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Comment by shadester88 | Hacker News Reader

I find the obsession with performance reviews interesting. I manage teams of developers in a large organisation, and I have been doing so for many years now.

I hate performance reviews. I think they do not achieve what people think they do, they take up a lot of time and effort to decide and perform, and they often have quite a negative effect on the staff member.

I think performance reviews and KPIs for individuals just need to go. Get rid of them. If someone isn't performing, you can manage that without a KPI system. If someone is performing well, you can provide that feedback without a KPI system. We need to start having meaningful conversations, not scoring people.

People, like in this article, seem to double down on them and make them more complex and intricate in an effort to make them effective. They are going in the wrong direction. Just get rid of them altogether.

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My gut tells me that these metrics are in place because upper management does not trust you to be objective or consistent when it comes to your people. Rather than actually trust your judgement, they give you a checklist and tell you to check the boxes.

Along with a lack of trust, there's also the need for a paper trail in some states if it comes down to firing someone who needs firing. Without an appropriate paper trail the company would be on the hook for paying that individual's unemployment.

I'm not saying you're wrong. In fact, I think you are right. Most people will rise to the expectations set for them (or fall, according to the expectations set).

You are correct in assuming the fact that you need a paper trail to fire someone. I work in Australia and firing someone for poor performance requires a fair bit of work.

But for performance management, I basically have to put them on a performance management plan and set expectations. If they fail to regularly meet those expectations, then they can be let go. This generally takes a few months to progress through, giving the staff member the opportunity to prove us wrong.

But this process is very different to KPIs. An important one, nonetheless.

No its really because:

1 In order for hr to justify themselves.

2 As a hypocritical way to cut the pay quanta.

Just for giggles, lets say that a large company doesn't need an HR person or department.

What are the alternatives? Is this something we could build an automated system around? Could the functions be moved to managers (hiring, firing, pay, etc.)? It seems like moving this way would be somewhat like implementing the officer/NCO relationship in the US military.

Are there benefits for non-specialized decision making as it applies to employees?

> pay quanta.

What's that?

>> pay quanta.

> What's that?

"paying a lot". So basically as away to combat a (perceived) inflation in salaries

So, amongst other things, it could refer to salary and raise confidentiality agreements as a way to reduce employee negotiating power?

Its the amount the pay bill increases sorry its a HR/IR term

I think HR can justify its existence probably just fine in the absence of annual performance reviews.

Off the top of my head: Healthcare (especially in the US - as a non-native I was truly shocked the amount of HR time that is spent managing this...), benefits, immigration issues, legal disputes, compliance, pay, hiring and firing, disabilities... there’s plenty for a competent HR team to do at most medium or larger sized enterprises that isn’t performance reviews.

That and the fact that upper management also wants a way to compare employee performance ACROSS teams or departments to decide who's a "rising star", who deserves a promotion or a raise (because the raise budget is always limited so they want to pick the most valuable performers).

Hence the "need" for a standardized performance review, which is bullshit anyway because a true equal assessment would mean that all employees are assessed by the same person/group, which never happens.

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