Ask HN: What do you think of performance appraisal at your workplace?
What does the process looks like? What are the primary inputs? Do you use any tool to capture peer reviews?
What's your take on the whole process?
What's your take on the whole process?
I appraise myself - have I learned new marketable skills? If so? I jump to another job that will pay the equivalent of 3 or 4 years of raises.
Now, I just decide if I'm happy making what I'm making. If I'm ever not, I'll change jobs.
I get benefits through my wife's job so what's the point?
Why shouldn't I get paid for every hour I work?
So why should you get paid for hours that deliver no value? Or to make it a spectrum, why should you get paid a fixed rate for hours where you deliver less than the fixed rate of value?
The few stints of contracting I have had, I knew close to 100% of the technologies I am working in. If not, I wouldn't bill for learning time.
Propose a good way to measure that. I tend to agree with you, but in so many companies, what you deliver often gets impacted by so many other decisions that the final 'value' of a project is minimal, but it's because of decisions outside your control.
If people only paid me based on the value they got out of what I delivered, many would find a way to weight the measuring to leave me short. "Hollywood accounting" springs to mind - blockbuster movies somehow lose money.
to your apple analogy... you might pay $1 whether you eat it or not, but if you had no intention of eating it you wouldn't buy it in the first place. You had some expectation of doing something with it - eating it, cooking it for yourself, cooking it in some other dish to sell to others, etc.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employee...
Much of the data could be because people who are significantly underpaid can and do switch jobs and get a big salary bump to market rate. But once someone is at market rate, it is difficult to find a job that pays super market rates, so they stay put.
The authors don't provide any longitudinal data to show that serial job hoppers get paid more over the long run. They provide anecdotal hearsay, and a questionable extrapolation from statistical data.
Not to mention more than likely that person who stays put in technology is more likely to see their skills get stale and be less employable.
And I'm saying this as someone who has had very good performance reviews in the past.
Probably within the next two years, I'm going to max out what I can make by job hopping - I'm okay with that- I'm actually okay with what I make now.
Then it's going to be about what looks interesting, a decent rate, commute, etc.
Well the ACA is still a thing now, but I don't think I could charge enough to make the difference in the amount of pay be worth the benefit cost. Maybe if I were single?
I know people in tech who have been making that for years with just a bachelors... and not even in CS. My stepdad, my girlfriend’s father...
As a W2 contractor (meaning you work for the contracting company that pays the employeers share of employment taxes), I'm seeing rates up to $90 an hour.
If you assume 2080 hours a year - 80 hours holidays - 120 hours PTO - 120 hours between gigs, you are at $158,000 a year.
But the few times I have contracted, I have always gotten more than 40 hours a week. I'm just now at the point in my career that I could get top dollar contractor rates when I start back looking.
Let me clarify that those numbers are for W2 contractors. You're basically still working for another company. I'm not referring to 1099 contracting where you have to pay an additional 6.2% in SS up to $127K and 2.8% in Medicare.
The other path to higher salaries is specializing in a particular technology that enterprise companies pay handsomely for. Salesforce is one of those, as is Sharepoint.
I highly doubt you or your friend make that salary without some special niche knowledge. Even a PHD, perhaps.
This triggers an in-depth review, which consists of the chain of command asking themselves "Do I like this guy?", "Can we afford it?", and "How much of a pain in the ass would it be if this person quit?"
Repeat every 12 - 18 months.
That being said, the performance review is basically a formality. We have 5 steps in each pay grade, and I have never seen someone miss a step after each year. Someone could be sitting at their desk reading their Kindle all day and still get their 5% jump every year. In addition to that, nearly 100% of promotions are based on tenure. You will probably go from a level 1 --> 2 --> 3 --> Senior every year, and supervisory/management positions are only opened upon the incumbent's retirement (to be filled typically by the most tenured person to apply, regardless of fit).
It is not a good system. Lots of people stick around who should receive the boot, and the wrong people are placed in supervisory/management positions simply because they have been there for a while.
I used to work for the state of Kansas and we had most of this, except we didn’t get raises, nor were non-performers culled out. We probably lost a month of productivity each year due to the work and anxiety the process caused, yet the process had no bearing on anything.
Possibly had a bearing on compliance stuff that wasn't relevant to anything you were doing. Having to have an annual review may be some legislative requirement that makes little sense for what you're doing. (or, at least for the level of time/effort involved).
Most (95%) people want to do their fair share and be good at their job. Some years they do a little worse because of health or family issues, some years they hit it out of the park. The 5% who don't want to do this are always a problem and need to be catered for separately. High performers can get promotions. Appraisals are to determine these two things and share information.
In all seriousness, this type of appraisal process always confused me.
What are some examples of measurable goals that a rank-and-file "Member of The Technical Staff" can come up with on their own, seeing as they likely don't have much choice re the projects they work on, the teams they are in, etc.?
Inputs are company goals and a self assessment of how your current work aligns with them. Your manager then provides review.
Performance is a function of the business line. There is no carrot only stick. So I think promotions and good performance reviews are a function of how impactful your role is to some core business function. If you are not in a profit center then you have to justify how your work saves money overall.
They also encourage maladaptive behavior among and across teams. Stack ranking is particularly bad and I don't think companies have found ways to measure performance without inducing competitiveness. Exceptions might be multi-functional teams but these are more akin to a sports team where the best players get playing time and they completely ignore the farm system.
It changes every couple years, but the outcome is basically a rating of below/meets/exceeds expectations. No one is ever fired, and no one is ever promoted based on these reviews (IT staff don't even have a career ladder to climb). The rating will determine if your annual raise is CPI or CPI +- 1% so it doesn't really affect salary either. The occasional market review which can bump you from lowest decile of market to lowest quartile of market dwarfs the effects of the review ratings.
So it's basically pointless and most managers don't pretend otherwise.
Looked at another way, I was docked because I consistently outperform estimated time to delivery, which means the company actually makes more money off my work because we charge our customers for development work.
So, what do I think of performance appraisals at my work place? I'm actively looking for other work.
I also believe that performance appraisals, for anything but bottom rung employees, are currently done one way only. They should be done from both perspectives. The managed employees reporting to the managers boss. This way, ineffectual middle managers can be disposed of.
Theirs a reason they pay as little as they do. The 'good' talent leaves for higher paying jobs elsewhere. It's a self perpetuating problem.
I read an article just the other day about a group of IT workers who attempted to form a union - that didn't go well. I'd be all in.
But I suspect you are talking about something more formal, something tied to salary increases.
I think such appraisals are damaging to the relationship between employer and employee. The only benefit is for the company in that they make it clear that you can't have maximum marks on everything (which is fair enough), but then tie that to salary increases. "Well, we would have given you a bigger pay rise, but you didn't get top marks on this particular skill." Or similarly, evidence to get rid of someone you wanted out.
Typically what you'll see is 2% increase a year if you're a moderate/good employee. It takes a special effort to not be, and it's basically impossible to be above that in their books, and especially in most roles.
They also often tie specific job titles to salary grades, so there's a black box facing you in terms of what your manager is allowed to pay. Couple that with yearly culling of the fleet and you've got a pretty tough space to navigate if you just want to advance at your role.
You either have to be promoted to receive a raise, or be hired in at a higher rate.
This feedback is anonymised, reviewed in terms of personal goals identified at the previous review, and a new set of goals is generated for the next period during a review meeting with each team member.
There are no objective metrics, and the focus is on helping employees to identify and improve any areas they want to work on, with peer feedback used as a tool to help identify those areas and understand if they are engaging in behaviour or practices that might be positive or negative without realising it.
This works pretty well, tends to lead to constructive criticism that can be tied to actual steps to be taken to improve performance, and removes the pressure of having to work to an arbitrary metric.
We were judged by the number of lines committed to our CVS.
They realized that was probably not the best of ideas when a colleague and I checked in 1M lines of comments just prior to our review.
Simple warm human communication beats all? systems
The only positive thing I can say about it is that it's less stressful than the interview process, which is my only reason for staying somewhere that I'm not particularly happy.
The only meaningful self-appraisal is "can I make more money doing the same work for someone else?" And the only meaningful goals are "build my resume to make myself a more valuable employee for any company, not necessarily my current employer."
It has always been a waste of time to require the employee's participation in the review process. We are perfectly capable of appraising ourselves, and when we do it, we are always doing it in the context of the whole job market, and not just one company. But no one is ever going to admit "my goal is to jump ship for your leading competitor within the next year and get 20% more pay for doing exactly the same work." We will happily tell the current employer "I plan to increase meaningless metric X by Y% of completely subjective measurement units this year." We might even put that on our resumes, and pretend it's not bullshit in an interview.
It's pants-on-head stupid. Just hire managers that know how to assess the performance of their reports for whatever it is they specifically do, and trust them to do it to the best of their ability. The amount of cargo-culting used to prop up those who are completely incompetent to assemble a working team and keep it humming is ridiculous. Eventually, these companies are going to have to promote more tech workers into tech management, because they'll be the only ones that actually know what good tech work looks like. Slapping on the same performance appraisal process used by the sales department from the top-down just isn't going to get around that.
The best thing I can say in favor of the current system is that the managers I know realize that it's a mess/work in progress. It seems like the poorly aligned official standards are being duly ignored for now. I'm not a fan of subjective evaluations, but they're better than completely random "objective" ones. We'll see how it goes in a year or two.
How is it a mess? Line engineers and managers had opposing goals (maximizing bug counts fixed, minimizing bugs--and those are terrible metrics even without the mismatch), individuals had goals that had no relation to their work, or which they had no power to affect.
Team leads had to give feedback, but there was zero structured discussion about standards: I had to ask a manager how to translate my evaluation of a developer into a numeric scale.
My manager had to stack rank 5 people on a 1-5 scale. This was theoretically not just ranking "first" through "last", but ranking from "exceptional" through "unacceptable".
https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
As always, this is my single-sample personal view, so please don't mistake this for anything beyond that.
It's true, we do place a lot of importance on complexity and impact, which are fuzzy metrics, potentially inconsistently defined, and can be subject to circumstance. Yes, engineers do suffer the temptation to game things by releasing their work prematurely and not committing themselves to supporting it. And yes, not all managers know how to set expectations appropriately, occasionally resulting in disappointment and confusion for their employees.
However, that's the individual's perspective. Promotions serve the institution first, and the individual second, and I'd like to offer the institutional perspective.
Promotion to senior engineer is a big freaking deal. Once you are Senior, you've effectively been given the keys to the kingdom. It's the industry equivalent of tenure. Want to transfer to a team? No problem, your manager knows they're going to get someone who's been through hell and is able to deliver. Want to join another company? Great, "Senior Engineer, Google" is an indisputable mark of quality, you'll at least get an interview.
If there's one thing I've learned in my time here, it's that false positives are way more costly than false negatives. Hire someone who can't do the work? Enjoy six months of trying to grow them plus however long it takes to get them to leave and release their headcount. Promote someone who isn't indisputably good enough for the title? Enjoy watching them fail to meet expectations cycle after cycle, trying to grow them, only to watch them leave out of frustration a year later.
Yeah, it kinda sucks as an individual contributor because proving yourself is difficult and subject to external forces. That's torture for the sort of ambitious overachievers that tend to be drawn to this company. However, the thing that makes your career growth difficult is the same thing that makes the work so challenging and the work environment so pleasant.
Also, there are some recent developments the author didn't mention, and I presume he left after this was put into place. A lot of focus has been drawn away from the rank of Senior. On paper, things used to be "up or out" until Senior, even though that wasn't really applied in my experience. Now it's only "up or out" until L4, one promotion below Senior. Plus the Senior promotion process is getting streamlined somewhat, although time will tell how that plays out.
EDIT: And then there's money. Managers have enough leeway that overachieving L4s can make almost as much as an L5, so it's not like the lack of a promotion is impoverishing you.
EDIT EDIT: To give some more context on the process itself:
For non-promo candidates, we do mutual reviews. You list the colleagues you'd like to review you and list the projects you've worked on and your contribution to them. Then everyone comments on their colleagues' assessments.
Managers then get together and have a powwow in which they agree on who in their groups are giving exemplary performance at each level, and people are calibrated as above or below the models for their level.
For promo candidates, the self-assessment is much more in-depth, and a committee of unrelated people get together and perform a similar assessment, except against a more abstract rubric describing expectations at each level.
Almost nothing is unceremonious around here. Even employees who are on their way out are placed on performance improvement plans to give them a change to turn themselves around. I've never seen anyone fired: the closest I've seen is people leaving of their own accord to save themselves the trouble of going through the process.
There is a process managers are supposed to follow for promotions, which is good on paper, but it's pretty clear managers only do the paperwork steps of that and pick based on their own criteria. The one aspect of that that seems to function well is managers get nudged about people who haven't been promoted in a while.
Usual funding issues with promotions, but I think that's true everywhere.
We often do code reviews. I sometimes do pair programming. Once in a while I have a private chat about something specific that's not code related.
And this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-B...