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Comment by mmmBacon | Hacker News Reader

I recently moved to a SW company that does this every 6 months. I haven't been through the review process yet but it seems all consuming for 3 out of the 6 months. My manager has a team of 7 and it seems like he spends half his time on this.

Since I work on HW my projects are long-term and they don't fit this review cycle very well. I also think it causes people to do a lot of nonsense stuff as they desperately try to "make an impact" during the review period. A lot of stuff is done that is a distraction in the name of making an impact.

I get the need to measure people and provide feedback but this constant review shit is ridiculous. In my experience it's clear who is pulling their weight and who isn't.

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It may be clear to you, but it's probably less clear to management. This gives them a "pulse".

If you are managing small teams of people and don't know if they are pulling their weight, then the problem is that you aren't a very good manager.

This sounds familiar.

haha until you said you work on HW I thought we might work at the same place :)

We even introduced a web form to make it quicker which helped ... not at all

Part of the problem with peer feedback is that if somebody asks for your help, and you don't drop everything you're doing and focus strictly on helping them - even if you don't know how to help and all you're doing is sitting next to them watching them point and click aimlessly - they'll remember you as "the guy who didn't help me that time that I needed help". I've learned (the hard way) that in any environment where peer feedback has any place in the review process, if somebody asks you to "look at something" - no matter how inefficient or ineffective your help is, no matter what deadlines you have of your own, no matter how detrimental it is to the work that you're supposed to be doing - you must go to their desk, sit beside them (or kneel, if there aren't any spare chairs) and reason through whatever they're struggling with for the remainder of the day. Not doing this will hurt your performance review more than anything else, including missing deadlines, including delivering broken functionality to customers, and including ignoring customer's needs.

It's probably worth remembering that this isn't absolute. In my experience this isn't the case at all, and probably differs from company to company, team to team.

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