7 ms·

Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You

41 points by KeepTalking 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jtbigwoo 16y ago
The biggest problem I've seen with performance reviews is that most managers spend very little time working with or observing their employees. Couple that with performance review processes that don't actually measure results and it's a wonder anybody knows anything. I was once a manager at a medium-sized consulting company. I had an employee we'll call "Roy." He was always involved in the critical parts of large, profitable projects. He generally got 3.5 to 4 out of 5 in his peer reviews. There was another guy, "Jim." Jim was mostly on smaller, simpler systems and maintenance work. He generally got similar scores in his peer reviews. For their first performance review, I gave Roy a 4.2 and Jim a 3.8. Roy got a 7% raise and Jim got a 5% raise. Later on, I was the lead dev on a project with Roy and Jim as my team. Once the project got rolling, getting Roy to actually produce code was like pulling teeth. I talked to the other leads and found out that Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done. He was always on the critical components not because he was a great developer, but because the lead or architect was already paying extra attention to the critical components and could more easily manage the babysitting. Jim, of course, got all his work done on time with minimal fuss and even stayed late to finish some of Roy's work. I went back and looked at those peer reviews... Roy's lead dev had given him a review that averaged to 3.5. The soft skills were mostly 4's, the technical skills were mostly 3's and 4's. (He was an OK developer when you actually got him to work.) My only clue would have been a 2 in "Works Independently." Jim didn't have other devs on his projects so he had Project Managers giving him 3's and 4's for soft skills and 4's for technical skills. A poorly designed performance review was actually worse than no performance review.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  Once the project got rolling, getting Roy to actually produce code was like pulling teeth. I talked to the other leads and found out that Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done. He was always on the critical components not because he was a great developer, but because the lead or architect was already paying extra attention to the critical components and could more easily manage the babysitting. And none of this came through in the peer reviews, beyond the 2 in Works Independently? I think the review system here broke down in the peer area - no one who was working with him was communicating the vital info on this one, beyond just numeric scores.
  - jtbigwoo 16y ago
    I think the review system here broke down in the peer area Exactly. The review process wasn't actually measuring anything useful, it was just a list of traits that upper management thought were important. This story also reflects how clueless I was as a manager, that I was only talking to my people to gather information.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  >Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done Move him over in sales, he will properly do very well there since he knows the technical part very well but has human skills as well.
  - jtbigwoo 16y ago
    Last I heard, he's a project/product manager. :)
  - dwc 16y ago
    This is an awesome suggestion. Except for very small companies there's usually a place to move someone where they will excel, if management is willing to take the time to think about it for a moment. Once in a while you have someone who doesn't work out at all, but at least as often you can go for the win-win of moving them somewhere they like and perform well.
- frossie 16y ago
  The biggest problem I've seen with performance reviews is that most managers actually spend very little time actually working with or observing their employees. Flip side: if you are a small enough group that know each other very well, performance reviews can be a good opportunity to raise awkward subjects. It's a tool - it can be used or misused.
- mwsfc 16y ago
  Another problem is when you really do have self-serving mgmt that would actually rank as a 1 or 2 themselves but use performance reviews as a method to throw other perfectly capable people in their org under the bus to cover their failures.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Summary: performance reviews are not very effective, due to the injection of subjective opinions of the boss. Therefore, we need a variant of performance reviews which gives the boss incentives to inflate performance estimates. Of course, the author completely overlooks any solutions besides his own pet method, suggesting "taxpayers can't ask for more than that". They certainly can. For teachers (the situation he uses as a lead in and fade out), they can use Value Added Modeling. In fields with more subjective performance, 360 reviews (reviews by your peers, underlings, overlings and self, discarding any singleton viewpoints) are very effective. But I guess it's more fun to push your own toy method (and hopefully get hired as a consultant) than propose serious solutions.
- jbooth 16y ago
  Well, for whatever it's worth, when they're at the negotiating table, the 2nd most important issue (after comp of course) to the teacher's unions tends to be "assorted protections against a psycho principal". So there's a lot of cruft in the typical collective bargaining agreement that was initially aimed at taking personalities out of the evaluation process but then turns into it's own monster.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    No, teachers tend to oppose having an evaluation process of any sort. They are just as hostile to objective measures of their performance (standardized testing) as they are to subjective ones.
    - jbooth 16y ago
      Sure, everyone is, given the choice. I mean, you've described your own experience as getting out of the hidebound checklist mediocrity of university life to the dynamic 1-man-shop life. Similarly I pick startups to work at instead of big lumbering corporations. I was just explaining where the unions tend to be coming from when you sit across the table from them. I think the seniority rules are dumb, particularly last-in-first-out which is probably the worst thing about the current state of your typical municipal agreement. But I think you're mischaracterizing the opposition to standardized tests.. some % of teachers are lazy and don't want to teach the material but the strongest objections tend to come from some of the best teachers who resent having to "teach to the test" instead of using their judgment about the best way to teach/evaluate their students.
viggity 16y ago
like the old saying goes, "its the worst system out there until you look at all the others". I'm sorry, but a subjective review by a principal definitely has problems (personal biases), but it is a HELL of a lot better than judging teachers solely on how many years experience they have and how many meaningless masters degrees they have (French literature).
fleitz 16y ago
Whenever measurements are involved one should diligently research the values expected and optimize accordingly. If you care about such things as getting a good performance review you should know that it measures likability far more than productivity. If one of the KPIs on the CEO's dashboard is hits to the website, you should drive that up, if it's acquisitions then drive that up. Performance reviews and KPIs are highly instructional as to what you should be optimizing for. It's the company telling you what they value most. If you find yourself in disagreement with the things being measured it's probably an indication that the value systems you use and your company uses are out of alignment. It's usually much easier to find a company that shares your values than change your companies' values to suit your own.

41 points by KeepTalking 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

The biggest problem I've seen with performance reviews is that most managers spend very little time working with or observing their employees. Couple that with performance review processes that don't actually measure results and it's a wonder anybody knows anything. I was once a manager at a medium-sized consulting company. I had an employee we'll call "Roy." He was always involved in the critical parts of large, profitable projects. He generally got 3.5 to 4 out of 5 in his peer reviews. There was another guy, "Jim." Jim was mostly on smaller, simpler systems and maintenance work. He generally got similar scores in his peer reviews. For their first performance review, I gave Roy a 4.2 and Jim a 3.8. Roy got a 7% raise and Jim got a 5% raise. Later on, I was the lead dev on a project with Roy and Jim as my team. Once the project got rolling, getting Roy to actually produce code was like pulling teeth. I talked to the other leads and found out that Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done. He was always on the critical components not because he was a great developer, but because the lead or architect was already paying extra attention to the critical components and could more easily manage the babysitting. Jim, of course, got all his work done on time with minimal fuss and even stayed late to finish some of Roy's work. I went back and looked at those peer reviews... Roy's lead dev had given him a review that averaged to 3.5. The soft skills were mostly 4's, the technical skills were mostly 3's and 4's. (He was an OK developer when you actually got him to work.) My only clue would have been a 2 in "Works Independently." Jim didn't have other devs on his projects so he had Project Managers giving him 3's and 4's for soft skills and 4's for technical skills. A poorly designed performance review was actually worse than no performance review.

brown9-2 16y ago
Once the project got rolling, getting Roy to actually produce code was like pulling teeth. I talked to the other leads and found out that Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done. He was always on the critical components not because he was a great developer, but because the lead or architect was already paying extra attention to the critical components and could more easily manage the babysitting. And none of this came through in the peer reviews, beyond the 2 in Works Independently? I think the review system here broke down in the peer area - no one who was working with him was communicating the vital info on this one, beyond just numeric scores.
- jtbigwoo 16y ago
  I think the review system here broke down in the peer area Exactly. The review process wasn't actually measuring anything useful, it was just a list of traits that upper management thought were important. This story also reflects how clueless I was as a manager, that I was only talking to my people to gather information.
tomjen3 16y ago
>Roy talked a good game in front of clients but required a baby-sitter to actually get anything done Move him over in sales, he will properly do very well there since he knows the technical part very well but has human skills as well.
- jtbigwoo 16y ago
  Last I heard, he's a project/product manager. :)
- dwc 16y ago
  This is an awesome suggestion. Except for very small companies there's usually a place to move someone where they will excel, if management is willing to take the time to think about it for a moment. Once in a while you have someone who doesn't work out at all, but at least as often you can go for the win-win of moving them somewhere they like and perform well.
frossie 16y ago
The biggest problem I've seen with performance reviews is that most managers actually spend very little time actually working with or observing their employees. Flip side: if you are a small enough group that know each other very well, performance reviews can be a good opportunity to raise awkward subjects. It's a tool - it can be used or misused.
mwsfc 16y ago
Another problem is when you really do have self-serving mgmt that would actually rank as a 1 or 2 themselves but use performance reviews as a method to throw other perfectly capable people in their org under the bus to cover their failures.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

Summary: performance reviews are not very effective, due to the injection of subjective opinions of the boss. Therefore, we need a variant of performance reviews which gives the boss incentives to inflate performance estimates. Of course, the author completely overlooks any solutions besides his own pet method, suggesting "taxpayers can't ask for more than that". They certainly can. For teachers (the situation he uses as a lead in and fade out), they can use Value Added Modeling. In fields with more subjective performance, 360 reviews (reviews by your peers, underlings, overlings and self, discarding any singleton viewpoints) are very effective. But I guess it's more fun to push your own toy method (and hopefully get hired as a consultant) than propose serious solutions.

jbooth 16y ago
Well, for whatever it's worth, when they're at the negotiating table, the 2nd most important issue (after comp of course) to the teacher's unions tends to be "assorted protections against a psycho principal". So there's a lot of cruft in the typical collective bargaining agreement that was initially aimed at taking personalities out of the evaluation process but then turns into it's own monster.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  No, teachers tend to oppose having an evaluation process of any sort. They are just as hostile to objective measures of their performance (standardized testing) as they are to subjective ones.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Sure, everyone is, given the choice. I mean, you've described your own experience as getting out of the hidebound checklist mediocrity of university life to the dynamic 1-man-shop life. Similarly I pick startups to work at instead of big lumbering corporations. I was just explaining where the unions tend to be coming from when you sit across the table from them. I think the seniority rules are dumb, particularly last-in-first-out which is probably the worst thing about the current state of your typical municipal agreement. But I think you're mischaracterizing the opposition to standardized tests.. some % of teachers are lazy and don't want to teach the material but the strongest objections tend to come from some of the best teachers who resent having to "teach to the test" instead of using their judgment about the best way to teach/evaluate their students.

viggity 16y ago

like the old saying goes, "its the worst system out there until you look at all the others". I'm sorry, but a subjective review by a principal definitely has problems (personal biases), but it is a HELL of a lot better than judging teachers solely on how many years experience they have and how many meaningless masters degrees they have (French literature).

fleitz 16y ago

Whenever measurements are involved one should diligently research the values expected and optimize accordingly. If you care about such things as getting a good performance review you should know that it measures likability far more than productivity. If one of the KPIs on the CEO's dashboard is hits to the website, you should drive that up, if it's acquisitions then drive that up. Performance reviews and KPIs are highly instructional as to what you should be optimizing for. It's the company telling you what they value most. If you find yourself in disagreement with the things being measured it's probably an indication that the value systems you use and your company uses are out of alignment. It's usually much easier to find a company that shares your values than change your companies' values to suit your own.