylum and all that jazz. Scapegoating
| reports for operational failings is toxic.
| landedgentry wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| > I have given poor reviews to people who invested lots of
| time and energy in projects and probably even did good work
| on them, because they were _completely_ off strategy and
| completed before anyone who knew better could tell them they
| were a waste of time and energy.
|
| Alignment is really hard to do when management claims they're
| there to "support" engineers and their decisions, and not
| dictate from above. I see this as a great CYA move, couched
| in empowering language.
|
| It is even harder when they visibly reward shiny new features
| while trumpeting a pivot to reliable infrastructure, only to
| change their mind and behavior on a whim. Mixed signals.
| erhserhdfd wrote:
| This is spot on. Obviously there is a lot to dislike about
| performance reviews, but big companies need some process to
| determine who gets a raise, who gets promoted, etc. Although
| flawed, performance reviews are the best process for that.
|
| I think the things that companies can do to make them better
| are:
|
| 1. Have well established career frameworks (aka career ladders)
| ahead of time. These should be as detailed as possible.
| https://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
|
| 2. Have transparency about the ranking system and distribution
| to all current employees and future employees.
|
| 3. Ensure that some amount of accountability is shared at the
| department level and also at the team level, so you can have
| somewhat objective conversations about trade-offs between
| departments and teams.
| ssimpson wrote:
| Unfortunately the malevolence comes when your manager was
| trying to do something out of scope and pushing the team in a
| direction to win some points, and failed miserably. And then,
| not wanting to take the fall, throws you under the bus even
| though you might have signaled your reluctance and risks
| associated with deviating away from the path the organization
| needed. There is no way to get out of that other than leave or
| get canned.
| gadders wrote:
| >> If you take nothing else away from this post, take this: a
| sufficiently skilled manager can take the same body of work and
| make it work for you OR against you.
|
| This is pretty much the only thing that matters (unless you are
| really at one of the far extremes of the ability bell curve).
|
| >>About a year ago, I finally came to the conclusion that I would
| not put anything on a performance review writeup for a coworker
| that could ever be used against them.
|
| When I was a contractor, I was occasionally asked for feedback
| from permanent employee managers. As if I would say anything bad,
| even if I hated them.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Tell me about it. I had just accepted a position at Company A
| when Company B came in with what seemed like a much better
| offer: full-time employment instead of a contract, higher pay,
| and equity. So, I left Company A and joined Company B.
|
| From the start, my boss at Company B was very dismissive, with
| very little interaction with me. Not because I didn't
| approached him or because distance (we sited one desk appart).
|
| Then, despite a very positive interview with him, he quickly
| decided I wasn't a 'fit" and at the two-month mark, he let me
| go, citing my 'lack of Data Science expertise' as the reason.
|
| This happened even though the two major stakeholders, for whom
| I was doing 90% of the work, were super happy (as happy as you
| can be in two and a half months of work) with my performance.
|
| The situation was frustrating. My role wasn't to be a Data
| Scientist. It was just two and a half months into the job (the
| first being holiday-heavy, with half the team out), and I was
| making good progress.
| jimberlage wrote:
| Sounds like there were three major stakeholders in your work
| at Company B.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Sure, my boss was a major stakeholder. But he never
| complained about anything untill the last moment when he
| brought up the "data scientist" bs. So it is not like I
| didn't do anything that he asked me to do or that the
| stakeholders asked me to do. 99.9% of our interaction was
| our weekly 1:1 and like I said, he never complained.
| kshacker wrote:
| Been there, done that. And sorry for the long anecdote.
|
| This was not a new job, but I got re-orged. There were a
| bunch of personnel changes and my manager's manager was
| also new in the role, but he was an old hand in the
| product we were building. The grand-manager controlled
| everything, and my manager did not have much say (at
| least in the beginning). 100% of our interaction was our
| 1:1s where he will either defer to his manager, or say
| "you are senior enough to manage this decision". Zero
| decision making.
|
| Then one fine day he blew up at me saying "I did not do
| any work". He "watched my emails and slack conversations
| and did not get a feeling I was working". Long story here
| which I will omit. When we finished the meeting, which
| was in a conference room, I did not exit the conference
| room until I had reached out to a couple of teams who
| were hiring. I left shortly thereafter.
| pbnjeh wrote:
| One year was insightful, when in a meeting we watched our
| management rewrite their own performance plans on the fly to
| pass them. They even threw in the minor only partial success or
| two, so that the results didn't look too perfect.
|
| Another time, at another job, while we had hiring and expense
| freezes, my manager walked up to my cube with a 12% raise --
| out of the blue. Because my previous management had screwed me
| (causing me to accept his internal hire offer) and I was "doing
| the job" he'd hired me for.
|
| Performance reviews, of themselves, are bullsh-t and serve
| primarily to generate a record that your management and HR can
| use to accomplish and "legitimize" whatever they want.
|
| Once you know this, and if you're still in a position subject
| to them, it feels like a hostage situation. Any information you
| provide to them is subject to use against you or someone you
| care about (and/or just in violation of your own ethics --
| "s/he's not my friend, but this just isn't right" -- if you
| have them).
|
| Mr. 12% and I learned, through experience, to trust each other.
| No management process is going to replace that.
|
| P.S. And, in my experience, if you don't "provide them enough
| ammunition", they will actively "guide" you in rewriting it
| until you do, refusing to accept otherwise. They are not really
| soliciting your feedback. They are soliciting your tacit
| endorsement of what they are hoping to accomplish -- regardless
| of how and whether that aligns with their and the business's
| public statements and objectives -- internal and external).
|
| Sorry, my language went a bit into the weeds, there. Stated
| shortly, I've had managers insist I write what they want,
| contrary to my own actual opinions and feedback. The process
| was entirely rigged. Glad I don't work for them, anymore.
| netghost wrote:
| Performance reviews can definitely be used for ill, at the same
| time I think it's valuable to have some mechanisms in place to
| make sure people are accountable. Generally if one person is
| slacking off, being sloppy, or just plain not doing the job it
| puts even more pressure on those who do which isn't fair and
| tends to burn out the people picking up the slack.
|
| What systems do people see in practice that keep folks
| accountable? What works?
| tgma wrote:
| This is written as an indictment of Perf Review process. I think
| it is an indictment of most managers. Where possible, they should
| be axed and replaced with software. There are way more "evil" or
| "useless" managers than you'd think.
| boogieknite wrote:
| If anyone thinks software is bad, the anecdotes from managers
| in healthcare make me existentially depressed.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Performance reviews have been very good to me. One of the best
| things for my career has been my blog.
| (https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/)
|
| At the end of the day a perf review is storytelling. Learn to
| tell a good story and reviews will be good to you.
|
| It sucks that getting a good or bad review is dependent on
| factors outside the actual work. But it is what it is. No one
| disputes that employees should be rewarded for the quality of
| their work. That's an effectively unsolvable problem so companies
| do the best they can.
| stocknoob wrote:
| For employees the mid/long term solution is to seek FI so you
| can do your creative work without the meta-game of managing
| perceptions.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Kind of. Solo creative work can only go so far.
|
| A bigger goal would be to achieve independence and then get
| people help you pursue your creative goals! In which case you
| likely want a system to assess how much those helpers are
| helping...
| yshui wrote:
| Okay, I can't believe I am going to defend performance reviews (I
| hate them with passion), but I actually disagrees with the
| author's main point. Same accomplishments can be colored good or
| bad, but that in itself isn't wrong. You could've moved a
| mountain with a teaspoon, but that's pointless if you don't work
| for a mountain moving company. i.e. performance isn't just what
| you have done, but also whether that aligns with the goal of your
| employer.
|
| (Of course there's the problem where the capitalistic system
| forces people to work and do things that aren't necessarily
| aligned with their personal goals and values, just to have a roof
| over their head and food on their table. But that's a whole
| different story.)
|
| (And then there's also the problem where people will abuse the
| review system for their own benefits...)
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| You could work for a mountain moving company and your boss
| could still find issues with how the mountain you moved wasn't
| the right height, or had rocks that didn't quite match the
| destination.
| dude01 wrote:
| I loved this quote: "This is why people join companies and quit
| managers."
|
| You'd think that directors or VPs would carefully look into why
| someone is quitting, if it's because of their manager, but I have
| never seen that happen. I've only ever heard of managers getting
| in trouble if at least 3 people under them leave.
| ssimpson wrote:
| This is exactly correct. Toxic management (i won't call them
| leaders). I left because of my last manager, but I miss the
| company.
|
| If they did care, some good engagement studies/surveys would
| show where the problems exist from the perspective of the
| managed. Many ICs are aware their manager is doing good for
| them, as good as they can and the problem exists up the chain.
| Some managers are just terrible. But without some kind of
| upward feedback process, there is no real way to make this work
| for the managed. Management can always spin the story they want
| to make up for the issues and with no data, there is not much
| that is going to be done. Ultimately it is the senior
| management that is responsible for the toxic environment
| created by not having a 2 way feedback process.
| RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote:
| > I've only ever heard of managers getting in trouble if at
| least 3 people under them leave.
|
| That seems reasonable to me? One is a fluke, two is a
| coincidence, and three is maybe a pattern, as the saying goes.
| Clubber wrote:
| >You'd think that directors or VPs would carefully look into
| why someone is quitting, if it's because of their manager, but
| I have never seen that happen.
|
| I've had this happen once. We got acquired and 2 years pass and
| they start implementing "efficiencies," which involved firing
| everyone but me and this other guy.
|
| The other guy had had it and didn't do squat, so I was working
| his workload and the 2 people they fired. I dealt with the 12+
| hour days for a few months then quit. They then fired my
| manager and his boss.
| charlie0 wrote:
| This is why you never work overtime under these conditions.
| Let them fire you, collect the unemployment, keep your
| sanity, and look for the next job.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| This is precisely why I consider the notion that the IC track and
| manager track are somehow parallel to each other.
|
| Only managers truly have any say over employee performance; there
| is an inherent power imbalance that always puts ICs at a
| disadvantage.
| dzdt wrote:
| Is there anywhere a collected writeup of performance review
| practices of different large employers? I feel like things are
| somewhat homogenized but by no means is it exactly the same
| process everywhere...
| debacle wrote:
| Perf reviews are a terrible abstraction. The ranking and self-
| scoring and meetings and goal setting and stomach aching could be
| boiled down to a 5 item list:
|
| 1. We want this person to leave. They probably should have been
| let go already.
|
| 2. We wouldn't mind if this person left, but we aren't going to
| go out of our way until there are layoffs.
|
| 3. This person provides adequate value, loyalty, and flexibility
| for their salary.
|
| 4. This person is a key contributor and should be advanced if
| possible.
|
| 5. We don't know why this person is still here, and we are
| terrified they might leave us when they realize how
| undercompensated they are.
|
| That's it. That's all perf reviews are for. No one needs to be
| stack ranked or anything silly like that. HR is an abomination.
| bruce511 wrote:
| The root of the problem is scale.
|
| If your company has say < 100 employees then you pretty much
| know everyone and there are enough interactions for the pecking
| order to become clear quickly.
|
| By this point you're already dividing into teams - sales,
| support, development etc. There are probably only 2 layers if
| management. Everyone is ultimately a human.
|
| But large tech companies aren't happy unless there are hundreds
| of thousands or millions of employees. And human interactions
| simply do not scale like this.
|
| So, we need non-human approaches to manage all this.
| Spreadsheets, forms, percentages, in other words data. So we
| "datafy" people, and (shocking I know) it doesn't turn out
| well.
| thrwaway1985882 wrote:
| Funny enough, those 5 line items are almost precisely how my
| company manages performance.
|
| The only thing I'd highlight here is the importance of salary
| with scoring/calibration. As your salary changes, the
| distribution of scores changes too. Almost no time is spent
| talking about juniors/engineers. The most junior of developers
| tend to bottom out at a 3 no matter how good they really are
| because they're so inexpensive. You have to be _near malicious_
| to land a 2 or 1.
|
| But I'm a senior director of blah blah now. I could move heaven
| and earth and triple my companies' ARR next year and I'll still
| get a 3 because there's no budget to make VP of blah blah, and
| giving me a 4 means giving my peers less and my boss won't want
| to do that or else they'll get mad.
|
| I don't like tying perf to comp, but as long as everyone
| understands the deal they're making, it tends to work out.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was thinking about this the other day and how it's played out
| for me and some of my coworkers.
|
| We were at a place, like some I've been at before, where there
| were essentially no speculative promotions. They didn't promote
| you to Level N when they were sure you could do the job, they
| promoted you after you had already been doing it. Most
| promotion announcements came with an "I thought you already
| were" tacked onto many of the congratulations.
|
| Let's say you have levels 1-5. You have a person Tom who is a
| level 3 but is working at a consistent 3.8. The interpretation
| of 'exceeds expectations' is pretty tricky here and IMO largely
| contributes to the fuckery. You have another person Harry who
| just got promoted to 3, and is operating at a 3.1.
|
| If Harry and Tom turned in identical work for the year, they
| should both get Meets Expectations, because they both performed
| at a 3.1 out of 3, which is barely more than you expect of
| them. But the problem is that if Tom has been a 3.8 for two
| years, you're going to _expect_ that Tom '24 does at least as
| much as Tom '23 did. If Tom turns in a 3.9 this year, he
| deserves an Exceeds, but he's going to get a Meets or Exceeds
| because he's only improved a little. If he manages to squeak
| out a 4.0 he also deserves a promotion. But at many places he's
| not going to get either of those unless he makes a stink, and
| doing so puts him farther down the list come layoff time.
|
| If they both turn in a 3.4 you're going to give Harry a raise
| and PIP Tom, which is shitty behavior.
|
| The whole thing isn't based on objectivity it's based on
| negging employees. Convince them they aren't awesome and you
| don't need them, pay them like they're expendable even if
| they're keeping the wheels on.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| At my last job, the performance reviews had nothing to do with
| employee performance.
|
| As a manager, I was told which numbers to assign.
|
| It could not have been about money, because maximum raises were
| about 3% (another number I was told to use). I suspect that it
| was to prevent employees from feeling "uppity."
|
| I had my challenges, but was able to keep a pretty high-
| performing team together for decades. No thanks to my bosses,
| though.
| patrickhogan1 wrote:
| What's the solve from a company perspective? Serious question.
| The problem is clearly stated. Is there a best worst option > no
| perf reviews?
| ssimpson wrote:
| I think the thing that is trying to be solved is promotions,
| raises, etc. But there is this concept in larger, older
| companies that this needs to be done once a year. But there is
| no reason this couldn't be done quarterly or even regularly. If
| you manage a team and someone on that team is not doing well,
| it should be an ongoing conversation, not something that should
| pop up as a surprise one day. When I interviewing for a manager
| role at Netflix, they often talked about how "it shouldn't be a
| surprise when you are giving someone the news they are being
| let go". Unfortunately difficult conversations are difficult
| and people avoid having them. But the fair thing to do is give
| people a chance by giving them the feedback they need to
| improve, and then holding them accountable when they don't.
| None of this needs to be done in the guise of a "performance
| review"
|
| Or someone just doesn't like you and they are just making stuff
| up to throw you under the bus and get rid of you, like my last
| job!
| junkaccount wrote:
| I dont think this problem has an easy enough solution. Possibly
| the biggest problem in the world.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| This is why peer reviews are so important. Amazon does it right.
| epage wrote:
| > If everything you provide is at best a no-op and at worst a
| negative, and there's never an upside to it, stop providing.
| Write much, but say nothing.
|
| One of my best managers would help collect unofficial feedback
| and give it to us while providing a filtered version for the
| official record.
|
| > If you take nothing else away from this post, take this: a
| sufficiently skilled manager can take the same body of work and
| make it work for you OR against you.
|
| One of my "better" managers gave me a middle-of-the-ground review
| when I felt I had done great work. Reviews were supposed to be
| calibrated for job title and tenure but my manager instead rated
| me for the job title that I was working on being promoted to
| (which I never got and dealing with all of this was a major
| reason I left). Even in that, I felt he was short-changing me.
| The only feedback they gave about it was that I didn't complete a
| specific goal. I pivoted mid-review cycle because it was going to
| be a train wreck to complete that goal without doing something
| else first. We had regular one-on-ones and we discussed this and
| he never raised a concern over the pivot. The pivot didn't just
| unblock that goal but was a major process improvement for my team
| and a lot of other teams across the company. The problem was that
| the original goal was a tool mostly focused on helping
| management. In other words, because I didn't do a death march or
| sacrifice the productivity of the company for his sake, he used
| the review process against me.
| Bulbasaur2015 wrote:
| based off of blog activity, wow you write a lot!
| pmarreck wrote:
| I learned this in my very first corporate job at Factset and it
| made me sick of them; it's the main reason why I've worked at a
| bunch of startups.
|
| If the manager likes you, they will see the things you do in a
| positive light.
|
| If the manager doesn't like you, they will see the things you do
| in a negative light.
|
| So obviously, the solution is to optimize for always keeping the
| manager happy... except that that is a little dehumanizing.
|
| It's basically like any relationship coupled with confirmation
| bias. Basically, if you get onto the shit-list of your partner or
| friend or manager, it is difficult to get off it. People seem to
| automatically polarize their opinions about other people
| (probably due to confirmation bias) and then just apply post-hoc
| justification.
|
| If nothing else, I have gotten very good at noticing the change
| of tone when the point-of-no-return is reached (perhaps because I
| feel like I am terrible at avoiding it). You'll feel some
| queasiness/nausea after a conversation that went from friendly to
| critical based on something you perhaps flubbed... you'll start
| blaming yourself (even though you probably didn't actually have a
| ton of control over the outcome). Something will feel "off."
| Things won't feel as harmonious anymore. Details will be off- you
| didn't get invited to an important meeting that you are pretty
| sure you would have been invited to months prior. A new hire will
| get approved, but without anyone checking in with you first. You
| will feel like you are on the defensive and are working
| "defensively"- you're struggling to complete work or put
| presentations together or whatever- you're not sleeping well-
| those are all the feel of the ring ropes against your back,
| because you're actually _on them_ , and you're in denial. It's
| hard not to take personally; has anyone actually ever been put on
| a PIP that made it back to "stellar performer", or are PIPs
| purely just lip-service to a CYA for the inevitable layoff?
| hinkley wrote:
| Gottman has documented this phenomenon in romantic
| partnerships, and I personally think we overplay the
| differences in romantic versus other partnerships, like
| teamwork, mentor/mentee, boss/employee.
|
| In a good relationship, neutral acts are seen as neutral. In a
| struggling relationship, neutral acts are interpreted as
| negative. They don't exactly come out and say it, but to an
| extent your problems with another person are all in your head,
| and there are things they can do about it but it's a _lot_ of
| work, because any time you 're not actively being awesome you
| might be getting construed as a shithead.
| makz wrote:
| 1000% agree with this, couldn't have explained it better myself
| LaserToy wrote:
| Can anyone talk about a better model?
|
| Some things to consider: 1) The company needs a way to weed out
| folks who are net negative. In general, if someone is not playing
| their part, there should be a mechanism to evict if up-leveling
| fails. 2) The company needs a way to distribute incentives
| (bonuses) as fairly as possible.
| cleandreams wrote:
| I once worked for a manager who had 5 highly skilled AI engineers
| quit in two years. Somehow I thought I would not be impacted. I
| just wasn't used to working for dysfunctional personalities. He
| did stab me in the back when I brought in (as tech lead) a
| complex project maybe 5 mo late. He had managed an earlier
| iteration and it was over 2 years late. I got a lot of blame in
| my immediate management chain but outside that it was seen as
| critical and important. So weird. The other thing he did, my god
| how petty, was to refuse to approve a development environment for
| me. I used the freebie and had to reauthorize every 2 hours.
| Believe it or not, I now think this was because I was so much a
| better coder than him that I scared him. I never had to deal with
| dynamics like this before. I was an innocent.
| agentultra wrote:
| As they say, it's all about how your manager perceives you. Once
| they've formed an impression of you it's hard to shake it. And
| that impression influences your performance review regardless of
| how they try to present the numbers.
|
| It also doesn't help that most companies don't consider anyone
| for promotion who isn't doing more than what they're obligated to
| under the terms of their contract. If they pay you $20 for your
| services and you're not doing the work of someone who makes $40
| for the services they provide, you don't get promoted. "Meets
| expectations," isn't enough.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Brutal but true. When I first started managing people I thought
| "I'm going to hate writing performance reviews" but the reality
| was if my reports and I talked about what was expected of them
| and how I was measuring it, we didn't have any misunderstandings
| and the reviews were perfunctory at best. (if they weren't
| cutting it they knew it long before the review came around, if
| they were exceeding their expectations they knew that too)
|
| But what I _did_ hate, was managers who played games to make
| their 'friends' look good and their 'enemies' look bad. How was
| senior management supposed to understand the organization when
| getting such an intentionally warped view of it? That taught me
| the value of "skip level" discussions where I would talk to some
| of the reports for the manager I was managing about _how they
| managed_ and _how well the employee understood what was expected
| of them and how their performance was analyzed._
|
| Not surprisingly, being a good manager is often perceived by your
| peers (and even your boss!) as a threat since you "make them look
| bad." That was the part I disliked the most. I'm always willing
| to help a person become the best at what they do. But if they
| already feel like you are "making them look bad" and they don't
| understand what they need to do to look better, they can often
| look upon advice as "an attempt to trick them." All rooted in
| insecurity I suspect. And all very sad.
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