5 ms·

Get Rid of the Performance Review

53 points by prakash 18y ago

timcederman 18y ago
I found this article's descriptions of performance reviews was simply nothing like what I've experienced. Maybe it's a combination of being in the Bay Area and having gotten used to getting feedback, and enjoying improving my performance based on it, as a TA.
DenisM 18y ago
I tought this would be another anti-management bandwagon rant but this was surprisingly insightful. Having endured 10 years of this I can clearly recognize what is being discussed.
wynand 18y ago
I fully agree with what's written here. It's still quite disappointing to see him referring to managers as "bosses" and non-managers as "subordinates". The next logical step is to state that managers are not there to exert power, but to make it possible for non-managers to do work. Fewer power plays means a better working environment.
LPTS 18y ago
No performance reviews. If you do good, you get generous raises, stock options to get your own piece of the pie, and a bigger role in making the company succeed. If you do bad, mediocre, or merely slightly above average, you get a generous severance package and the gentlest kick out the door. I do not understand why adult human beings, who get a few short years to do something creative and useful, want so bad to be treated so similarly to grade school children. Line up to pee in the cup and have your bodily fluid tested just like the cattle you fat fucks gorge yourselves on. Come into the principa...manager's office and get reduced to some meaningless numbers it a social ritual that directly links to mankinds worse tendencies to form hierarchies that exist to mantain power. Piss away the potentially creative years of your lives living the same day over and over again and get a few measly biosurvival tickets in return, until you drop dead. If you are going to go through life processing your relationships to power structure like a grade school kid, what's the point of being an adult? I do not want to hire the kind of person who needs or wants to be validated like a second grader. I would prefer to hire the kind of person who demands the dignity and responsibility due to adult human beings, and would blow me off if I tried to sit down and hand out gold stars based on what's already happened. I would prefer to address real problems when they come up, as appropriate, and ignore nitpicks rather then saving nitpicks to be unleashed in a minefield of potential miscommunications and ignoring problems with employees until the review. There is no need to have this stupid ritual every six months. I do like his "preview" idea. The idea of replacing review with long range planning seems exactly right. Companies exist to invent the future, attention should be focused on the future.
narag 18y ago
I did an excellent work for months so my project manager wrote a review that should have granted a raise. But I got sent to a new customer that didn't like my face and asked for a replacement after a week. My boss was asked to burn the review. Someone else from above would write a new one. I guessed what was going on (later my boss confirmed my guesses), so I didn't waste a second. A week later I gave the two weeks notice to go to a place with 20% more pay. I wouldn't if not for the review system.
- andrewf 18y ago
  Sounds like the powers that be in your situation could corrupt any system.
  - ajross 18y ago
    Agreed. What happened here is that narag's employer wanted to fire him, or at least demote him. Irrespective of the moral issues, it's not at all unusual for an employer to choose their favorite customer-facing employees based on who their customers prefer. That's just good business. The review thing was just paperwork, basically. They needed to push some numbers around to get the result they wanted, so they did. Is that ethical? Probably not. But it's not insane either.
    - narag 18y ago
      Well, I would say that the previous customer that I worked for during many months was very satisfied, so was my direct boss. They didn't want to fire me anyway, just to freeze my salary. My point (same as in the article) is that performance is not the question, but market forces. It turns out they really lacked the power to give me a bad review. The same person that ordered the good review to be burnt and wrote a new one (very bad, I guess) was a few days later offering me 10% more pay, just because I was leaving.
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
I love reading commentaries. As a result of that love, I've come to spot populist messages. To me, a populist message is one in which most all of the listeners are going to feel like "heck yes!" while they are reading it. Populist messages have a tendency, however, to fall apart upon further inspection. There is no doubt that people hate performance reviews -- managers and employees alike. There's no doubt that in most cases they cause and create behavior that nobody wants. I think he misses the boat right off the bat with the purpose of the review. The purpose of the review is to make sure the manager is doing his job with the employee, knowing what's going on in the employee's work, having an interest, offering to help, seeing where the employee and the company's interests can be aligned. Some of these conversations are tough, and if you didn't require them, a lot of employees would never have the chance to say no, I don't want to be a tech lead, I'd rather get into teaching (or something similar). To view the review process as primarily raise and checklist based is to see how it's done instead of seeing what it's supposed to do. A common argument in populist writing is to say "since X is commonly done very poorly, X is therefore a bad idea altogether" He gets even further into the cool-aid with this comment "I'm sick and tired of hearing about subordinates who fail and get fired, while bosses, whose job it was to ensure subordinate effectiveness, get promoted and receive raises in pay." Sounds good -- as long as you think bosses should always be able to make/help subordinates be happy and productive. But while managers are definitely super people, they're not superman. Things happen in life. People get accepted at jobs they will never like. Companies take directions employees simply can't agree with. There are lots of reasons why somebody can get fired while management is not responsible. I'm not even sure that most times management is responsible, but I know that it's not all of the time. Generalizations are always false: including this one. </Rant>
- narag 18y ago
  >A common argument in populist writing is to say "since X is commonly done very poorly, X is therefore a bad idea altogether" I'd say "since it's a bad idea, it is therefore commonly done very poorly" instead. It's not a demonstration, but a cue.
- wynand 18y ago
  Not every idea that is popular is populist. Evidence of popularity is not evidence of dubiousness. Populism plays to people's prejudices, but when people are the objects of some experience which they perceive negatively, it's something different than populism. No doubt the idea of the performance review was meant to create a additional channels of communication. But human beings are human beings and things don't always work out the way they're intended (Communism being a supreme example). If we are empirically honest, we should conclude that performance reviews don't work, whilst avoiding undue judgement of managers who are still compelled to do them.
pg 18y ago
One of the startups we funded this summer is solving this problem: http://ididwork.com http://ididwork.com
ambition 18y ago
I think this is a critique of bad organizations more than performance reviews themselves. Most of the points can be attributed to organizational problems rather than problems with the process of performing reviews. A good boss in a candid organization will be delivering informal feedback throughout the year. The annual performance review has no surprises; it's a set time to formalize what is already known. People shouldn't treat performance reviews as salary negotiations, but instead as evidence-gathering for a salary negotiation. A salary negotiation has two important variables and the performance review provides evidence for only one. The two variables are a) Value delivered to the company by the employee and b) Best alternative salary for the employee.
wallflower 18y ago
If I were trying to hire top people, I would try the idea of Sony's Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) where everyone is on a 1-yr contract (a variation of publish or perish). "Unlike the rest of Sony, CSL employs researchers on a one-year contract basis, with annual performance reviews. Salaries are high, but they are based on success, not on seniority." http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=12016&channel=computing&section= http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp... And then you have GE and IBM. At GE in Jack Welch's days, they routinely fired the bottom 10%. Up or out. At IBM, they rank all of their scientists from top to bottom.
- mkn 18y ago
  At GE in Jack Welch's days, they routinely fired the bottom 10%. Up or out. At IBM, they rank all of their scientists from top to bottom. One of my favorite examples by Edwards Deming is a factory that has three production lines, each manned by an employee, each producing the same product on the same equipment. Furthermore, assume that there are no defects in the equipment, the manufacturing processes are under statistical control (negligible products appearing 2 standard deviations from the mean in any measured variable, iirc), and that the employees are equally skilled at their jobs. The company has a policy to promote top performers and dismiss low performers. Every year, at the annual review, the company policy demands that they promote one average worker, keep another average worker in production, and fire the other average worker, simply because even a statistically controlled process produces some variation. This is a random process in that all three candidates have been defined as equally qualified. In a typical software organization, where there is hardly such a thing as a controlled process, performance reviews are pure fiction if they purport to say anything about the individual. It's simply amazing hubris to think that you can attribute any given success or failure to a quality of the individual employee when your processes are not under statistical control. It is therefore amazing naivete to think that promotions in an organization of any size are handed out based on merit. They are handed out based on, at best, a record of performance, which is subject to the vagaries of chance. Note that I'm not advocating for any particular Utopic solution. I'm just acknowledging that local reviews of system components (employees, in this case) will never produce a globally optimum solution.
- 18y ago
newt0311 18y ago
Ummm... Replace performance reviews with performance previews and pretty soon, they will become indistinguishable.
skmurphy 18y ago
Periodic feedback in one on one meetings is a necessary precursor to any effective formal review. One of the bigger problems with most review forms is that they rest on a premise of a well rounded individual and focus on improving weaknesses instead of building on strengths. Marcus Buckingham wrote a great book, "First Break All The Rules," critiquing this approach. Problem with Performance Reviews http://gmj.gallup.com/content/529/The-Four-Keys-to-Great-Management.aspx First Break all the Rules summary http://gmj.gallup.com/content/1144/First-Break-All-Rules-Book-Center.aspx
gamble 18y ago
Some companies do genuinely believe in reviews for their own sake, but I suspect that their current ubiquity has more to do with the fear that a laid-off employee might sue for wrongful dismissal if a paper trail hasn't been established. It would be interesting to know if performance reviews are as common in jurisdictions where employers can fire staff at will.
- anthonyrubin 18y ago
  Illinois is an "at will" state. The useless checklist performance reviews described in the article are extremely prevalent here. Wrongful termination isn't the only reason that people sue. Claims of discrimination are probably the biggest fear.

53 points by prakash 18y ago

I found this article's descriptions of performance reviews was simply nothing like what I've experienced. Maybe it's a combination of being in the Bay Area and having gotten used to getting feedback, and enjoying improving my performance based on it, as a TA.

DenisM 18y ago

I tought this would be another anti-management bandwagon rant but this was surprisingly insightful. Having endured 10 years of this I can clearly recognize what is being discussed.

wynand 18y ago

I fully agree with what's written here. It's still quite disappointing to see him referring to managers as "bosses" and non-managers as "subordinates". The next logical step is to state that managers are not there to exert power, but to make it possible for non-managers to do work. Fewer power plays means a better working environment.

LPTS 18y ago

No performance reviews. If you do good, you get generous raises, stock options to get your own piece of the pie, and a bigger role in making the company succeed. If you do bad, mediocre, or merely slightly above average, you get a generous severance package and the gentlest kick out the door. I do not understand why adult human beings, who get a few short years to do something creative and useful, want so bad to be treated so similarly to grade school children. Line up to pee in the cup and have your bodily fluid tested just like the cattle you fat fucks gorge yourselves on. Come into the principa...manager's office and get reduced to some meaningless numbers it a social ritual that directly links to mankinds worse tendencies to form hierarchies that exist to mantain power. Piss away the potentially creative years of your lives living the same day over and over again and get a few measly biosurvival tickets in return, until you drop dead. If you are going to go through life processing your relationships to power structure like a grade school kid, what's the point of being an adult? I do not want to hire the kind of person who needs or wants to be validated like a second grader. I would prefer to hire the kind of person who demands the dignity and responsibility due to adult human beings, and would blow me off if I tried to sit down and hand out gold stars based on what's already happened. I would prefer to address real problems when they come up, as appropriate, and ignore nitpicks rather then saving nitpicks to be unleashed in a minefield of potential miscommunications and ignoring problems with employees until the review. There is no need to have this stupid ritual every six months. I do like his "preview" idea. The idea of replacing review with long range planning seems exactly right. Companies exist to invent the future, attention should be focused on the future.

narag 18y ago

I did an excellent work for months so my project manager wrote a review that should have granted a raise. But I got sent to a new customer that didn't like my face and asked for a replacement after a week. My boss was asked to burn the review. Someone else from above would write a new one. I guessed what was going on (later my boss confirmed my guesses), so I didn't waste a second. A week later I gave the two weeks notice to go to a place with 20% more pay. I wouldn't if not for the review system.

andrewf 18y ago
Sounds like the powers that be in your situation could corrupt any system.
- ajross 18y ago
  Agreed. What happened here is that narag's employer wanted to fire him, or at least demote him. Irrespective of the moral issues, it's not at all unusual for an employer to choose their favorite customer-facing employees based on who their customers prefer. That's just good business. The review thing was just paperwork, basically. They needed to push some numbers around to get the result they wanted, so they did. Is that ethical? Probably not. But it's not insane either.
  - narag 18y ago
    Well, I would say that the previous customer that I worked for during many months was very satisfied, so was my direct boss. They didn't want to fire me anyway, just to freeze my salary. My point (same as in the article) is that performance is not the question, but market forces. It turns out they really lacked the power to give me a bad review. The same person that ordered the good review to be burnt and wrote a new one (very bad, I guess) was a few days later offering me 10% more pay, just because I was leaving.

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

I love reading commentaries. As a result of that love, I've come to spot populist messages. To me, a populist message is one in which most all of the listeners are going to feel like "heck yes!" while they are reading it. Populist messages have a tendency, however, to fall apart upon further inspection. There is no doubt that people hate performance reviews -- managers and employees alike. There's no doubt that in most cases they cause and create behavior that nobody wants. I think he misses the boat right off the bat with the purpose of the review. The purpose of the review is to make sure the manager is doing his job with the employee, knowing what's going on in the employee's work, having an interest, offering to help, seeing where the employee and the company's interests can be aligned. Some of these conversations are tough, and if you didn't require them, a lot of employees would never have the chance to say no, I don't want to be a tech lead, I'd rather get into teaching (or something similar). To view the review process as primarily raise and checklist based is to see how it's done instead of seeing what it's supposed to do. A common argument in populist writing is to say "since X is commonly done very poorly, X is therefore a bad idea altogether" He gets even further into the cool-aid with this comment "I'm sick and tired of hearing about subordinates who fail and get fired, while bosses, whose job it was to ensure subordinate effectiveness, get promoted and receive raises in pay." Sounds good -- as long as you think bosses should always be able to make/help subordinates be happy and productive. But while managers are definitely super people, they're not superman. Things happen in life. People get accepted at jobs they will never like. Companies take directions employees simply can't agree with. There are lots of reasons why somebody can get fired while management is not responsible. I'm not even sure that most times management is responsible, but I know that it's not all of the time. Generalizations are always false: including this one. </Rant>

narag 18y ago
>A common argument in populist writing is to say "since X is commonly done very poorly, X is therefore a bad idea altogether" I'd say "since it's a bad idea, it is therefore commonly done very poorly" instead. It's not a demonstration, but a cue.
wynand 18y ago
Not every idea that is popular is populist. Evidence of popularity is not evidence of dubiousness. Populism plays to people's prejudices, but when people are the objects of some experience which they perceive negatively, it's something different than populism. No doubt the idea of the performance review was meant to create a additional channels of communication. But human beings are human beings and things don't always work out the way they're intended (Communism being a supreme example). If we are empirically honest, we should conclude that performance reviews don't work, whilst avoiding undue judgement of managers who are still compelled to do them.

pg 18y ago

One of the startups we funded this summer is solving this problem: http://ididwork.com http://ididwork.com

ambition 18y ago

I think this is a critique of bad organizations more than performance reviews themselves. Most of the points can be attributed to organizational problems rather than problems with the process of performing reviews. A good boss in a candid organization will be delivering informal feedback throughout the year. The annual performance review has no surprises; it's a set time to formalize what is already known. People shouldn't treat performance reviews as salary negotiations, but instead as evidence-gathering for a salary negotiation. A salary negotiation has two important variables and the performance review provides evidence for only one. The two variables are a) Value delivered to the company by the employee and b) Best alternative salary for the employee.

wallflower 18y ago

If I were trying to hire top people, I would try the idea of Sony's Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) where everyone is on a 1-yr contract (a variation of publish or perish). "Unlike the rest of Sony, CSL employs researchers on a one-year contract basis, with annual performance reviews. Salaries are high, but they are based on success, not on seniority." http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=12016&channel=computing&section= http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp... And then you have GE and IBM. At GE in Jack Welch's days, they routinely fired the bottom 10%. Up or out. At IBM, they rank all of their scientists from top to bottom.

mkn 18y ago
At GE in Jack Welch's days, they routinely fired the bottom 10%. Up or out. At IBM, they rank all of their scientists from top to bottom. One of my favorite examples by Edwards Deming is a factory that has three production lines, each manned by an employee, each producing the same product on the same equipment. Furthermore, assume that there are no defects in the equipment, the manufacturing processes are under statistical control (negligible products appearing 2 standard deviations from the mean in any measured variable, iirc), and that the employees are equally skilled at their jobs. The company has a policy to promote top performers and dismiss low performers. Every year, at the annual review, the company policy demands that they promote one average worker, keep another average worker in production, and fire the other average worker, simply because even a statistically controlled process produces some variation. This is a random process in that all three candidates have been defined as equally qualified. In a typical software organization, where there is hardly such a thing as a controlled process, performance reviews are pure fiction if they purport to say anything about the individual. It's simply amazing hubris to think that you can attribute any given success or failure to a quality of the individual employee when your processes are not under statistical control. It is therefore amazing naivete to think that promotions in an organization of any size are handed out based on merit. They are handed out based on, at best, a record of performance, which is subject to the vagaries of chance. Note that I'm not advocating for any particular Utopic solution. I'm just acknowledging that local reviews of system components (employees, in this case) will never produce a globally optimum solution.
18y ago

newt0311 18y ago

Ummm... Replace performance reviews with performance previews and pretty soon, they will become indistinguishable.

skmurphy 18y ago

Periodic feedback in one on one meetings is a necessary precursor to any effective formal review. One of the bigger problems with most review forms is that they rest on a premise of a well rounded individual and focus on improving weaknesses instead of building on strengths. Marcus Buckingham wrote a great book, "First Break All The Rules," critiquing this approach. Problem with Performance Reviews http://gmj.gallup.com/content/529/The-Four-Keys-to-Great-Management.aspx First Break all the Rules summary http://gmj.gallup.com/content/1144/First-Break-All-Rules-Book-Center.aspx

gamble 18y ago

Some companies do genuinely believe in reviews for their own sake, but I suspect that their current ubiquity has more to do with the fear that a laid-off employee might sue for wrongful dismissal if a paper trail hasn't been established. It would be interesting to know if performance reviews are as common in jurisdictions where employers can fire staff at will.

anthonyrubin 18y ago
Illinois is an "at will" state. The useless checklist performance reviews described in the article are extremely prevalent here. Wrongful termination isn't the only reason that people sue. Claims of discrimination are probably the biggest fear.