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It's all honestly completely useless. I've never had a useful performance review at any company ever. It's either I'm doing bad, and know it, and that is eith

• brightball 6y ago
  If you’re ever in a SAFe team, one of the tenants is that annual reviews are useless. It pushes for doing constructive reviews every PI (approximately quarterly).
  • brtkdotse 6y ago
    On the other hand, you’re in a company doing SAFe so you have plenty of opportunity to stare at a wall.
    • chris11 6y ago
      But companies doing SAFe can use developer velocity to help judge individual dev productivity. That can be surprising if you aren't aware of what story points are used for.
      • sharken 6y ago
        As someone who is again at a company doing SAFe, I am genuinely curious as to the relevance of story points. For estimation, hours is a good measure, even more so when there are external consultants that get paid by the hour. Developer velocity can be measured by tasks/features completed compared to the estimate. Could you elaborate on why story points are useful or perhaps point to some resources on the topic ?
        • brightball 6y ago
          This is a hot button for me also. Story points are a solid measure of complexity, but when it comes to estimates on a planned timeline over the next few weeks I want it in hours or days. Otherwise, somebody ends up trying to convert story points into hours and that's not what it's there to measure. I wrote extensively about this a couple of years ago before I found out about SAFe itself. https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-development-fixing-project-management-in-software https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-developme...
        • chris11 6y ago
          I'm not saying it's useful, just that I found out it was a metric for management. I was originally expecting it to be an internal metric. The company I was at actually used it in performance reviews somewhat comparable to stack ranking. There was an expectation that devs complete about 8 points a sprint. I don't know if the eight point target is common, but SAFe does talk about comparing story points across teams. > At scale, it becomes difficult to predict the story point size for larger epics and features when team velocities can vary wildly. To overcome this, SAFe teams initially calibrate a starting story point baseline where one story point is defined roughly the same across all teams. ... > Give every developer-tester on the team eight points for a two-week iteration https://www.scaledagileframework.com/story/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/story/
  • pc86 6y ago
    I've never been on a SAFe team so maybe this is addressed in that methodology, but I think annual reviews are more a tool to pass your performance up to higher levels in a structured manner as opposed to letting you or your boss know how you're doing. Like the GP said, the manager and their direct typically know exactly how they're doing, or at least more or less where they fall on the spectrum of the team. Ideally stand ups should give daily feedback to everyone when someone starts to fall behind, and managers should be giving their directs feedback often (not necessarily daily).
    • jdmichal 6y ago
      Yes, exactly this. What I tell my directs when they write their reviews is two things. The lesser one is that I'm a human and I don't remember all the awesome stuff that everyone does through a whole year. So now is the chance to remind me of it. Secondly, and more relevantly and importantly, I'm about to walk into a shooting match to defend my employees' performances against a larger pool. And what I need in that battle are bullets. The more bullets I have, the more successful I will be. So load up my gun with every single bullet you can think of!
      • abhorrence 6y ago
        Do you make an effort throughout the year to write down all the awesome stuff your directs have done?
        • jdmichal 6y ago
          During our one-on-ones I try to take notes. But I still miss things. Visibility is always a problem, and is even more binary now with remote working. I have zero chance to stumble into awesome things happening. I can either already see it happening or I can't.
  • sidlls 6y ago
    If I'm ever again in a SAFe team, something has gone terribly wrong. I won't join a company that uses this practice unless I'm very desperate. If a company I'm at adopts it after I've joined I will immediately begin looking elsewhere.
    • C1sc0cat 6y ago
      Why? reading Wikipedia this seems to be what used to be called RAD - done right its Fucking awesome. One thing is you need 100% collocated experienced people who know what they are doing - no third party agencies who spend 15 mins discussing pixel separation in photoshop mock-ups. It also not something you'd carelessly throw a junior or an intern into
      • sidlls 6y ago
        SAFe as I’ve seen and experienced it is a cumbersome, process-heavy system. Like most other project management systems currently in use in this industry it’s probably okay if 95% or more of the features are well-known and specified clearly. For any non-trivial software development work it’s a burden. For development touching other disciplines (e.g. statistics/ML, new product development) it’s more like an obstacle.
        • brightball 6y ago
          It is process heavy outside of the dev flow, but that is more business side so it shouldn’t affect devs themselves much. It’s supposed to be getting out of the way of developers.
    • brightball 6y ago
      Yea, I'm very curious to hear more about this. I've loved it at my company. It seems like development best practices + sanity enforcement outside of it and it's fairly flexible too (we use kanban instead of scrum). It's done wonders for putting the planning of how things should be implemented into the hands of developers themselves and then essentially gets out of the way.
  • deepaksurti 6y ago
    Sorry but what is SAFe? (No pun intended)
    • brightball 6y ago
      Scaled Agile Framework https://www.scaledagile.com/ https://www.scaledagile.com/
• electricslpnsld 6y ago
  I wish I had that kind of insight into my ‘performance’ pre-review! I’m at a FAANG right now and given my interactions with my manager alone, I figured I was bombing performance-wise (constant complaints about my work, refuses to acknowledge any accomplishments, super angry at me during one on ones, assigns piles of work that ‘need’ to be done by Monday on Friday at 6pm and then doesn’t even acknowledge the completion of the work next week, ...). Come performance review time on the other hand I’ve had awesome peer reviews, performance ratings, stock refreshes, etc for the past four biannual performance cycles. Given the complete mismatch here between how I feel I’m doing and how my manager treats me, I’m actually pretty happy we have this performance review system in place. Probably just need a new manager...
  • cbanek 6y ago
    As just a random internet person, please, let me agree that you need a new manager. Other than yourself, no person has more impact on your job, and if you're taking shit and dong well, you can do so much better. Also, never forget that your performance is 'capped' by your management chain. While others may see that you are amazing, the best they will be able to do is poach you to their team, but they can't override your manager's feelings about raises, promos, etc. (I feel like I'm talking to past me, who I really wish I could have told this to earlier.)
    • Merrill 6y ago
      I've heard that its your manager's manager that is important to your career. Your manager can't actually promote you, except by recommending you as their replacement if promoted or transferred. Your manager's manager can either promote you or work a deal with their peers to get you promoted. If your manager is keeping your performance results from being reflected upwards, you have a problem.
      • stennie 6y ago
        A promotion doesn't mean you have to take on the role of your manager, it generally means you have expanded (or new) responsibilities and expectations. For larger companies career progression broadly falls under either an individual contributor (IC) track or a leadership track. As an IC you can grow your career from Engineer to Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer without changing managers or teams, and there is a similar progression for leadership. Becoming a manager because you think that is the only ladder to climb is definitely the wrong choice. I think a great manager is also a leader who takes an active interest in the motivation, growth, and outcomes of their team. If a management team worked the way you describe (manager's managers run the show and broker deals with their peers for micromanaged promotions), that would be an extremely dysfunctional environment. In my experience it is always the direct manager who recommends someone for promotion rather than the next level up (although your manager's manager likely has final approval on budget). As a manager, I support and coach my team toward their career growth aspirations with regular performance & growth conversations. I also try to ensure my direct manager has visibility on the state of the team, but ultimately they are expected to be looking at a bigger picture and trust that I am taking care of my team.
• monkeydust 6y ago
  I have short 15min weeklies with my team members and then other frequent check-in points. By doing this the official review process becomes redundant i.e. no surprises in expectation mismatches - from my side and team this is a good thing but we waste time doing the official stuff.
  • funnybeam 6y ago
    Good work. This is called management - performance reviews are a sop to try and make up for poor management but are utterly useless and often counter productive (there’s no better incentive to start job hunting than having to prepare for a performance review) Competent managers don’t need to do performance reviews and bad managers are not helped by them
    • egberts1 6y ago
      Yet the corporate legal eagles will insist on documentation as to bolster their case of such dismissal, if any.
      • funnybeam 6y ago
        And that’s when you create a performance improvement plan. If someone is underperforming then you take steps to try to understand why and help them to get to the level the company needs them to be at. Hopefully this works and everyone is happy but you need to be clear (to your employee and yourself) that ultimately this could end up in dismissal if it doesn’t work out. This is when you document everything and have regular meetings with the individual so everyone understands what is going on and if it ever becomes legal then you have everything you need to justify your decision. Point is, you only need to do this if someone is underperforming so much that you’re thinking you need to dismiss them, and if someone’s performance is bad then you don’t wait for the annual (or quarterly or whatever) review before doing something about it - you deal with it straight away
        • WJW 6y ago
          I've never seen PIPs work out well, although all my observations are from outside the manager/PIP-ee perspective and perhaps my sample size is not large enough yet. One employee managed to meet the demands of the PIP but only at the expense of dropping all other (not documented in the PIP) tasks, an extreme case of "what gets measured gets managed". Overall, they got to stay on but it was detrimental to the team they were in. The more savvy people started applying at other companies the same day they received the PIP, since it was clear to them they would have to work significantly more for no increase in salary and they perceived the attainable effort/reward ratio to be better elsewhere. In one case this led to hilarity when the CTO had instructed the managers to PIP at least one of their team members "for morale reasons" and it ended in more than a third of all devs leaving the company in the next two months.
• nilkn 6y ago
  Here's my slightly unusual take on performance management as a manager. If I'm doing my job well, reviews should mostly feel like a formality. They shouldn't take much time from me or from my reports. If I'm doing my job poorly, one signal of that is that a review takes a lot of effort. If a performance review takes a lot of my time or that of the report receiving the review, it suggests there's been some considerable communication breakdown. Typically this means the report has been performing poorly, doesn't realize it, and I have failed to convey this situation to them. More rarely, someone is doing well but I failed and made them feel like they were doing poorly. In this way, I still appreciate the review process. It encourages me to confront performance management issues continuously throughout the year, and in the worst case that I slip up it provides a safeguard that makes sure I eventually do get on the right page with the employee.
  • nickff 6y ago
    Thank you for sharing your insight.
  • Decker87 6y ago
    Wow, how very unusual.
    • ci5er 6y ago
      May I ask why you find that unusual? EDIT: I don't know what country you are in.
  • shajznnckfke 6y ago
    Some people just don’t like talking and/or writing about themselves. I find the process painful even if I know I’m doing great and I know that everyone else knows too.
    • SergeAx 6y ago
      And that is a clear direction sign towards being a better team member.
    • deleted 6y ago
• httpsterio 6y ago
  I don't think that my performance reviews have been a question of whether I'm doing a good job or not, it's always been more about if the employer agrees that I've spent my time wisely and do they appreciate what I'm doing. In Finnish performance reviews roughly translate to "Development discussion" and in my experience that's exactly the case as well. I've spent most of the time in my reviews talking about my boss about how the company can support me better and how I can achieve personal goals (raise, titles etc) and what I'd need to do.
• ghettoimp 6y ago
  I've been at $megacorp for a few years. We just completed yet another formal, annual review. It would be easy for me to look at the process and say it is needlessly structured, time consuming, and has never had any surprises. That said, I once worked for many years at a small company with no formal review process at all. At this place, there was practically no communication from upper management about how they thought you were doing, whether they understood or valued your work, what they wanted you to focus on, etc. After years of this, I left feeling rather bitter and unappreciated. For all its flaws, the review process at forces a conversation where you get to summarize to higher management what you have accomplished and why it is important. Peer-review at least gives you a chance to call out outstanding work from your co-workers. And the review itself at least gives you a venue to hear what management thinks of what you have done. Anyway, I'd do a lot differently now, if I were back at the old place. But on the whole, I think the review process is actually a good thing.
  • edgefield0 6y ago
    Thanks for this comment. Can you please share more details on how the process is structured at your company?
    • temikus 6y ago
      Not the OP but sounds like Google’s “Perf” process. You can take a search through HN and get a couple of accounts. Generally; you write how well you did, then you get a couple of peers to confirm it and give you feedback. Then your manager works with a bunch of other managers to “calibrate” to make sure their view of the world is not skewed (think you did poorly but you actually did well and vice-versa). Then you receive a rating based on that calibration.
    • ghettoimp 6y ago
      Sure -- once per year: - Write up self review. 1-2 pages to highlight what you worked on and accomplished, who you helped, why it matters. Score yourself on various dimensions of how good of a job you are doing (working with others, getting stuff done, etc.) - Nominate 3-4 people to give you peer reviews. Best to pick people who can speak to your work, ideally with some folks from outside your particular group, and ideally with some seniority. - Managers decide who to ask for peer review about whom. You'll get asked by various managers for feedback about their reports. Write and submit this feedback -- could be as short as a paragraph, more typically 2 or 3 paragraphs: what did you work on with them, what did they do achieve, what could have gone better? I've probably given feedback for 5-10 people on average. - Manager synthesizes all of this into a report, score you on the same dimensions. - Manager meets with you, gives you their report, goes over it with you. There's a lot to this meeting. It's a review of how they see your work, a comparison of your self-scores and their scores to get on the same page, a discussion of noteworthy feedback from others (positive and negative), a chance to defend yourself against any negative feedback, and a discussion of ideas for addressing any concerns. Typically there is also a lot of goal-setting for the upcoming year, and more generally a discussion of how things are going, how happy you are, and so on. - Formally acknowledge that you discussed the report with your manager (checkbox in some system). This also gives you a chance to formally comment on the report, I imagine in case of some dispute. - Followup meeting, some time later, deals with compensation adjustments, promotions, etc. This is kept separate from the review itself. Effort level has been perhaps 2-3 days per year for writing up all the reviews. I'm sure it's worse for managers.
• deleted 6y ago
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• ChuckMcM 6y ago
  This is sad, when I read it I think, "This person has never had an actual manager, just people faking it badly." That said, it isn't too unusual in my experience because people who are good engineers usually get told "you should go into management if you want to keep advancing" but they don't tell them "Oh, and this is a completely different job than you have been doing and none of your skills will apply, kthxbye!" For a long time in my career I didn't want to be a manager because I didn't trust myself to manage well. And it took a really bad manager at Google to educate me on what the job of a good manager is. I stumbled around a bit but figured out that there are two things a manager must do to be successful; first is to communicate with their team what is expected of them and how that expectation will be measured, and second is to listen to what their employees say to them. Sounds kind of simple but it's actually kind of hard to get right. Performance management is drilling down into understanding what is going on with the person who is failing to meet their expectations. If you both understand the metric for measurement, whether it is lines of code or time to delivery or what ever you have worked out with the employee ahead of time, both of you have to look at the metric, and the action to date, and get to a common understanding of what is going "wrong." The most common problem I have dealt with are people who claim to be "senior" from a large company but don't really have any idea what that means other than "time spent in the role." I have pretty qualitative definitions of "entry level", "experienced", and "senior" that I work from and right away I try to communicate that to an employee. Sometimes they get hired into a role that is "above" them and they are unable to rise to the challenge, sometimes its just a different work flow than they have been used to. The second most common problem is ego. An engineer who defines themselves by how good of an engineer they are, has a really really hard time looking critically at their own weaknesses. That conversation usually has a lot of "this doesn't mean you are a bad engineer, it means we have to work out how you can be even better than you currently are." type discussions. The third one that comes up are people who are doing the job because someone else (spouse, parent, peer) thinks "it's a good job, you should be a ..." rather than the job they really want to do. As a result they put in only enough effort to not get fired and not much more. I'm okay with that if they don't mind being paid at the entry level wage level. If they are in the mindset that "I've got five years of experience and <reference> says I should be making $Y at this point." Then we have the conversation about "careers" versus "jobs". There are plenty of people who just want a paycheck and will do the minimum for it. They do fine work and clock in the hours, but they don't add value to the team like someone who wants to be good at what they are doing. Too many engineering managers try to treat engineers as cogs with the only power of "do it or I will fire you" to motivate them. From my limited experience with this type of management it only works so much, and it doesn't build teams, or good product in the long term.
• bob33212 6y ago
  You can ignore the actual goal of assessment and just write words in the form of "Action, Noun, Target" like: "Gained Expertise in product X in Q3." "Implemented self guided research in Technologies X,Y,Z in Q1" "Member of diversity committee in Q1-Q4" "Increased bug detection by 10%" "Code quality increased by 15% per code analysis done by codetech.com" "Upgraded deprecated libraries on build servers"