The biggest problem I've seen with performance reviews is that most managers spend very little time working with or observing their employees. Couple that with performance review processes that don't actually measure results and it's a wonder anybody knows anything.<p>I was once a manager at a medium-sized consulting company. I had an employee we'll call "Roy." He was always involved in the critical parts of large, profitable projects. He generally got 3.5 to 4 out of 5 in his peer reviews. There was another guy, "Jim." Jim was mostly on smaller, simpler systems and maintenance work. He generally got similar scores in his peer reviews. For their first performance review, I gave Roy a 4.2 and Jim a 3.8. Roy got a 7% raise and Jim got a 5% raise. Later on, I was the lead dev on a project with Roy and Jim as my team. Once the project got rolling, getting Roy to actually produce code was like pulling teeth. I talked to the other leads and found out that Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done. He was always on the critical components not because he was a great developer, but because the lead or architect was already paying extra attention to the critical components and could more easily manage the babysitting. Jim, of course, got all his work done on time with minimal fuss and even stayed late to finish some of Roy's work.<p>I went back and looked at those peer reviews... Roy's lead dev had given him a review that averaged to 3.5. The soft skills were mostly 4's, the technical skills were mostly 3's and 4's. (He was an OK developer when you actually got him to work.) My only clue would have been a 2 in "Works Independently." Jim didn't have other devs on his projects so he had Project Managers giving him 3's and 4's for soft skills and 4's for technical skills.<p>A poorly designed performance review was actually worse than no performance review.
Summary: performance reviews are not very effective, due to the injection of subjective opinions of the boss. Therefore, we need a variant of performance reviews which gives the boss incentives to inflate performance estimates.<p>Of course, the author completely overlooks any solutions besides his own pet method, suggesting "taxpayers can't ask for more than that".<p>They certainly can. For teachers (the situation he uses as a lead in and fade out), they can use Value Added Modeling. In fields with more subjective performance, 360 reviews (reviews by your peers, underlings, overlings and self, discarding any singleton viewpoints) are very effective.<p>But I guess it's more fun to push your own toy method (and hopefully get hired as a consultant) than propose serious solutions.
like the old saying goes, "its the worst system out there until you look at all the others".<p>I'm sorry, but a subjective review by a principal definitely has problems (personal biases), but it is a HELL of a lot better than judging teachers solely on how many years experience they have and how many meaningless masters degrees they have (French literature).
Whenever measurements are involved one should diligently research the values expected and optimize accordingly.<p>If you care about such things as getting a good performance review you should know that it measures likability far more than productivity.<p>If one of the KPIs on the CEO's dashboard is hits to the website, you should drive that up, if it's acquisitions then drive that up.<p>Performance reviews and KPIs are highly instructional as to what you should be optimizing for. It's the company telling you what they value most. If you find yourself in disagreement with the things being measured it's probably an indication that the value systems you use and your company uses are out of alignment. It's usually much easier to find a company that shares your values than change your companies' values to suit your own.