Unfortunate things about performance reviews (2021)
(rachelbythebay.com)240 points by zargon 9 days ago
240 points by zargon 9 days ago
The best ever advice I received from my dad, maybe the only advice he ever gave me, was exactly what you are writing here.
It was a few days before my first day at elementary school. He told me that teachers very quickly put people into little boxes. “The good students” vs the “troublemakers”. If you end up in the first basically no matter what you do they will see your output in a more positive light. They will forgive your mistakes as “momentary lapses”. If you are in the second category no matter what you do they will see your work in a negative light. If you do well that will be because you got lucky, or because you cheated. Or so they will think. And how they feel about you will affect your grades, your everyday, and your opportunities. And this is completely and utterly unfair, but this is how it is. You can’t change it, but you can learn to use it to your advantage.
So i put in some extra effort to the first few days of elementary school and coasting on that ever since. ;)
Later as i got older i learned that managers work the same way. Obviously it doesn’t mean that one can completely neglect the actual work, but one’s manager’s (and manager’s manager’s) perception is paramount.
100% agreed. This is very much human nature and impossible to avoid. I do this; you do this. We meet someone and very rapidly bucket them into whatever categories we've built over the years. When you're younger, it takes longer because those buckets aren't as well defined. But once I've played someone, it's very hard for them to move into another.
My favorite clip that encapsulates this thread is from Suits[0]. Mike hates it, but first impressions matter.
ha, haven’t been much of a TV show watcher in years (I play games for entertainment) and never heard of this show (nor did I know that Meghan Markle was a TV actress before now, LOL… also, damn she was fine in 2011!) but this one looks entertaining, especially because I live 40 minutes from NYC… Anyway, insightful clip!
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.
I think you've got it around backwards. Your trying to look for external validation instead of having a internal locus of control. It is nice to talk about observation of people and some how rationalize some inner monologue of some sort of internal mental model but it is just a exercise in conjecture.
Just focus on developing your own set of qualities that you want from people. If people meet those qualities then great but if they don't then just move on. All you can do with people is sit down and shut up, and let them do what-ever they want to do, and then you get to decide if you want to participate in it or not.
Re: PIPs, it depends on how they’re used. For stronger managers, who address issues quickly, a PIP (even informal) can be effective at creating behavior change that sticks. However the way many companies practice them, they are simply a formal recognition by HR that things have gotten intolerable. The only way out of one of these other than leaving is to move to another team. Thankfully companies who practice this style of PIP are also usually full of junior managers who are easy to convince that they can “fix” whatever issues have caused the situation to arise.
If its been documented then you're probably on your way out, or you should at least operate as if you are. I don't think a "stronger manager" would put you on an official PIP if they wanted to address the issue quickly. They would probably have a face to face discussion and let you know what the issue is. Nothing else is required.
I know this forum is suspicious of managers on general principle, and that’s sometimes appropriate, especially the more layers there are between decisions your manager is executing vs where they were made. That said, it is my experience that some managers truly want people to improve when they’re operating below expectations at a given level, and furthermore that some people need that feedback written down, formally, for it to really land and produce change.
I am happy to accept that the majority of cases where you’ve gotten a formal PIP that HR is involved with will end with the employee’s termination. I don’t have industry data on this but it would match both my actual experience and the experience of my peers as has been relayed to me over the years. But someone in that situation should be open to the possibility that they can truly succeed if the dominoes fall correctly. There are many signals along the way that will also inform you what your manager in turn believes and even HR sometimes gives themselves away despite the legal risks they are trained to avoid.
Finally, there’s a spectrum of how people use the term PIP. At the far end is what you’ve described, a written document that exists to provide evidence in the event of litigation and is largely HR driven. However a manager can absolutely use the same structure and terminology and never involve HR and hopefully we both agree those are more likely to result in win-win outcomes. In fact the trend in this space is towards a continuous performance management environment where expectations are formally defined and updated and checked in on at least quarterly if not more frequently.
I'm sorry but even if you manage to resolve the PIP, it is always there in the HR records as a black mark. It will always make it easier (not guaranteed, but easier) to get hit in the next round of layoffs
> 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.
On that note, the article "The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome" by the Harvard Business Review[1] covers similar ground and was discussed on HN[2].
I normally brush this stuff off, but I have gone from a high performer to something lower in the past 6 months because my team got a new boss, and we are all miserable. I'm definitely in that cycle that is described in the Harvard Business Review. No matter what I do I can't seem to get off the shit list, and was just venting to my wife about it last week. Good to know it isn't just me.
Thanks so much for sharing this HBR article, it is so useful!
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.
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.
I worked at a tech company with 30k+ people for 3+ years. We avoided all these issues by trusting department leadership. Our department had 50-60 people and everyone knew everyone else just as you describe. Our VP would look over our numbers and ask some questions about outliers and of course give us our share of the budget but we pretty much operated as you described for a smaller company. This probably only worked because our product existed somewhat in isolation. Seems like an approach though that should still work for many organizations.
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.
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.
The root cause of many (internal) business-evils is idle HR departments. Without a tight reign kept on them to minimise their reach they will proceed to reach their tendrils into a thousand cracks and “implement” a thousand pointless endeavours that results in some of stuff talked about in this thread.
It starts with pointless little surveys and SaaS products for 1:1’s. Left unchecked it results in stack ranking employees and other awful things.
>> 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.
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.
Sounds like there were three major stakeholders in your work at Company B.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Sure, but so does the word "unbearable." If your workplace is unbearable, you will probably need to leave sooner or later - either because you found a way out or because you burned out. Whatever GGP did might've saved their hide, but it probably didn't result in a "bearable" level of stress (indeed, they said it was "wrong", so it probably gnawed at them). Stress has a way of diminishing your capacity when you need it most. Better to act sooner than later.
> 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.
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.
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.
Doesn't this mean that rating scores end up measuring the distribution of what customers believe "decent service" corresponds to, rather than the performance of the driver? And in this case, whether a driver ends up with a score above or below their peers will just reflect which customers they were fortunate or unfortunate enough to have.
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.
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.
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.
What does "honestly and correctly" mean?
Users certainly aren't trained by Uber on what the ratings are intended to communicate. There is no agreed on scale.
"No issues whatsoever; smooth, helpful and professional" could be my "3" (where 3 means "as expected" and "5" is as exceptional as "1") but your "5" (where <5 indicates shortcomings).
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree. My understanding of layoffs is you're closing out the role, and thus, the person holding the role loses it. This is separate from the actual performance of said person. Conversely, for a poor performer, you're cutting off the person but intend to refill the role with a better one.
Going from 10 people on a team to 8 and not planning to re-hire back up to 10 is also closing out roles.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
I've always worked in places that either didn't have an IC track, due to being too small, or where the top of the IC track reported directly to higher levels of management.
I assume the idea was that if you're a Principal Engineer reporting to the VP of Engineering, and the team X Engineering Manager also reports to the VP of Engineering, then the two of you are in balance.
(2021) Small discussion at the time (49 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197676
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
honest face to face, real human discussion. actual management and creative problem solving. why is this person not doing well, maybe I can engage them in discussion and tease out some hints without putting them on the defensive. maybe I can pair them with someone who knows exactly what needs to be done, and get their take. maybe look for try putting them in another role with less long term planning. the list goes on. and when you've invested enough energy and been repeatedly disappointed, move them along.
what repeatedly fails is 'systems' - scores, infantile task management systems and other easy answers to what is a very difficult and nuanced job.
just the word 'accountable' implies to me that you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. if you're a first-line manager, and don't have a pretty clear picture about your ICs contributions, skills, and weaknesses...you're not even close to doing your job.
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.
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.
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.
I totally agree with everything you said about information asymmetry and responsibility to provide context. Maybe I didn't explain clearly: it's not an operational failing if someone just decides to "take initiative" to solve an irrelevant problem without telling their boss. It's not the managers job to monitor everything their employees do. It is their job to state goals, assign work, and monitor progress.
One off things here or in the name of taking initiative... drawing down tech debt, POC's to prove a point, internal tools to help grease team productivity, sure. Stuff that a dev might do on their own time that they ensure doesn't get in the way of their assigned work.
But large chunks of work that form the corpus of a performance review? No. I've been doing this 26 years now and the only time I've seen that kind of maverick behavior on a team is when a manager is overwhelmed/distant/checked out or simply afraid of a particular employee because they're a chaos agent with a bit too much power, and IME, pretty dang rare.
> 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.
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.
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.
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> You could have moved Mount Fuji with a teaspoon, but that doesn't matter unless they are on board with whatever you did. If they are, then that accomplishment will be billed as "did something nobody else could possibly do", and you are the best thing since sliced bread. On the other hand, if they aren't on board, then that same project will turn into "you should have used it as an opportunity to delegate tasks to other employees", and you're a sorry excuse for an engineer. At this point, facts don't matter.
That... seems fine? If my english teacher assigned me a book report, and I come back with a proof of one of the Millennium Prize Problems, I still shouldn't get an A? In a good organization, individuals SHOULD have the latitude to identify and solve what they believe is The Most Important Thing to work on, but part of working on that is making the case for why it's important.
> odds are pretty good you'll be within one ratings bucket of wherever your manager put you
That said, I definitely agree that your relationship with your manager will determine how hard you have to work to make that case.
The alternative to peer reviews is that the manager reviews without any peer input. I think between these alternatives the peer review process is better.
As a manager I can honestly say that the peer comments and ranking give me better insight into things I might have missed. I don't follow people who report to me around all day and see every little thing they do. I get a sense of things they do that I didn't necessarily have visibility into.
This can totally move the needle for me. It's not going to change my opinion 360 degrees but it can move the needle. In general I'm going to put a decent weight on peer input.
That said in any system when there are enough individuals, managers or non-managers, that actively try to thwart and game the system, things are not going to end well. That seems to be the kind of place Rachel is describing. In that case nothing is going to work.
To Rachel's example of moving Mount Fuji with a teaspoon. Is that something you were supposed to do? One of the other comments says that if not that reflects poorly on the manager but when you manage senior people you don't manage them at the level of one teaspoon at a time. A senior who chooses to move Mount Fuji, and is given the right input, can totally be penalized for doing the wrong thing if that was wrong.
EDIT: All that said I think I read a paper somewhere about how performance reviews are generally counter-productive. I've always them somewhat disruptive as an IC and not a lot of fun as a manager. That said, there has to be some method by which we determine how much responsibility and how much compensation (e.g.) different people get.
I can believe there's some benefit, but my experience has been that peer reviews sap productivity a lot - people spend a lot of time on them, and worse, they can cause a breakdown in team trust as people wonder which colleague said something that meant they didn't get the raise they deserved. So while I don't fully agree with the author, I do think it's important to consider the cost.
I think that's fair. I have noticed people going out of the way in the time immediately preceding peer reviews to be nice and avoid confrontation to a point where it feels very artificial. There's definitely added stress around those times as well. Where I am we do two reviews a year. In a previous company we did one peer review a year. Both places are very peer review centric and I generally prefer doing this once a year. The process overall is fairly lightweight- you don't spend more than a few hours on it unless you're a manager.
If anyone thinks software is bad, the anecdotes from managers in healthcare make me existentially depressed.
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.
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…
After hundreds of hours of teaching coding, I started thinking, "I know I'm here to teach them, but I can also rank and order the class attendees after the first day."
You know who will struggle, who will take up all of your time, who will ask questions that show they weren't paying attention, and who will be done and offering to help others rather than wasting time. I've never been approached to do it, but it seems like having a 3rd party do the (at least the technical) assessment might be less biased.
> 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
I decided decades ago that I would never throw a fellow programmer "under the bus", no matter what. I've stuck by this for 30 years ago, although sometimes it's been _very hard_ to stick with (especially when they had thrown _me_ under the bus).
What’s the solve from a company perspective? Serious question. The problem is clearly stated. Is there a best worst option > no perf reviews?
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!
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.
The major problem I see with these "performance reviews" is putting everything into the same bucket: feedback, compensation, career ladder progression—which I could go on about, but this isn't the point I'm trying to make.
In the end of the day, what _really_ matters is if people are getting compensated fairly compared to their peers. Sure, some people like to play the power game and get excited with becoming a "newly-made-up-title-that-sounds-important-but-I-dont-get-paid-more". But these people are only playing a game, very likely unawarely, that was already set by the company.
It all comes down to how a company lays out its incentive models. And, truth be told, the vast majority of the software companies out there do a terrible job at it. The people in "charge" don't know better and end up replicating what others do: a Taylorist approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management). It goes without saying that, for a company that requires knowledge work, this isn't the best approach. A lot of perverse incentives crop up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive).
A better model, from my perspective, is one that dissociates feedback from compensation. This usually goes hand-in-hand with a more transparent culture; with self-managing and self-organizing companies:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_(book) - https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/ - https://mooseheadsonthetable.com/ - https://www.humanocracy.com/
Team-set salaries is one that I like a lot. Unfortunately, it isn't as wide spread. Here's a few more resources on it:
- https://www.percival.live/post/team-set-salaries-tss - https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/03/tss-company-wide-compensa... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1rMMmO_iO0
Hopefully I planted a few seeds.
I don't understand why the team doesn't also get a performance review.
I dont think this problem has an easy enough solution. Possibly the biggest problem in the world.
This is why peer reviews are so important. Amazon does it right.
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...)
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.
Exactly.
I've had managers like this. It's a sort of uncontrolled OCD if I'm being honest, particular painful as well if you know it's a kind, deeply well intended person.. unable to control their OCD. People with OCD applied to a technical field can be brilliant superstars, as is the case here. Of course I said, "maybe better if we part ways". And as I left, I got grilled on, let's say by way of example, how the company NAS worked. Then it became me giving a lesson in NAS 101 and simultaneously explaining how the setup was kosher, because he didn't know jack about NAS setup but had deep anxiety there was a problem. It's like asking a surgeon "I don't trust you, how do I know you're a good surgeon" "you need to explain why you're a good surgeon but also explain surgery on the whole to me at the same time because I don't know it".. after that I cried all the way to a better job with full trust.
Now you all think it's bad in tech, now try medicine. They use "360 reviews" and your "boss" is a bureaucratic admin. It's all politics. If you throw a rock, you'll hit ten people who use reviews as weapons. Telling people off face to face is frowned upon. Penting up the rage for the day the review comes, that is the "safe" method to blow off grievances. At point whichever narrative of their grievance becomes hyperbolic. Medicine itself is saturated with sociopaths, type A personalities, OCD, so there's a lot of people with a lot that they get mad about. If the boss wants you to be the fall guy, nothing you can do. If another department decides they don't like you, or they make you the fall guy, your boss will weigh the politics of the situation, and if you're not politically as important as that department, they'll gladly sacrifice you as a pawn towards their goal. I once got written up due to my deep, seething, hatred of women. The person writing it (now a cancer doctor), you see, they did not claim word nor action against women, for I had committed none. They had seen me make eye contact with a male coworker a single time and thought, "why was he not making eye contact with the FEMALE coworker" and went on a long, long rant expanding upon the basis of this event regarding my hatred of women, perhaps due to an innate psychic ability to read my thoughts, or at least that's how it read. In medicine, that writeup is then held against you. I'm a republican now, in part because of this type of culture and the power people can wield playing games such as this.
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?