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Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

In my first few years on the job, I would fill out peer evaluations honestly. We have peer evaluations where you rate people out of 5 on various performance elements like "innovative" and "leader" or whatever. Then I survived a couple of rounds of awful layoffs where really good people lost their livelihoods.

Since then, I put 5 out of 5 on everyone for everything always, and say something nice in all the boxes.

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Goodness, yes. The last time I put (genuinely constructive) criticism in a peer evaluation, it turned out to be the only non-positive thing that was said about that coworker. So it became a focus of his yearly review.

He later told me about how his review went (casually at a conference; he had no idea I was the source), and I fessed up and clarified what I actually meant. The HR process had twisted it to a much more extreme version of what I was getting at, completely undermining the utility of the feedback.

Nowadays, I'm just gonna give perfect scores and if I have feedback that needs to be given, I'll just tell the coworker directly. (And if I'm not comfortable doing that, then the feedback probably isn't important enough.)

I think a big factor of that is that usually most people just do the positive feedback and don't say anything negative or constructive. So when someone does do so, it's seen as "wow, this must be so bad that they just had to say something, no matter how delicately or toned-down it is being phrased as". These days I just mention the problems and concerns to the people making the decisions because yearly review time is the wrong time to do it. At best they've only been doing this "bad" thing for a month or so, and at worst almost a whole year and no one did anything.

> I think a big factor of that is that usually most people just do the positive feedback and don't say anything negative or constructive.

You are most certainly right. But whose fault is this? HR and CxO.

Theres a nice chinese saying

Nail that stands, gets the hammer

OTOH, "squeaky wheel gets the grease"

carrot or stick management styles heh

Never give constructive criticism through management! Management will use it as evaluative feedback. Give constructive feedback directly.

For real. I have bought a car and the same day discovered a minor issue, I had to get it fixed next day. I rated the service 8/10, it was excellent otherwise. Next day I get a very apologetic call, begging me to change my rating, because anything less than 9/10 triggers some kind of investigation process. I said screw it and took the survey again, I'm not going to ruin someone else's work because of this.

I bought a mouse on Amazon that didn't fit my hand and was uncomfortable to use. I gave it a 3-star review. The company immediately refunded me and told me I didn't need to return the product. I was shocked. I get "the customer is king" but I think it's gone too far. A review system where everything is expected to have a perfect rating is not a useful system!

There's scammers gaming the amazon review system to put fakes in highly reviewed (previous) ad posts.

so you where messing with their real-state i guess

Net Promoter Score (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score) has (if it ever was useful) turned into madness in way too many contexts.

I do the same. Doing HR’s job is not my job. And yet, some how I do. If I rated any satisfaction metric below 80% my manager’s manager would have him talk to me; there would be flogging until morale improves. It seems all a game of Emperor’s New Clothes.

This isn’t even HR’s job. It’s the person’s manager’s job.

Layoffs are arbitrary and not based on performance.

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