Formal performance reviews are the worst method for evaluating your workforce that has ever been tried, except for all the others.<p>For me, performance reviews are the single most demoralizing aspect of working at a large company. They are doubly demoralizing because I can see so many things wrong with them, but also can't imagine any system that would work better.<p>So what's wrong with them?<p>1. Over the long term, they incentivize people to work on things that have easily measurable short term costs and benefits. More difficult to measure costs and benefits get ignored. They also encourage sunk-cost fallacy. In almost any company, you're better off, at least in the short term, if you ship something that turns out to be a huge waste of resources later on, than if you make the decision "this isn't turning out the way we wanted, we should just cancel this project".<p>2. They pretend to be a relatively objective system, when in fact your performance rating at most companies is strongly (though not entirely) dependent on how your manager views you. Attempts to lessen the impact of point 1 above will generally increase the impact of this point. Research suggests that most of what passes for rational justifications are made up after the fact to support gut-level emotional decisions.<p>3. They replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation, which at least some research has shown can lead to much less durable motivation over the long run.<p>At one point I was very enamored of the way Valve does things, but now it seems that that sort of management approach produces super toxic cultures in the long run.<p>Ultimately it seems like the only way to get away from this stuff is to work for yourself or in a very small team with trusted partners.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."<p>In this case, the measure is your position on the career ladder, not e.g. the success/failure of your product or company as a whole (unless that is required to advance). I feel that because of this, performance management at big companies leads to unnecessary product churn. Think about how many messaging apps Google has released, or how every product seems to get a top-to-bottom redesign every year or two... having been on the inside, I think this is definitely a symptom of employees optimizing for climbing the career ladder. Promotion Driven Development is a real phenomenon and is in the long-term detrimental to everyone. I don't know an easy solution to it, since bigger and bigger projects are required to "prove" that you should be promoted. Maybe in a few years people will have experienced this enough to think of a better way.
I find the obsession with performance reviews interesting. I manage teams of developers in a large organisation, and I have been doing so for many years now.<p>I hate performance reviews. I think they do not achieve what people think they do, they take up a lot of time and effort to decide and perform, and they often have quite a negative effect on the staff member.<p>I think performance reviews and KPIs for individuals just need to go. Get rid of them. If someone isn't performing, you can manage that without a KPI system. If someone is performing well, you can provide that feedback without a KPI system. We need to start having meaningful conversations, not scoring people.<p>People, like in this article, seem to double down on them and make them more complex and intricate in an effort to make them effective. They are going in the wrong direction. Just get rid of them altogether.
With the risk of getting roasted, here are my top three impressions of the article:<p>(1) The guy is very deep in the management / higher-level business bubble and is extremely disconnected from the day-to-day work that enables his lifestyle. He seeks to optimize things that are mostly managerial / consultant lingo and don't have much connection to things in the real world. That's not 100% true of course but it mostly strikes me as such.<p>(2) Instead of de-formalizing the process he seeks to find more and more micro ways to measure people. This can probably work long-term, <i>maybe</i>, but many people have tried and failed many times in the past and I think it's arrogant to not take that into account in your supposed solution.<p>(3) He is not accounting for humans, like at all. I knew programmers that worked quietly for 3 weeks and then showed us all a gem that made us go "wowwwwww". In traditional systems like Scrum and any agile-based nonsense this is severely frowned upon. Truth is however, people are different and as long as you are happy with the average ($result / $month) of somebody then you should leave them the hell alone to find and optimize their own way of being productive.<p>---<p>The above is overly simplified and I am well aware there is a lot of nuance. But I didn't want to write a book so I settled for a condensed and partially inaccurate summary.
Fundamentally, are performance systems done objectively or "on a curve"? Meaning, if 100% of the engineers are operating at say Staff Engineer level, do they all end up with that title? Or does the Staff Engineer title really come down to some sort of percentile in a stack ranking?
I think we all tend to focus on building the system which is the most point of failure resistant rather than the point of failure itself. I've found performance reviews to be fantastically valuable and motivating when I have a good manager.<p>Rather than endless optimization of the system. Train your managers. Everything from giving good feedback to ignoring or forgetting a bias is a skill that can be learned.
I liked the idea of Objectives and Key Results (OKR), a system that was started at IBM and brought over by John Doerr to Google and others[1]: short term goals alongside long term goals, set at the company level <i>and</i> the individual level, constant review and adjustment of the short term goals, disconnection of these metrics from employee bonus.<p>The idea is to get to you goals faster and re-evaluate them for relevance as you go along. Since they are not directly connected to pay there is less of a perverse effect where people are incentivised to work on improving their KPI at the expense of the rest.<p>[1]:"Measure what matters", by John Doerr
I think I missed the author's design goals for a performance management system: what it's supposed to accomplish.<p>Performance management systems have a natural tendency to degenerate into sources of toxic behavior... one of the most important design goals would be to avoid this, and one of the most instructive parts of a "how to" would be strategies in that vein.<p>As an aside: I've noticed that people who run performance management systems are under the impression that their system does a good job. After all, it chose them, didn't it?
There are two aspects to any system like this:
1) The "carrot" - goals you set to rate yourself on to (in theory) get a raise at the end of the year. Or qualify for a promotion.<p>2) Career feedback.<p>Now I've found for both of these if any review with your manager take longer than 10-20 minutes, something is amiss. This usually means you don't see eye to eye on either the state of your goals, or your performance.<p>That being said, without the carrot, I think most people wouldn't execute these at all.