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Ask HN: What does performance management look like at your company?

212 points by edgefield0 6y ago

I'm curious to learn about staff performance management at other companies to understand what works and what doesn't. How does your company set goals, evaluate performance, etc? Do you use OKRs or a similar tool? Thanks! Edit: Clarified that I am asking about staff and employee performance management. Thanks!

ochronus 6y ago
Shameless plug about goal setting: https://ochronus.online/goal-setting/ https://ochronus.online/goal-setting/
ochronus 6y ago
Just to clarify: what kind of goals do you mean? Is the context people management or anything in general?
- edgefield0 6y ago
  People management. Goals for staff. Thanks!
BewareTheYiga 6y ago
I worked for a big enterprise type company. Our performance management process was predictably broken like most BigCorp companies processes are. We had cascading goals from the CEO down to the team manger level, with numerous layers in between. These goals were not data driven in any way. Our performance process was heavily biased towards the quarter prior to the annual review -- so don't put any points on the board until the 4th quarter, that's when they'll count for the most. Common saying -- wins cover up sins. As a manager of a team, I tried to institute OKR's into the process for my team at minimum. I found that technique partially successful -- meaning successful for me and my team but limited in that other teams in my department wouldn't adopt them. Too much work they said.
- arethuza 6y ago
  I worked in a large company for a number of years that had a system where you were scored 1 to 5 (1 being bad and 5 excellent). However, it really meant you were scored as either 3 or 4 as "nobody is a five and if you were a one or two you wouldn't be here anymore". My manager and I did agree it was a silly system so we settled on me being a 4 and I set everyone who reported to me as all 4s - even though they all deserved 5s.
madkat 6y ago
Personal level or on a company/business/team level?
howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
Slightly off center from your question, but: 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!) is a big help in tracking email activity. RingCentral reporting is a big help in validating Salesperson activity. 2. Every Friday I review Github repository activity for my development teams. A very soft-touch and collaborative conversation follows for developers and engineers whose pace of work or direction seems off. This is almost always a result of improper scoping, unrealistic milestones, or miscommunication. 3. Every Monday and Tuesday I'm hands-on with my marketing team preparing for the Wednesday release of our marketing communications, and reviewing ongoing advertising campaign results. 4. Every weekday I'm in our Xero accounting software looking at cash flow projections, inventory, A/P and A/R. Xero is hot garbage IMHO, but I've built some integrations that make is easier to use for real-time reporting. 5. I visit our satellite facility every other week for in-person chats with that team. 6. I've invested a lot in automation to track our market, predict conditions and generate alerts. Notwithstanding 1-6 above, there's no substitute for good market conditions and good employees. I have the latter, but not the former. I mention this just in-case you're thinking you can systematize your way out of a demand vacuum.
- edpichler 6y ago
  How big is your company?
  - howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
    In the seven figures in sales. Assuming we survive the current volatility.
- pryelluw 6y ago
  I wonder how much you pay your sales people based on the last paragraph.
BrianOnHN 6y ago
What size is your company/team? Different strategies perform well depending on size. For example, most of the time I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team. Have you identified KPIs? What are they? "What's measured is managed," said Drucker. Personally, finding what exactly to measure is difficult. So don't be afraid to spend a lot of time figuring this out. When you do, all the other performance management strategies will somehow find a way to work towards your goals.
- tomxor 6y ago
  > What size is your company/team? Different strategies perform well depending on size. I can't emphasis how important this advice is in general - Use it to validate everything you read about, especially on HN. If you work in a small organisation or team (the ones that don't make lots of noise) then most of the advice out there, from technology choices to management choices, are going to be biased against your size, some of those choices are the direct opposite depending on size.
- argiopetech 6y ago
  Drucker never actually said that, though it's been attributed to him frequently. I found this blog interesting, and they link to the Drucker Institute if you'd like something more authoritative. https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-gets-measured-gets-managed-its-wrong-and-drucker-never-said-it-fe95886d3df6 https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-gets-measur... Similar quotes are often attributed to Deming. He never make this claim either.
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    I suppose I confused this with "Know Thy Time" in Effective Executive. Thanks for clarifying, I'm sure I've incorrectly made this attribution before. Edit: typo
- irjustin 6y ago
  > I find OKRs a little excessive for a small team Can you explain this one a bit more? Are there specific pitfalls of the OKR system that don't work well for small teams? Is it purely a size of the organization as a whole? i.e. If the whole company is <10 OKRs don't work. Or is it inclusive of team size? Any group/unit of <10 should not use OKRs, too single metric heavy.
sushshshsh 6y ago
Thankfully, there is none. What a blessing.
- onion2k 6y ago
  It's not a blessing. As bad as performance management, goal setting, and OKRs can be when it's done badly, working for a company that isn't engaged with helping you to improve is far worse. Even if you're motivated to improve on your own you'll be working with people who aren't and that's more stressful and annoying than any number of performance measurement systems.
mr_blobby 6y ago
We are a company of about 4000, our performance management is pretty shite. We essentially function as a company of middle managers with a software engineering department tacked on. Getting promoted has very little to do with the role profiles of the above grade but instead involves doing some menial task, for example I knew a guy who was a total manchild and would smash the keyboard, groan and hide in the toilet if he encountered some difficult code, he would also never ask for help but because he did support he got promoted. Also there's a limited number of slots, so you could meet the criteria of the above grade go through the process and still not get promoted. We basically lose all our developers after 2-3 years and most projects are composed of contractors. people who can't leave before 2 years and mediocre developers who are promoted way beyond their means and aren't good enough to work at other companies. The worst thing is our clients usually have a high opinion of us so our competitors must be even worst.
combatentropy 6y ago
It looks like a total waste of time. As a developer of internal web apps, it is apparent what I must do next to serve my users, in the next week, month, quarter, year --- I have a long to-do list! It is also apparent what I must do to serve my team, in the next week, month, quarter, year. (I get rave reviews from both, unsolicited.) The goals that cascade from the executives are laughably vague and obvious: cut costs, increase revenue, reduce maintenance, get to the root of recurring problems, please the customer (of course they phrase those things with your typical multisyllabic jargon). So what the process ends up being is taking my goals that I have already got and writing them down in another place (a shockingly flimsy and probably expensive web application they bought from a vendor) using certain words that they like. It is a total waste of money and time (which, ironically, is counter to at least two of their supreme goals). Let me be clear. While it is theoretically possible that the executives know of a problem or need at the company that I don't, and when they share their company-wide goals it would be news to me, this has never happened. There has never been a time when the yearly goals come out and I say, "Oh, well, now that you put it that way . . . " On the other hand, I must be above average, because there exist many at my company who, left to themselves, would sit around and do nothing, or worse. Presumably this whole ceremony is in reaction to their behavior. In my opinion, such people should be fired, not babysat.
- azhu 6y ago
  My experience matches this to a tee. Engineers who take initiative and ownership are the ones most likely to know the function of the revenue generator's vital organs and how they interact in a system. Execs, product folks, designers, and people managers may understand at the level a 5th grader understands bodily anatomy, but the engineers necessarily must know it on a surgeon's level. For startups. I will say though, that the executive layer above our heads is not to be totally dismissed. They do have vision into things that we can lack, namely people and culture stuff that has significant impact on the company's long term trajectory. Or maybe big acquisitions and whatever. But the people stuff is what generates all the perceivably asinine people management stuff because if you get rid of the average nonautonomous employee, you have no one left pretty much. Hiring good engineers is HARDDDDDDDDDDD unless you can just bury the problem with cash. The best potential solve I can personally see still hinges on having the right people. For any unit of people at any scale doing anything, a leader who can effectively recognize who to empower within what boundaries feels like it's by far the most crucial thing. I'm not sure there's even a way to have a pilotable thing made of individuals without having a conductor. If you just build out the org in a way where it can be conducted and put good conductors in place then they will be able to tell you wtf is going on at the level you need to know about and effectively translate your intentions into implementation. Feels like this is the why behind the whole "idk y'all figure it out" style of startup engineering nonleadership that's becoming common these days. People just flat out don't know what they're doing, and even when they know it, they obscure it for self-serving reasons. If you have a leader setting this example via doing anything but having technical field vision and directing as a respected and well liked military officer would, then you will have an engineering org that is optimized for bleeding money.
WJW 6y ago
Last company I worked with used OKRs, but in their own "unique" way. Senior management was always 3-4 weeks late with the company wide OKRs, so the OKRs for individual teams would either be wildly divergent from the approved company direction or they were switched mid-quarter to align with the company OKRs. Nobody ever checked the progress of the OKRs either, not even at the end of the measuring period and not even to calibrate the realism of the goals for the next measuring period. Once, when asked at an all hands meeting by the person who had been designated "OKR champion" a year earlier, the CEO answered he had forgotten about it but that OKRs were certainly still on. I think the most success was had by a single guy who had managed to get "increase twitter followers" on his personal OKR list. Not for some company account btw, for his personal twitter account. It was continuous hilarity, but I don't regret not working there anymore. Whatever system you use, take it seriously.
pjc50 6y ago
I've never worked anywhere where the annual review wasn't an almost entirely fictional process. It's totally subjective finger-in-the-air stuff. Often to my benefit, but I recognise that it's subjective.
candiddevmike 6y ago
In most companies I've worked in: thinly veiled nepotism and cronyism. I've never seen the inputs of a performance management tool being the only inputs for calculating merit or bonus amounts, so the outcomes of both these situations depends heavily on your relationship with your boss and their boss. Don't get me started on stack ranking or making sure everyone "fits the curve" by knocking down everyone to average because HR said so.
- anonymous1111 6y ago
  > thinly veiled nepotism and cronyism Exactly my experience as well, but it's often not even thinly veiled. These processes should not even be referred to as "performance" reviews since they often have little or nothing to do with performance. It's loaded and deceptive language.
poof_he_is_gone 6y ago
I work for a company that makes performance management and recognition and rewards software. As such, it is deeply embedded in our culture. We have a mix of tools that enable goals/OKRs, 1:1s, feedback, structured performance reviews, and 9-box evaluations. I lead product design for the company, and part of the reason I took the job was being able to deep dive into the user experience of how this works, and ultimately improve my own management skills. The process of rebuilding, testing, and developing the tools has exposed me to some top brass HR folks at large companies. It has been awesome being able to get the perspective on what works for individuals, and what outcomes people are expecting at the company level. I really feel like I have grown significantly as a manager in my time here. At our company Goals/OKRs are set at the individual, department, and company level. You can align your goals up, or set individual (personal growth) goals. These can/should be reviewed in your weekly 1:1s with your manager. We allow anyone to send recognition, or send or request feedback at any point. We have several templates that facilitate different feedback types. We do quarterly Check-Ins which is more of a top down performance review where you can reflect on goal progress, feedback, and next steps with your manager. The 9-box talent assessment is calibrated for each employee twice a year. We also facilitate surveys at the company level to help do things like eNPS scores. If you want to learn more, ask away or check us out at https://www.kazoohr.com/ https://www.kazoohr.com/
cbanek 6y ago
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 either my fault or due to reasons outside of my control. Or I'm doing well, and know it. Honestly, sometimes at places things were so bad that I felt I was doing terrible, but I was actually keeping the team going by pushing past a lot of tricky issues. Really I think any company that waits until performance review time is really broken. That could be a year, or sometimes many years. Also, the usefulness or performance management is usually undermined by the fact that the people doing the worst usually are in hardcore denial as to their performance. Those people are the hardest to change and manage. I've rarely seen performance management actually fix a problem, other than making the environment so unpalatable that the person just leaves. I really wish I could have all that time wasted on writing useless "self-reviews" back. Even if I was staring at a blank wall it'd be time better spent.
- 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).
  - 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!
giantg2 6y ago
I work for a large company. There are four ratings you can be assigned - 'not doing your job', 'need more improvement', 'you're doing your job average to well', and 'exceptional' for about 8% of people. I can't really tell you how it's measured or anything like that. The company has policies about it, but more often than not those policies are blatantly violated. It basically comes down to the subjective opinions of your manager, the department head, and the business people you interact with.
awinder 6y ago
I’ve used pseudo-OKRs at the last few places, where there’s basically a bailout option where you just change the OKRs at the end of the year to match what happened (if you were doing well). Depends on what you mean by works/doesn’t work. In my experience performance management is mostly about recording business justification for continued employment, bonuses, advancement, or the negative versions of these. So by that metric these systems definitely work.
- anonymous1111 6y ago
  The OKR's can be ignored as long as there is "progress", but progress measurement is still very subjective and statistics can be deceptive, so the process often just ends up being the usual game of nepotism. Not hitting OKR's can also allow managers to request more headcount, meaning they are incentivized to make excuses instead of delivering value.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
It has been known for nearly 100 years that you can never criticize your staff. “I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of everybody.” ― Benjamin Franklin Last job, my last performance review. There was literally only 1 complaint against me. I was late >40 times. My boss told me he was disappointed in me. I was upset because I was never ever late to work; I was always early. I asked him to tell me when I was late. He pulled it up. Everytime I worked the weekend because I was oncall 24x7; I would swipe in and because I swipped in after 8am or whatever it was considered a late. So not only was I going above and beyond helping people afterhours, I was taking a hit in my performance review because of it. Dont care how stoic you are, that hurts.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  I hope you then worked out how much TOIL you where owned and pointed out to them the definition of salaried employment.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Salaried employment doesn't mean unscheduled.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      Possibly in some cases (eg doctors on particular shift in a hospital) - but normally as a salaried professional you manage your own time.
  - sleepysysadmin 6y ago
    About a month after that. I had a coworker speaking to me in my office. He was quite angry at 2 coworkers and said he was going to kill them. To be clear, this guy hangs out with gangs and has rifles. He was serious in his rant. I reported this to my boss. The next day I was fired.
abyssin 6y ago
At my previous company, performance management was a show they put on to get a story to tell when it was time to discuss compensation. Lack of performance resulted in firing without warning. Performance assessment gave information about their reading of the job market and the risk you'd jump ship.
afarrell 6y ago
Tangent: Are there any good books or articles on how to find the answer to this question within your own company as applied to yourself?
JackMorgan 6y ago
I'm eight years into management across two different sized companies. Both have ultimately had entirely subjective systems. I'm currently a director of a twenty person office. My current teams are supposed to have stack ranked individuals, so I simply give everyone the exact average. I also give everyone the same objectives: improve performance with technical debt repayment, use retros to determine working agreements and adhere to them, adhere to a WIP limit and then help any other team areas when there are bottlenecks, do weekly research to keep your skills sharp, self organize your team to best meet the business goals, help anyone with their job when asked or offer a time when you next are free, and if you have no work ask your team for something to do. These are pretty easy to meet, so people usually do well on them. Ultimately compensation is tied to the whole product, not the employee, since we all split any money evenly. I find this works exceptionally well at ensuring the ultimate goal is team performance, not individual performance. Team members not pulling their weight are identified and asked to find a new job or improve. The ones that don't are given low ratings and let go. In all it allows us to have a very stable team of high performers. Our average tenure is over seven years. No one has any incentive at all to "beat" everyone else. I've found the teams that employ such tactics never have long lasting talent anyway, just a string of "heroes" who burn out after a few years. Also I flush this out with a regular "salary review" where I try to ensure everyone is paid fair market rate for their job. This happens maybe every 18 months or so for new grads, and less frequently as people get closer to salary ceilings for our location.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  My company doesn’t fire anybody so low performers are often moved into management or get to do new green field projects. :(. Good performers are stuck doing maintenance work on the money making products.
- PaulStatezny 6y ago
  This is perhaps the most useful comment with actual solutions in a thread with a mostly hopeless vibe. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, I may be referencing it in the coming year.
sameersegal 6y ago
I am in the quest of a system myself. I have tried various systems and asked other companies (big and small) on theirs. My tech startup was around 25-30 employees over 5 years. We have tried Balanced Scorecards/OKRs linked systems, 360 Evaluations, etc and ended up making a mix. We used Google Sheets and asked for qualitative feedback on defined headers (skill with KPIs & culture/values), and a rating (1-5). Each of the headers had weightage that changed with roles & levels. We tried to make promotions and compensation changes as data driven as possible, but they were inline with intuition / general opinion. To the employee it always felt like "Why did we do all this for such little change?!" It sucks but you need to improve the system across many years. With every round try and understand signal vs noise. That's how you build trust. Consistency is key. A few learnings regardless of the system that I learnt the hard way: * Communication. You need to communicate before, during and after the process. You need to make it relatable for all levels of employees. Give them specific templates with specific examples. You need to remove the narrative of you-vs-them, doing-this-to-justify-an-increase, and bring focus on reflection. * Frequency/Cycle. "if it hurts, do it more often" is the quote that applies to this. Never let it slide. Minimum every six months, ideally every quarter. * Review of KPIs. You need to review the KPIs every week without fail. It forces you to focus on metrics that you can move on a week-on-week basis. Anything that changes in step function over a month/quarter/year can be broken into a smaller metric. * Rewards and Recognitions. We were always late on this. Always rolling out the red carpet when someone threatened to quit. It always felt like extortion as the manager. Don't wait for the cycle to call out extreme performance (great and terrible). Give negative feedback in private as quickly as possible. Do a non-monetary (Amazon Gift Coupons etc) for great performance. Wait for promotions and compensation. * Pay performance linked pay well. I think this was what I got wrong the most. I did not plan the company finances well enough to pay out immediately. I would say "Hey great performance! We will pay you $$ but in 2-3 months when our situation improves". That erodes trust in a moment. * Getting and acting on feedback. I struggled on this one too and made many excuses -- we are going through a curve Hope this helps. I would love to hear from others.
heymijo 6y ago
Performance management is subjectivity masquerading as objectivity. I'm a broken record about this.
- heymijo 6y ago
  In theory performance management should be about helping people improve. In practice performance management is about four things: 1) Pay 2) Promotions 3) Accountability (e.g. firing) 4) To satisfy legal requirements (perceived and real) Performance management falls under the umbrella of HR. HR's historical roots are in compliance. In the 90's when cost vs. profit center was the rage, the HRBP model emerged to prove HR could provide business value beyond compliance. HRBP is the dominant model now but it hasn't had the impact its creator intended. Inertia is a powerful thing. Combine HR's roots in compliance, with the above four reasons performance management exists in practice and that will give you a good way to understand why performance management works the way it does. If you're learning about these things in an effort to improve your own organization's practices then you can also use the above to evaluate any proposed changes and think about what they would have to contend with. History is replete with failures. Unless you are in a small organization, with total control over incentives and the culture then I will leave you with a quote from Blade: "Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill."
nemetroid 6y ago
You fill in a bunch of forms during the year, at the end they tell you you've placed in the highest tier, and as a reward you get a 3.5% pay increase instead of 3.0%.
spaceisballer 6y ago
I’m a big fan of Dr. Deming’s suggestions in this realm (for those not familiar he was involved with helping the auto industry in Japan post WWII among other things). Basically we focus too much on the who and not the what. The manager creates the system to which the worker is involved in, then you judge the employee on your system. So performance reviews are just ways to blame. Instead power needs to be placed in the hands of the employee. They are closest to the problem and the manager is supposed to empower them and basically remove impediments. I’d have to go back to the books but I recall him saying a three tier system but really aimed at seeing what employees need help and those excelling that need to help distribute their expertise to help the processes and continual improvement.
jkingsbery 6y ago
(Disclaimer: I work at Amazon, but don't speak on behalf of the company. Just sharing some bits about my experience, this is just my experience and doesn't reflect official Policy.) Prior to working at Amazon, I had mostly worked for start-ups. The thing I found at startup is that people are trying to figure out processes, and it's kind of hard. Most people putting in a process (whether that's HR or the founding team) are trying to do their best, but start-ups aren't at a large enough scale where they really need to have scalable processes, and for individual contributors all the distinctions are pretty informal anyway, so there's usually no individual contributor promotion path. At Amazon, I was fortunate to work under someone who had been my boss previously, and we had a good working relationship. He was not afraid to give me blunt, useful feedback about either my work or how my work was perceived. At some of the start-ups I worked with, part of the year-end evaluation involved filling out a form with a lot of evaluation criteria - the employee would fill out a self-eval form, and the manager would fill out a form, and then they would compare during the evaluation meeting. There's no such equivalent at Amazon. One thing that overall I like about Amazon's performance management in terms of promotions is how it's centered around a document that you and your manager write together. There are some tedious aspects to the process, but if nothing else when you go up for promotion you know what your manager is officially telling other people are your strengths and weaknesses. The flip side of the process is that decisions about your promotion are being made based sometimes on the quality of your promo doc. I'm not sure about all the company, but at least in the team I was on some of the senior folks set aside time for reviewing promo docs that they were working on with other members of the team to iron out any "doc writing" issues. We don't really have an official OKR system, but as a more senior engineer my personal goal has generally been to enable whatever my team's goal is for the quarter or year (launch this product; get this architecture document done; research how to solve this problem). Besides the official process, I've also found it useful to ask trusted peers how I'm doing, whether I'm giving them everything they need and expect of me. It's also pretty common to have one or more mentors outside of your team to give you more informal feedback.
narenchoudhary 6y ago
It was pretty standard (at least on paper) in my last company (a top 10 bank in terms of total assets). 1. Agree OKRs with managers in the beginning of the year (to be completed by March). Everyone at same level/hierarchy will have same baseline. 2. Performance evaluation in October. Employees discuss their achievements with managers. 3. Results disclosed in February. This waterfall-ish process never really worked: 1. Over the year priorities change, teams evolve, and products take new directions. So, everyone used to put vague OKRs. 2. Evaluation process is a black box. Performance metrics (if there really were any) were never disclosed, and were calibrated at multiple levels. 3. You get to know only your evaluation. No data to compare to whatsoever. I've seen this doing damage only. People with good visibility, and network used to get better ratings despite average work. Silent hard-workers will get average ratings, and will leave.
dimitar 6y ago
I manage 30 people, but I review only 10 of them and the rest are reviewed by my team-leads. We use KPIs and 360 feedback. These are not perfect measures, and I acknowledge that often, but are good enough for some purposes. Performance reviews are easy for all sides if there is nothing new in them. If you either side is surprised during a performance review they are not talk to each other nearly enough during the reviewed period. If I had the opportunity to evaluate I would experiment with more frequent feedback - like monthly sessions, small forms focusing on a very few key items.
- edgefield0 6y ago
  What are your thoughts on 360 reviews? I've heard the process can be very devisive?
  - dimitar 6y ago
    They allow me to see if I'm missing something (another way of looking at it they also prevent me from being totally unjust). So they are ok as an information source, but can create nasty incentives. So you don't give them too much weight, you don't want them to influence employees too much. We used to do that and it impacted company culture negatively IMHO. Now it is under 20% of the score and so it cannot be abused, but it remains a useful tool.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    I want to do 360s on the managers two level up and higher. Because they are the real problem in my view. I hate snitching on my direct team members not knowing how the the feedback is used so I usually just praise them without much detail.
    - dimitar 6y ago
      We are not a big shop so there are not many levels up but the managers, including myself also got 360 reviews.
      - 6y ago
jdmichal 6y ago
I'm actually defining this process for the first time in my current company. I'll explain my philosophy behind performance levels and goals. I'd love any feedback. I'm specifically trying to make this an actionable process. First, the levels, because I perhaps have a different interpretation of these than I'm used to seeing. There are essentially three levels that correspond to performance compared to expectations. So underperforming, performing, and overperforming. Only underperforming carries a negative connotation [0], because it means that you are not meeting the expectations for your level. In contrast, overperforming means that you are reaching beyond your current level. So, hopefully we have zero people underperforming. Also, hopefully we have the vast majority of people performing. Because overperforming basically means we need to be finding an expanded role for that person, which we may or may not have. If too many people are overperforming, then we can maybe expect turf wars as people start trying to expand their role without guidance, which is terrible for morale. Hopefully we can balance overperformers with growth, so we are moving people to expanded roles and then filling in below with new hires. So, given this leveling, there are two types of goals: baseline and growth. Baseline goals apply to the entire team and define those baseline expectations for that team. Meeting these goals will keep the team out of underperforming territory [1]. Growth goals are tailored to a specific individual, and detail specific targets to work on. The idea is to provide meaningful growth to the person and their capabilities, with an eye towards expanding their role. Over time, having and meeting these growth goals will result in overperforming as the individual fills that expanded role more and more. [0] Caveat: I would expect a junior-level to be growing. So juniors who are not overperforming are worrisome. [1] There's a bit of issue here in team vs individuals. Generally, as long as the team is successful, I tend to err on the side of overrating individuals. After all, part of the reason we make teams is to allow them to shore up weaknesses and play to strengths. However, I leave in an out by having a baseline goal centered on teamwork and team success. So if someone is not contributing as expected to the team, there's something to call them out on.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
renewiltord 6y ago
We used Google Sheets. Honestly, it appeared that culture was more important than tooling here.
vosper 6y ago
I've never worked anywhere that OKRs are actually taken seriously or followed through. They'll get rolled out with a big hype, people will fill them out with varying degrees of diligence and understanding of how OKRs are supposed to work. 3 months later they're already forgotten and out of date. Some managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because that's what they were told to do, but that'll peter out once they realise no-one else in the org is taking it seriously. 6 - 12 months later there'll be a half-hearted attempt to reset and resurrect the OKR process, but after the first time people take it even less seriously the second time around, and after a few more months OKRs are never mentioned again.
- edgefield0 6y ago
  I've had a similar experience with OKRs. The issue becomes how often to review and update? On the surface, OKRs seems like it would be a helpful tool but in practice it seems pretty cumbersome and only moderately useful to guide goal directed action.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    OKRs are useful at the level of the company that has medium and long term goals, not merely keeping the lights on and reacting to short term emergencies. An OKR is about a paragraph of text per quarter, hardly seems cumbersome.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ggregoire 6y ago
  > 3 months later they're already forgotten and out of date. Some managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because that's what they were told to do, but that'll peter out once they realise no-one else in the org is taking it seriously. > 6 - 12 months later there'll be a half-hearted attempt to reset and resurrect the OKR process, but after the first time people take it even less seriously the second time around, and after a few more months OKRs are never mentioned again. At GitLab (I don't work there but it's explained in their public handbook), OKRs are updated/redefined every quarter. Seems a good way to avoid the issues you are describing. https://about.gitlab.com/company/okrs https://about.gitlab.com/company/okrs
jimnotgym 6y ago
HR people in the UK use 'performance management' as a euphemism for a kind of legal constructive dismissal. 1) Their attitude stinks but nothing specific that can be picked up in a disciplinary on its own 2) They have been in the job for a few years, and their old manager never recorded the behaviour problems 3) Their role is not redundant So to get them out you meet regularly, set short term goals, and be really picky about not meeting them. The whole thing is designed to make the staff miserable so they leave or get sacked for missing the goals, whilst building up a substantial volume of paperwork supporting a legal defence at tribunal. Or less cynically it allows the staff to understand what is expected of them, so they perform better. This never works IMHO
- funnybeam 6y ago
  As someone that has been in this position (manager in the UK) I have to agree and think you have summed it up perfectly. However, it is occasionally successful and those (admittedly rare) occasions have been some of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I also don’t think that what you have described is necessarily a bad thing. As long as the manager goes into it in good faith and genuinely tries to understand what the problems are and to help solve those problems then the process works well for everyone - either they improve and become a happy and productive employee or they leave (voluntarily or not) and can seek a position more suited to their skills or personality. Most of the times I have been through this the person involved was perfectly capable of doing the job but they just didn’t want to for various reasons and putting them on an improvement plan helped them see this and they move on themselves before they were forced to
egberts1 6y ago
Survival of the fittest: after being at the lowest 10% for three of five years, you get washed out
fsloth 6y ago
To my knowledge there is no performance management as such (at least in my subsidiary). We have a mandatory quarterly review, but it's intent seems to be to maintain the manager-employee relationship to at least a bare minimum, and to offer a platform to collect data if someone is really, really not pulling their weight.
29athrowaway 6y ago
From a task-oriented perspective, developer A can seem more productive than developer B because developer A marked more tasks as finished than developer B. The problem is that marking a task as finished does not mean that its deliverable is solid. A developer can game the system by leaving technical debt behind for others to fix. In this way, the developer is stealing productivity from others, by forcing them to spend more time reading, debugging, refactoring their half-baked code. A neophyte manager may buy into this approach to performance, and even encourage it. But after a few iterations of this unsustainable practice of leaving tech-debt behind for no reason, reality sets in: now you need an army of engineers to get things done because the system becomes fragile and complicated. And you also need an endless amount of documentation that is constantly getting out of sync. In a way, under poor performance management rules, development becomes like a game of pool: it's not only about having a higher score, but also about making it more difficult for others to have a high score. If you want high productivity, recognize this and penalize it.
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Traubenfuchs 6y ago
At my previous company we had to pick goals that aligned with the goals of our role/level and the goals of the company. It was a shit show. Our partner in charge would reject goals until everyone was struck with goals that were very far putside everyones comfort zone. Everyone hated it. As senior dev / senior consultant I had to pick goals like „prepare a pitch for a potential customer“, stretch goal „win a pitch“. I didn‘t want to do this. I don‘t care about sales. I want to design and develop systems for someone who wants me to do that, not convince someone to let me do it. By now almost everyone quit. Current company: I can work in peace. Bi-weekly 1:1 with my manager that is usually over rather quickly.
_t0du 6y ago
First company: My manager met with me once over two years. It was 18 months into my just over two years stay, and all she told me was "We don't know eachother at all so I can't really judge your performance." She gave me the standard 7% and we never spoke again. Second company: It was a huge joke. The CTO invented KPIs that were unattainable and didn't matter, and we were given raises purely because our contract was profitable. Third company: We had such a ridiculous process of "Write three goals and go over them with your manager", which turned into "Just write anything so HR doesn't complain." The goals were totally useless. Engineers did not have the ability to decide what they worked on or how it went, but the goals implied they did. It was awful and, luckily, did not effect bonus targets. I honestly think that "performance management" at most companies is a huge joke. I haven't seen it, and none of my peers have seen it, run successfully or be taken seriously. Companies want to pretend they care about your career trajectory and goals only until an employees goals require any legitimate effort from the company's side. The goals/KPIs are pretty much only successful if an employee sets those goals to be "Do whatever their manager thinks they should do", which I would argue isn't a goal at all.
totaldude87 6y ago
My experience: Most of the time, all it takes , is to beat the system.. In one of the companies I worked for : one hand we were doing marvels in automating stuff and repetitive work which saves ton of manual efforts and reduces human errors , and guess what ! its not even accounted for in the standard goals.. Sometimes you need to stare at the bullshit and say here we go and beat the crap out of it..
jldugger 6y ago
Generally, it's a dumpster fire. In any rational world, execs would be basing their OKRs on something similar to https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundamental-equation-of-saas https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundame.... Instead it's a trickle up process whereby people tell execs what they want to work on, then the execs group those into OKRs. Also the OKRs appear to only have one level, despite being an org with a thousand people. And finally, the system uses the internal wiki to track, rather than integrating with the project/issue backlog tool. Annual reviews are even worse. People fish for peer reviews that paint the rosiest picture. They only happen once a year and if something bad is going to happen to you, I recommend it happen directly after reviews, and absolutely never right before them, the recency bias is huge.
- randycupertino 6y ago
  > People fish for peer reviews that paint the rosiest picture. I found this happening when our firm used KPI metrics (key performance indicators). Whichever metric management emphasized, those would shoot way up via ... weird methods (all sorts of finagling, but not necessarily helping overall firm performance). Every time they optimized for some other lever it would have all sorts of unintended outcomes on other metrics and overall people spent more time trying to get around the system and increase their metrics than just doing a good job. System was scrapped < 12 mo later.
  - sriku 6y ago
    Don't reward raw metrics. Goodhart's law is too real in this context.
dghughes 6y ago
Everyone got a 3 rating every quarter. Pointless.
underwater 6y ago
I'm surprised at the references to OKRs as a part of performance reviews. Yes, OKRs have elements of focusing and measuring progress, but they are also about encouraging people to be ambitious and communicating intent. It's generally accepted that using them for performance reviews is a bad thing because it encourages people to be conservative and create hackable key results.
SergeAx 6y ago
We are a team of ~50 software engineers and about the same amount of non-engineering staff. We have a quarterly performance review. It starts from setting goals at the beginning of the quarter. Then we have a home-brewed CRM-like system to enter accomplishments, nominate peers, giving reviews and feedback and finally grading. Then managers talking to their reports, discussing results, giving and receiving feedback. Grades are from 2 to 5, greater is better. Normal grade is 4, it gives a bonus of 1/2 of monthly salary. 5 is 1 monthly salary and 3 is 1/4 of monthly salary. Our compensations are on market, so we ended up better compensated even after grade "3". Two 5's in a row is an occasion to talk about promotion. Two 3's is a reason to talk about leaving the company. That's about it, the whole process takes about two weeks, most of the time in a grade calibration process.
Ruth_K 6y ago
Most of the answers I would give to your questions are in this post: https://ivypanda.com/essays/performance-management-essay/ https://ivypanda.com/essays/performance-management-essay/
Aeolun 6y ago
Frankly, our personal performance goals are just copied straight from the department goals. Any attempt to make them a little sensible is met with a ‘just do what everyone else does’. That said, when performance review time comes around, that also means that it doesn’t really mean anything. The important thing is how your manager feels about you, and the rest is a formality.
obi-wan 6y ago
I'm currently working on solving this (still in the early stages). More specifically I'm working to objectively measure performance over time, with a strong focus on actionable insights to help you improve. If you would like to test this email adaobi@mesure.app. Or you can just email me your problems and i'll see if I can solve them.

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/

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.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    They're both important if you are in a large corp. They both need to praise and recommend you in order for you to be promoted (your manager has more to do on that). A bad word from either will kill any prospect of promotion instantly. They both need to carry their weight for the team and the department respectively. They put a ceiling on what your team and your department can do and can get (work, budget, opportunities). In a bad case there's simply no slot for promotion so you can't be promoted. In the worst case your team/department might get gutted.
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
Alternatively your manager could proactively give you bits and pieces of that positive feedback without being forced to by a formal, time-consuming process.
- electricslpnsld 6y ago
  And this is at a company that supposedly prioritizes constant feedback, we even have multiple mandatory training sessions per year on providing fast feedback. Go figure...
AnotherGoodName 6y ago
Stop your manager in their tracks next 1:1 and state you have some feedback about how you're feeling here. Start by noting that it's a very stressful time right now and that these concerns are even more important for you. Your manager would likely be hurt if you left and good managers appreciate upwards feedback so that they can correct on their side. The fact that the performance rating is good means your manager probably is acknowledging the work you do, just not to you. The manager input for ratings is hugely important at the FAANGs, so your manager is clearly telling others you're doing a great job. There's just clearly a gap here between you and her/him in that feedback. Source: Am a manager at one of the FAANGs. I'm finding that everyone is overthinking every bit of feedback right now. Clearly minor feedback is hard to differentiate compared to major feedback. Likely due to the video communications barrier and that everyone is a little bit more alone with their thoughts. I'm being cautious on delivery because of it. There's also less ad-hoc thank you's and acknowledgements going around due to the remote barriers.
- m0zg 6y ago
  > Stop your manager in their tracks next 1:1 BAD idea with most managers. Your manager is likely to be vindictive and insecure if confronted like that. Even with peer reviews in place managers have disproportionate influence on your reviews, and promo/comp decisions (something you readily acknowledge). If the manager treats you with disdain, it's almost impossible to fully reverse that - it's just human nature, let alone do so through confrontation. The best thing is to move on to greener pastures, of which there's vast abundance at any FANG. People can move around easily there by design: that way shitty managers get naturally de-staffed. Anything else is a sunk cost fallacy. Do yourself a favor, and go to a team where you're appreciated, respected, and can work alongside decent people. Do not tolerate this abuse. Otherwise your career will stall, you won't be able to do anything about it, and you'll feel miserable throughout. Source: been there, done that.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Yes. Suck up to the boss, then say you're interested in a new opportunity at Team X, or, sadly, you've accepted an offer to work somewhere else, or, you are quitting for personal reasons.
temikus 6y ago
Or just talk to them regarding how you feel. I concur with one of the commenters below regarding FAANG - you rarely get good feedback if your manager is not supportive of you.
Der_Einzige 6y ago
Is this Amazon? It sounds like Amazon...

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.
      - funnybeam 6y ago
        Wow. PIPs should only be used when someone is underperforming so badly they are damaging the team (and the business) at that point you have nothing to lose if they voluntarily leave (which in fact, is probably better for everyone) "what gets measured gets managed" is one of the reasons I don't like the usual metrics and performance reviews, but in the specific case of a PIP they are necessary. If someone meets the targets of the PIP but starts dropping other required behaviours then you just add that into the PIP to make sure they don't do that

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.
  - condercet 6y ago
    I had the displeasure of working for a company that had a similar review system, but it was quarterly rather than annual. Total nightmare.
  - edgefield0 6y ago
    Thanks for this detail. Was there any goal setting at the start of the review period so you understood what you were going to be evaluated against?
    - ghettoimp 6y ago
      The dimensions that you are scored on are fixed ahead of time and haven't changed in years. The individual goals are set in this year's review, evaluated in next year's review.
BeetleB 6y ago
My very cynical experience: > 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. In my experience, they've decided it already and don't really care what you put down - unless they want you to get a promotion and then they will care as they need buy-in from others. Particularly, if they want to screw you over, then it doesn't matter what you've written (i.e. even if you put in great accomplishments you can still get a poor rating). > Peer-review at least gives you a chance to call out outstanding work from your co-workers. Same thing here. We used to require naming 3 people to give peer feedback. When they want to screw someone, the manager would actively seek out negative reviews to support his case - regardless of whoever you picked. > And the review itself at least gives you a venue to hear what management thinks of what you have done. I can agree with this - although where I worked they'll let you know throughout the year. I did have one manager who was very reluctant to give negative feedback, though, so I suppose this benefits the employee where the manager is at least forced to formally give you negative feedback. Processes are good in general, but useless if the system doesn't value it. If the manager can actively go and solicit feedback from folks you didn't nominate, then why waste my time and the time of the people I did nominate? I cheered when my company stopped doing annual reviews.

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.

stennie 6y ago
Great comment! My corollary would be that "Many managers have never had a great role model". In my first role as an engineering manager I thought it was the logical career progression and promotion from lead, but my preparation was more along the lines of "I've had managers, I can do what I think they do". I was very fortunate that my company at the time was supportive with follow-up training and building a peer group of newly minted managers, but it would have been more ideal to have some prior leadership & management training so I was more aware of the role and responsibilities I was signing up for. I think training provides helpful insight into intentional motions and being a competent manager, but it is hard to beat experience and learning from some great role models. One secret I would tell any engineers considering management: "management is a career change, not a promotion". Charity Majors has some excellent blog posts on this, including the Engineer/Manager Pendulum: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/ https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum....
cbanek 6y ago
It's true that most of my managers have been terrible, which I think is honestly par for the course (statistically at least). I have had good managers, but for them, the performance review process actually tends to hamper them. A good manager who knows all the people under them are amazing and then has to stack rank them is going to make someone mad. Your manager only has so much power. Then it's their manager, and their manager. Managers don't have infinite amount of social capital, or even the amount they deserve. Some have too much. I agree, performance reviews can be a time to get feedback and make changes, but in general, I find the continuous feedback (from standup/team, customers, daily work, incoming types of bugs) much more useful. If anything, I feel that my written reviews have had a lot of dissonance with the financial results or lack of promotion. Many times I can have glowing written reviews, but due to stack ranking, budget, or whatever other excuse they want to use, many times it just doesn't line up with results from management. And it's impossible to hold management to account in general, which is why HR is there. So when you're doing bad, performance reviews are a stick. And when you're doing good, they dangle the carrot, but many times you can't grab it. Then they force everyone to do mandatory training about how objective the process is, even though it really isn't. And that level of gaslighting has spelled the end for many good employee/employer relationships IMHO.