Writing good performance self reviews
andrewhuth.substack.com
andrewhuth.substack.com
Just submit a list of single sentences that say things like "Designed and implemented a doodad that saved n hours per day and enabled $BUZZWORD". List the outcomes of things you did this year, use STAR, whatever you prefer.
The best part of doing it this way - if they don't give you a nice bonus/raise, you've just updated your CV ready for your next place of work!
This is a useless exercise, raises come or not regardless of what is said or done.
As someone who's in the room when we go over these, if you write "stop doing performance reviews" the whole room rolls their eyes, and is not very kind.
Maybe stop shooting yourself in the foot? Give it a shot, for like 5 years, see how it goes. It's about an hour of your time annually, so if even at a 20% chance of success that feels like a wise investment.
At my place of work it is common for people to spend multiple days on these things, with some people on my team spending a whole week. I'm told the process was substantially more heavy weight before I got here. Maybe you are just blissfully unaware of the true costs? I would give your right arm to waste only an hour every review cycle on this counterproductive insanity! I would happily accept no promotions or raises above inflation to not go through this were it an option.
Cool, no more questions, thanks for your time.
Are sure it only takes your subordinates an hour?
Most reviews are finely crafted BS. And it generally takes much more than an hour annually. If you have to do a full blown "360 peer review" process (which is very common) it can take at least a day+.
I'm no fan of perf reviews but I have no idea how you could even run a process at all if you were to only give people 1 hour to do the whole thing end-to-end.
At worst, self-reviews take up an hour of your time per year -- at a full time job, that is about 1/2 of a percent of the total hours you work in a year. You spend more time on a lot of other stuff that is more annoying and less beneficial to yourself.
Do you want to get promoted? Do you want to make more money? Do you at least want to avoid getting laid off? If so, it is your job to demonstrate that you deserve those things. In many cases, the people who make the decisions do not know who you are and will only ever see your self review, peer reviews, and your manager's review of you. Even small companies often have this problem.
This is not hard. List your achievements and good personal qualities in a way that highlights their value to the business.
Your manager can't fight for you to get a raise or a promotion if you don't provide any ammo. So you should care about your performance review and put some effort into it.
Don't have a manager like that? Leave, and find one.
At companies with annual reviews you will almost always get annual raises and/or promotions. At companies without reviews, you often won't. Much like an "unlimited vacation time" policy, a policy of going without reviews is often actually worse than having a defined process.
For an ok-paying (yearly income) job that needs only 200h per year (1h being 0.5%) I would happily spent two 2h of unpaid time for that.
Totally doing this next time.
My wife and I did the same thing to write the note that will go out with our family Christmas card.
This tech is a game changer for people who do not like to bullshit but find it a necessary part of life.
If I am employed to perform a service, I am going to provide the best service that I can, that one has paid for. If my service is not satisfactory to you, fire me.
Performance reviews are a weird unnecessarily subservient exercise in corporate dance.
Ultimately, employers and employees need a way to ensure pay tracks employee value to company. At hiring time, it's easy: the employee presumably got multiple offers and so there's a quasi-market for that employee.
Later, what do you do, especially if the employee is otherwise happy at the employer? The employee can go out and periodically solicit competitive job offers to hold the employer accountable and ensure their pay keeps up with their skills. But this is super inefficient: even one interview loop costs the employee much more time more than the self-eval process. And this would impose a huge cost on employers, if a huge fraction of their candidates don't intend to ever convert and are just using the job offer as negotiation leverage.
Like, I hate doing performance evals as much as everyone else, but I'm not yet convinced there's a better system for solving the core problem of ensuring people's pay tracks their market value.
* Have the time to know what you are working on
* Set aside time to talk to you about your career development goals
* Help you work and progress towards them - with a plan that is personalized for you.
I didn’t talk about this in the article, but (right, wrong, or indifferent) I find it helpful to think about how to help my manager help me.
Semi-related, I've somewhat started calling the engineer-advocacy work in the org the "Lorax" position; speaking for the trees, who are not as able to. Where & how this happens varies, & it's not usually a role or position, alike emotional support.
Why do we have to pretend I'm not just there to do a job / make you richer in exchange for less money than I know you yourself are making? It's so patronizing.
I don't ask my plumber or my doctor what their goals are and the world carries on.
Because some managers and employees want to work on career development that might benefit you in your current role, a future role at the company, or a future step in your career elsewhere.
If you don't care about your career, fine.
But it's not patronizing. It's literally doing our job by trying to help you advance. If you don't want that, just say so and your manager will stop wasting their time by asking.
Then they should be doing that throughout the year because it's part of their actual job.
Not once per year by mandate via a stupid questionnaire.
Must have been the pointy-haired guy that hijacked your account to defend periodic formal self reviews.
> but when a company asks you what your goals are, that's worse.
I made absolutely no statements for or against yearly reviews (in fact, in one of my other comments, you'll find I mention I'm not personally a fan). You're arguing with a strawman.
Meanwhile, please direct your bitterness elsewhere. If you want to get into flamewars and insult people I'm sure you can find better places to do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
Frequently impossible. The annual goals they set are often both vague, and fail to encompass much of the activity at the company.
You can try bullshitting something, but I'd just remind them how either the company and/or customers depend on what you're doing.
My final answer wasn’t total bullshit, but there’s no way I would have come up with it on my own. I think part of the reason is that we often are “in the weeds” of the organizational hierarchy and lack sufficient perspective about how we fit into the bigger picture.
I keep my own notes over the year from 1:1s and so forth and use those to build the review.
The self-review is a way for me to get my staff member's perspective and to identify gaps so we can talk about them.
If a manager is so lazy they need the staff member to remind them of what they did, they shouldn't be a manager.
Edit: to be clear I am not a fan of yearly review cycles, but we aren't always in control of how reviews are conducted. But if I have to do a yearly review, I'm going to take it seriously and do it properly.
Don't fight the game though, play it to win. Throughout the year, I keep a single note open "Accomplishments 2022". I simply add my accomplishments to it, typically as a weekly summary. Plus anything notable, process improvements, innovations, overtime, compliments from peers, the like.
All of this adds up into a war chest. During the actual performance review meeting I come armed to the teeth. This is how you flip the script. I don't need to explain that I deserve a great review, my manager needs to explain the opposite in the face of a mountain of evidence.
The individual accomplishments don't even have to be earth shattering, just document them consistently. The total amount of them will be so overwhelming that nobody is going to bother taking them apart.
Learn to write corporate speak: "Improved automated test coverage by 40% to support our do more with less corporate goal, freeing up resources to work on value-adding services". Whilst this was just me editing a file for 20 minutes.
You want red tape? I'll bury you in it.
Mix it with psychology. Act modest and humble despite the boat load of evidence of good performance. As if it "was the least you could do", radiating supreme loyalty. A minority of eager managers might still throw in a point of critique, feeling they need to do their job in providing some balance to this review.
As the critique hit, look down and pause for a few seconds, make it awkwardly long as if the air is sucked out of the room. In this period, the manager is going to feel awful, thinking they just deeply hurt a great worker. Then, respond with "I hadn't though of that. That's very insightful and something I surely will integrate into my work to do EVEN better, going forward". The word "even" is important here, as well as "going forward". Managers love going forward.
The manager is now relieved that the air is cleared, plus feels very smart. Be sure to already open a new note "accomplishments 2023" and at the top, in bold and red write the critique. Then, in next year's review start the session with "Really loved the suggestion made last year and here's how...blah blah".
It wasn't even a serious remark, they just wanted to say something. They forgot all about it. But here you are fully remembering it and acting upon it, which is somebody nobody does.
And this is how you corner your manager.
Meeting notes, any issues I hit, resolutions, etc. It wasn't necessarily something I posted to every single day, but at least weekly. Ended up being around 2-3x/week. Notes on why certain decisions were made, other options tried, etc. I had originally put some of this in comments, but was working some place where "comments in code are bad - remove them all - should be self-documenting" so... I needed to put them someplace.
I was lightly teased for keeping this log. Then I quit, and a couple folks told me they were still looking up things in my blog months after I left, as they couldn't tell why certain things were done. "Couldn't use X because person Y indicated we weren't paying for X, so I had to build a smaller Z version instead" - that type of thing.
It 'helped' some because we got a new dept manager in, say, June, and July was the time for all the 'end of fiscal year' review stuff. Dept manager had to do 10-12 staff reviews in... 3 weeks? He had no ability to contextualize most of anything, but I had a running history of months of issues, resolutions, meeting notes, conversations, and more.
I will say that was... over a decade ago, and I don't think I've been that diligent since. It was useful, but definitely more work than I would feel comfortable committing to again, at least with current workloads. The workload there was surprisingly... light enough such that I could keep docs as a regular part of week to week work.
I also have a section in that file for buzzwords from team meetings, town halls and broader presentations.
I fill reviews with 3 things
- "I did ___ and ___ and ___"
- "Last year I said I would do ___. This is what I did for it ___"
- "Next, year I plan to ___"
accomplishments are microscopic, aligned to broader team/company goals.
future plans are high level, things I can contribute to but not own like "Improve documentation culture" , "Increase user engagement for ___" never actually committing to any deniable numbers cz priorities change, that document from last year does not.
Last, remember this stuff may seem strange but the next hiring manager in your org will read it. They will instantly see your soft skill to blow your own trumpet.
Prior to that, in ignorance, I thought my productivity and contributions would be self-evident. That is not a great strategy for someone who isn’t inclined to self-promotion.
It doesn't really matter what you write there, as long as it's not negative. If it's negative, it can be used against you. If it's not negative, it can be spun as negative when the external reviewer of the self review adds their comments. It's a tedious exercise with little to no benefit for the employee.
I find it hard to believe you have 20 years of experience but don't see the point of performance evaluations. Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer the question "what are you working on"
It's very simple. They pay you, you do work. If they stopped paying you, you'd probably stop working.
Why would you expect that if you stop working, they won't stop paying you?
If they need an end-of-year self review to determine that, something has gone horribly wrong. They already know what I'm working on: they're the ones that assigned me to it, and I report on it regularly in standups. So what's the point of the review? If they don't already know what value I'm bringing, that's a red flag.
Suppose you hired a plumber who refused out of principle to tell you whether or not they fixed your toilet.
That's what I mean by it's professionalism.
The message from the plumber is based on the assumption that the default state of things is that the plumber has not done their job and things don't work. If you feel like that's the default state of things, you should choose a different plumber, not ask for notifications about which things don't work.
2. I call plumber.
3. Plumber fix.
4. New state: toilet work.
kqr: "Hi Mr. Plumber, could you let me know when 3-->4 happens. I need to use it once you're done, but I'm busy and don't have time to micromanage or continuously observe your work on the toilet."
(plumber's gaze narrows) "No. Fuck you, kqr. Fuck you, I'm not telling you jack shit. I have rights and dignity as a professional."
kqr: Wow, what a great plumber. I'd hire that person again.
plumber: Done sir! Your new toilets ready to go.
(6 months pass during which time the plumber completed some other work that was done satisfactorily and approved by the client)
kqr: I'm trying to decide whether I should keep using you Mr. Plumber. Please write me a few pages summarizing all the work you've done for me over the past 6 months. Make sure you emphasize how it has helped me move my KPIs, and how it helped me look good to my wife. Make sure talk about how the work you did contributed to our objectives as a family. Also make sure to add a bit about how you have developed as a plumber over the last 6 months and how you plan to continue to develop over the next.
Clearly, I would have two toilets for redundancy (much cheaper than 40 weekly hours of plumber time). In the rare occasion when both are broken at the same time I would expect the plumber to volunteer that information. The brokenness is the exception, the workingness the default assumption.
Sure, you can take the stance "they should know", but then don't complain when even well-intentioned managers can lose perspective or miss some of your accomplishments when is time to recognize your efforts (promo, raises, etc).
I consider myself a "well intentioned" manager, I care about my team and their work, try to keep up with the details, etc; but there's just too much going on at a large organization and I'm fallible. I may forget, or fail to see the complexity and value of something someone did (even my own accomplishments). There's nothing wrong with advocating for yourself and making your manager aware of your stance. If there's disagreement about how valuable something I did is I'd rather know when having that conversation. I may learn my manager cares more about x/y/z and not something I thought it was valuable but turns out is not important for the org or my manager for some reason I wasn't aware of.
Chances are your manager could fill this out for you most of the time as they should have a good grasp of what you have been doing in your day to day.
Most of the time I can generate a list of what I have worked on via commit messages or ticket names to get a high level idea of what I have been doing. I still feel like my manager may have a better idea of what impact my changes have had then I do in some cases.
Just not you.
I do that almost every day during standups and every week during 1:1s. I have no problem with it. What I do have a problem with, is when I'm forced into making judgements about my work. That's for someone who gets paid more than me to do in the corporate context. My opinion about my work and all the other self-reflection stays with me. I don't want to bootstrap their work by coming up with all sorts of ways of rewriting history to match some artificial and arbitrary expectations which are anyway outside of my control. And so is the performance review itself, in the end. Some places even allow you to review what your boss said about your performance review and even 'contest' it. You know what happened when you did that? Literally nothing, except for a checked box saying that the employee disagrees. It's all pretend.
I've had plenty of good career dev chats with my manager (and my reports once I became a manager) following a review. This should be happening all around in 1:1s, but the semester or yearly review is a larger retrospective summary of the work we do, what we're proud of and what we feel could have gone better. If there's no trust however, this exercise is moot.
Even if my manager did not read it, writing about it has been valuable to me and makes me realize more clearly what I've done, whether I feel I'm being valued or not, and if it's time for me to move on.
That said, in the former kind on company (the one that allows you to break you neck as you wish), I find extremely educational doing self-reviews, especially if you do them incrementally as the year passes by so that, by the time the review is needed, you just need to "JIT" the document and serve it out. It provides a way to tell in advance if you are working on something that feels like bullshit on paper.
Myself, I also use favorites as bookmarks on HN. And stars as bookmarks on GitHub (hence I'm always perplexed why people care about star count - for me, "starring" a repo doesn't mean I use it, or even like it; it just means I want to look at it again, somewhen, for some reason).