Jack Dorsey is getting rid of annual reviews and PIPs at Block | Hacker News Reader

Jack Dorsey is getting rid of annual reviews and PIPs at Block

businessinsider.com

31 pointsrustoo12 comments

> no more wasting time on annual reviews [...] Instead, the company will give workers a rating of "exceeds, meets, or fall below" expectations

No more performance reviews. Instead, performance reviews!

I’m surprised business insider articles are allowed on HN. They post extremely clickbaity and misleading headlines

Roll D20 for evaluation ... did you make your save?

The typical "performance review" process involves writing pages of BS that nobody really reads or cares about. I'd much rather a simple rating and a quick conversation.

I’m reminded of what Deming has said about performance reviews, going as far as to call it a “deadly sin of management.” For context, Deming was a famous statistician who went to Japan after WWII and introduced management techniques that boosted the quality of products; he is still a well-known figure in Japan. A lot about Deming’s philosophy on performance reviews can be found here (https://deming.org/deming-on-management-performance-appraisa...).

Sadly I’m unaware of any American companies that adopts Deming’s philosophy on performance management. The HP Way was similar, but the HP Way died at HP decades ago and HP is now run like any other corporate American enterprise, but I digress.

The "philosophy on performance reviews" linked here seems to be only a few paragraphs, which I'd hardly characterize as a lot on Deming's views. His philosophy is essentially "performance reviews reward conformity rather than improvement of the review process".

Jack Dorsey is the king of over-hiring, slow, non innovative businesses. Then when it eventually collapses he slowly slinks away. He is like a govt organization masquerading as a startup.

I don’t buy it. I think his strong suit is fostering innovation. It turns out that the logistics challenges of maintaining complex systems over long periods of time is a different strength that Stripe and Twitter seem not to Meet Expectations

What innovation?

I truly wonder how much time and money big corporations waste with these week to month long processes of rating an employee on perceived impact of work. People say it is complicated, but clearly it isn’t.

How is a system designed to give people the rating of “exceeds, meets, or fall below" expectations”?

I can only imagine permutations involving rapid assessments by humans (manager and team). Same as performance review, but everything (primarily exits) are executed faster.

I always found external factors to be most influential to my work.

It's not like I am a massive entity and I am getting blocked by other people stopping me from working.

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