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Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

Definitely happening much faster than middle age. My friends and I have realized this and we're <25.

One of my friends busted his ass the first year he started working, got an average performance review. 2nd year he chilled out a lot and got a better performance review. Performance reviews at most companies are useless and it doesn't take long to figure it out.

Another friend told me that it's not possible to get the top performance rating in his company. They just don't give that rating out.

My take is that a lot of Gen Z are entering the workforce and thinking "you expect me to do all this work for an ok salary I will never be able to afford a house on? that's a bad deal".

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Manager here. I'd like to offer a plausible explanation for your friend's performance reviews. I tell my reports that I don't want them busting their asses or anything else, because that leads to burnout, which leads to falling behind, which makes them think they have to bust their asses to catch up, and it becomes an unhelpful cycle. Is it possible that your friend, after a year's experience, figured out ways to work more efficiently, so that they were more productive with less effort? That tends to happen when we strengthen muscles, and it also happens once you've gotten your bearings in a new role.

More likely if you stop paying attention to what needs doing, and more attention what your boss wants to see, you get a better review, regardless whether your boss is incentivizing business/customer needs or not.

Yeah I see so many areas where things need doing but they are unpleasant and provide no incentives for completion. Yeah they worked return 5-10x but that’s not something anyone cares about. Even worse if you get caught doing unpleasant things you will get punished by having to do more of them. It’s a loose loose proposition

You're not wrong, and if you have a good leader then those two sets of tasks are similar or identical.

Or...his managers are just bad at evaluating performance.

I'm sure he did get better at working, but he himself said to me he cared less and was surprised about getting a better performance review. He has very little supervision/management. I doubt the company has a good understanding of what he does.

> Performance reviews at most companies are useless and it doesn't take long to figure it out.

Not just useless but political and down to interpersonal relations more than they are to actual work.

I used to work for a major tech company that would have their employees write a plan for each year. It would be agreed and signed off by your manager.

At the end of the year you were supposed to use this as a template to see if you had achieved your goals, and that would be part of some sort of grading which would affect any bonus, promotion chances and any pay rise you might have coming that year.

Only, in between the two the year would happen. Business realities and management direction would change, and what you did bore little relation to what you planned to do. So instead of you being graded on how much of your plan you had achieved, you were graded much more fuzzily, usually on how much the manager liked you or how much you made them look good to their superiors. I'm not saying this out of bitterness either, I was usually one of the more favoured ones.

When I had a few years under my belt I decided that it was much easier to be a contractor and opt out of all that sort of ****

I got three exceptional performance reviews now, but nothing more than nice words and I am also kind of done with doing anything extra.

It's only fair that you should give nice words on return.

Uhhh.

Boss: You did a good job this year, really appreciate the effort.

Serf: Well, golly thank you boss! Have I noted how great your hair is? Or how well you crack the whip? I surely would not have been as productive had you not been overseeing me with such zest.

To me, the funny part of all this is that I'd never work in a place that write me a performance review to begin with.

I have spend the past 15 years working in early stage startups, and I have never experienced a company with more than 30 people that were not doing annual performance reviews (mostly superficially just to tell investors that they were doing them).

So I have to question the validity of your anecdote. And even if you HAVE completely avoided any going-through-the-motions performance reviews, because you're working only for SUPER-early-stage seed round startups, then well... there are plenty of disadvantages to that life too. Not the least of which is that rising interest rates will likely be choking off the 15-year private equity gravy train cycle this year.

Even though you've worked for such amount of years, really impressive, that doesn't make you familiar with all companies out there and their cultures.

My experience might be abnormal but do most people not have to do their own annual performance review, with the "reviewer" just skimming it and giving a rating based on what they understood of your attempt to condense a year's work into a 500 word essay?

Your performance is always being reviewed

A formal review process at least surfaces those thoughts. It’s better than the quiet process where managers form their own conclusions without communicating them.

What companies don't do performance reviews?

Small ones, where everybody knows everybody else. Below a certain size you don’t really need a lot of larger company ceremonies because there’s nowhere to hide, either you deliver at the expected level or it very quickly becomes apparent.

This. And thats exactly my case. You have a deadline and you just commit to that. We as a team always "judge" or analyze in a constructive way our own job, we are adults and we know our flaws and our strenghts, once we delivered a job we ask ourselves what could we've done better, etc. So there's no need of corporate bullshitism and arbitrary reviews.

Companies that humanize their employees won't reduce them down to a single review that only cares about the previous year and not the sum of their work. And yet we've normalized the former for some reason.

How do they ensure that rewards (promotions, salary increases, bonuses) go to people delivering value to the business and not those who are friendliest with management?

Huh. There are places that ensure actual effort results in salary increases, promotions, and bonuses? I seem to get better results when I work at a good level but without obviously putting in exceptional effort, to be honest. I wonder if this is shared by others?

I've never seen performance reviews ensure that.

Every place I've been, management runs the review process so... they don't.

Are performanxe reviews viable if your company wants to have your employees to cooperate with each other?

Individual performance reviews reduce incentives to cooperate, because you only need to have a good review in comparison, not on some non-existent absolute metric.

Yes they are. In fact, one’s performance objective in many cases depend on effective teamwork with one’s peers. And then there are the behavior part of performance reviews where you’re graded on intangibles like teamwork, trust-building, etc…

Performance review systems will always have flaws, but it’s better (in nearly all workplaces) to have a formal and transparent process for them than to have none at all.

I once saw a book written by a former HR manager who states, performance reviews are not really used to get better performance. They are ways for organizations to get documentation to fire you without getting sued for it, if they need it. HR’s job is to protect the company, not to protect the employee.

Yes they're valuable. Working together with your team is a core skill that everyone needs to have to be a professional developer, and as such is a major part of the reviews I do. Any good leader will encourage cooperation over competition.

the one I work for

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