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> 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.

I gotta confess, I'm very deeply confused by this.

The company's goal is to develop their staff in ways that benefit the business the company is engaging in, because the purpose of the company is to be successful in that business.

If I'm operating a company that produces bread, no, I'm not going to help you develop your skills in woodworking. Why would I? If you really want to learn professional woodworking, develop those skills on your own time and then go get a job as a woodworker.

Or, accept you work for a company that needs people with skills related to baking bread, and develop your skills accordingly.

Or, alternatively, convince me why your becoming a skilled woodworker is good for my bakery business.

That said: If the company wants skilled bread bakers, they should be providing the time, space, and resources to allow their staff to develop those skills during their time at work. They should not expect people to continue to develop those skills outside of work. That's your time to use as you see fit, including picking up those woodworking skills if that's what's really important to you.

Both you and OP have made excellent points. I guess the challenge in software is understanding when bread is not bread.

For example, I manage a team of devs. Our stack is React, and one of the devs asks for a course on Vue. Is that relevant? What about Bash, AWS, security, networking, user experience? All these things are relevant and could feasibly help the company.

I think the OP was suggesting we allow people to set goals like this, as opposed to setting goals like “finish project x by April”.

Yup, totally agreed!

And that's where a) as a professional, you need the ability to advocate for the development of skills if you think the business will see benefit, even if the benefit isn't immediately obvious, and b) as a manager, you should be actively encouraging staff to think this way, and you should have an open mind when a they bring these kinds of ideas to the table.

Personally, I desperately wish my staff were more aggressive about thinking proactively about professional development. Most of the time I have to nag them just to take an hour out of their work week to read a book or something...

> Most of the time I have to nag them

You've recognized that you're nagging them. If you're not joking, then it sounds like you need to do the much more difficult and risky job of cultivating and protecting a culture where they feel safely encouraged to do it themselves. Make sure you're taking on the risk that they probably perceive they are taking when they sacrifice that hour of their work week.

You know, you make a really interesting point, here.

I've tried to consistently deliver the message that they have the freedom and protection to take time out for PD, but I've not actually dug into their perceptions to see if I've been successful or if the on-the-ground reality doesn't match what I think is going on...

I think I have a topic for my next 1:1's!

Thanks for the suggestion!

This might sound silly, but I found that actually buying the book and handing it to the developer was quite effective. They then understood I was serious about them reading it.

Yeah, so first off, not silly at all!

Second, if I have a staff member where we agree that reading a book (or listening to an audio book, or taking a course, etc) is a good idea, we make sure the resource is available for them (there's no way in heck I'd expect a staff member to go out of pocket on a PD resource of any kind).

At that point, they can either expense the thing themselves, or I'll just get it done (especially if they're dragging their feet a bit). One way or another, that book lands on their desk. :)

This is how I see it too. Technology is inherently about dynamic navigation of unknowns.

Having your employees laser focused on things the company knows it needs leaves your company with a dearth of information about the landscape around it and how best to navigate those unknowns, while also stifling employee growth at the same time.

I would change the bread analogy from woodworking to flour-making, sandwich-making, chemistry of baking, and engineering of ovens, encouraging creative exploration of things on the edge of the business that could help to grow the business and employees at the same time by providing a better map for steering the business.

> If I'm operating a company that produces bread, no, I'm not going to help you develop your skills in woodworking. Why would I? If you really want to learn professional woodworking, develop those skills on your own time and then go get a job as a woodworker.

Because the bread is stored on shelves, and you use rolling pins and workbenches that could be repaired/built better/designed better, knowledge of structures could help making new bread products, and the tools used in woodworking could have direct applications in making bread, which could save you money or make you better products.

And this is how you might "convince me why your becoming a skilled woodworker is good for my bakery business".

Well done! :)

This seems like a poor example to me. More like a shop that makes wooden chairs and OP wants to learn how to make a nice hardwood desk.

I can completely understand your confusion. Your example is a bit extreme. To give you more specific examples of "things that interest me, but do not (directly) benefit the company":

* The company uses SVN, while I'm interested in learning Git.

* The company uses JQuery and PHP, I'm interested in learning React / Vue / Angular.

* The company is interested in hosting websites on VM's - I'm interested in learning about containers (Docker).

A better example: Let's say you're a bakery.

You want to bake cookies: I want to (on a random, slow, friday afternoon) learn how to bake elephant ears.

You want to produce bread: I want to produce cheesecake.

Your example of bread to woodworking would be more akin to a Web developer working on embedded systems engineering or something way different. Of course that makes sense to do during your off time only.

My examples above are things that could be used by the company I currently work for (git / docker / Angular), but the company chooses not to use these technologies due to various reasons (political, economic, expense, etc). As a result, I can't put that on my "Competency plan" because it does not directly or immediately benefit the company.

Now good managers will allow this. They see the benefit in trying new technologies even if there's no immediate need. But those managers are far and few between. Personally I would love to work with folks who just want to try some cool shit on a boring, slow Friday afternoon.

> The only reason performance reviews exist at companies is so they have an established way of firing people.

No. At most companies, the main reason is to have an established way of promoting people. Are people merely performing "at" their level (no promotion) or are they showing clear evidence "above" their level (promotion-worthy)?

In my experience, firing is pretty rare, while a promotion every ~2 yrs to a new level and pay grade is pretty common. (Granted you could often make more by jumping companies.)

Of course there are some companies (especially smaller ones) that tend to hire rather than promote, as they expand. In which case you "promote" yourself by jumping to a new company. But I wouldn't say that's necessarily the norm.

Maybe this should be changed to "the only reason performance improvement plans exist."

> Are people merely performing "at" their level (no promotion) or are they showing clear evidence "above" their level (promotion-worthy)?

Or are they showing clear evidence "above" their level but the manager has not generated enough career capital to put them up as a promotion candidate because promotions are about politics not merit (praise-no-promo)?

Possibly, but I don’t think I would necessarily blame my manager for that. It was the case at my previous two companies until I finally found one where it appears promotion is actually feasible.

You forgot 3. You are doing a great job. Push harder and maybe you'll get that promotion next time. (earlier at a budget meeting: no budget for promotions this quarter).

I read through Brian Kernighan's Unix memoir and it had an interesting anecdote about performance reviews. Turns out that Brian was a department head for quite a long time at Bell Labs and at first performance reviews were all "You're doing great work, keep it up!" but eventually someone at corporate added a "areas to improve" section. So for a couple of years he got away with "nothing, great job", but then the upper management came back with "nobody is perfect, you need to fill in that field." And he's like "What would you put down for Dennis Ritchie?"

"CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave? CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?"

> 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).

This is exactly why I only rate myself 4 or 5 out of 5 on any review I ever have. Normally I'm a quiet, humble person and maybe a little self-effacing. But in performance reviews, I'm always a stellar employee. I learned a long time ago that an honest, uncompromising self evaluation is little more than a signed admission of guilt. If I could remain silent I would, but if I have to document myself with the disadvantage of not knowing the context it's being sent into, I'm not going to give any other party leverage against me. And putting every employee in that position habitually is a recipe for a dehumanizing and demoralizing interaction

Either your HR/People team sucks or you're just meeting expectations. If you are exceeding to greatly exceeding expectations and they don't drive your comp either via equity or salary increase faster than that then something is off.

Perf review history is also used by other managers if they want to approve a transfer into their team and used as part of promotion packet considerations. So does matter beyond that too.

Agreed, I once had a team which I gave all good PRs, but was told that we had to fit a curve and these 2 people will start PIP before being let go 3m later.

Wow, I agree with all of your points. I have had the exact same experiences and thoughts. I had to check the username to make sure I didn't write this.

Did you mean to post this a second time?

It is posted by a different username.

It is a completely different user.

Based on history, the other one seems to be regurgitating comments.

Those spammers must be at it again.

Edit: if you guys notice accounts doing this, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. Flagging them doesn't really help since the comments themselves are innocuous, it's the spammy duplication that's bad.

exposed!

The GGP appears to be the “real” poster of the comment. The other one was posted after.

No, AFAIK I only posted this once.

If confused on why you were asked, another user stole your comment in this same thread.

Ditto

This is crap (the current outcomes of performance reviews), and one of the reasons the Technical Leads (me included) are a part of the review process. Managers deal with the non-technical stuff but our job is to help people get the skills they want to derive from their Professional Development Plan and have their process contrasted as part of their review.

I worked at a place where we had peer reviews. You had to select three people to rate you out of five in a number of areas.

One review I got a few fives. They got scrubbed. So I averaged out at three ish. I was told its basically impossible to get a five, so all fives just get discarded. That fours are best you can hope for but even then you have to be exceptional. So most we're expecter to average was a three. Only if yoy were under three was it a problem.

However, the annual pay rise was linked to your score! And when complaining about measly two percent, you are told to get a higher raise you need to average a four....

It was just exhausting and absurd.

Catch-22

> its basically impossible to get a five, so all fives just get discarded.

Did they also say that there's a "talent shortage" and they just can't seem to find developers no matter how hard they try?

I had the exact same experience, except that I had to do a self-review.

Preface:

In November of that year the org REALLY needed some important work done in a language that I didn't develop in. It was a super large update to a legacy PERL app that had NO TESTS WHATSOEVER. If it wasn't done by a deadline they would have lost their largest contract and very likely have been out of business. Did I mention that this org was part of a fortune 500 company?

Since I was the ONLY developer left at the company who had any idea how things worked they pleaded with me to help them. Sensing opportunity, I rose to the occasion for a month of 60 to 80 hour weeks.

I pulled off the release that would have been the nail in their coffin had it failed.

A couple of months later we had to do self-reviews. It was my first one because for an unknown reason I hadn't received one the year prior.

I was really proud that I'd pulled off the impossible so I gave myself a couple of fives in areas like "works hard" and "teamwork" or something.

Then I had my official review with the C level exec of development, since they still hadn't replaced the director who was my former manager.

He told me that we had to change the fives, because even though they existed the company felt you had to do something reeeeally awesome to get a five.

Then he said fours were not impossible to get, but almost impossible to get, and since he was too busy running the company to really give me a review he'd give me the benefit of a doubt and reset the fives to threes.

Next he knocked a couple of other stats down to twos, saying that I had too many threes.

Then, he said unfortunately my average score was pretty much dead on the company average and that I only qualified for an average 2% raise.

Aaaaand at that moment I realized that performance reviews were nothing more than a dog an pony show for HR to justify giving you a minimum raise, or documenting why you should be fired.

I also realized that there was absolutely no reason to break my neck for them again, and the only way I was gong to improve my situation was to find another job.

Which I did. Securing myself a 40% raise doing 1/2 the work in 25% of the knowledge domain.

Is what you're describing what we think of as a "performance review"?

I've found as the other user describes performance reviews to be a largely formalized HR driven process that is disconnected from any real "development plan". At best a development plan is tacked on but the nuts and bolts of any of that is largely determined outside whatever the performance review structure is.