You are lucky. I have never had a really useful review. We also do 360s but you never get the real comments but only a compiled version which then is also not very useful.
I'd agree with this, I've had good experiences and downright painful ones with performance reviews. I've always found the process outcomes are heavily influenced by the relationship with my manager. I feel like you need a certain comfort level discussing with them or it tends to fall into that "Waste of Time" the author is referencing.
I rarely receive useful, actionable advice during the formal annual review. Critical feedback, especially, is lacking (the past two years, I've gotten "exceeds expectations" with no identified areas for improvement—really!?). The best feedback has come from colleagues, in the moment.
At my current employer, we completely reinvented our performance management [1] and it has worked out to be so much better. We spend less time on coming up with arbitrary goals and really focus on strengths and developmental needs. The overhead involved with spending a lot of unproductive hours on performance has been minimized. The conversations are really about what people have contributed, what their strengths are, and how the firm can support their development goals. Also, by using our new performance management system, the conversations around promotions and such are much more streamlined and data-centric. Overall, the expectations of both sides are better managed.
Good stuff, although I think the "what do I want to be when I grow up" question is needlessly infantilizing. Much better is something like, "what am I trying to accomplish?"
For peer feedback, I strongly recommend a trick I stole from my last boss: manager interviews of the employee's peers. You ask the employee for some people who they've worked closely with, mix add in others you think would give good perspective, and then do a short (30-60 mins), structured interview with open-ended questions and follow-up on patterns.
With that material in hand, a manager can write up a peer feedback digest that I think is way more useful than what normally comes out of the process.
At least part of the high cost can be explained by HR departments wanting to hedge their bets in case someone needs to be fired for cause. Having a well documented paper trail of reviews which demonstrates that an employee was unfit or underperforming is the surest way to avoid a lawsuit if it comes to that. Whether or not it is worth a couple of hours of every employees' time every year is up for debate.
I've been working professionally for over a decade, and it never occurred to me that performance reviews were meant to provide career advice. I thought they were meant to help you understand if your are meeting the expectations for your current capacity. For example, as an engineer at company X, is my development-time vs customer-support-time supposed to be 50/50, 80/20, 20/80, etc.. and how well am I aligning with those specific expectations. I consider this separate from "career advice".
Ideally, that should be tracked in near-real-time—either through reporting from a time tracking or project management system, or maintained manually by management. If you're only getting that feedback on an annual basis, it's going to be tough for you to adapt.
In fact, they're mostly meant as a way for HR to have a paper trail to fire people. That's the only real reason for them to exist, and any good that managers do with them is incidental.
Such a paper trail can be useful in more situations than just firing someone. For example, consider the values of performance reviews in aggregate.
I can think of many reasons why upper management may want to analyze aggregate trends of performance reviews throughout the company, broken down by team, department, manager etc. They can use those trends as data-driven feedback on policy and personnel changes. That is, they can answer questions like “how has our re-org affected overall performance YTD?” Or, “has changing our interviewing methods resulted in higher quality performance reviews of newer employee cohorts?”
You can also use the information to optimise your workforce.
Lets say you're a big home improvement chain opening a new store. You need to get 150 workers to staff the new store.
Do you want to hire 250 people cold and hand the new store off to them? No.
You want to take the top 100 performers from nearby stores, who are busting for a chance to prove themselves, and pepper pot them into the new store, in positions of team leadership, seniors, etc. (And then do a bunch of hiring for the remaining 150, and the 100 to replace the ones you just transferred).
These are the sorts of win-win efficiencies you can pull off if you have good performance data for employees.
(Also astonishingly rare to see in action in the real world, but that's another story :)
I've found performance reviews are good for understanding upwards perception and expectations when a manager doesn't communicate well.
In my experience, I've found that they've lead to an, "oh, I better get out of this place ASAP," or, "oh, there's a problem with my manager that I better raise ASAP with his boss."
Thanks for calling this out... In my career, I've seen some reviews be a complete waste of time and others provide value. It depends on the company and how seriously your manager takes the process.
During my time at Yahoo the process was an absolute joke as leadership was changing on the daily. When I was a PM at Intuit, I received feedback which I still leverage years after the fact.
People shouldn't feel like performance reviews are the only way to receive feedback. Feedback needs to happen regularly, not on an annual basis. Feedback should also come from people you respect, not the people your boss tells you to listen to at work.
What's the alternative, exactly? You still need some way to tell people whether they are promoted or how big a bonus they get and why it happened that way. Whether you call that communication a "performance review" or not seems like an irrelevant detail.
> You still need some way to tell people whether they are promoted or how big a bonus they get and why it happened that way.
If you've been giving them actionable feedback throughout the year, then it should be as simple as "here is your new salary and your new title" and no one should be surprised about anything.
When that works, it works well. When that fails (e.g. people disagree as to how they performed relative to their peers), it fails badly. Performance reviews (if done well) lower the risk of system breakdown.
(Not to defend performance reviews explicitly--there may be a much better approach that accomplishes the same goal)
That's not necessarily true. When managers are doing a good job of regularly communicating with an employee and having critical conversations in regular 1:1s, nothing in a performance review should come as a surprise. If you've ever been surprised in a performance review, your manager failed in their responsibility--and you probably also failed yourself in that you didn't push for regular conversations.
Sure, those disagreements still happen. But, when things are transparent, there's very little risk of a "system breakdown" and a very high chance that a dissatisfied employee (who doesn't seem to be performing well in our scenario) will leave to make room for someone with more potential.
Edit: I just noticed the GP was jedberg; we both spent enough time at Netflix to see what each of us is describing work well in practice. :)
If scheduled infrequent conversations about that can adjust those expectations, wouldn't consistent frequent conversation adjust them sooner/easier?
In perfect world I'd have a mind-reading powered live dashboard I could check that shows a graph of anonymized averages of my perceived performance across broad categories (teams, peers vs subordinates vs leadership, etc.) and a single point for my direct report.
Getting feedback each year when there's no surprises feels like a formality and waste of time. In the rare case that there are any surprises it's disappointing and I get to make adjustments months late, having been left in the dark.
Sure. That's still a performance review. Performance reviews are usually unstressful and simple if you and your manager have had good communication for a while. That is the goal to aim for whether you call it a "performance review" or not.
I love when it happens like that, but many companies have managers rotating very quickly. So you are left in the dust. Its only fair for the previous manager to formalize their thinking and position on how they felt about your performance. So that the next manager can see that and you're not ending back to square one.
Yeah, and so it's very easy a lot of times. But you still need some formal paper trail, if for no other purpose than getting that salary into the HR system.
IME reviews are like icebergs: the conversation is the easy part and pretty small. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes throughout the year, and it's useful to have a process to base that off of. For instance, someone has to balance your recommendation for your employee's new salary and title against your peer's recommendation for their employee's new salary and title. And so your performance review information has to be sufficient to make that case to your management.
As an alternative to jedberg's "you know why not trying talking to them more than once a year/quarter". A fixed pay schedule: transparent, easy to plan around, easy to know if you should stay or go if you get an offer somewhere else.
If the company is giving individual bonuses they can and should be tied to tangible outcomes anyway or it's just going to be a source of even more office politicking (i mean it's inescapable either way but it's a more vs less thing).
Most performance reviews are basically convoluted ways to say: "Do I like you?". Actual performance has miniscule effect on the rating, maybe only in a decision if one should be let go or not, but even excellent results won't save one if they aren't liked. I have seen many top performers single-handedly building branches of business being let go when they finished and somebody wanted to claim credit or push their friends once profit foundation was laid.
God this is so true it hurts. It's what I've always hated about performance reviews. It feels like an attack on my personally because it's never about my work, it's about my clothes or my face. One memorable experience was when my boss came out of no where and said "You don't seem happy here. You don't smile enough. You're now on probation until you get your act together."
Not one sentence about my work as a software engineer; not one sentence about specific interactions that were problematic, or whether or not I had been reported for anything. Just vague as can be.
This article is a nice example of quality clickbait. Title: 'Performance Reviews Are A Waste Of Time', ooh contentious. The lede, 'formal performance reviews are a waste of time...', switched 'performance review' for 'formal performance review' while you weren't looking. Now he's set up a new context for his answer - 'a different type of performance review' (where the process starts with a self-assessment)! Lovely.
Bonus points if the author runs a consulting company specializing in alternative performance reviews or a SAAS startup building software to facilitate them. :-)
I'm the Engineering Manager for the Reviews team at Reflektive (performance management SAAS), and I have to say that this article rings true with me personally and aligns with our company's mission. The recent trend when it comes to performance management is that companies a) no longer want the feedback process to be centrally driven and b) feedback between managers and direct reports should be given on a more frequent cadence. The latter point is especially challenging, because no software out there can magically can change an individual's behavior; the company culture[1] has to exist first to foster it.
Every company is different, but for some traditional companies Reflektive works with them to initially roll out Performance Reviews because companies have dedicated budget for it. Then, once they're comfortable with our tools, our Customer Success team partners with them to craft a roll-out plan for our "Check Ins" product, which is a lightweight feedback tool intended on used every 3 months. For Check Ins, it's meant to be purely about development; at Reflektive, our Check Ins contain no performance rating scores nor do we use it for compensation (we have a separate process for that).
The good news is that a LOT of companies, ranging from small startups to large 50k-employee enterprise companies, actually want to shift towards a more employee-driven model. Our team's number one priority right now is to empower employees/managers to own their own feedback process and to increase the frequency of feedback between managers and their teams. I'm super excited about what's coming down the pipeline!
Why do raises and bonuses have to match up with yearly performance reviews? Why not make them more immediate. Great launch everyone here’s a bonus. You went above and beyond for this release so we’d like to give you this bonus. You’ve been working very hard the last while and we think you deserve a raise. Nothing says it has to be at specific times.
> Avoid the temptation to synthesize and anonymize feedback that really should be given directly.
Yes, yes, YES!
When I solicit feedback for people on my team, I always remind everyone that anonymous feedback is the worst. Honest, direct feedback is incredibly valuable.
Feedback should be the catalyst for a conversation; not a one time statement to be interpreted or ignored.
That works great in a non-dysfunctional team. In many teams, communication is so toxic that anonymous feedback is the only way to express grievances. I've had team meetings where my manager scolded us for 90 minutes because he received a poor rating in an anonymous review from his subordinates. He was surprised that no one had expressed disatisfaction; yet he never encouraged open, honest, reprisal-free communication.
Performance reviews should be always on-going. A good manager will be constantly giving you feedback on the things that would happen in a performance review.
I liked the idea of the self review, and doing that once or twice a year, as a good stepping off point for a discussion on career pathing, but in general, no one should ever be surprised by anything that would come up in that discussion, otherwise you haven't been a good manager.
It's up to the manager to make sure the feedback discussion happens often, and not wait for the employee to ask or wait for a formal review period.
This is total clickbait. He says performance reviews are terrible so instead.. write a performance review.
Seriously, what performance reviews in 2018 don't involve a self appraisal? Pretty much everything he recommends has been part of the performance review process at my company for the last 8 years. And I'm not saying our process couldn't be improved, but this article offers no real insights of any kind.
I was a young employee during a recession, and finding work was difficult. When I landed my first job I was I was grateful and focused on ways I might make my work contribute to the company's bottom line, by pushing the limits of my job description and tasks to ensure my role impacted revenue and value creation. I appreciated training and feedback, but forced myself to deliver results autonomously through self-teaching and long hours. Perhaps it was because I grew up as the son of a small business owner, or because I worked throughout high school and college, I was closely attuned to the businesses needs and I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations. How do I know? Because as I look back on what is now a long career I can't recall ever having a performance review, a counseling session, or retraining. I only remember anticipating needs and delivering results.
Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain.
It's not surprising it's hard to find. I think it helps if you are working in a place that rewards such initiative. In my experience, it is not always the case. How do you even screen someone for self-teaching and self-motivation by the way?
Self-teaching can be measured through asking probing questions about what the candidate does to keep up with new developments in their field. Self-motivation is harder to get at, but sometimes it helps to ask about what the candidate looks for in a role.
The best/worst advice I ever received was "you're doing a great job of what I ask you to, now I need you to do what I don't ask you to" -- at the time, it made no sense. Now, it's a core part of my work style. Developing autonomy is a very valuable skill, and I think that's what OP is driving at. It's also not something that'd been developed during my education.
I agree that performance reviews aren't particularly helpful because feedback should be delivered as you go, in the moment, with actionable and relevant examples.
Now I need you to make me want to. And no that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reward me, often it’s enough to feel like I won’t get in trouble for going the extra mile, or that at the very least it will be noticed when I do.
There’s only so often a person will give suggestions and extra effort to a lukewarm or negative response before they say fuck it and stop caring.
There’s only so often a person will give suggestions and extra effort to a lukewarm or negative response before they say fuck it and stop caring.
Bingo. I'm happy to put in extra effort, go the extra mile, and try to make things better... until about the second time that my efforts go unacknowledged, unimplemented, unrewarded, etc. At which point, what you'll get from me is "exactly what I'm asked to do, and no more, no less" from there out.
That's exactly it. A boss can't ask for initiative, unless they offer autonomy. Autonomy means you might do things differently than your boss would, so they need to be open to listening to you and letting you direct your efforts in the best way you know how.
Working autonomously is usually still working for someone, be it a boss or a client. I can deliver results, but I still need to know if I'm delivering value to the client. And since I am mere imperfect human, I know I can improve and so I crave feedback. I'd never want to work with someone so arrogant as to think they don't need constructive criticism from anyone.
It's not about reading minds, it's about taking the initiative to make things better or get things done without specifically being told what to do.
And there is a big difference between people that can and people that can't.
If your significant other reminded you to go to the grocery store, would you get a general idea of what she wanted and go get a bunch of stuff you know y'all need, even if it isn't on the list? Or would you only get the exact things she wrote on the list and nothing else, even though if you applied some initiative you'd realize that she wanted to make pancakes and she forgot to put milk on the list so you go ahead and grab the milk also.
It seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people stick exactly to the list and don't take that initiative.
More importantly, you're not in a hierarchical power relationship (probably) with your spouse. And at some point after management has demanded some amount of initiative and workers have implemented some amount of things on their own initiative (which is another barrier), there's a big question of why there's a manager at all, or at least why they get paid more.
Not the Op but I hire the same way and there is some questions I like to ask to gauge people's interest in "getting things done".
I like to ask about their passions outside of work. Video games? Sports? Communities they may be a part of?
I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself. Does this person like to dig into the details and figure out how something works and how they can make it better or do they just like something and not show much deeper interest? Do they tinker or try to make things better on the things they are passionate about? Do they even have things they are passionate about? (You'd be surprised how many people can't really answer this question, even in casual conversation.)
It's not full proof, but I've found that people that go the extra mile, people that are passionate and inquisitive and not always happy with the status quo, are people that are more likely to take the initiative when working on a project for me. At that point, it's my job to spark their interest in the product so they will (hopefully) apply that passion in the same way.
>> I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself
I used to think the same. But over time, i realised passion in other stuff doesn't correlate to passion at work. sometimes they end up being distraction.
Also there are people who don't like to share much outside of work.
I think more than passion, focus (esp. attention to details) is essential. Someone who understands depth of his/her work is likely to be better learner.
For e.g. everyone can use an open source library but underlying working of libraries are explored by a few.
> I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find.
Anyone with your profile should run their own business. It's unrealistic to expect somebody to work long hours, over-deliver for "maybe someday"-promises. People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it.
Not everyone has the skills to run their own business. Some people prefer to be part of a team and not at the top of the pyramid. They get satisfaction by contributing.
Right. But someone who's starting their own business has to spend all their time on that business, and is spending most of their income on that business. I have free time to devote to other things I find more rewarding.
Yes and no. Although you are getting your paycheck, it's extremely demotivating be the only person in a team who gives a damn about getting things done. It gets more demotivating with passive aggression from your coworkers that are afraid that your performance raises the bar for everyone. It gets even more demotivating to see others promoted behind your back because they were going to the bar with the boss while you were figuring out how to deliver that critical thing to the customers.
I have personally been in those shoes and had to learn the business skills the hard way. And I don't think I had any other choice aside from giving up and becoming just another employee who doesn't care.
If you are the only one giving a damn about getting things done then it means you are in the wrong team. All teams have their rock stars and their slower devs but if they are to be called a "team" then they should all care even if they can't contribute the same amount of quality or quantity of work.
Even if you are a rockstar, your pay might be only 20% higher than that of those "slackers", more often only 5-10% or even lower than them (seniority/friends/family etc.). So all you get is a sticker "rockstar" translating in time smoothly into "ninja" (=No Income, No Job or Assets) as you become burned out and slackers are promoted.
OK, you get paid but you have to slow down, play politics, form your/join a clique, because otherwise you become hated by all your colleagues for casting a shadow on them, then be driven slowly out of the company by hiding information from you and spreading rumors about you. In other words, you are wasting the most precious thing you have - time, where you could perform much much better, for some "standard salary". Is that a good bargain?
> Not everyone has the skills to run their own business. Some people prefer to be part of a team and not at the top of the pyramid. They get satisfaction by contributing.
Working 60+ hour weeks for a paycheck that can get gotten elsewhere provides no one with satisfaction. Anyone who rides programmers that hard will find the programmer firing his manager.
Almost none of the people that push you to do that are worth working for. Even a startup that provides RSUS.
If you want what the OP wants in an employee, you need to pay a minimum of a 30% premium over what they can get elsewhere.
I'd say that, in the professional world, most want to be part of a team because they want to trade the upside potential for stability and shorter, more predictable hours and a smaller, more defined scope of responsibility. You can't expect "change the world" passion from these people when they've traded that away as part of the bargain.
I think a lot of people prefer to be part of a team as it helps spread the responsibility (and more importantly, blame) around. I've worked a few "high powered" corporate jobs, and most so-called team-players at that level are really just team-blamers, yet conniving enough to single-handedly take credit for anything good that happens, while still appearing humble. It's pretty much why I quit and started my own firm. I like having the responsibility on my shoulders and enjoy putting my neck on the line. When I get something wrong, I'm only answerable to me (rather than be reprimanded by some know-it-all boss), and I can pick myself up quickly, reaim and try again. It's a less stressful experience with better results. For my staff, we discuss things, but I will never ever talk down to them or reprimand them like kids. If I do, I bet they'll just leave as soon as they can, as I did.
"People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it."
Those of us that are trying to build high-performing organizations will still avoid and remove those types of people. And we will continue to reward and not take advantage of our people to fill our end of the bargain.
Further, those of us that are also highly self-motivated will continue to leave bad situations, not become slackers in response to being taken advantage of.
I don't think slackers are the problem. But the unappreciated high performers.
The moment somebody gets a whiff you didn't reward one of your employees for their work is the time your organization starts its decline (people talk). Frankly, I don't think you can avoid it as nobody can be really objective and tunnel vision is real. I just take it as a "nature's" way to move forward - blindspots of one company become strengths of another one, and due to past history, people would really compete against each other because of past perceived wrongdoings.
Anecdotal but I feel like I'm that kind of person but absolutely don't want to run a business.
The worst case scenario of my own business is the whole thing crashing and me having to reorganize my life to accommodate whatever job I can find before my emergency fund runs out.
The worst case scenario for being an employee is getting fired. Pretty much the same outcome but much, much harder to hit.
If I want to start a family or just have a stable enough career to (essentially) never worry about going broke, I'll take the latter. That personality profile just makes keeping a job as simple as hitting the bare minimum requirements (which you habitually blaze past).
Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style.
If your organization gets large enough, then out of necessity, you will have many different managers with many different styles. That is usually the point when a performance review system needs to become more formalized - it's important to be sure that in some ways, all managers are treating their reports similarly, even if it means some of them changing their default management style.
No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that leads to workplace bias. Working styles like this tend to reinforce hiring single, young men who are otherwise unencumbered so they can work long hours and push the envelope of the job description. That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity.
Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues. Your experience with this working style has been positive, because you were born and raised speaking the jargon. If they come from a different background, they may not actually know what is important for the company because they haven’t spent their whole life interpreting these cultural cues.
This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work. I promise you it is not, and as a manager you should be doing more to communicate needs/value opportunities to your direct reports. Your view of what those are may be different from theirs.
What? you are saying only young single men are willing to work hard and actually function autonomously? That is so offensive I can't fathom you actually believe that.
I agree with you completely and am flabbergasted you're being downvoted on an ostensibly startup-oriented forum. The comment you replied to managed to be ageist and sexist, too.
He is saying that people with different background a.) won't be able to guess right what is the thing to learn that will give them advantage later on and would benefit feedback b.) have less free time to play around and thus will perform better if you don't expect tell them to figure via trial and error what is needed.
Through, my experience with this organizational style was bad, mostly because people ended in quite ugly competitive behavior. Mostly due to rules being unclear, resentment being build up, people choosing highly visible tasks instead of needed tasks and so on and so forth.a lot of insecurity everywhere.
There were also a lot of of random attempts by random colleguess to take control and micromanage random people+responsibilities in attempt to look like natural leaders. Did I mentioned insecurity? Someone tring to look like autonomous leader while being completely insecure about limits of his responsibilities and powers is highly unpleasant to work with. You deal with politics like 80% of time as result.
I think the issue is that many managers and business owners do believe that and confirmation bias leads them to never challenging their own beliefs.
It is an unquestioned, invisible belief, which may bring up defensiveness when pointed out, as it is no longer (as) politically correct.
As we are sloooowly transitioning from institutionalized sexism, it becomes obvious how a premise which is offensive to someone who sees and values everyone’s contribution and dignity could be seen as naive or outlandish by people carrying unquestioned old beliefs.
I read the comment not as saying that other people are not willing to work hard and function autonomously, but rather that they may have a harder time than the OP did transferring those capabilities into the right practical activities for the success of the company without review/feedback, and if that is not recognized, their lack of success could be incorrectly interpreted as a lack of willingness to work hard or ability to function autonomously, rather than a lack of the same background that allowed the OP to apply the same capabilities without review/feedback.
No I think OP means that the stereotype for what managers expects it looks like usually match that profile. Not that, it's what that takes to "work hard and actually function autonomously"
He never said “only“. For his argument to be true it's enough that the features are more prevalent among young single men, and me didn't say more than that.
The work ethic in question involves “long hours and self learning“ self learning implies that it probably also happens outside work hours. People who are in a relationship are obviously less likely to work long hours and self learn in their free time.
Statistically, young people are also far more willing to do long hours.
I'm a bit torn on bringing gender into it. Women are more likely to work half time, but I would expect them to be better at predicting needs (yes, I'm aware that's potentially sexist).
So basically I find everything very reasonable if you assume he didn't mean the worst possible interpretation. I don't see the gender bias, but I'm sure there are arguments I'm not aware of.
But gender is only a part of it; unconscious bias is intersectional just like identity. The fewer intersectional traits you share with someone, the greater the cultural gap you have to cover.
More formality at work in terms of expectations and progress provides a clear way to cover that gap.
Not that they’re the only ones willing; but they are overwhelmingly the only ones capable of operating in the way OP describes due to a variety of societal pressures, lack of family attachment, confidence/ego, etc.
Other people are certainly willing and able to work hard and independently, but you do have to provide more formal guidance because you cannot expect someone living in a different cultural context to meet all the standards you hold yourself to. There may simply be a misunderstanding, and because I guarantee the employee would be acutely aware of the understanding gap, it’s on the manager to be aware of it as well.
Informality has a lot of benefits, but it’s also necessarily exclusive to people who don’t know the unwritten, informal rules under which you operate. This can and will lead to a homogeneous team that seems productive from the inside, but may miss other goals because they’re just unaware of them.
You act as if others' opinions should not offend you. I happen to find you're misinterpretation of the parent comment offensive. See how it doesn't matter?
>but forced myself to deliver results autonomously through self-teaching and long hours.
He's saying that it's harder to compete on self-teaching and long hours if you also, say, have a child that you're trying to teach good values to and need to pick up from school at 3:30pm during the week. Which is a reasonable critique of the parent post, IMO.
I think the key in the OP's sentence is "who are otherwise unencumbered".
There's a significant amount of privilege in our society for white males, which makes it much easier for the group to offer their employer long hours with initially less pay, etc.
Well, yours is another type of bias: that people are unable to have an honest and just view on their employees/applicants because they have a worls view.
I prefer dealing with people to dealing with black-boxes.
> This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work.
After decades in the industry, I'm comfortable that my success is repeatable (as I have done) and is the most effective way to do the work. As if there's a debate, I'm really surprised by the endless process and bad management advice circulating on the web, among the good. "This hasn't killed my company yet and I'm happy with what we have" is the refrain from small and large companies wasting time and effort (with things like scheduled reviews). Talented Managers aren't supposed to be listeners, unless you're trapped in a byzantine/hobbesian org (these emerge in different tiers).
> Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues.
No, they aren't. They are important for you to set standards of accountability, at best...unless you really don't have power to do anything about it, which I've seen. You don't change their culture and they don't change yours, regardless of what you tell yourself. The job description and company-necessary responsibilities aren't changing based on the person. I'm not sure there's any value in going on about it, this kind of thinking is just madness.
He spoke about being a young man willing to put in the hours starting out to learn his craft. Yes, the young need to learn a lot after schooling just to keep up.
After that, he spoke about figuring out how to provide the most value for the business. I've had a 25+ year career and can verify that everyone should follow this advice.
Whatever hidden biases we are concerned about in the workplace, they all pale in comparison to the metric of fulfilling the purpose of the company. It took me a few years to realize that businesses were less interested in paying me because I was smart and could solve hard problems and more interested in how I could measure and move the purposes of the company.
The only direct value a manager provides to a company is a regular calibration of employee purpose with the purpose of the business. This is best done with regular 1-on-1s, not through semi-annual reviews.
There are other indirect things that a good manager brings to the table which mostly revolve around increasing employee happiness and satisfaction, but all of it pales in comparison to aligning employee and company purpose.
It’s all virtue-signaling in the end, and a manager from the same background is going to be more receptive to virtue-signaling from their own cultural background than from someone with a different background.
Formal reviews distill virtue signaling into a standard process with explicit rules rather than an informal set of norms that individuals may or may not be aware of.
I think there are a lot of ways to make the rules explicit that don't require formal reviews. A formal review process can be equally biased by incentivizing people to game the system by targeting easy wins rather than tackling harder, more important problems.
For instance, tackling existing bugs or documenting code often seems to be undervalued compared with writing new code, when writing new code often just introduces new bugs and requires new documentation. If you start tracking bugs, people will benefit from creating and tackling easy bugs, while tackling harder bugs is effectively a punishment.
Regardless, defined performance metrics are better than none at all. You have to create the formality around performance evaluation or else you end up with those who understand the informal rules outperforming those who don’t simply because they grew up in a certain environment. I don’t think anyone would claim that’s fair, but that’s how the “meritocracy” works when you don’t define these things formally.
On the flip side, when you do define these things formally, you end up with those who can and will game the formal rules more effectively outperforming those who don't. This isn't fair either, and there are probably all sorts of biases in who is willing and able to game such metrics (for example, I have seen men game them more often).
Evaluating performance is tough. Evaluating performance without greatly distorting incentives is much tougher. I agree fairness should be a consideration, but it is not the primary purpose of a business.
By not defining them, you leave the priorities of the business up to what amounts to a popularity contest with each manager. Raises and promotions thus get handed out to the people who are most likable.
Senior executives (usually VP and above) at major companies typically sign contracts explicitly outlining their goals for the next 12-24 months. They are incentivized or fired based on meeting those goals. And it’s the executives who demand this, not the companies.
Point being, if the executives are demanding clear performance goals for themselves, it’s probably good practice. Managers typically are not responsive to demands from below, so guess where the mandate has to come from.
Once you start to manage people for real, you’ll realize that the truth is often very subjective and it’s easy to appear awesome to your boss without being so when he has 8 other people to evaluate.
Getting to the bottom of it all is hard, if not impossible given the power imbalance. So yeah, virtue signaling is important when different cultures teach you to show virtue in different ways.
counterpoint: the harder he tries to provide value to the business, the business typically only offers the exact same basic salary value to him.
sure, there are exceptions -- but they are exceptions.
my career has taught me that adding as much value as you see the potential for adding is a surefire way to get a promotion, complete with an extra 2% salary and the new expectation of you continuing to work at 110%.
oh yeah, and you get a good reference.
but seriously give me a break. if you're in a position to add so much value to a company, you should be elsewhere in another company, two levels up. good companies don't leave easy pickings hanging.
It seems wholly unremarkable, to me, that people who work hard, try to anticipate the needs of their employers, keep the big picture in mind, and take initiative are more valuable employees. I wouldn't want to hire indolent and apathetic people, and neither should any business that either is successful or wants to be successful.
If you're worried about building products that appeal to the indolent and apathetic, just look at the entertainment industry, where actors and screenwriters work very very long hours to produce content that reliably keeps the indolent and apathetic entertained.
If you're just worried about diversity, I assure you that there are plenty of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and even single women, as well as both men and women of all ethnic and national backgrounds, who are diligent and conscientious.
"It seems wholly unremarkable, to me, that people who work hard, try to anticipate the needs of their employers, keep the big picture in mind, and take initiative are more valuable employees."
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't. Different roles are going to require different personality types. There are scenarios in which "complacent, trustworthy, consistent" are the 3 most important traits someone needs for a role. Those things may also combine with the other skills you're mentioning, but not always.
Some roles just don't have a career track for advancement, and there's plenty of times where advancing an employee is less beneficial to a company overall so it's best to hire for someone who's just going to settle into their role and be happy with a slight pay increase from time to time.
> That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity.
I am not sure this is true to the extent that people want it to be. You see the main benefits of diversity when groups of users use products in different ways depending on who they are. However, a large majority of products are used the same way by all people (almost all b2b products / services that I can think of and many if not most consumer products / services), so for those products I'm not sure it matters who your creators or developers are as long as they understand the industry they are making products for and they talk to users.
I can see the benefit in having a diverse workforce when it comes to discovering new markets or uses for technologies or products, but I think it would be far more important to shoot for having people from a variety of industries and backgrounds on your team to spot these opportunities as opposed to trying to preferentially hire minorities, women, parents, the elderly, lgbt, etc regardless of their backgrounds.
That being said, I do agree that communicating cultural values, mission, and expectations regularly is very, very important as many people have a suboptimal idea of how their work meshes with overall goals of the organization and what is expected of them. Regularly checking in with direct reports can help them internalize these ideas better.
I'm confused on what you mean by this. Businesses don't exist to hire and pay people, and the value a business generates for users has little to do with who they hire as long as a high quality product or service is being outputted.
I’m not talking about preferential hiring; I’m talking about removing bias from the hiring process. This must be done by the company because I guarantee the prospective employee is doing everything they can to try to virtue-signal the company in the ways they know work.
There’s an entire industry devoted to helping women and minorities better integrate with the business climate (Lean In, et al). I guarantee these people are doing a ton of work just to be able to “fit in” and close the cultural gap.
In that context, it’s not unreasonable to ask companies to do something as well. The workers most definitely are.
I agree that companies should try to help all of their employees grow and thrive, that people don't have the same cultural starting conditions, and that company led efforts need to be tailored differently for different people / groups.
It's somewhat unclear to me what you are asking managers to do in terms of removing bias. It seems natural to preferentially reward people who push the bounds of the position, who add out sized value, and who work hard. Not rewarding these people for their efforts will lead to them leaving and finding other jobs that will reward that behavior. People have different priorities in life, different aspirations, and I'm not sure why this is a problem. Those who want to work very hard and don't pursue familial obligations lose out on the benefits of having children or spending time with a SO and in return get rewarded career wise. There's an opportunity cost either way.
If I'm totally missing the point here or am off base, please correct me.
It’s more that there are people who could be rockstars, but because they weren’t immersed in startup culture or entrepreneurship since childhood, they don’t know what’s important to the business. That’s why clear goals and responsibilities are important.
That indicates to me that you're probably a bad manager
When I was broke and had no connections, I was willing to work the way you described.
Now that I have options, I'm not willing to expend that energy when I could save it for gym, girlfriend, self-education after hours, etc.
If I'm broke and need to switch to another industry or you're paying me multiple times my next best offer I'll do that.
Otherwise, no, my manager needs to do his job instead of asking me to do it for him
That said I'm now entering a graduate school and am willing to do that in this context because I'm intrinsically interested in learning the applied math I'll be working on
Software jobs, no
You would probably need to hire people who are interested in running their own business im a few years and mentor them towards that end to get that kind of commitment in my opinion
>It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain.
Blame the economic cycle. I would assume, your company is self-funded, profitable and being run with efficiency in mind. Unfortunately, in the current economy you just can't compete salary-wise with companies that focus on raising, bloating the headcount, raising more, playing hocus-pocus with the "cost of revenue" line and doing a spectacular exit. And as an employee, if playing a hipster infant who loves his boss and depends on him pays 2x more than hard work and initiative, well, I'm sorry to say that, but I'll go where the money is.
That said, you might be able to find that type if you offer more equity or some revenue-based incentives or look into partnering with other small business owners rather than trying to find someone to work under you.
> Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person.
You're getting a lot of crap for this statement ranging from it being a bias dog-whistle to it being an indicator that you're expecting too much.
I didn't find either to be the case in reading what you wrote. My dad, too, was a business owner and growing up he pushed the same kinds of values onto me. He married my mom at 19, moved out of a two-bedroom house with 7 siblings (he never had his own room, slept on the living room couch), took a job as a union construction worker out of high-school, attended college up to his senior year but didn't graduate and ended up starting a manufacturing business supporting the automotive industry in Detroit. He's wealthy and retired, now.
I started a few businesses, but decided against them over time and realized that I really didn't like the whole "running a business". I like to write software and learning about technology and programming. Anything that takes me away from that makes me less happy. The ancillary (taxes, accounting, management, etc) that owning a business entails wasn't for me. I "put in long hours"[0], but I like to spend those hours doing the one specific thing that I love doing and I'm paid well enough that I have no desire to strike out on my own in the hopes that I can make buckets more (but in the greater likelihood that I'll have less reliable income).
As for the bias dog-whistle of these sorts of traits belonging only to white, young, men ... I find those statements to be curiously biased, as well. I have worked at several different companies on teams with women and men of both races and ages ranging from around 25 to around 57 -- yes, in tech, in Detroit. I haven't found that these traits vary based on race, gender or even age. The hardest working manager (which I wrote about in my last comment on this post) was almost 60, the guy I routinely went to when I desperately needed something to actually get "done" was a soft-spoken PoC gentleman of around 30 and when a technical project manager was forced upon me, I begged for a very overworked black woman on the PM team[1]. Anecdotal as my experiences are even social class wasn't a particular limiting factor -- I used to get advice from the "soft-spoken gentleman"[2] about kids and he revealed to me that he was the only of his brothers and sisters to go to college, that he's been pushing that on his kids and that his parents and his family ridiculed (and still ridicule) him for choosing to seek higher education.
Sure, there's no denying that women (of a certain age) get pregnant and that this is a problem for some business owners. It's never been a problem at any of the places that I have worked, personally, but I can imagine it does happen despite it being both illegal (and morally wrong IMHO). Outside of that, I often wonder if the over-sensitivity to "bias" ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My dad's company was interesting -- they were often the coordinator among several small business to outfit a large manufacturing operation. As a result, during my childhood, I spent a lot of time around a lot of small business owners. Every one of my father's many friends was a business contact and owner of some other outfit. Many of them were old enough to have grown up at a time when casual racism and sexism was normal, my father in particular. My parents raised us in a manner that when I first entered the real world, I was surprised that there were still people out there who thought that way. Growing up around these business owners I knew one thing about hiring, the concerns "Can the person do the job to the level I expect and at a price I can afford to pay them?" and "Good God, payroll taxes are expensive!" Of the business owners, only one had hiring practices that were unusual, and possibly illegal -- this was a manufacturer who had o...
What exactly is your management style then? A review doesn't need to be the typical corporate slog - it's simply feedback comparing reality with plans and execution. It let's you know if (a) your planning is any good and (b) your execution was successful.
Looking for someone to "anticipate the needs of my business" is great, but how do you respond to someone who makes a mistake or pursues a strategy different from your ideal? Do you fire them on the spot like the emperor or learn from it. If it's the later, I got news for you; you're doing reviews.
"I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations."
Gee - wouldn't it be nice to know this without waiting 20+ years to look back and assess the entire composition of your career? It's also super handy to self-assess with the eroding benefit of time. The most brutal performance assessment I ever had radically changed the trajectory of my life, and looking back on others who stayed the same path shows it was ultimately net-positive for me. You seem pretty satisfied with how things have turned out, but just imagine what you could have accomplished with a little feedback, such a waste of potential...
I empathize with a lot of this, but man...you gotta tell people when they do a good job. By "good job" I mean that they did work that furthered the goals of the people who lead the company (since companies per se don't have goals).
It may be increasingly hard to find because employees see things differently now.
It's a job market. My employer wants me to put in overtime and go out of my way to improve the company? Great, let's go. But I demand appropriate compensation.
I think that's a reasonable position. My company treats me as a human resource, I treat my company like my client who writes checks for the work I put in.
It sounds like you want an employee to take on the responsibilities of a company owner without actually making them an owner, giving them stock, or giving them proper incentives. The problem is not with the labor market, it's with your sense of entitlement to your employee's skills. Employees no longer act the way they used to because modern companies more regularly dispose of employees when it suits them.
If you want employees to act the way you want, either give them stock, pay them significantly more, or give them long term, multi-year employment contracts. If you expect to get something (employees going above and beyond) for nothing, you are entitled.
When I went from a small company to a much much larger one I was amazed at the amount of time that was wasted on the performance review cycle every year.
They spend SO MUCH time on it, for a thing that is mostly irrelevant to how things seem to operate. It’s not like drastic changes are being made to peoples’ salaries or hours off it. Or job titles.
It's pretty unrealistic, as you can be fired for any reason, at least in most states in the USA. It's called at will employment, and all a manager has to do is say "You know, things just aren't working out, good bye!"
They do, but unless you can prove you were fired for one of the reasons that is explicitly illegal you’ll lose. And of course that can be hard to prove even if true.
I disagree with this dudes blog. I love my reviews. I seek criticism so that I can improve and like the positive feedback because it helps motivate. But maybe I am an outlier. And as a person who has to give reviews, I want to tell people where they need to work on and praise their strengths.
I tend to work with people from East Coast finance world, and they not too keen on the touchy feely story telling stuff. Its sort of expected that you have to have thick skin and get to the point.
I like criticism in the moment because I can directly link it back to my actions and contemplate improvement. I don't find it helpful during a summative "review" session when the details of what I did (or should do differently) have been lost. When you say you seek criticism, I'm wondering if you're doing it frequently enough that it's more like the former and less like the latter.
Yes, it's good if it's done right. When it's done poorly it's not. Let's say you've independently identified a systemic problem, report it, fight to fix it, and fix it all with quantitative numbers to show a large, direct benefit to the bottom line. You'd think that would be a pretty big deal to a company. If you got an average review because, "well that's your job, isn't it?" it's fairly demotivating.
My concern (which I think is at least partially shared by this blogger) is the rigidness of formal annual reviews. A formal review should contain no surprises—if a formal review is the first time you've heard a certain piece of feedback (especially negative), then your management is shirking one of their primary responsibilities. Given an environment where feedback is frequent and useful, the formal annual review becomes a tool that only satisfies the larger enterprise machine—it's of little value to the manager or the employee.
When feedback is continuous and healthy throughout the year, I think the review itself acts just as an amplifier. It lets you really praise someone officially in a big way for good work. If someone has been seriously troublesome, it should never be the first time that has come up, but it lets you magnify how important it is that their performance issues get resolved. In that sense, it can serve a dual role as a sort of PIP. The review is also an opportunity for the manager to sift through all that continuous feedback over the entire past year and condense the important stuff down into some easy-to-understand big picture ideas.
Reviews can also be an opportunity for the direct report to get career plans in writing from their boss. For instance, if you want a promotion to X, the result of the review may be a written plan by your boss on how you can achieve that promotion.
Completely agree on "no surprises", but the annual review process provides a way to frame progress that the manager and employee can work within. When folks stayed at one company for their whole career it was a permanent record of progress that could be referenced. Moving companies is the norm now in tech, but when your are working in an enterprise having this record will benefit you when you want to move up or around in the organization.
I seek criticism so that I can improve and like the positive feedback because it helps motivate.
Why do you need a formal, periodic review process for this? If you seek feedback, you're asking for it regularly, right? If you have feedback for someone, you just tell them, no?
This is what the dude was saying: We have teams of creative people who crave feedback, of people who want to learn and grow. Let’s not stifle them with bureaucracy.
To be perfectly honest, if you use the phrase "touchy feely story telling stuff" I'm going to probably disregard your opinion on management. Management is first and foremost about people, and people are first and foremost about feelings... If we're not starting from that point, there's some problems (and probably huge misconceptions about the nature of work) that need to be addressed before we can even start to talk about management, let alone performance reviews.
Otherwise, I'd love some examples of what is discussed in your performance reviews.
Performance reviews are important as they provide a means for companies to document negatives about workers they eventually want to get rid of. It's like the secret police building a dossier that they could pull out at any time to use against you: "Well according to our files you've been 'underperforming' for the past four reviews. In light of that we'll be letting you go."
If you want constructive feedback to build your career you need to find a personal mentor, build a relationship, and regularly check in to both provide updates and solicit feedback.
"Performance reviews are important as they provide a means for companies to document negatives about workers they eventually want to get rid of"
That's true, and it's horrible. That's why the whole thing is a joke. You can be a GREAT employee, but managers can just ding you on this or that simply because they want to or don't like you, and then you get fired as a result. It's ridiculous to wrap that up in the lie that it is a meritocracy.
Ongoing coaching is more productive. If you are a manager you are coaching your team even if you don't realize it. Embracing that is important and approaching employees differently is important.
You can talk to your managers about how you're doing any time you want. Almost any manager will give you feedback if you ask for it. But you won't know what they really think until you see your raise/bonus allocation.
A simple rule for employees: If your raise/bonus is bad, then they want you to quit. If it's good, then they want you to stay.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 393 ms ] threadI think they can be brilliant, and they can be awful. It depends on the approach of the manager and their subordinate.
I guess the odds were in my favor.
[1] https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management
For peer feedback, I strongly recommend a trick I stole from my last boss: manager interviews of the employee's peers. You ask the employee for some people who they've worked closely with, mix add in others you think would give good perspective, and then do a short (30-60 mins), structured interview with open-ended questions and follow-up on patterns.
With that material in hand, a manager can write up a peer feedback digest that I think is way more useful than what normally comes out of the process.
Specifically around the mechanism of the performance review, this piece is pretty practical for framing thinking about an alternative approach: https://medium.com/the-carrot-or-the-stick/the-performance-r...
Some people like getting told what they're doing right and wrong.
I can think of many reasons why upper management may want to analyze aggregate trends of performance reviews throughout the company, broken down by team, department, manager etc. They can use those trends as data-driven feedback on policy and personnel changes. That is, they can answer questions like “how has our re-org affected overall performance YTD?” Or, “has changing our interviewing methods resulted in higher quality performance reviews of newer employee cohorts?”
Lets say you're a big home improvement chain opening a new store. You need to get 150 workers to staff the new store.
Do you want to hire 250 people cold and hand the new store off to them? No.
You want to take the top 100 performers from nearby stores, who are busting for a chance to prove themselves, and pepper pot them into the new store, in positions of team leadership, seniors, etc. (And then do a bunch of hiring for the remaining 150, and the 100 to replace the ones you just transferred).
These are the sorts of win-win efficiencies you can pull off if you have good performance data for employees.
(Also astonishingly rare to see in action in the real world, but that's another story :)
It's the conversation together about what the next chapter could be and should be that can be really valuable.
In my experience, I've found that they've lead to an, "oh, I better get out of this place ASAP," or, "oh, there's a problem with my manager that I better raise ASAP with his boss."
During my time at Yahoo the process was an absolute joke as leadership was changing on the daily. When I was a PM at Intuit, I received feedback which I still leverage years after the fact.
People shouldn't feel like performance reviews are the only way to receive feedback. Feedback needs to happen regularly, not on an annual basis. Feedback should also come from people you respect, not the people your boss tells you to listen to at work.
Coincidentally, this is an area I have a lot of passion for given I was a HORRIBLE boss at my last company (acquired by Atlassian): https://medium.com/matter-app/you-matter-d7a0b07d078b
I'm also working to fix this problem, if anyone's interested in chatting on the topic or interested in fixing the problem... brett@matterapp.com
If you've been giving them actionable feedback throughout the year, then it should be as simple as "here is your new salary and your new title" and no one should be surprised about anything.
(Not to defend performance reviews explicitly--there may be a much better approach that accomplishes the same goal)
Sure, those disagreements still happen. But, when things are transparent, there's very little risk of a "system breakdown" and a very high chance that a dissatisfied employee (who doesn't seem to be performing well in our scenario) will leave to make room for someone with more potential.
Edit: I just noticed the GP was jedberg; we both spent enough time at Netflix to see what each of us is describing work well in practice. :)
In perfect world I'd have a mind-reading powered live dashboard I could check that shows a graph of anonymized averages of my perceived performance across broad categories (teams, peers vs subordinates vs leadership, etc.) and a single point for my direct report.
Getting feedback each year when there's no surprises feels like a formality and waste of time. In the rare case that there are any surprises it's disappointing and I get to make adjustments months late, having been left in the dark.
IME reviews are like icebergs: the conversation is the easy part and pretty small. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes throughout the year, and it's useful to have a process to base that off of. For instance, someone has to balance your recommendation for your employee's new salary and title against your peer's recommendation for their employee's new salary and title. And so your performance review information has to be sufficient to make that case to your management.
Companies are using performance reviews to try to tackle two things: Compensation (bonuses, promotions) & feedback.
Compensation and feedback should not be lumped into one event.
If the company is giving individual bonuses they can and should be tied to tangible outcomes anyway or it's just going to be a source of even more office politicking (i mean it's inescapable either way but it's a more vs less thing).
Performance reviews, in my experience, have been very heavily weighted towards politics over underlying performance.
Not one sentence about my work as a software engineer; not one sentence about specific interactions that were problematic, or whether or not I had been reported for anything. Just vague as can be.
Please, if anyone has ideas about what a good performance management SaaS would look like - share!
Every company is different, but for some traditional companies Reflektive works with them to initially roll out Performance Reviews because companies have dedicated budget for it. Then, once they're comfortable with our tools, our Customer Success team partners with them to craft a roll-out plan for our "Check Ins" product, which is a lightweight feedback tool intended on used every 3 months. For Check Ins, it's meant to be purely about development; at Reflektive, our Check Ins contain no performance rating scores nor do we use it for compensation (we have a separate process for that).
The good news is that a LOT of companies, ranging from small startups to large 50k-employee enterprise companies, actually want to shift towards a more employee-driven model. Our team's number one priority right now is to empower employees/managers to own their own feedback process and to increase the frequency of feedback between managers and their teams. I'm super excited about what's coming down the pipeline!
[1]https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1df5MALZKZU6lOeIXUiO-...
Yes, yes, YES!
When I solicit feedback for people on my team, I always remind everyone that anonymous feedback is the worst. Honest, direct feedback is incredibly valuable.
Feedback should be the catalyst for a conversation; not a one time statement to be interpreted or ignored.
I liked the idea of the self review, and doing that once or twice a year, as a good stepping off point for a discussion on career pathing, but in general, no one should ever be surprised by anything that would come up in that discussion, otherwise you haven't been a good manager.
It's up to the manager to make sure the feedback discussion happens often, and not wait for the employee to ask or wait for a formal review period.
Seriously, what performance reviews in 2018 don't involve a self appraisal? Pretty much everything he recommends has been part of the performance review process at my company for the last 8 years. And I'm not saying our process couldn't be improved, but this article offers no real insights of any kind.
Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain.
I agree that performance reviews aren't particularly helpful because feedback should be delivered as you go, in the moment, with actionable and relevant examples.
Now I need you to make me want to. And no that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reward me, often it’s enough to feel like I won’t get in trouble for going the extra mile, or that at the very least it will be noticed when I do.
There’s only so often a person will give suggestions and extra effort to a lukewarm or negative response before they say fuck it and stop caring.
Bingo. I'm happy to put in extra effort, go the extra mile, and try to make things better... until about the second time that my efforts go unacknowledged, unimplemented, unrewarded, etc. At which point, what you'll get from me is "exactly what I'm asked to do, and no more, no less" from there out.
And there is a big difference between people that can and people that can't.
If your significant other reminded you to go to the grocery store, would you get a general idea of what she wanted and go get a bunch of stuff you know y'all need, even if it isn't on the list? Or would you only get the exact things she wrote on the list and nothing else, even though if you applied some initiative you'd realize that she wanted to make pancakes and she forgot to put milk on the list so you go ahead and grab the milk also.
It seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people stick exactly to the list and don't take that initiative.
And how do I know I won't be yelled at or punished if I happen to get this wrong?
Are there any specific questions you ask?
I like to ask about their passions outside of work. Video games? Sports? Communities they may be a part of?
I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself. Does this person like to dig into the details and figure out how something works and how they can make it better or do they just like something and not show much deeper interest? Do they tinker or try to make things better on the things they are passionate about? Do they even have things they are passionate about? (You'd be surprised how many people can't really answer this question, even in casual conversation.)
It's not full proof, but I've found that people that go the extra mile, people that are passionate and inquisitive and not always happy with the status quo, are people that are more likely to take the initiative when working on a project for me. At that point, it's my job to spark their interest in the product so they will (hopefully) apply that passion in the same way.
I used to think the same. But over time, i realised passion in other stuff doesn't correlate to passion at work. sometimes they end up being distraction.
Also there are people who don't like to share much outside of work.
I think more than passion, focus (esp. attention to details) is essential. Someone who understands depth of his/her work is likely to be better learner. For e.g. everyone can use an open source library but underlying working of libraries are explored by a few.
Anyone with your profile should run their own business. It's unrealistic to expect somebody to work long hours, over-deliver for "maybe someday"-promises. People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it.
Presumably they're getting paid for their work.
I have personally been in those shoes and had to learn the business skills the hard way. And I don't think I had any other choice aside from giving up and becoming just another employee who doesn't care.
Working 60+ hour weeks for a paycheck that can get gotten elsewhere provides no one with satisfaction. Anyone who rides programmers that hard will find the programmer firing his manager.
Almost none of the people that push you to do that are worth working for. Even a startup that provides RSUS.
If you want what the OP wants in an employee, you need to pay a minimum of a 30% premium over what they can get elsewhere.
Those of us that are trying to build high-performing organizations will still avoid and remove those types of people. And we will continue to reward and not take advantage of our people to fill our end of the bargain.
Further, those of us that are also highly self-motivated will continue to leave bad situations, not become slackers in response to being taken advantage of.
The moment somebody gets a whiff you didn't reward one of your employees for their work is the time your organization starts its decline (people talk). Frankly, I don't think you can avoid it as nobody can be really objective and tunnel vision is real. I just take it as a "nature's" way to move forward - blindspots of one company become strengths of another one, and due to past history, people would really compete against each other because of past perceived wrongdoings.
The worst case scenario of my own business is the whole thing crashing and me having to reorganize my life to accommodate whatever job I can find before my emergency fund runs out.
The worst case scenario for being an employee is getting fired. Pretty much the same outcome but much, much harder to hit.
If I want to start a family or just have a stable enough career to (essentially) never worry about going broke, I'll take the latter. That personality profile just makes keeping a job as simple as hitting the bare minimum requirements (which you habitually blaze past).
Only in an employee's market.
If your organization gets large enough, then out of necessity, you will have many different managers with many different styles. That is usually the point when a performance review system needs to become more formalized - it's important to be sure that in some ways, all managers are treating their reports similarly, even if it means some of them changing their default management style.
Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues. Your experience with this working style has been positive, because you were born and raised speaking the jargon. If they come from a different background, they may not actually know what is important for the company because they haven’t spent their whole life interpreting these cultural cues.
This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work. I promise you it is not, and as a manager you should be doing more to communicate needs/value opportunities to your direct reports. Your view of what those are may be different from theirs.
I'm not. HN is a sausagefest. Just remember to add in some virtue signalling every now and then, and it's OK.
Through, my experience with this organizational style was bad, mostly because people ended in quite ugly competitive behavior. Mostly due to rules being unclear, resentment being build up, people choosing highly visible tasks instead of needed tasks and so on and so forth.a lot of insecurity everywhere.
There were also a lot of of random attempts by random colleguess to take control and micromanage random people+responsibilities in attempt to look like natural leaders. Did I mentioned insecurity? Someone tring to look like autonomous leader while being completely insecure about limits of his responsibilities and powers is highly unpleasant to work with. You deal with politics like 80% of time as result.
It is an unquestioned, invisible belief, which may bring up defensiveness when pointed out, as it is no longer (as) politically correct.
As we are sloooowly transitioning from institutionalized sexism, it becomes obvious how a premise which is offensive to someone who sees and values everyone’s contribution and dignity could be seen as naive or outlandish by people carrying unquestioned old beliefs.
It sucks that this takes as long as it does.
The work ethic in question involves “long hours and self learning“ self learning implies that it probably also happens outside work hours. People who are in a relationship are obviously less likely to work long hours and self learn in their free time.
Statistically, young people are also far more willing to do long hours.
I'm a bit torn on bringing gender into it. Women are more likely to work half time, but I would expect them to be better at predicting needs (yes, I'm aware that's potentially sexist).
So basically I find everything very reasonable if you assume he didn't mean the worst possible interpretation. I don't see the gender bias, but I'm sure there are arguments I'm not aware of.
But gender is only a part of it; unconscious bias is intersectional just like identity. The fewer intersectional traits you share with someone, the greater the cultural gap you have to cover.
More formality at work in terms of expectations and progress provides a clear way to cover that gap.
Other people are certainly willing and able to work hard and independently, but you do have to provide more formal guidance because you cannot expect someone living in a different cultural context to meet all the standards you hold yourself to. There may simply be a misunderstanding, and because I guarantee the employee would be acutely aware of the understanding gap, it’s on the manager to be aware of it as well.
Informality has a lot of benefits, but it’s also necessarily exclusive to people who don’t know the unwritten, informal rules under which you operate. This can and will lead to a homogeneous team that seems productive from the inside, but may miss other goals because they’re just unaware of them.
He's saying that it's harder to compete on self-teaching and long hours if you also, say, have a child that you're trying to teach good values to and need to pick up from school at 3:30pm during the week. Which is a reasonable critique of the parent post, IMO.
There's a significant amount of privilege in our society for white males, which makes it much easier for the group to offer their employer long hours with initially less pay, etc.
I think comments like this are part of the problem.
I prefer dealing with people to dealing with black-boxes.
After decades in the industry, I'm comfortable that my success is repeatable (as I have done) and is the most effective way to do the work. As if there's a debate, I'm really surprised by the endless process and bad management advice circulating on the web, among the good. "This hasn't killed my company yet and I'm happy with what we have" is the refrain from small and large companies wasting time and effort (with things like scheduled reviews). Talented Managers aren't supposed to be listeners, unless you're trapped in a byzantine/hobbesian org (these emerge in different tiers).
> Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues.
No, they aren't. They are important for you to set standards of accountability, at best...unless you really don't have power to do anything about it, which I've seen. You don't change their culture and they don't change yours, regardless of what you tell yourself. The job description and company-necessary responsibilities aren't changing based on the person. I'm not sure there's any value in going on about it, this kind of thinking is just madness.
After that, he spoke about figuring out how to provide the most value for the business. I've had a 25+ year career and can verify that everyone should follow this advice.
Whatever hidden biases we are concerned about in the workplace, they all pale in comparison to the metric of fulfilling the purpose of the company. It took me a few years to realize that businesses were less interested in paying me because I was smart and could solve hard problems and more interested in how I could measure and move the purposes of the company.
The only direct value a manager provides to a company is a regular calibration of employee purpose with the purpose of the business. This is best done with regular 1-on-1s, not through semi-annual reviews.
There are other indirect things that a good manager brings to the table which mostly revolve around increasing employee happiness and satisfaction, but all of it pales in comparison to aligning employee and company purpose.
Formal reviews distill virtue signaling into a standard process with explicit rules rather than an informal set of norms that individuals may or may not be aware of.
For instance, tackling existing bugs or documenting code often seems to be undervalued compared with writing new code, when writing new code often just introduces new bugs and requires new documentation. If you start tracking bugs, people will benefit from creating and tackling easy bugs, while tackling harder bugs is effectively a punishment.
Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Evaluating performance is tough. Evaluating performance without greatly distorting incentives is much tougher. I agree fairness should be a consideration, but it is not the primary purpose of a business.
Senior executives (usually VP and above) at major companies typically sign contracts explicitly outlining their goals for the next 12-24 months. They are incentivized or fired based on meeting those goals. And it’s the executives who demand this, not the companies.
Point being, if the executives are demanding clear performance goals for themselves, it’s probably good practice. Managers typically are not responsive to demands from below, so guess where the mandate has to come from.
Give me somebody who can actually do the work instead of talking about how great they are — or about how unfair others are to them.
Getting to the bottom of it all is hard, if not impossible given the power imbalance. So yeah, virtue signaling is important when different cultures teach you to show virtue in different ways.
sure, there are exceptions -- but they are exceptions.
my career has taught me that adding as much value as you see the potential for adding is a surefire way to get a promotion, complete with an extra 2% salary and the new expectation of you continuing to work at 110%.
oh yeah, and you get a good reference.
but seriously give me a break. if you're in a position to add so much value to a company, you should be elsewhere in another company, two levels up. good companies don't leave easy pickings hanging.
If you're worried about building products that appeal to the indolent and apathetic, just look at the entertainment industry, where actors and screenwriters work very very long hours to produce content that reliably keeps the indolent and apathetic entertained.
If you're just worried about diversity, I assure you that there are plenty of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and even single women, as well as both men and women of all ethnic and national backgrounds, who are diligent and conscientious.
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't. Different roles are going to require different personality types. There are scenarios in which "complacent, trustworthy, consistent" are the 3 most important traits someone needs for a role. Those things may also combine with the other skills you're mentioning, but not always.
Some roles just don't have a career track for advancement, and there's plenty of times where advancing an employee is less beneficial to a company overall so it's best to hire for someone who's just going to settle into their role and be happy with a slight pay increase from time to time.
I am not sure this is true to the extent that people want it to be. You see the main benefits of diversity when groups of users use products in different ways depending on who they are. However, a large majority of products are used the same way by all people (almost all b2b products / services that I can think of and many if not most consumer products / services), so for those products I'm not sure it matters who your creators or developers are as long as they understand the industry they are making products for and they talk to users.
I can see the benefit in having a diverse workforce when it comes to discovering new markets or uses for technologies or products, but I think it would be far more important to shoot for having people from a variety of industries and backgrounds on your team to spot these opportunities as opposed to trying to preferentially hire minorities, women, parents, the elderly, lgbt, etc regardless of their backgrounds.
That being said, I do agree that communicating cultural values, mission, and expectations regularly is very, very important as many people have a suboptimal idea of how their work meshes with overall goals of the organization and what is expected of them. Regularly checking in with direct reports can help them internalize these ideas better.
There’s an entire industry devoted to helping women and minorities better integrate with the business climate (Lean In, et al). I guarantee these people are doing a ton of work just to be able to “fit in” and close the cultural gap.
In that context, it’s not unreasonable to ask companies to do something as well. The workers most definitely are.
It's somewhat unclear to me what you are asking managers to do in terms of removing bias. It seems natural to preferentially reward people who push the bounds of the position, who add out sized value, and who work hard. Not rewarding these people for their efforts will lead to them leaving and finding other jobs that will reward that behavior. People have different priorities in life, different aspirations, and I'm not sure why this is a problem. Those who want to work very hard and don't pursue familial obligations lose out on the benefits of having children or spending time with a SO and in return get rewarded career wise. There's an opportunity cost either way.
If I'm totally missing the point here or am off base, please correct me.
Feedback is a gift. Without people around you to give honest, brutal feedback, you have no idea if you are really doing a good job or not.
There's a great podcast episode from Adam Grant's WorkLife about criticism that's worth listening to: https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_dear_bill...
When I was broke and had no connections, I was willing to work the way you described.
Now that I have options, I'm not willing to expend that energy when I could save it for gym, girlfriend, self-education after hours, etc.
If I'm broke and need to switch to another industry or you're paying me multiple times my next best offer I'll do that.
Otherwise, no, my manager needs to do his job instead of asking me to do it for him
That said I'm now entering a graduate school and am willing to do that in this context because I'm intrinsically interested in learning the applied math I'll be working on
Software jobs, no
You would probably need to hire people who are interested in running their own business im a few years and mentor them towards that end to get that kind of commitment in my opinion
Alas it even caused me harm in college, teachers weren't very welcoming my enthusiasm.
If the employer pays a generous salary for work done well, I don't see what the problem is.
Blame the economic cycle. I would assume, your company is self-funded, profitable and being run with efficiency in mind. Unfortunately, in the current economy you just can't compete salary-wise with companies that focus on raising, bloating the headcount, raising more, playing hocus-pocus with the "cost of revenue" line and doing a spectacular exit. And as an employee, if playing a hipster infant who loves his boss and depends on him pays 2x more than hard work and initiative, well, I'm sorry to say that, but I'll go where the money is.
That said, you might be able to find that type if you offer more equity or some revenue-based incentives or look into partnering with other small business owners rather than trying to find someone to work under you.
You're getting a lot of crap for this statement ranging from it being a bias dog-whistle to it being an indicator that you're expecting too much.
I didn't find either to be the case in reading what you wrote. My dad, too, was a business owner and growing up he pushed the same kinds of values onto me. He married my mom at 19, moved out of a two-bedroom house with 7 siblings (he never had his own room, slept on the living room couch), took a job as a union construction worker out of high-school, attended college up to his senior year but didn't graduate and ended up starting a manufacturing business supporting the automotive industry in Detroit. He's wealthy and retired, now.
I started a few businesses, but decided against them over time and realized that I really didn't like the whole "running a business". I like to write software and learning about technology and programming. Anything that takes me away from that makes me less happy. The ancillary (taxes, accounting, management, etc) that owning a business entails wasn't for me. I "put in long hours"[0], but I like to spend those hours doing the one specific thing that I love doing and I'm paid well enough that I have no desire to strike out on my own in the hopes that I can make buckets more (but in the greater likelihood that I'll have less reliable income).
As for the bias dog-whistle of these sorts of traits belonging only to white, young, men ... I find those statements to be curiously biased, as well. I have worked at several different companies on teams with women and men of both races and ages ranging from around 25 to around 57 -- yes, in tech, in Detroit. I haven't found that these traits vary based on race, gender or even age. The hardest working manager (which I wrote about in my last comment on this post) was almost 60, the guy I routinely went to when I desperately needed something to actually get "done" was a soft-spoken PoC gentleman of around 30 and when a technical project manager was forced upon me, I begged for a very overworked black woman on the PM team[1]. Anecdotal as my experiences are even social class wasn't a particular limiting factor -- I used to get advice from the "soft-spoken gentleman"[2] about kids and he revealed to me that he was the only of his brothers and sisters to go to college, that he's been pushing that on his kids and that his parents and his family ridiculed (and still ridicule) him for choosing to seek higher education.
Sure, there's no denying that women (of a certain age) get pregnant and that this is a problem for some business owners. It's never been a problem at any of the places that I have worked, personally, but I can imagine it does happen despite it being both illegal (and morally wrong IMHO). Outside of that, I often wonder if the over-sensitivity to "bias" ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My dad's company was interesting -- they were often the coordinator among several small business to outfit a large manufacturing operation. As a result, during my childhood, I spent a lot of time around a lot of small business owners. Every one of my father's many friends was a business contact and owner of some other outfit. Many of them were old enough to have grown up at a time when casual racism and sexism was normal, my father in particular. My parents raised us in a manner that when I first entered the real world, I was surprised that there were still people out there who thought that way. Growing up around these business owners I knew one thing about hiring, the concerns "Can the person do the job to the level I expect and at a price I can afford to pay them?" and "Good God, payroll taxes are expensive!" Of the business owners, only one had hiring practices that were unusual, and possibly illegal -- this was a manufacturer who had o...
Looking for someone to "anticipate the needs of my business" is great, but how do you respond to someone who makes a mistake or pursues a strategy different from your ideal? Do you fire them on the spot like the emperor or learn from it. If it's the later, I got news for you; you're doing reviews.
"I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations." Gee - wouldn't it be nice to know this without waiting 20+ years to look back and assess the entire composition of your career? It's also super handy to self-assess with the eroding benefit of time. The most brutal performance assessment I ever had radically changed the trajectory of my life, and looking back on others who stayed the same path shows it was ultimately net-positive for me. You seem pretty satisfied with how things have turned out, but just imagine what you could have accomplished with a little feedback, such a waste of potential...
I think that's a reasonable position. My company treats me as a human resource, I treat my company like my client who writes checks for the work I put in.
If you want employees to act the way you want, either give them stock, pay them significantly more, or give them long term, multi-year employment contracts. If you expect to get something (employees going above and beyond) for nothing, you are entitled.
They spend SO MUCH time on it, for a thing that is mostly irrelevant to how things seem to operate. It’s not like drastic changes are being made to peoples’ salaries or hours off it. Or job titles.
Such things can be discussed and documented at any time.
Why would you let that go one 26 weeks (average) before taking action?
I tend to work with people from East Coast finance world, and they not too keen on the touchy feely story telling stuff. Its sort of expected that you have to have thick skin and get to the point.
Reviews can also be an opportunity for the direct report to get career plans in writing from their boss. For instance, if you want a promotion to X, the result of the review may be a written plan by your boss on how you can achieve that promotion.
Why do you need a formal, periodic review process for this? If you seek feedback, you're asking for it regularly, right? If you have feedback for someone, you just tell them, no?
This is what the dude was saying: We have teams of creative people who crave feedback, of people who want to learn and grow. Let’s not stifle them with bureaucracy.
Otherwise, I'd love some examples of what is discussed in your performance reviews.
If you want constructive feedback to build your career you need to find a personal mentor, build a relationship, and regularly check in to both provide updates and solicit feedback.
That's true, and it's horrible. That's why the whole thing is a joke. You can be a GREAT employee, but managers can just ding you on this or that simply because they want to or don't like you, and then you get fired as a result. It's ridiculous to wrap that up in the lie that it is a meritocracy.
Real World: X depends on your livelihood.
A simple rule for employees: If your raise/bonus is bad, then they want you to quit. If it's good, then they want you to stay.