Hopefully fair performance reviews for software developers

As a developer who has worked at several billion-dollar (non FAANG) companies, the only thing I get out of performance reviews are one of two things:

1. You're doing a great job. Keep at it.

2. You're doing terribly. We are going to start a paper trail to fire you (aka performance improvement plan).

The only reason performance reviews exist at companies is so they have an established way of firing people. Even if I do a great job, top marks across the board, I only receive a 2-4% increase in salary. On the rare occasion I might get a bonus. So there's zero incentive to go "above and beyond" or otherwise improve in a way that benefits the company I am currently employed for.

Now, I continue to improve every day by learning new skills. But these new skills rarely relate to what the current company needs - these are simply things I am curious about. However, these skills will never end up in a "core competency plan" because those plans, by nature, only list skills that benefit the company. Because the target / competency plan only benefits the company, the performance review (which is based off the comp plan) feels very one-sided / binary.

So instead of focusing intently on those competencies, I do the minimum necessary to fulfill them (less than 2 hours of work) and spend the rest of my "self improvement time" learning things I'm genuinely curious about. Then, when I have a marketable understanding of these new tools / tech, I jump ship, usually for a higher compensation package.

If you want performance reviews to actually matter, allow people to set goals that do not always benefit the company. Understand your employees have many different interests and give them space to explore those interests.

When was the last time you sat down with your spouse or someone else you spent a large portion of your day with and gave them a really fair and objective performance review?

Make sure to frame the negatives along with the positives and use concrete examples: Honey, I liked that casserole but the way you did the dishes could use some work, I found a spot on my glass the next day. I'm hoping you'll improve by Q3.

No. Performance reviews are not how humans are meant to interact. Even slight negatives will be blown out of proportion in peoples minds, that's how we're hard wired.

So why create this drama intentionally in your company? If the person is really bad, then you have an intervention or possibly terminate them, but most people are just okay.

Regular 1:1 meetings should be the only 'performance review' needed, a way to make sure both the manager and subordinate are on the same page about everything.

Nobody has mentioned Deming yet, so here we go.

Team members generally all perform around the same level, at least within a couple of standard deviations. The reason for this is simple: individual skill does not determine performance in a team as much as the rest of the environment does.

The system a software developer works in shapes their performance so much more than individual differences.

So if you're going to assign promotions and bonuses on individual results, make God damn sure these results are truly off the charts compared to their peers.

If you don't, you're basically running a lottery. Except you don't call it that, so your team will still try to actively do things to try to win this lottery. And these things will not be in line with what you want your team to be doing, because they will try those things first and see that they don't work. Because it's a lottery they have very little ability to affect, so obviously nothing will work.

What's worse, you might very well also create internal competition, where your team stops working as a team. They will realise they can't win your lottery by doing great work, so they will start to prevent their teammates from doing great work instead.

Performance reviews are so stupid.

Just talk to your people. Have a conversation about how they are doing. And then let the entire team have the bonus(es). It can be so simple.

The best discussion I've ever seen on performance reviews was Joel Spolsky's observation (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/03/incentive-pay-cons...):

"Negative reviews, obviously, have a devastating effect on morale. In fact, giving somebody a review that is positive, but not as positive as that person expected, also has a negative effect on morale. ... Most software managers have no choice but to go along with performance review systems that are already in place. If you’re in this position, the only way to prevent teamicide is to simply give everyone on your team a gushing review."

I had a performance review once… The only thing that I decided to change was my attitude in the office: I started smiling more, wearing nicer clothes, cleaning my desk, saluting my co-workers in the morning and wishing people a nice day in the elevators. All of a sudden my next performance review was labelled as “great” and I got a $5k bonus followed by $10k four months later. Nothing related to my workload changed.

My theory is: either my co-workers, manager, human resources or all of them were concerned about my facial expressions and personality being always neutral, doing just what I was supposed to do in the office: work. My co-workers did not have anything special to say about me, nothing bad nor good, I talked with them just enough to do my job, almost never said anything about my life, family or the things I did during the weekend. Many people draw mental images of you using the information you give them about what you do in your life outside of work, so I assume they unconsciously translated the lack of personal details as “this person is not good for me” and somehow this ended up in the performance review that almost fired me.

Years later, here I am, still playing the psychological game at work. It is tiring but it works.

I absolutely hate reviews. There is little I dislike more in formalized work culture than the annual review process. I recently worked at a place that did mid-year and year-end reviews and it was twice the hate. I worked at another company that had a massive job competency matrix distributed in excel with nearly 100 cells to fill in. I've had managers change my self-evaluations to ensure I used the exact language necessary to allow them to give me a raise/promotion that they felt I deserved. I've also been in the mid-level management hell that is stack ranking where 10 TLs get put into a room with senior managers and argue what order devs are relative to each other.

But as a TL I've managed devs who are eager for this feedback. I don't understand it since I hate it. I also ensure I do 1:1s frequently and I focus on career topics during those discussions. Despite my inability to understand I've witnessed it many time: some people not only want reviews they feel like they need the review. This is especially true the younger a developer is. My theory is that they are still in the after-glow of university and they are used to the idea of regularly getting grades.

So while I find reviews to be little more than justification for adjusting renumeration while providing legal cover, I respect as a leader the genuine need of many to receive a clear and useful performance review at least once a year.

Unless you work for a FAANG, in fintech, or some other company where raises and bonuses are a real thing these reviews tend to be useless.

A lot of managers are busy and just throw something together at the last minute, subordinates realize the process is just a formality and stop putting much effort into it as time goes on, etc. Sometimes these meetings are actually counter productive because you end up arguing for a tiny slice of the bonus pie having to "sell" yourself to an individual who knows well what you have contributed. I have witnessed multiple people quitting shortly after feeling underappeciated in a performance review.

I'm a contractor these days, I work with clients for a few months to a year or so at a time and then switch company, project and everything else.

One of the major reasons I switched from regular employment to this model was not having to deal with bullshit like annual reviews, personal development plans, coming-year-business plans etc etc and other corporate nonsense.

Maybe it works for those organisations, I don't really care, it always been just a waste of time for me. Particularly the annual reviews where you're supposed to show how what you achieved this year matches up to or exceeeds the plans agreed at the beginning of the year. Without fail those plans became irrelevant within a couple of months and I'd done something entirely different to the plan for the rest of the year. The review result thus always came down to how much management liked and appreciated what you had done for the year, which is a metric they would have used anyway and without the need for a tedious process.

If you're in a position to review employees, never ever ever let them go into a review not knowing what is going to be on it. How do you do that? Communicate. Communicate constantly. Talk about their wins. Talk about their non-wins. Talk about their skills. Talk about what needs to be improved. Talk to them about what they want to learn. Talk to them about what they have learned. Talk to them all throughout the year.

The yearly performance review system at most places I worked seemed to be largely formalized process laid out by HR to determine raises .. or paths to firing someone.

That's it... the fact that it involved me seemed entirely unnecessary as mostly it was between HR and my boss and/or his boss as to what if any actions came of it. Sometimes not even my boss...

Whatever work I did day to day if my manager had an issue I sure hope he would come to me and we'd work it out right then and there.

At smaller companies things like raises and moving on were just determined largely as needed. I changed careers recently and managed 5 or 6 raises in salary in about a year's time (this was largely because I had no past career experience programming so I came in pretty low).

In the meantime a coworker was politely invited to look elsewhere (more of a situation where everyone knew this wasn't the environment for him and not so much anything he did 'wrong' and they let him work while job hunting) after about 3 months of work.

Performance reviews are a waste of time, there has been plenty of research that shows they add little value to a company. Unfortunately is an easy process for HR to justify their existence and makes putting people on performance management a lot easier. Even worse are 360 reviews. Research has shown that peer review are generally inaccurate and often politically motivated.

I'm against the concept of performance reviews on principle for two reasons:

1. No matter how friendly and "two-way street" the manager tries to make it, the engineers are still captive audience with their jobs on the line while the manager holds all the cards. Even if the engineer is encouraged to, and does, provide feedback, this feedback is, at best, in the air.

2. No matter the feedback, the outcome is pretty similar: negative feedback encourages the engineer to look for other options because of the desire to be valued better. Positive feedback encourages the developer to look for new horizons that might be more challenging and/or more rewarding.

Of course, I don't have a solution, because the closest alternative I can think of also has its own problems. That is, for the team to be completely self-managed so engineers encourage each other by deliberately highlighting and logging the teammates' achievements and for these achievements to be rewarded eventually by management.

Regardless, if performance reviews are inevitable, this article is a nice, if maybe too optimistic, approach. Ultimately, I'd bet that the number of the engineers he manages who considered that his reviews were, at best, the best of a bad situation is more than zero.

I find performance reviews are better at confirming management problems to employees than reviewing employee performance.

In once case a manager complained that I wasn't working on a component that wasn't my responsibility. (I was always happy to help!) I had to get the CTO involved, and then my manager stopped dragging me into this component. (Edit: It was SSO, and I wrote the browser part. About 95% of the bugs were server-side.)

In another case, a project failed because it wasn't managed. My manager basically said something like, "I'm surprised to learn..." At this point, I realized that he wasn't paying any attention to the project.

The problem is the idea of an “annual” review itself, such as:

- arbitrary annual review times almost never coincide with the most useful times to summarize contributions (e.g. try handing out bonuses the day after a big project ends, not months later)

- similarly, arbitrary review times disadvantage new employees; you essentially “waste” a few months on tasks that won’t end up counting this year (“not enough contributions yet”) and that won’t count next year either! (oh those tasks were from last review cycle so...)

- most systems I’ve seen will force you to summarize your worth in just a few broad strokes, and so much valuable work falls through the cracks in such systems

The biggest problem with performance reviews: managers are too scared to give feedback throughout the year, so when the feedback does come during the performance review - the employee is in utter shock.

Generally, there's no perfect time to give others' feedback. Most people hate criticizing others. But as a manager, I find that it's necessary; otherwise the performance review experience is less than desirable.

I have been using some performance feedback generators, and it's been helpful in helping me figure out how to phrase feedback so it's specific and mentioned in a way that's not careless or thoughtless.

Of all things, this stood out to me:

I've read reports of hazing, students being yelled at, forced to do pushups

Have any of these reports been publicized anywhere? I have a morbid curiosity to read about this and what people's responses to those moments were, compared to what my (a US Army veteran) response would be to someone who isn't my commanding officer telling me to get on the ground and push[0].

[0] It wouldn't be very polite, and it may contain a few expletives.

Good article, but I thought that the linked "shields down" article about what triggers an employee to leave a company was equally insightful:

https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/

In my experience, that's happened at most jobs that I've held, and with most people who left. I find it kind of sad that with all of the work that goes into building a company, and all of the resources and expertise available at their disposal, that managers and employees can't really talk about what's really going on. Most interactions at a company are a delicate dance to preserve the thin veil of hope that makes capitalism possible.

In the end, it really truly is just business. So I've found it helpful to treat it as such, and not get too wrapped up in the emotion of it. Something that really helped me was watching the entire Mad Men series, to get an idea of how this all works. I know that's old news today, but that show arguably had as much effect on my career as stuff like The Secret, manifesting things, The Pick Up Guide about neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) that circulated in the late 90s, and moving furniture (which taught me that all manual labor is exploitive because the lion's share of profit always goes to the people held in high esteem not the people who do the most work).

That said, I'm a highly emotional person who wears my heart on my sleeve. YMMV.

Oh god, another info product written by some new manager who has a whopping... three years of experience as a manager. Of small teams.

It's the same as all those 2 year developers who discover a pattern or two and gush advice on how they're the canonical authority to write MVC in rails.

Try waiting for year 10 or so before dispensing your wisdom. Because the first part of dispensing wisdom is having the wisdom and experience to dispense.

We can do better than Eternal September for advice.