7 ms·

Defending performance reviews is like cheerleading taxes -- automatic way to accrue downvotes here, but bear with me. I've lived through unfair, biased and unh

Defending performance reviews is like cheerleading taxes -- automatic way to accrue downvotes here, but bear with me. I've lived through unfair, biased and unhelpful perf reviews, I know what it's like to have this sky beam open up out of nowhere and vaporize you over absurd nonsense, but in a company of > 100 people you need a paper record of performance. If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased? Unfair performance reviews are usually a byproduct of bad managers. For ex: I knew fellow managers who never told reports what they were doing wrong, they'd wait til the end-of-the-year review and write vicious stuff. Why? It was hard to say face-to-face. That's cowardly and not good mgt: you meet weekly or biweekly to discuss all issues, a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year. This author suggests that employees present managers "handwritten notes" of their performance "in a notebook every 6-12 months." Guess what-- that's a performance review! As if the problem w/perf reviews was the formality of the process and not the human judgment being applied. Again, I get it: performance reviews suck. But I think it's not the paperwork or the process, it's that management can be very inept at evaluating talent periodically, regardless of how that process is run. Unfortunately, it's hard to run a company of > 100 people without written records of performance (especially if someone sues).

markbnj 8y ago
> If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased? This is why I don't work for large orgs anymore. If you can't trust the manager's recommendation then why is that person a manager, in a position of power over people's lives? It's almost like acknowledging that you're too big to know whether your people can be trusted or not, so you need formalized checks and balances. I get that this in fact may be reality, and I also get that we need big companies to create many of these cool things modernity has given us, but man I have no desire at all to be part of such a thing.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  Another way to frame this: new technical or social methods for enhancing/extending trust mechanism in large organizations would have massive societal benefits. I wish more people explicitly thought about and experimented with this.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    A problem I'm noting is that information technology seems to have corrosive effects on interpersonal trust. That's not a solid conviction, but it's how I'm leaning.
    - citrablue 8y ago
      Subtle adjustment, I think the real cause is scaling human relationships. IT enables this scaling. So if interpersonal trust scales sub-linearly with number of connections, it's not really IT corroding trust, it's what IT enables.
      - dredmorbius 8y ago
        It's ... complicated. More than I can get into here, or eveen than I've really worrked out. Short version is that in the absence of advanced comms, you have no option but to extend trust. I'm thinking here where inteervals might have been months, eveen years. (Historically, sea passage was not possible from November through May.) Instead you had trust-establishing institutions, a role usually filled by religion, in virtually every pre-industrial civilisation. Comms, from the scroll and telegraph forward, obviate this. Wearables, CCTV, desktop tracking, cellphone monitoring, all substitute surveillance for trust.
        r00fus 8y ago
        They also come with significant opportunities for fake signaling. Gaining trust means you signal properly to the people you are attempting to influence. With records you now move mechanisms with which your signal that trust.
Avshalom 8y ago
>> Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased? But a perf review is just a manager's recommendation.
greggman 8y ago
what bugs me about performance reviews is feeling like I'm a copywriter writing ad copy for products. I have to try to come up with flowery text about the 5-10 major things I did rather than just "did x" which is already known. the only part of perf atbmy last job I thought was useful was ranking my peers. I'm not saying my ranking was correct but I'm just guessing those ranked high or low more often probably deserve a look?
- deleted 8y ago
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djsumdog 8y ago
And you need it for labour law reasons. If someone claims unemployment, and you have one of those companies that doesn't like to pay, your lawyers are going to need those reviews. If they were truly a bad employee, specific things in the reviews help if you go to court.
the_af 8y ago
> a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year. Agreed. This is my experience at my current job, the first place I've ever worked for which runs reviews like you describe. Yes, we have boring and poorly done tools to "automate" reviews or whatever, pushed by clueless HR people, but the actual review is done constantly by your team leader. You -- and your direct boss -- mostly know what's going on and how your review is going to go, no bullshit or last minute surprises. Unfortunately, my current workplace is the exception. Most other places I've worked for either had no formal reviews at all -- which may initially sound ok, except you get the nasty last minute surprises anyway -- or it was endless red tape.

markbnj 8y ago

> If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased? This is why I don't work for large orgs anymore. If you can't trust the manager's recommendation then why is that person a manager, in a position of power over people's lives? It's almost like acknowledging that you're too big to know whether your people can be trusted or not, so you need formalized checks and balances. I get that this in fact may be reality, and I also get that we need big companies to create many of these cool things modernity has given us, but man I have no desire at all to be part of such a thing.

jessriedel 8y ago
Another way to frame this: new technical or social methods for enhancing/extending trust mechanism in large organizations would have massive societal benefits. I wish more people explicitly thought about and experimented with this.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  A problem I'm noting is that information technology seems to have corrosive effects on interpersonal trust. That's not a solid conviction, but it's how I'm leaning.
  - citrablue 8y ago
    Subtle adjustment, I think the real cause is scaling human relationships. IT enables this scaling. So if interpersonal trust scales sub-linearly with number of connections, it's not really IT corroding trust, it's what IT enables.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      It's ... complicated. More than I can get into here, or eveen than I've really worrked out. Short version is that in the absence of advanced comms, you have no option but to extend trust. I'm thinking here where inteervals might have been months, eveen years. (Historically, sea passage was not possible from November through May.) Instead you had trust-establishing institutions, a role usually filled by religion, in virtually every pre-industrial civilisation. Comms, from the scroll and telegraph forward, obviate this. Wearables, CCTV, desktop tracking, cellphone monitoring, all substitute surveillance for trust.
      - r00fus 8y ago
        They also come with significant opportunities for fake signaling. Gaining trust means you signal properly to the people you are attempting to influence. With records you now move mechanisms with which your signal that trust.

Avshalom 8y ago

>> Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased? But a perf review is just a manager's recommendation.

greggman 8y ago

what bugs me about performance reviews is feeling like I'm a copywriter writing ad copy for products. I have to try to come up with flowery text about the 5-10 major things I did rather than just "did x" which is already known. the only part of perf atbmy last job I thought was useful was ranking my peers. I'm not saying my ranking was correct but I'm just guessing those ranked high or low more often probably deserve a look?

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deleted 8y ago

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djsumdog 8y ago

And you need it for labour law reasons. If someone claims unemployment, and you have one of those companies that doesn't like to pay, your lawyers are going to need those reviews. If they were truly a bad employee, specific things in the reviews help if you go to court.

the_af 8y ago

> a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you've been discussing all year. Agreed. This is my experience at my current job, the first place I've ever worked for which runs reviews like you describe. Yes, we have boring and poorly done tools to "automate" reviews or whatever, pushed by clueless HR people, but the actual review is done constantly by your team leader. You -- and your direct boss -- mostly know what's going on and how your review is going to go, no bullshit or last minute surprises. Unfortunately, my current workplace is the exception. Most other places I've worked for either had no formal reviews at all -- which may initially sound ok, except you get the nasty last minute surprises anyway -- or it was endless red tape.