AI makes bad managers
staysaasy.com
staysaasy.com
I don’t disagree with the content. A well-thought review will help employees perform better. AI can’t create a good performance review from whole cloth. You have to at least put some thought into the content and bullet out what you want the review to say. An AI could clean up the language, but not create good content.
But most managers’ managers would consider that wasted effort. The unspoken fact is that performance reviews are pretty arbitrary and end up reflecting whatever is needed at the time. If budgets are tight, performance suddenly becomes less impressive and no one deserves a promotion. If hiring is difficult and an employee expresses dissatisfaction with their pay then suddenly they’re a star performer. The efficient manager tells the AI “make this a good review that makes a case for promotion” or “make this a mediocre review with room for improvement” and lets the AI write something vague and unhelpful that agrees with the result they want. An _effective_ manager will put time into their reviews and growing talent. Managers aren’t incentivized to be effective leaders though.
Source: my experience; your mileage may vary.
Performance reviews are a dumb system, and you shouldn’t be learning anything new from them anyway. Just give helpful feedback throughout the year, and give promotions to people strategically as you’re able.
The purpose of them is to avoid discrimination lawsuits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM
The TLDR version is most models eventually adapt to lie to users and unit tests. =3
ymmv
Many workplace issues can be solved, a shitty manager is a total dead end.
I've never met a person who didn't believe with all his soul that he could do the job better than his manager.
Corollary: anyone promoted into management instantly becomes a PHB to his reports.
Employees: if you don’t know how you’re doing at your job, your manager isn’t managing you well.
All performance reviews should be good/positive unless you are looking to fire the employee sooner than putting them on a PIP. Because employees should always know what they need to work on, if anything.
Management Basics 101.
Worker power basics 101.
The best a bad (or worse, toxic [0]) manager can help for, is that AI will help them look like less of an idiot.
The nominal I have seen however, is managers providing non actionable, non provable feedback. In these cases you'll see conflicting feedback (while not providing enough detail to understand if this is a real thing or an AI hallucination), such as 'You are not afraid to interject important points in meetings -> You need to not take people off topic on meetings', or for a team where every IC always meets deadlines agreed to every sprint planning, 'You are working too slow'.
In the worst case, you've got the folks who enjoyed ChatGPT's especially sycophantic phase and wind up buying into all sorts of dumb shit because the computer told them it was a good idea...
[0] - As an example of toxic, consider the sort of manager that uses near-circular logic like 'you need a doctors note for a sick day -> oh you were good enough to drive to the doctor then we need you in here' and then wonders why half the team gets sick over the next few days.
I think students see this (use AI as a friend/tutor, but don't use it to do your entire HW), and software engineers see this (use AI to refactor or handle small tasks, but don't use it to design your whole system, or for abstractions that need to be carefully designed)
(Many comments here are about if performance management is core to a manager's job - which for the record I think it is)
Every three months for 5 years, he would send me some blurb that basically said "NAHWheatCracker is a great engineer. Sometimes he's difficult to work with." We would have a one-on-one to review the performance review. I would ask about the "difficult to work with" part.
My manager wouldn't say who said what. He wouldn't discuss circumstances. He wouldn't facilitate having a discussion with whomever for specifics. It could be an issue that came up once, a chronic problem, or a minor complaint on a bad day.
I wanted something specific to improve on. It wasn't hard to make assumptions, but assumptions aren't clear. Non-clarity drives greater wedges between people. I shut down in conversations lest someone say something to my manager.
The idea of it being made more dehumanizing by having an AI slop out a performance review seems even more depressing. That said, I think bad managers will ruin this process regardless of AI. You can't get much worse than being less than useless.
It's not what's said either, it's the whole idea of someone turning my performance into a silly numbers game.
I'm pretty sure performance reviews were invented for much the same reasons as democracy; but instead of the illusion of a choice you get the illusion of progress.
Why do so many people roll along with this?
I see engineers often bad-mouthing each other. Why do it for the managerial class? Surely you realize they are herding us like cattle.
Just do your job. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now that I think about it, a LLM-guided conversation that results in a review following a pre-defined grading scale/feedback form/whatever doesn't sound like a horrible idea. I'm not talking about hooking up MCP to pull in data or feeding it data about the employee to one-shot this. Rather the LLM asks a series of questions, with follow-ups where it makes sense, and tries to hone you responses into useful, actionable feedback.
So, a replacement success story?
This has to be satire right? PMC sniffing their own farts
It's possible for good managers to do much better management work with the aid of AI (saying from first-hand experience).
AI does not make mediocre managers good or bad managers mediocre.
Today's best managers are putting a lot of thought and experimentation into making AI a powerful tool for being even better managers. Others ... cope.