Performance reviews don’t assess performance | Hacker News Reader

Performance reviews don’t assess performance

workweek.com

105 pointsgmays62 comments

Whether you are getting a raise/promotion or not is determined by your manager during the year and finalized behind closed doors in calibration meetings. A handful of paragraphs in your performance review at the end of the year aren't really going to change that outcome.

> So, if everyone hates performance reviews why do we do them?

A formal performance review process is a requirement from legal, nothing more. The only part of it that actually matters is clicking the button stating that you have read and acknowledged your manager and peer feedback. That way if you sue the company later they have a paper trail defending themselves.

>>The only part of it that actually matters is clicking the button stating that you have read and acknowledged your manager and peer feedback. That way if you sue the company later they have a paper trail defending themselves.

I think your opinion is weak - if the review you get, doesn't actually outline problems you have in your performance, then how can it be a defense against firing someone? If I sign off on 5 years in a row of 'meets expectations' type of a review, then if anything, it makes it easier for me to claim that I am not being fired for a good reason (lets assume I am over 55 or a minority, or both, for example who could claim age or race discrimination).

If you are a manager, and you want to get rid of somebody for poor performance - and you are afraid of getting sued - then you darn well better have a paper trail showing that the employee was warned in writing about specific deficiencies if you want to use that as a legal defense - having multiple years worth of 'meets expectations' that you signed off on, helps the employee getting fired to make the case that it is because of performance - and hurts the company trying to cover their ass.

I also hate getting - and doing - employee reviews, but they are only valuable for a legal defense for wrongful termination, if the company did their job and documented everything properly along the way - its not just the sign-off that is important, its the paper trail of warnings.

I disagree.

> Whether you are getting a raise/promotion or not is determined by your manager during the year and finalized behind closed doors in calibration meetings. A handful of paragraphs in your performance review at the end of the year aren't really going to change that outcome.

Those paragraphs aren't going to change what your manager thinks of you, but they are usually important in convincing the other managers in the calibration meeting that you deserve the rating your manager wants to give you.

There's a few reasons for it:

* Your manager may want to advocate for you, but didn't actually do a good job of putting their thinking into words. And gets slaughtered during cross-examination (calibration).

* They serve as a reminder of all the important things you've done. Your manager may have forgotten some of them. (He's got a million balls to juggle, it's his job to remember, but people forget/make mistakes/prioritise the wrong things.)

* They are a good prompt for your peers, when they provide peer reviews. (There's nothing I hate more than writing a peer review for someone who won't write anything about themselves.)

In a perfect world where your manager has a photographic memory and an infallable ability to put what he knows about you into words, you wouldn't need to advocate for yourself, but we don't live in a perfect world.

> They serve as a reminder of all the important things you've done. Your manager may have forgotten some of them.

I regularly give this tip to employees, but it applies to managers too: when you (or in this case one of your reports) accomplishes something notable, jot it down. For ICs this is great for resumes, performance reviews, compensation discussions, but it's also great for managers in most of the same areas. The only thing that tells your employees you see what they do and value them more than actually being able to discuss specifically what they've done and how it helped...is paying them more.

Are the other managers actually reviewing what we wrote? I'd be surprised. It's my experience that it doesn't matter what I write.

Nobody reads everything that was written, but someone will always read some part of it. There's a reason perf and promo and calibrations take forever, and it's not because all the managers lock themselves into meeting rooms for a few weeks to twiddle their thumbs and pick their noses.

And if someone raises any red flags, your manager will really want to be able to point at something that addresses them.

It's unlikely anything would address the objections. The objections are made after the stuff is written, so it's not like you can form a cogent argument against an unknown attack. Especially considering the asymmetrical power dynamic.

The attack isn't unknown, neither you nor your manager were born yesterday, you should have some semblance of how your work meets/fails to meet the expectations for your role.

Writing also has a magical power, where people believe it more than spoken words. The reason it has this magical power is because it commits you to a particular story, as opposed to one that changes with the winds.

Also, just to clarify - are you making your claims from experience (I am, for promotion), or based on what you think takes place in perf/promotion meetings?

At some companies, that goes up 2 levels. At other companies, everyone above you can read it, but they rarely do (past your grand-manager).

First paragraph is true, but then it veers into silliness. I’ve worked at plenty of companies that do peer feedback and never signed anything. If they want to fire you, peer feedback leads to a PIP which is the actual documentation the legal dept needs to make sure you can’t sue.

Having been in calibrations - managers need justification for their recommendations, both positive and negative. Quotes from peer feedback are one of the pieces they use. If they’re a decent manager, nothing in peer feedback is surprising, they just pull some quotes to back up what they already know.

"managers need justification for their recommendations, both positive and negative."

But it can be kind of like with the law - if they want to get you, they will find something. The job descriptions are so high-level and aspirational they can find something wrong with anyone. The only real question is what cane to their attention, and if they'll ignore it or use it.

This is very Google-specific advice/terminology. It can be very different elsewhere

Wdym? Google didn’t invent this process. It was probably first introduced by the likes of ibm/msft a few decades earlier and then spread over entire industry by the way of mba osmosis

It's also not true there at least historically.

Correct, the bit about acknowledging the rating for a paper trail is literally from the last month

I have been in those calibration meetings. When it is a committee separate from the management chain, it can indeed be rule bound and checklist-driven, looking for evidence in the packet to justify each criterion in the rubric. With an org-level committee it’s less prominent since most people at the table already know the candidate and their work, but evidence from the packet does help to resolve disputes. For example if someone says, “I don’t think this person was doing X” and we can point to documented examples of X in the packet. Not everyone knows everything you do with all your time; the review cycle is partly a way to get credit for less visible efforts.

This is not a universal truth.

A formal review should just summarize (and record) what everyone already knows.

Which is less useless than it sounds, since it's a way to verify that everyone's on the same page. And maybe also to make sure people don't just completely forget to think about things.

good to know if true

Performance reviews exist because they are an accountability mechanism by which senior leaders can go, “okay at least twice a year some kind of feedback is delivered to all employees from their manager”.

Their effectiveness can be disputed (totally fair!), but my experience when they go away is that every manager does their own thing, and that leads to even worse outcomes because it’s harder to wrangle training, level alignment, and accountability out of ad-hoc periodic feedback (which will surely have varying degrees of frequency, depending on the manager).

When I was in college, there was some surveys that evaluates the professors, by the students, in order to provide aggregated feedback and points for improvement.

As one professor put it to us: “it’s pointless, the people that use it as feedback to improve are already good teachers because are using other ways to get better; and the ones that just ignore the surveys doesn’t care about any other way of improving. So the exercise is irrelevant”

I think management is the same, good managers take frequent opportunities to give feedback, manage, and care for their managees, and fill a form that it’s already redundant. Bad managers fill a form once a year and ignore it the rest of the year.

But, hey, we have a form that’s mostly ignored by everyone.

I feel like good managers show up in these as evidenced by the quality of the feedback. It shows in the writing. If the manager hasn’t been doing their job, it’ll be apparent too.

That’s been my experience on the other side of this. But I suppose plenty of directors, VPs, etc. can mail it in at this stage and probably do.

one of the reasons why tech culture has an 18-24 month half life at jobs... it's almost impossible to get a market competitive internal promotion. "not doing performance reviews" and only doing normal 1:1s + an occasional dive doesn't solve this problem at all. i've seen and been at plenty of places that do junior -> mid -> senior pipelines fine, but senior -> exec? it never happens despite external exec hires having extremely high miss rates and very high cost of miss. 100% blame this one on classism + unwillingness to trust people you know vs the shiny outsider.

The lack of competitive raises is an hr problem (or sometimes some form of zba style budgeting) not a process problem

I get this

I’m currently in a situation where my large tech company has clear criteria to be promoted and I am already measurably doing all of the things the next level does

Despite this, my manager says I won’t be promoted unless the other two people at the level above me “like” me

So despite meeting our company’s exact requirements for promotion that they do to make the process “fair”, I am being held at my level indefinitely until two people decide they like me as a person

Just ranting I guess. Not sure if anyone can relate / has advice here

In large corporations promotions are frequently way more a product of “playing the game” than of doing work that’s related with your work. It makes a tiny bit of sense from the point of view that sometimes promotions involve developing a network of contacts and knowing how to use it. But only a tiny bit…

In small companies, promotions are very very rare, as the organisation doesn’t have a big structure.

Also, “objective criteria” is, at least in my experience, pretty nebulous, which make it quite subjective in practice

Meeting the criteria for promotion is not an obligation to promote, and as you have seen it the criteria isn't always comprehensive. Maybe you are just leaving some details out, but many places have multiple candidates for promotion competing for a finite number of spots. Often, recommendations and sponsors are needed, and you need to cultivate those relationships. You have to get along well with your peers to get things done, it isn't unreasonable.

I've been involved in the process elsewhere and just trying to give constructive feedback, since it's frustrating you. Can you elaborate at all on the type of promotion? If not, I can appreciate the need for venting.

At big companies, leveling is sold as an objective/descriptive measure of one's skills. An engineer is at level L if and only if they meet the expectations at L. If you aren't at that level, it must be because you lack certain skills from the rubric.

What you are saying is true but it contradicts that model. It acknowledges that leveling has extrinsic criteria such as finite number of spots.

Is it Goldman Sachs where everyone is a VP? At some point titles are meaningless.

Leveling rubrics are to prevent mutiny and by definition amorphous.

"Works effectively with others to deliver outcomes that... Earned the respect of peers who..."

Yes, but that's not limited to GS. As I understand it, the title inflation is an unintended consequence of regulations, tech, and cross-company contracts.

Workers are considered cogs in the machine, and only "sufficiently senior" employees are allowed to make any individual decisions at all. As a result, anyone who works with code and is required to actually solve any problems at all must be either "senior[tm]" or have one explicitly authorise every piece of work they actually do. For finance regulators and ivory tower governance people, agency is a terrible thing to allow for a drone.

Meaning? If you are in a role that requires to make choices and implementation decisions that affect production or path to production, you must be sufficiently senior. Ergo, a VP or above.

It's not just the regulations either - the contracts finance industry negotiates with each other also try to impose the same demands onto the other parties.[ß]

ß: I get to review these contracts at work. Some of the proposed clauses would require every possible change to be pre-approved by the most senior management.

In most places your performance review is about your performance, in the theatrical sense. It's all about winning over your audience, and high-quality work is just one of many ways to do that

Same. I've had my team and adjacent teams calling me a tech lead because I was filling that role like a natural. No promotion though.

I switched to another department and had that team and members of other teams think I was a senior dev. Also I was filling a role earmarked for people above my level, and getting rave reviews for it. Still no promotion.

It's all political BS.

What was your management’s response to the above statements?

They don't really have responses because they have no obligation to explain themselves. In my experience, the explainations I do get on other topics are often lies anyways.

In one case, they wanted me to take a 13% increase in hours in order to get the promotion with a 7% raise.

For the other case, they just don't care. The only feedback I got was that they wanted work done faster. Basically, I was split between a primary role and secondary role. They considered the secondary role an "extracurricular" even though per company policy it should be 10-20% of my normal time. So they wanted me doing my regular hours for the primary role and doing the secondary role during extra hours.

The big takeaway is that my company measures engagement by the number of hours you work, and have backroom policies that conflict with the written ones.

Thank you for your reply.

The "like" thing means make friends with the folks higher up and help them out work wise so they see you as a trusted ally.

What level is this for? Mid -> Senior?

Yes, politics plays a huge role. I've seen it play out that way many times.

I had a boss who, well, you know how good bosses are supposed to be umbrellas and shock absorbers? He was the exact opposite. Whatever the fashion was in admin, he would go along with it. We got this whole song and dance from him a few years back about the new performance ratings that sounded not entirely unlike stack ranking, and that "five" was the max rating, but you would never get a five, but you were expected to be a five, despite that you wouldn't ever get a five, in this bizarre, self-negating informational tidbit. I saw the hot-shit new-ish hire start revising his resume behind his eyes.

People are constantly joining and leaving my team and requirements change on a daily basis and are vague/fuzzy. If an environment like this, I'm not sure formal performance reviews even make sense. I get my shit done every week but whether it's good shit or not is very subjective. Whenever I get my performance review I will take it as a political statement.

Performance reviews are both terrifying and humiliating. They’re just a chance for the boss to remind you that he holds your whole means of survival in his hands and that your absolute obedience is necessary to not become homeless. Want to keep custody of your children? Want to have food? Want to have a roof over your head? Better jump when I say jump, worm. No matter what he might say, even if your performance was fine, that’s the context the conversation takes place in- fear, intimidation, and power. It’s not any fun.

Apropos of nothing, that article is difficult to read with the short repeating GIFs. They'd have been better with static meme-format images. Also they take up 50-100% height of my browser window which is just wasteful. Give me words! Shove the memes to a sidebar or something.

reviews answer two, and only two questions:

- Does the company have enough money to give raises this year?

- Does the company think you deserve a raise?

Technically, the answers to those two questions also answer a third:

Should I leave?

... when that question of should I leave becomes repetitive enough then the answer is usually then yes but not yet. The not yet part is really the warning that you need to prepare to leave or prepare to change.

If you have doubts about staying then you also have no doubt that something is wrong.

Yeah, I've been at companies that did pretty well on continuous 1:1s and feedback, but off-cycle raises and promotions were still very rare because it simplifies a lot for the business to synchronize when budgeting and headcount-planning, etc, happens.

Off-cycle promotions can be fairly easy, but not in-place. With the constant churn in our line of work, an existing project may have a vacancy that's already budgeted for the higher level that left. Ar my company, in-place promotions are almost non-existent beyond entry to mid level.

Equity compensation has built in pay cuts. So they also ask if the company should maintain your total compensation or allow it to fall, in essence quietly and passively showing you the door.

I hate this kind of article where something constantly moves. I can't scroll away one funny GIF without the next one appearing.

What kind of person does this appeal to?

uBlock Origin is useful for snipping out these visual turds. But I agree, it's hugely irritating and the GIF's aren't even funny nor add any value.

Most of the advice only works in a scenario where there is symmetry in the power between managers and those they manage, or asymmetry in favor of those being managed.

>There is a way to get quality performance data, on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, in a meaningful way on things that are most important to the organization.

I'm very skeptical of this. Performance can very easily be gamed or influenced by the environment. Asymmetry between people even in the same team is a huge factor as to why performance reviews are complete bollocks in most skilled work.

I'd say it depends where you work and if your company fosters failure and growth.

Where I work I get a formally recorded performance assessment following each piece of work I deliver, which is usually in the range of 6-10 projects a year. Each of these projects is rated with strengths and weaknesses and if I was performing at the level required. This is then rolled up into my annual performance review, which is a review of the aggregate result of those, plus any other non-project related outcomes.

“I’ve got to ding you on something” - Bryan Cantrill

Worth a watch: https://youtu.be/1KeYzjILqDo

I think the most important part of the article is this

> Spoiler alert: I’m going to try rolling this out at Workweek in the next few months. I’ll be sharing everything I learn with this group! Hoping my hypothesis that more touch points around performance will lead to happier and more engaged employees.

Because I think it's easy to notice problems in the current processes but it's hard to create a new process that it's a net positive.

In my current situation, I don't care about raises/bonus or my manager feedback, I only care about 360 feedback to get others perspective I think this is better done twice a year. This means that doing one-on-one meetings with ratings would be worse for me, a net negative.

Also, I think that HR and executive management gets some good value from those twice a year rushes to fill "performance evaluation" forms so they also might think a different process might be a net negative.

So, please experiment and tell us about it.

This is the most important sentence:

> Performance reviews are riddled with bias.

Let me describe the apocryphal big tech company performance review process.

Once or twice a year you ask colleagues for feedback. Hopefully they do. They can also choose not to. You generally need 2-8 people to provide feedback. Less for a "standard" cycle. More for a promotion cycle. The specifics of this process vary from company to company (eg some reviewers might see your self-review, some processes just give textual feedback while others require reviewers to rate you in addition to supporting text).

Your manager may then distill all this feedback into a single page. Some processes have the full packet. Others do not.

Your manager will, based on this total packet, come up with a provisional rating and then go into calibration to argue your case. This provisional rating tends to be reasonably accurate. It may get argued down. It less often gets argued up (but it can happen). In this process you're essentially being stack ranked by similar employees (ie same job ladder and level).

To avoid ratings inflation across orgs (typically 100-150+ people), you are graded on a curve. Only a few people can get Greatly Exceeds Expectations. Some will require a percentage to get subpar ratings (eg Meets Most Expectations). This is the tech company equivalent of cutting the bottom 5-10% every year. These people may end up on PIPs or may be effectively forced out of the company because people with subpar ratings can't transfer or new teams just don't want to gamble on them.

Promotion decisions may be made by your org. They be made by committees of higher level individuals on your ladder (eg L5->L6 promotions decided by committees of L7/L8s).

Promotion candidates are also effectively or actually stack ranked. As a cost-saving measure there are promotion targets. Only the top X% will get promoted.

So how does this go wrong?

1. The number 1 most important thing is for your management team to like you. If they do, your failures will be viewed in a positive light (eg "we learned a lot from this failed project that we will take into future projects") as opposed to a negative light (eg same facts leading to "failed to ship project").

2. If the influential people in your org don't like you, it's going to be an uphill battle to do well;

3. Managers are subject to the same forces so may curry favor by supporting certain candidates for pomotion and higher ratings over others. There is an awful lot of horse trading that goes on behind the scenes. You will see none of this;

4. To curve fit the org, after all calibration is done people will have their ratings changed (generally down). This is more likely to happen if the org doesn't like you or simply likes you less than someone else;

5. Promotion target percentages are a key cost control measure. Reducing it saves significant costs (eg Ruth Porat did this in a leaked memo when she became CFO at Google). This creates a backlog for pomotion. Standards go up. You have to "wait your turn" and this may take years. This limbo will often keep people around who don't want to leave to get more opportunities.

6. Meeting goals, a key issue in defining "impact", is highly subjective too. You may get an impossible task dumped on you, fail and get dinged for it while someone else gets some way easier goal.

The whole process is honestly the worst part of working in big tech.

I worked for a company that did these kind of performance reviews and it was exactly as you describe. I found it basically "unworkable" because you end up with 2 jobs- (1) the actual technical job you were hired to do and (2) trying to not be screwed by the performance process. So you have to play politics, constantly watch what others do, try to advertise and sell the work you've done to managers. What if you're only interested in writing good code, not bragging about it? Especially if you're in tech because your skills are technical, not the schmoozing stuff. Some of the best developers are either introverted (which is fine :) ) or simply more interested in elegant technical solutions to real actual problems, than political BS. This performance process also makes people become rivals. They have to show they're better than their peers. Which is 100% destructive to teamwork. Then there's the unpredictability. In a good workplace, someone can work hard, deliver, forge relationships and as time goes on they become very trusted. What you don't want is that person constantly distracted by having to prove themselves. You don't want the situation where years of good work suddenly for no apparent reason comes up against something in performance management and get marked down. Another case, I saw 2 colleagues have misunderstandings due to geographical distance, culture, possible mental health issues by 1 of them. It all got worked out and fixed amicably, no lingering grudges, but one of them still I believe got a sub-par end of year, thus blocking a way to leave that situation behind. That cannot be helpful. Also such performance systems promote those more skilled at gaming the system than those who would do best in the more senior role. Thus you end up with incompetent managers, and technical staff that are good at stealing ideas and flogging them as their own, but can't really code well. I'm glad I got the ** out of there, into a workplace that values friendship and collaboration instead !! Is this the norm in big tech these days? If so.. well to me it just adds a big random element to everything. You can try to work hard, gain skills, deliver, but other factors can mean you aren't recognised. This was always true to some extent, you need a decent boss , company needs to be doing well etc, but my feeling is the "good old days" were more predictable. I wonder if this performance cr*p ultimately drives away good engineers, and it'll all come full circle when companies realise its a a bad idea. But then, I thought that happened years ago at Microsoft when they ditched "stack ranking"? Maybe this keeps bubbling up? I mean , some daft managers think its a good idea, it looks like its working for a while, then anyone decent gets hacked off and leaves to competitors, then they abandon it, till later some so-called bright spark re-invents it?

I love the article and agree with a lot of it, the only thing is that the action steps are a bit vague.

It's especially challenging for teams who have a hard time finding measurable targets. Like the brand team and the content team in my company have a bit harder time finding the numbers.

And although they have a great reputation and action steps, I can still imagine how it feels when everybody else lays out their numbers.

P.S. I'm writing a weekly newsletter for remote-working parents. Check it https://thursdaydigest.com/

I like the sound of your newsletter but sadly I am not seeing the pre-signup examples mentioned on the landing page so can't easily assess.

Ugh the moving memes make the article so annoying to read - who thought this was a good idea

These reviews provide legal protection in the event of a company being sued for wrongful termination. Once you realize that most things are to appease lawyers, the world seems more understandable.

The only people who actually do believe performance reviews (as they are practiced in the corporate world) genuinely measure performance... are the Dunning-Kruger'd tech bros who have convinced themselves tech is a "meritocracy" and they really deserve their positions.

Are you saying most tech people don’t deserve their positions?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com