At least for performance reviews it's so much easier. If your boss hates you for some reason, that sucks, but you can just move on. It's a lot simpler than trying to please a dozen different people simultaneously though.
I work at a 50-ish person services agency. We used to do reviews at the end of every project. Everyone staffed to the project has the option of publicly or anonymously evaluating anyone else, and we offer the option for clients to give us their feedback on anyone they want.
What we found is that nobody gives a shit. People with glowing reviews... still leave the company (even with reviews tied to bonuses). People who are great performers still get shit reviews from their peers based on personality instead of merit.
So it's pretty much all just shit that wastes time.
We dropped reviews in favor of public praise mechanisms where anyone use an open mic at our weekly staff meetings to praise a co-worker if they feel so inspired (holy fuck it's a lot of sales people patting each other on the back though), and a karma-tracking tool that keeps a tally in Slack. We also send out a very simple questionnaire at the end of a project to our employees, clients, and contractors... it's in a Google Form and they can opt not to leave their name... we just ask, "What sucked about this project?"
Love to find a better way to do it... but meh, I don't want to waste any more time on this. We all know who we like to work with, we know bosses give bonuses based on who they like, and anything else is just a BS time-sink designed to make you lie to yourself.
The last company I worked for had these '360' performance reviews where you get reviewed by a few coworkers as well as your boss. Also there was no money involved. I thought it worked really well. While you'd hope your coworkers would give you pointers on how you could improve throughout the year, realistically, shyer developers won't do that, and this gives them the opportunity to do so (mostly) anonymously.
Whether you are getting a raise/promotion or not is determined by your manager during the year and finalized behind closed doors in calibration meetings. A handful of paragraphs in your performance review at the end of the year aren't really going to change that outcome.
> So, if everyone hates performance reviews why do we do them?
A formal performance review process is a requirement from legal, nothing more. The only part of it that actually matters is clicking the button stating that you have read and acknowledged your manager and peer feedback. That way if you sue the company later they have a paper trail defending themselves.
Thanks for calling this out... In my career, I've seen some reviews be a complete waste of time and others provide value. It depends on the company and how seriously your manager takes the process.
During my time at Yahoo the process was an absolute joke as leadership was changing on the daily. When I was a PM at Intuit, I received feedback which I still leverage years after the fact.
People shouldn't feel like performance reviews are the only way to receive feedback. Feedback needs to happen regularly, not on an annual basis. Feedback should also come from people you respect, not the people your boss tells you to listen to at work.
One partial alternative is 360-degree performance reviews where each employee's performance is subjectively evaluated not just by one manager but rather by a collection of other employees they work with spread out across all levels of the org chart. Of course that's not perfect either but at least it provides more data points and can reduce the impact of some biases.
> Yet, I’ve worked on and with many teams filled with growth-mindset people, and universally the response to HR-driven reviews has been a collective groan. People on the team find it awkward, uncomfortable, and a distraction from their work.
What? A performance review is never something I've dreaded. They're just a regular, mundane, thing that happens. They tell you 'good job' give you your raise, which is sometimes just cost of living, sometimes it's $3 to $5k, and then you go back to your desk and go back to work.
It just feels like it's a standard in place to make sure people get income bumps every years. I don't think it's as big a deal as the author is claiming.
A much more reasonable approach is to provide performance reviews whenever someone wants one along with things they can improve. That allows for transparency without making people feel like they're working towards metric improvements rather than actual performance improvements
This is my experience as well. In 20+ years of employment, in both small and large companies, with positions from junior developer to startup CTO, I've never been anywhere where performance reviews weren't a complete waste of time.
We did periodic performance reviews at the startup I worked for (which had about 15 employees at the time). It wasn't anonymous: I wrote up a document that evaluated my own performance and how I felt about the working environment, and my boss and I went over it together. I found it quite useful, and it was a good opportunity to step back from the daily routine, discuss plans for my future within the company, and set goals for the next year. One thing that I felt was important was that my boss really took the time to think about the work I'd done, and gave me some legitimately useful suggestions for improvement (the feedback wasn't just "Work harder.", for example).
Most performance reviews are basically convoluted ways to say: "Do I like you?". Actual performance has miniscule effect on the rating, maybe only in a decision if one should be let go or not, but even excellent results won't save one if they aren't liked. I have seen many top performers single-handedly building branches of business being let go when they finished and somebody wanted to claim credit or push their friends once profit foundation was laid.
I gave up on the effectiveness of yearly performance reviews more than 20 years ago when I got a bad review for spending 20% of my time on internal company support instead of 10%. I had been sending my boss weekly reports all year and the week before my review he added up the time and decided my priorities were wrong. That review cost me more than 4K in bonuses and raises. Protesting to the VP made no difference.
When I resigned two days later the SVP got involved, gave me almost 10K in bonuses and raises and promoted me to a lead role on another team to keep me.
I've seen nothing but problems ever since; morale issues caused by disappointing raises and bonuses, problem employees left to fester until the review, a week or more of lost productivity as everybody fills in massive 360 surveys and then argues over them for.
Weekly 1-1 meetings with regular review checkpoints make far more sense.
Well, I can't say I have ever had a performance review that was inspiring or useful, but it's kind of depressing when you start out having them and then stop. Because one of the subtexts is, why even pretend we might give you a raise? And it means you're unlikely to be fired, but it also means nobody even cares enough to do something about anyone that is causing problems.
Odd that many in this thread blame performance reviews themselves ("complete and utter waste of time", "waste of time and simply busy work", etc) and not the manager giving them.
For your manager to do it right requires some courage (to give negative feedback), maturity (to do it professionally), training (e.g. never deliver feedback in 'the compliment sandwich') and empathy (to relate to the employee's POV). Obviously most managers lack these.
E.g. Some employees are over-eager and blitz colleagues: "Hey did you get the email I just sent 30 seconds ago?" Others like to have Jira ticket comment wars. A good manager would give direct feedback routinely throughout the year.
"Hey Bob, blowing up my inbox with dozens of IMs and emails in a single day is counter-productive."
"Hey Suzy, that 750-word Jira comment about why your dispatch function to the React store is a better approach then Duane's could have been better handled face-to-face."
Then the performance review is hopefully a boring, pedestrian summary of stuff talked about all year.
Instead managers are afraid to give feedback and wait until January to tell you all the things they hate about you. Plus your review is likely tied to your compensation/promotion, often making it unnecessarily a high-stress, do-or-die bombshell.
What's really important these days (IMHO) is not the review itself since nowadays everyone changes jobs like they change pants, what matters is your ability to receive negative feedback like an adult and adapt. It means having a manager who can give negative feedback like an adult (a big if) but that will likely help you more in your career than generic pats on the back.
This seems to be a screed against a particular type of performance review. As far as it goes I agree with it, but in a larger sense I disagree. Yes, giving peer feedback is hard. Nonetheless it's necessary. Let's be adults and do things that are hard. Peer feedback itself can be continuous or periodic, but even if it's periodic it all needs to be collected and compared at some point ... which brings me to the next point.
Besides purposes related to either helping employees grow or covering the company's backside if they need to fire someone, reviews serve another important purpose: they're a way to factor out biases in the award of raises, promotions, and equity. If you don't have performance reviews, these things are guaranteed to be a matter of the managers' subjectivity and bias. If you do have performance reviews, they can be compared to one another both within and across teams to ensure that the results don't favor anyone on the basis of anything except measured merit. That's absolutely essential in any workplace that we could consider modern.
I think this is a bit too simplistic. You can perform well without having pressure on you to perform well. Self-motivated people don't need that.
In fact there are some companies out there that my friends have moved to that don't have formal performance reviews like Meta etc, but rather continuous reviews that are low-stakes. They make more than I do now.
I recently moved from a large (40k employees) company to a small one (600).
Performance reviews at the large company always involve a lot of paperwork, self reviews, and hoping that your manager gives you good feedback. Reviews are rated from 1-5 where 3 is the midpoint and is considered 'acceptable'. Tbh, I started as an intern there, and I can recall three or four times someone scored 4+ off the top of my head. Getting a 3 was so trivially easy it was almost insulting. Getting a 5 once required a lot of work outside of the office and usually meant you wouldn't be able to get it again the following cycle.
Most of these incentive systems are just focused around being the best personal brand manager anyway, because they incentivize employees to sign up for the shittiest projects and then make a lot of noise and throw around a lot of money and bullshit to make sure everyone knows that they're singlehandedly saving the company.
At the small company, we mostly do small one on ones, and you set some yearly goals for each fiscal year that you get evaluated against. There aren't any 'metrics' involved, and it seems mostly like it's aggregation of subjective reviews from superiors and coworkers. This approach seems to work well for everyone. We have a really technical developer who doesn't really do the social game (and he's remote) and he does excellent every year. I'm more of a mix (I like to communicate with endusers and so on) and I did well this year too.
Frankly, I think the biggest thing is just getting out of big corporate environments. They're tough for mental health, and they're tough to get ahead in.
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