Unfortunate things about performance reviews (2021)

240 点作者 zargon6 个月前

38 条评论

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?

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debacle6 个月前

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.

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gadders6 个月前

>> 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.

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charles_f6 个月前

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

FigurativeVoid6 个月前

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.

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dude016 个月前

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.

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thinkingtoilet6 个月前

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.

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lars5126 个月前

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.

jmyeet6 个月前

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]: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...</a>

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agentultra6 个月前

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.

epage6 个月前

> 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.

Traubenfuchs6 个月前

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?

dblohm76 个月前

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.

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gnabgib6 个月前

(2021) Small discussion at the time (49 points, 7 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197676">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197676</a>

gdiamos6 个月前

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.

ChrisMarshallNY6 个月前

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.

cleandreams6 个月前

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.

ChuckMcM6 个月前

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.

netghost6 个月前

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?

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timssopomo6 个月前

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.

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albanthatcher6 个月前

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YZF6 个月前

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.

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tqi6 个月前

> 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 youThat said, I definitely agree that your relationship with your manager will determine how hard you have to work to make that case.

tgma6 个月前

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.

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forrestthewoods6 个月前

Performance reviews have been very good to me. One of the best things for my career has been my blog. (<a href="https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/</a>)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.

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__mharrison__6 个月前

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.

commandlinefan6 个月前

> 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 themI 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).

patrickhogan16 个月前

What’s the solve from a company perspective? Serious question. The problem is clearly stated. Is there a best worst option > no perf reviews?

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beryilma6 个月前

Performance reviews are a scam. I know from my manager days that the performance ratings at my company were determined even before any manager or self-reviews were written. Reviews match the performance ratings; not the other way around. It made me sick.

LaserToy6 个月前

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.

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JohnFen6 个月前

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.

dzdt6 个月前

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...

thimkerbell6 个月前

I don't understand why the team doesn't also get a performance review.

junkaccount6 个月前

I dont think this problem has an easy enough solution. Possibly the biggest problem in the world.

the_arun6 个月前

I am reaching to the same point & bumped into this article. Nicely written.

TheDudeMan6 个月前

This is why peer reviews are so important. Amazon does it right.

yshui6 个月前

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...)

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Bulbasaur20156 个月前

based off of blog activity, wow you write a lot!