Ask HN: approaches to performance review for tech companies?
Most of us spend much of our lives at work, out of necessity or voluntarily, and we all want to be at a place where we enjoy working. I get the sense that the approach of a business to performance review is critical to employee morale, to the tenor of their interactions with one another and to the long-term execution of the business.
In my own experience, I've witnessed forced/stacked ranking lead to serious, concrete difficulties for a company I worked for. Such difficulties might not have been avoidable under another scheme, and I don't want to overgeneralize from a single data point. But the experience leaves me wondering, have you worked at a successful tech company that had an approach to performance review that the people making things happen, at whatever level, were generally happy with or even enthusiastic about? One that keeps politics to a minimum and that encourages ownership and responsible risk-taking? Have you seen a business that successfully manages itself with an approach to performance review that is mostly or entirely implicit? Have you seen forced/stacked ranking carried out in a way that employees at all levels feel confident that reasonable outcomes are the norm?