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I respectfully disagree here. Having worked in the industry for many years (now at a startup) the review process was deeply flawed. Because it happened once a year and your bonus was tied to it people always erred on the side of providing 100% positive and thus superficial feedback. There wasn't a mechanism to know where you really stood and how you could get better. I'm not saying this is the solution in itself but the current low touch twice a year process which is minimally invasive is a disaster in my opinion. I think this solution has merit as it takes a page out of Ryan Dalio's Principles which is to shorten the feedback loop as quickly and as much as possible.

What I think would be interesting is to see behaviorial benchmarks for employees that are auto tracked. I sat next to kids that always printed 5+ extra color copies of 100 page presentations just in case. That could cost the desk 20k over the course of the year. banks have no way of knowing if employees are going out of their way to be efficient, save costs, or be productive other than subjective year end measures. bottom line is as someone in the industry I think this is a positive step forward and wanted to throw that in the mix for consideration.

I can respect your experience, and in fact it mirrors mine, in that any review process invented by HR inevitably becomes a broken, gamed system, with limited value.

Where it seems we disagree is on the solution. I don't think adding an even more burdensome artificial review system will fix what is still the same review process, just sped up. They've missed the entire human aspect of how immediate feedback is used/interperted, i.e. how a manager can correct a poor attitude or a deficiency without turning it into an everlasting stigma. As much as HR would like to pretend otherwise, good management is a skill and requires some basic human interaction talent to do correctly.

This will be another failed HR initiative within a year or two, at best. At worst, it'll turn into an episode of Black Mirror. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive

The solution is to game the system to advance your career.

That's how it always worked.

Successful "gaming" and "advancing your career" means you have figured out how to work the organization to achieve objectives...that means you know when you are a go-getter, a driver, a supporter, a smoother, a leader :)

Yes sure, if they actually put in real useful targets in there. But typically they don't. (Even if they on paper might look the part.)

I think what's important for Goldman is the quality of feedback that is given. Feedback is so contextual and subjective that there are a lot of variables that could make it difficult to extract the signal from the noise, and increasing the frequency of this would make this worse.

Here's an idea: ongoing bonuses. Money talks. Give managers a pool of money to reward performers as they accomplish things. You can have secondary or committee review for awards, but cut out the endless string of scoring systems and other bullshit.

Yea I hate this stuff... No longer is it good enough to work hard, you have to work hard, and then campaign for recognition for it... It should be the job of good management to recognize and foster tallent... but unfortunately, you have to be a good worker and a good politician on your own behalf to get ahead in a lot of corporate environments nowdays.

> No longer is it good enough to work hard, you have to work hard, and then campaign for recognition for it...

I find it interesting that people seem to think that there was a time when this wasn't the case.

I think it is potentially true in a small-group setting. And by that, I mean that magic number around 150 people where you can have a fully-connected network.

The moment you cross that mark, the network can no longer maintain full connection. That is the very same point when signaling worth becomes important. And humans have had organizations larger than 150 people for a very long time.

I've posted before about "meritocracy" being a fairy tale that technical workers need to stop telling themselves:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978841#10980628

EDIT: Sorry, was off on Dunbar's number, which is 150. Though I think the constraints required for a desired organization without signaling are a bit heavier -- you need to not only maintain the social network, but also the value of each person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Yeah, a fellow commentor posted here a few weeks ago the following:

"An infernal situation. There is no solidarity in a meritocracy, and no reward for merit with solidarity."

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022296)

The semantic and meaning packed in that is deep to the core of unions and the rights of an individual. Not only that, it also unpacks why a meritocracy is wanted when the individual is a genius. I'd think it's one of the best quotes of the year, thus far.

Do you know why companies spend billions on marketing? And why there are a gazillions companies helping people market their brand, product, and services?

Yeah, marketing matters. Take a look at any successful business and see how much they spend on marketing vs product development.

Perhaps, personal career management ought to reflect that ratio.

You're right about the value of marketing yourself and taking responsibility for your personal brand. People should take that seriously.

Unfortunately, having an HR department mediate the experience for you in a shitty way on your behalf is not a very rewarding experience!

At this point I can't tell where the made up busy work HR invents to keep themselves employed starts and where the "real" work they're supposed to be doing begins.

Enterprise HR has become a bloated cost center, which brings almost nothing to the table, except terrible ideas such as this one.

HR, just like any other department, is under pressure to perform better. Given the axiom that you can not improve what you can not observe, they are under pressure to improve their quantifying methods. In itself, it's not bad, but unfortunately we're a very long way from having a meaningful quantification that measures the right things.

Ideally, having a dashboard that can show the real, applicable performance of each employee would go a long way to improve the organizational personnel. People just don't want to consider themselves as a resources; they have feelings and emotions, desires and goals. But at the end, some employees are better than others and improving the quality of the workforce is a significant factor in improving the overall performance of a company.

How about hire smart people, trust them to do the job, and then leave them alone!

That would mean fewer HR jobs to go around, presumably.

Because no one can possibly get better at their jobs? Everyone just wants to hide away and quietly keep doing what they were originally hired for? And feedback has no value in helping people improve?

Seriously, I'm baffled by this attitude... yes, I love to hire smart people. And the smartest people? They realize they can learn stuff from other smart people, and that sometimes, those smart people are even their... gasp... managers. Worse, the really smart, driven people may even want to stretch or achieve career goals and don't want to just do the same thing forever! OMG!

Frankly, it's the folks who don't understand this that worry me the most. I've worked with my fair share of talent that believes they're the absolute best at everything they do, no one can possibly teach them anything new, and we should all just leave them alone to achieve greatness in solitude.

They're a nightmare.

Everyone just wants to hide away and quietly keep doing what they were originally hired for? And feedback has no value in helping people improve?

The problem is that you're assuming that there's a level of honest and integrity in HR reviews that just isn't there. HR reviews are fundamentally deciding about who should be promoted and who should be fired. Giving feedback as to how you can get better at your job is, at best, a secondary concern.

You're missing the trust piece.

That's precisely what I, being considered a star programmer, thought when I was 20. I knew better than anyone, so I wanted to be left alone. I looked down on methods, tools and organizational systems.

Over a decade now and being in charge of 20+ smart people now, I understand how without effective personnel and project management, employees are irrelevant. Now, if you get a smart person that's responsible, driven and methodical enough so they can be effective and contribute without being managed, you just make them a manager for other people so they can make them effective. Skilled managers are a force multiplier. Unfortunately technical ("smart") skills are often contradictory to management and people skills, so that person is very much a unicorn (but when you find them, it can transform a dysfunctional organization to a performer).

Between having a mediocre managed brilliant group, or a brilliantly managed mediocre group, I know where I'd put my money.

This is about performance reviews and not about managers. Although you can argue effective management does not require managers. What you missed is autonomy. That's the key. Alignment (join the company), autonomy (trust), effectiveness (facilitate).

Effective management requires managers, it just doesn't say how many managers (just one at the top, or many levels). But someone has to set the tone.

Trust is not enough. People need to be guided, synchronized and harmonized. It doesn't happen well in a flat, distributed system. A good employee receives autonomy, a great employee often receives control over other employees. But autonomy is not independence; it still requires a guiding hand, which is management.

Again, I didn't say anything about managers.

Managers are both a weapon and a threat. These 360 HR schemes are about asserting and maintaining control.

The company supposedly wants to purge the ineffective, but they also want to make sure that managers don't get too entrepreneurial.

I understand your intent, but it's really hard to quantify human performance in a complex workplace. It's not just that we're "a very long way from having meaningful quantification". I mean, it is _instrinsically_ a subjective matter. No "dashboard" is going work, IMHO.

Performance at work is very strictly an objective matter; it's just that it's hard to measure it right, but the outcomes are obvious and measurable.

How is human performance at work "strictly objective" -- lines of code? number of tickets closed? Customer/peer reviews? Number of unknown disasters averted because of diligence and focus? Number of hapless interns mentored who will, years later, become star players?

Unless one is in sales, performance can't be boiled down to a number or two for any individual. Even then, there could be questions.

That's precisely what I claim: that it's very difficult to measure. Yet it doesn't say it's not objective. It's not subjective, as is a matter of taste; it's a matter of fitting the requirements of the mission or organization.

Looking at it in other professions, it can be easy to say who's a better mover - they transport more items in a given time, with less property damage. Or better plumbers, or better painters. Or better investment bankers. Or indeed, better salespeople. If it's possible for those professions, it can also apply to IT.

If anything, it's exactly the opposite. Performance measurement of developers is an extremely subjective endeavor. One strict objective metric either doesn't exist or is unfeasible to measure.

Maybe your point is to say that "performance is objective but performance metrics are subjective" — sure, I agree. But I'm not sure what that adds.

It sounds like the infamous Bridgewater hedge fund's tablet-based employee review app. You can be having a conversation with someone while they're casually rating your performance. To be honest, I'd actually like to get that kind of data about what people think of me.

> another HR bullshit vehicle to suck away time and good-will

One of HR's main functions is to protect the organization from lawsuits. That said, this can be seen as yet another 'quantifiable' way to rationalize promotions and even firings.

I do love the (potentially untrue) story about Apple managers trying to track progress by lines of code written: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...

Bit of a tangent but worth the short read

You might like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-B...

"Will to Power"

I've seen more than a few HR departments that seemed to feel they should be running the whole company.

And I haven't seen one capable of running a gumball machine.