Ask HN: What do you think of performance appraisal at your workplace?

That being said, the performance review is basically a formality. We have 5 steps in each pay grade, and I have never seen someone miss a step after each year. Someone could be sitting at their desk reading their Kindle all day and still get their 5% jump every year. In addition to that, nearly 100% of promotions are based on tenure. You will probably go from a level 1 --> 2 --> 3 --> Senior every year, and supervisory/management positions are only opened upon the incumbent's retirement (to be filled typically by the most tenured person to apply, regardless of fit).

It is not a good system. Lots of people stick around who should receive the boot, and the wrong people are placed in supervisory/management positions simply because they have been there for a while.

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/

As always, this is my single-sample personal view, so please don't mistake this for anything beyond that.

It's true, we do place a lot of importance on complexity and impact, which are fuzzy metrics, potentially inconsistently defined, and can be subject to circumstance. Yes, engineers do suffer the temptation to game things by releasing their work prematurely and not committing themselves to supporting it. And yes, not all managers know how to set expectations appropriately, occasionally resulting in disappointment and confusion for their employees.

However, that's the individual's perspective. Promotions serve the institution first, and the individual second, and I'd like to offer the institutional perspective.

Promotion to senior engineer is a big freaking deal. Once you are Senior, you've effectively been given the keys to the kingdom. It's the industry equivalent of tenure. Want to transfer to a team? No problem, your manager knows they're going to get someone who's been through hell and is able to deliver. Want to join another company? Great, "Senior Engineer, Google" is an indisputable mark of quality, you'll at least get an interview.

If there's one thing I've learned in my time here, it's that false positives are way more costly than false negatives. Hire someone who can't do the work? Enjoy six months of trying to grow them plus however long it takes to get them to leave and release their headcount. Promote someone who isn't indisputably good enough for the title? Enjoy watching them fail to meet expectations cycle after cycle, trying to grow them, only to watch them leave out of frustration a year later.

Yeah, it kinda sucks as an individual contributor because proving yourself is difficult and subject to external forces. That's torture for the sort of ambitious overachievers that tend to be drawn to this company. However, the thing that makes your career growth difficult is the same thing that makes the work so challenging and the work environment so pleasant.

Also, there are some recent developments the author didn't mention, and I presume he left after this was put into place. A lot of focus has been drawn away from the rank of Senior. On paper, things used to be "up or out" until Senior, even though that wasn't really applied in my experience. Now it's only "up or out" until L4, one promotion below Senior. Plus the Senior promotion process is getting streamlined somewhat, although time will tell how that plays out.

EDIT: And then there's money. Managers have enough leeway that overachieving L4s can make almost as much as an L5, so it's not like the lack of a promotion is impoverishing you.

EDIT EDIT: To give some more context on the process itself:

For non-promo candidates, we do mutual reviews. You list the colleagues you'd like to review you and list the projects you've worked on and your contribution to them. Then everyone comments on their colleagues' assessments.

Managers then get together and have a powwow in which they agree on who in their groups are giving exemplary performance at each level, and people are calibrated as above or below the models for their level.

For promo candidates, the self-assessment is much more in-depth, and a committee of unrelated people get together and perform a similar assessment, except against a more abstract rubric describing expectations at each level.

We often do code reviews. I sometimes do pair programming. Once in a while I have a private chat about something specific that's not code related.

And this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-B...

Inputs are company goals and a self assessment of how your current work aligns with them. Your manager then provides review.

Performance is a function of the business line. There is no carrot only stick. So I think promotions and good performance reviews are a function of how impactful your role is to some core business function. If you are not in a profit center then you have to justify how your work saves money overall.

They also encourage maladaptive behavior among and across teams. Stack ranking is particularly bad and I don't think companies have found ways to measure performance without inducing competitiveness. Exceptions might be multi-functional teams but these are more akin to a sports team where the best players get playing time and they completely ignore the farm system.

This triggers an in-depth review, which consists of the chain of command asking themselves "Do I like this guy?", "Can we afford it?", and "How much of a pain in the ass would it be if this person quit?"

Repeat every 12 - 18 months.

But I suspect you are talking about something more formal, something tied to salary increases.

I think such appraisals are damaging to the relationship between employer and employee. The only benefit is for the company in that they make it clear that you can't have maximum marks on everything (which is fair enough), but then tie that to salary increases. "Well, we would have given you a bigger pay rise, but you didn't get top marks on this particular skill." Or similarly, evidence to get rid of someone you wanted out.

This feedback is anonymised, reviewed in terms of personal goals identified at the previous review, and a new set of goals is generated for the next period during a review meeting with each team member.

There are no objective metrics, and the focus is on helping employees to identify and improve any areas they want to work on, with peer feedback used as a tool to help identify those areas and understand if they are engaging in behaviour or practices that might be positive or negative without realising it.

This works pretty well, tends to lead to constructive criticism that can be tied to actual steps to be taken to improve performance, and removes the pressure of having to work to an arbitrary metric.

I appraise myself - have I learned new marketable skills? If so? I jump to another job that will pay the equivalent of 3 or 4 years of raises.

We were judged by the number of lines committed to our CVS.

They realized that was probably not the best of ideas when a colleague and I checked in 1M lines of comments just prior to our review.

It changes every couple years, but the outcome is basically a rating of below/meets/exceeds expectations. No one is ever fired, and no one is ever promoted based on these reviews (IT staff don't even have a career ladder to climb). The rating will determine if your annual raise is CPI or CPI +- 1% so it doesn't really affect salary either. The occasional market review which can bump you from lowest decile of market to lowest quartile of market dwarfs the effects of the review ratings.

So it's basically pointless and most managers don't pretend otherwise.

The best thing I can say in favor of the current system is that the managers I know realize that it's a mess/work in progress. It seems like the poorly aligned official standards are being duly ignored for now. I'm not a fan of subjective evaluations, but they're better than completely random "objective" ones. We'll see how it goes in a year or two.

How is it a mess? Line engineers and managers had opposing goals (maximizing bug counts fixed, minimizing bugs--and those are terrible metrics even without the mismatch), individuals had goals that had no relation to their work, or which they had no power to affect.

Team leads had to give feedback, but there was zero structured discussion about standards: I had to ask a manager how to translate my evaluation of a developer into a numeric scale.

My manager had to stack rank 5 people on a 1-5 scale. This was theoretically not just ranking "first" through "last", but ranking from "exceptional" through "unacceptable".

Most (95%) people want to do their fair share and be good at their job. Some years they do a little worse because of health or family issues, some years they hit it out of the park. The 5% who don't want to do this are always a problem and need to be catered for separately. High performers can get promotions. Appraisals are to determine these two things and share information.

Looked at another way, I was docked because I consistently outperform estimated time to delivery, which means the company actually makes more money off my work because we charge our customers for development work.

So, what do I think of performance appraisals at my work place? I'm actively looking for other work.

I also believe that performance appraisals, for anything but bottom rung employees, are currently done one way only. They should be done from both perspectives. The managed employees reporting to the managers boss. This way, ineffectual middle managers can be disposed of.

Simple warm human communication beats all? systems

There is a process managers are supposed to follow for promotions, which is good on paper, but it's pretty clear managers only do the paperwork steps of that and pick based on their own criteria. The one aspect of that that seems to function well is managers get nudged about people who haven't been promoted in a while.

Usual funding issues with promotions, but I think that's true everywhere.

The only positive thing I can say about it is that it's less stressful than the interview process, which is my only reason for staying somewhere that I'm not particularly happy.

The only meaningful self-appraisal is "can I make more money doing the same work for someone else?" And the only meaningful goals are "build my resume to make myself a more valuable employee for any company, not necessarily my current employer."

It has always been a waste of time to require the employee's participation in the review process. We are perfectly capable of appraising ourselves, and when we do it, we are always doing it in the context of the whole job market, and not just one company. But no one is ever going to admit "my goal is to jump ship for your leading competitor within the next year and get 20% more pay for doing exactly the same work." We will happily tell the current employer "I plan to increase meaningless metric X by Y% of completely subjective measurement units this year." We might even put that on our resumes, and pretend it's not bullshit in an interview.

It's pants-on-head stupid. Just hire managers that know how to assess the performance of their reports for whatever it is they specifically do, and trust them to do it to the best of their ability. The amount of cargo-culting used to prop up those who are completely incompetent to assemble a working team and keep it humming is ridiculous. Eventually, these companies are going to have to promote more tech workers into tech management, because they'll be the only ones that actually know what good tech work looks like. Slapping on the same performance appraisal process used by the sales department from the top-down just isn't going to get around that.