Ask HN: How does performance appraisals happen in your organisation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does performance appraisals happen in your organisation?

33 pointsblackpanda26 comments

What's the process like? Is it one time effort at the end of the year or there are some continuous efforts made throughout the year.

Also, please mention if some tools are used for the same.

And lastly, are your satisfied with the process?

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360 degree reviews. Peer reviews, manager reviews all that shenanigans. None of that matters anyway because in the end 5- 10% people will be fired based on curve.

How satisfied am I with it? I hate it and it's the sure shot way to ruin mental health of your employees.

Tools used: Workday (which deserves a special place in hell itself)

Personally I've always prefered 360 over whatever the hell I have. Non-technical people reviewing your performance without knowing what you actually do.

that'd be true if peer reviews carried any weight. Management just seems to ignore it and go with whatever they want anyway. You can't challenge the final ratings so it's a one way street.

What is or what means “curve”?

HR version: The bell curve of emp performance. (figures collated from workday/slack or some other metrics) So the worst performers are adjusted (read purged) to get to a better standard for the next 'cycle'.

[rant] the tone deafness of the process is in the fact that the company is okay letting perfectly good people go for some self congratulatory metric. The company has a high interview bar, if I may claim so myself. So it's perfectly possible that all 5 people in a team are doing good work. But now you are forced to push someone out because "we only retain the best".

They are okay losing people, okay losing the investment done in them, okay losing the knowledge of systems they acquired for a rule someone in the HR made because they read a study on it. What a bunch of buffoons really.

What would you prefer to those reviews?

360 degree reviews without explicit curve fitting.

You write down some goals and discuss with direct supervisor. After 1 year, another meeting to see how well you did, and you get a rating like "Succeeded", "Succeeded+" or even "Excelled". Set some new goals for the next year, rinse and repeat.

For promotions, you give a 1-2hr presentation on the work you've done to a group of other developers and managers not directly working with you. Work done needs to match 51% of the competencies to go to the next level. Usually the pay increase is 10% per level (promotion).

It's practically impossible to get fired. Only way is up.

That sounds pretty ideal. Where do you work? Has this scaled to a large size?

Public service, in Canada :)

AFAIK every department follows this structure for performance[1], so that's about 200k employees.

The promotion system is a bit special for my department, since it's tailored for software engineers (about 40% of the department). The rest of the public service has a more competitive system, more similar to the private sector.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services...

At my company, there's the way they are supposed to be done, and there is the way they are actually done. Even with a process in place, managers and department heads set their own rules and just fo whatever they want.

I asked how reviews are done when I joined a recent company. A VP said that they doesn’t pay attention to it & just makes it up. That’s pretty consistent with my experience at every company.

At least they admit it. Most places won't.

We have an elaborate process, which no one pays attention to when making decisions.

Seems to be the most common methodology.

We do midpoint reviews as well as year end reviews. End of year “raises” (also called merit) are dished out between ~3-5% based on some black box algorithm that, as far as I know, no non-managers understand. Not sure if managers completely understand it either, or if they just aren’t allowed to talk about the inner workings. I haven’t had a problem with it since the range isn’t huge, and I’ve never felt slighted. Doesn’t mean it’s right but it has never bothered me.

I'm at a FAANG-adjacent big company, we use what seems to be an in house tool. Twice each year I fill out a form in which I describe what I did, what I plan on doing, and how this contributes to my goals as well as to our shared goals of Diversity and Inclusion. Then my manager fills our the same form about me from his perspective.

Simultaneously I am encouraged to request feedback from my colleagues and they from me, in the same system. Also via the system, my skip-level sends me a request for feedback about my manager, and I have the option to make it anonymous to her (the skip), regardless it will not be visible to my manager.

Less formally, my manager periodically emails me asking for feedback about my colleagues, a few weeks later he shares with me what others said about me (anonymously).

I don't know how this process plays in to the raise and promotion discussion, it's opaque to me. Filling these things out is not my favorite task, it creates stress for me. I'm not sure if it's overall a good thing or not compared to my previous job where we had none of this, as well as no job titles, levels, promotions, etc. We just worked and got raises now and then, sometimes you had to ask and sometimes you didn't.

> FAANG-adjacent big company

Microsoft

> [...] as well as to our shared goals of Diversity and Inclusion.

Does this apply to people working in Engineering? are you incentivized to have goals that have impact on D&I?

Yes, it applies to everyone. I don't know about the incentives, I think it really depends on your management chain. Different managers emphasize different priorities, like in any job, you need to read the room and figure out what really matters to your boss (and their boss) and what is "nice to have".

Our employee handbook states we are supposed to undergo annual performance reviews but I never received one in the years I've been with this company. I don't believe anyone on my team has received one either but other teams within the company have as there have been promotions.

I know I'm not perfect and have even asked the person I report to for feedback / training / continuing education opportunities and he literally says he doesn't have any for me. I've asked HR too but they have no suggestions.

There is some incompetence, negligence and careless mistakes that occur repeatedly with specific team members but there isn't any kind of corrective measures being made with anyone. I believe performance reviews would help rectify this problem.

When working for previous companies, we had extensive performance reviews, 1 on 1s and step 1 on 1s with our supervisor's supervisor. Everyone always took those opportunities seriously and wrote essay-like evaluations. It was time consuming but now I actually miss those days.

They don't really seem to.

In my past organization, I never got any non-peer feedback whatsoever, even though they were expected every three months.

In my current organization, you get a little bit in biweekly 1 on 1s, but otherwise I have little idea how the org rates me overall.

Once a year and it is mapped to specific objective criteria. It is meant to be as objective as possible and then tailored to your specific needs and goals.

I like it. No 360 bullshit, no subjective manager bullshit. Everyone is held to the same standard.

There's a 1 to 5 rating where you're expected to at least get a 3. 4 gets a salary increase and 5 is not given out that often but it's the best. I am pretty sure it's a bell curve but don't know for sure really.

I ignore it and just do my job to the best of my ability. It works pretty well except for managers who try push silly things like increasing exposure or demonstrating leadership.

Online database. You type-in and they “review/award” according to their own machinations. It’s better than nothing, by far. It’s probably better than many options.

I would like to know too...

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