Writing good performance self reviews

https://andrewhuth.substack.com/p/writing-good-performance-self-reviews

by ahuth • 4 years ago

121 85 4 years ago

andrewhuth.substack.com

eppp3• 4 years ago

As near as I can tell, I could write literally anything on a self review and it would make no difference to anyone in any way. My first item has been 'stop doing performance reviews' on the 'what can we do to help you' section for years.

This is a useless exercise, raises come or not regardless of what is said or done.

droopyEyelids• 4 years ago

I was rolling my eyes going into the article, but it was actually useful. Your perspective is kind of the starting point for the author- Analyze how the self-review is actually used.

eppp3• 4 years ago

I definitely read it. I have never worked at a place where it mattered. Maybe it would be interesting to work at a place where it did.

SpeedilyDamage3• 4 years ago

This is not universally true, and if you're somewhere like this, you can and probably should move if you value being valued.

As someone who's in the room when we go over these, if you write "stop doing performance reviews" the whole room rolls their eyes, and is not very kind.

Maybe stop shooting yourself in the foot? Give it a shot, for like 5 years, see how it goes. It's about an hour of your time annually, so if even at a 20% chance of success that feels like a wise investment.

TexanFeller2• 4 years ago

It's about an hour of your time annually, so if even at a 20% chance of success that feels like a wise investment.

At my place of work it is common for people to spend multiple days on these things, with some people on my team spending a whole week. I'm told the process was substantially more heavy weight before I got here. Maybe you are just blissfully unaware of the true costs? I would give your right arm to waste only an hour every review cycle on this counterproductive insanity! I would happily accept no promotions or raises above inflation to not go through this were it an option.

brazzledazzle3• 4 years ago

It’s never only been an hour of my time anywhere I’ve worked. At minimum one day but if you are provided feedback with back and forth (and most of my managers have done that) and you meet about it at least twice a year you’re looking at 2+ days worth of your time.

Are sure it only takes your subordinates an hour?

andelink• 4 years ago

An hour of my time? I wish. The fact that the work you’ve done in the cycle is finished regardless, but depending on how you write about it can impact your rating and compensation going forward really stresses me out.

icedchai6• 4 years ago

They're not very kind because someone actually told the truth. Many of us roll our eyes when asked to fill out these ridiculous forms. One previous company had everyone rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 for various aspects of the corporate culture. How did you drive innovation to achieve corporate synergies over the past 6 months?

Most reviews are finely crafted BS. And it generally takes much more than an hour annually. If you have to do a full blown "360 peer review" process (which is very common) it can take at least a day+.

type-r2• 4 years ago

I've been through many companies (and many iterations of the process in each of those companies) but have never experienced a case where this takes only an hour annually. Even as an IC you're going to be spending at least half a day on your own self-review. This doesn't even include peer reviews, upward feedback, or talking about the results of this whole process with your manager. In my experience, the process also doesn't just happen a single time per year -- it's usually twice (plus 'check-ins' outside of that).

I'm no fan of perf reviews but I have no idea how you could even run a process at all if you were to only give people 1 hour to do the whole thing end-to-end.

barrkel• 4 years ago

It's closer to 4 hours a cycle, not including procrastination and stress, and it's usually at least two cycles a year.

zie• 4 years ago

I just copy and paste from the previous year.

icedchai6• 4 years ago

This is my experience as well. In 20+ years of employment, in both small and large companies, with positions from junior developer to startup CTO, I've never been anywhere where performance reviews weren't a complete waste of time.

pcurve• 4 years ago

It's only useless if you do it at the end of the year like the author is suggesting. It's fairly useful to keep track of throughout throughout the year, including communicating to others assuming you're a above average performer.

maximinus_thrax4• 4 years ago

I've been doing these for almost 2 decades and regardless of the amount of rationalization and propaganda thrown at me, I still believe they are worthless and a tool of corporate oppression. These ideas have been borrowed from something everyone should be able to hate equally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-criticism_(Marxism%E2%80%....

It doesn't really matter what you write there, as long as it's not negative. If it's negative, it can be used against you. If it's not negative, it can be spun as negative when the external reviewer of the self review adds their comments. It's a tedious exercise with little to no benefit for the employee.

eschneider• 4 years ago

Yeah, the process is _mostly_ useless, but a 'good' self-review is a handy cheat sheet your your manager and is worth doing well. At the margins, you're "helping them help you."

rrrrrrrrrrrr25• 4 years ago

Of course, the classic corporate oppression of "hi we're paying you $200,000/yr to write code... could you list out your contributions for the past quarter so we can evaluate your performance?".

I find it hard to believe you have 20 years of experience but don't see the point of performance evaluations. Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer the question "what are you working on"

It's very simple. They pay you, you do work. If they stopped paying you, you'd probably stop working.

Why would you expect that if you stop working, they won't stop paying you?

phailhaus• 4 years ago

Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer the question "what are you working on".

If they need an end-of-year self review to determine that, something has gone horribly wrong. They already know what I'm working on: they're the ones that assigned me to it, and I report on it regularly in standups. So what's the point of the review? If they don't already know what value I'm bringing, that's a red flag.

mrrsm• 4 years ago

Why would you expect that if you stop working they won't stop paying you? They aren't going to rely on someones self-written review to notice you haven't been working.

Chances are your manager could fill this out for you most of the time as they should have a good grasp of what you have been doing in your day to day.

Most of the time I can generate a list of what I have worked on via commit messages or ticket names to get a high level idea of what I have been doing. I still feel like my manager may have a better idea of what impact my changes have had then I do in some cases.

walls• 4 years ago

What are these managers getting 400k/year to do if they can't list the accomplishments of their subordinates?

maximinus_thrax4• 4 years ago

Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer the question "what are you working on"

I do that almost every day during standups and every week during 1:1s. I have no problem with it. What I do have a problem with, is when I'm forced into making judgements about my work. That's for someone who gets paid more than me to do in the corporate context. My opinion about my work and all the other self-reflection stays with me. I don't want to bootstrap their work by coming up with all sorts of ways of rewriting history to match some artificial and arbitrary expectations which are anyway outside of my control. And so is the performance review itself, in the end. Some places even allow you to review what your boss said about your performance review and even 'contest' it. You know what happened when you did that? Literally nothing, except for a checked box saying that the employee disagrees. It's all pretend.

mhss2• 4 years ago

They're a communication tool, and as such, can be used for good or bad purposes. If you already distrust your manager and organization to a large degree, yeah you won't ever see any value on them, but the problem is the inherent distrust and antagonism.

I've had plenty of good career dev chats with my manager (and my reports once I became a manager) following a review. This should be happening all around in 1:1s, but the semester or yearly review is a larger retrospective summary of the work we do, what we're proud of and what we feel could have gone better. If there's no trust however, this exercise is moot.

Even if my manager did not read it, writing about it has been valuable to me and makes me realize more clearly what I've done, whether I feel I'm being valued or not, and if it's time for me to move on.

stcroixx2• 4 years ago

I really do appreciate that my current employer doesn't do this crap. I haven't done one of these in close to 10 years now.

iuafhiuah• 4 years ago

I've been doing these for the best part of a decade and it was only in the last couple of years I realised completing a performance review (for me) has been the same as updating your CV - the same advice applies.

Just submit a list of single sentences that say things like "Designed and implemented a doodad that saved n hours per day and enabled $BUZZWORD". List the outcomes of things you did this year, use STAR, whatever you prefer.

The best part of doing it this way - if they don't give you a nice bonus/raise, you've just updated your CV ready for your next place of work!

dbsmith83• 4 years ago

gah, I knew I should have pushed out doing mine one more day so I could have read this first. I guess there's always next year!

mkl95• 4 years ago

I would happily review my performance if my employer lent me the money and time to continuously improve my skills. At the moment that budget is nonexistent, so I don't really owe them this kind of thing.

avg_dev3• 4 years ago

This is a total tangent but I wonder if there is something like a bookmark on HN. I would like to save this link so I can read it later. I could upvote it which seems wrong as it has a social component but then I could see it in my upvotes later. I could favorite it but then it would appear to someone else looking at my favorites that I really loved the article when I haven’t even read it yet. I will take that option so I can see it later because it seems like the lesser of two evils. But I would love to see a reading list or something. (I am the kind of guy who was 500 browser tabs open at a time lol)

ddelt• 4 years ago

If you use an iPhone, explore the “Hacker Feed” app, which gives you this exact feature

avg_dev3• 4 years ago

Thanks - I do!

brazzledazzle3• 4 years ago

I just use favorites as saved articles. Who cares what anyone thinks?

avg_dev3• 4 years ago

But, but, all three people who look at my favorites will misunderstand me!

luckycharms810• 4 years ago

Articles like this make me think about how the software community has chronically under-invested in developing managers. It is not crazy to think that a manager could actually -

* Have the time to know what you are working on

* Set aside time to talk to you about your career development goals

* Help you work and progress towards them - with a plan that is personalized for you.

ahuth• 4 years ago

You’re totally right. Companies should invest more in developing managers.

I didn’t talk about this in the article, but (right, wrong, or indifferent) I find it helpful to think about how to help my manager help me.

twblalock2• 4 years ago

The reviews aren't for your manager. They are for your manager's manager, and so forth, up the chain to the people who make the compensation and promotion decisions. Reviews give your manager some ammo to deal with those people.

rektide• 4 years ago

One of the favorite things I've heard of comes from a friend's new job, where he had a upward manager he reports to, but also an engineering manager who works on career/environment/developer-experience topics. Making sure the engineering side of the org is running well, while the more product-driven side does what businesses typically do.

Semi-related, I've somewhat started calling the engineer-advocacy work in the org the "Lorax" position; speaking for the trees, who are not as able to. Where & how this happens varies, & it's not usually a role or position, alike emotional support.

andrewmcwatters3• 4 years ago

I don't fill these by policy anymore, and when an employer requests that I do them, I tell them by default I fill my perf sheets with whatever their maximum evaluation is.

If I am employed to perform a service, I am going to provide the best service that I can, that one has paid for. If my service is not satisfactory to you, fire me.

Performance reviews are a weird unnecessarily subservient exercise in corporate dance.

waynesonfire• 4 years ago

Yes, such a dumb exercise. People have and do, as their primary purpose, game it and raise the ranks.

mrbabbage• 4 years ago

They feel like Churchill's quip about democracy: self-evals are the worst system, except all the others that have been tried.

Ultimately, employers and employees need a way to ensure pay tracks employee value to company. At hiring time, it's easy: the employee presumably got multiple offers and so there's a quasi-market for that employee.

Later, what do you do, especially if the employee is otherwise happy at the employer? The employee can go out and periodically solicit competitive job offers to hold the employer accountable and ensure their pay keeps up with their skills. But this is super inefficient: even one interview loop costs the employee much more time more than the self-eval process. And this would impose a huge cost on employers, if a huge fraction of their candidates don't intend to ever convert and are just using the job offer as negotiation leverage.

Like, I hate doing performance evals as much as everyone else, but I'm not yet convinced there's a better system for solving the core problem of ensuring people's pay tracks their market value.

blacksmith_tb• 4 years ago

Hmm, I am trying to picture how it would be different to pretend to solicit my honest opinion of my work for the last year, versus my managers' doing even the most rudimentary sort of pass/fail appraisal. It all requires a lot of earnestly looking the other way - did I do some good work, sure; some clever things, yes, here and there; did I also slog through mountains of work that seemed obviously dumb/wrongheaded/not-long-for-this-world? Did I ever, but we won't talk about that. Even if I try to think of my best-ever 'save the day' moments, or the biggest screwups I've made, none of that really makes it into the reviews, or if it does, it doesn't seem to change the outcome. It'd be sort of nice to have simple points-based scoring, doing the basics gets you X, doing something excellent/hard/very profitable adds a few points, making a colossal screwup costs you some points, raises and/or bonuses doled out accordingly.

icedchai6• 4 years ago

What do you do for the written response part, if anything? Rating yourself at the top of the scale is fine, though often there are several questions. Stuff like, "Please describe how your work exemplified our primary corporate values, including our commitment to innovation, transparency, diversity, and team work." Do you just write "No comment"?

andrewmcwatters3• 4 years ago

Yes.

anonymousDan• 4 years ago

Pro tip if you just can't be bothered with this shit - my friend's wife recently asked chatgpt to generate a glowing performance review covering four required areas. What it generated was according to her better than what she usually wrote. She copied and pasted it almost verbatim and the job was done in 5 minutes.

cableshaft• 4 years ago

... You aren't kidding. I fed it my title, what type of job I did, a couple things I did this year, and each of the prompts, and it generated something better than I submitted, after I spent almost two whole days on it. In only a couple of minutes.

Totally doing this next time.

voakbasda2• 4 years ago

I did this as well. Asked it to provide some generic answers and used those as templates for filling in my own facts. It saved me a huge amount of time. Best performance review of my life, both in terms of quality of the review as well as minimizing the time required to write it.

My wife and I did the same thing to write the note that will go out with our family Christmas card.

This tech is a game changer for people who do not like to bullshit but find it a necessary part of life.

mkoubaa• 4 years ago

I've started to just write "thanks" in my self review. Patting myself on the back feels slimy especially as I get more experience

gizmodo59• 4 years ago

We have this ridiculous app called CultureAmp. Every quarter we get emails and slacks from HR and managers asking us to complete it. It’s an absolute waste of time and no one really values it and yet you need to fill it out. This did not exist when the company was small. When you hire more people there are jobs that exist just to organize these things. To make things worse there is not a single question that asks “What the company can do better”.

icedchai6• 4 years ago

I had to use that at a previous company! I'm having flash backs...

fleddr• 4 years ago

I'm going to go against the grain here. Yes, I believe self-reviews are stupid. Frankly they indeed serve as a cheat-sheet for your manager, which is a sign that they are so disengaged that they don't even know what you're doing.

Don't fight the game though, play it to win. Throughout the year, I keep a single note open "Accomplishments 2022". I simply add my accomplishments to it, typically as a weekly summary. Plus anything notable, process improvements, innovations, overtime, compliments from peers, the like.

All of this adds up into a war chest. During the actual performance review meeting I come armed to the teeth. This is how you flip the script. I don't need to explain that I deserve a great review, my manager needs to explain the opposite in the face of a mountain of evidence.

The individual accomplishments don't even have to be earth shattering, just document them consistently. The total amount of them will be so overwhelming that nobody is going to bother taking them apart.

Learn to write corporate speak: "Improved automated test coverage by 40% to support our do more with less corporate goal, freeing up resources to work on value-adding services". Whilst this was just me editing a file for 20 minutes.

You want red tape? I'll bury you in it.

Mix it with psychology. Act modest and humble despite the boat load of evidence of good performance. As if it "was the least you could do", radiating supreme loyalty. A minority of eager managers might still throw in a point of critique, feeling they need to do their job in providing some balance to this review.

As the critique hit, look down and pause for a few seconds, make it awkwardly long as if the air is sucked out of the room. In this period, the manager is going to feel awful, thinking they just deeply hurt a great worker. Then, respond with "I hadn't though of that. That's very insightful and something I surely will integrate into my work to do EVEN better, going forward". The word "even" is important here, as well as "going forward". Managers love going forward.

The manager is now relieved that the air is cleared, plus feels very smart. Be sure to already open a new note "accomplishments 2023" and at the top, in bold and red write the critique. Then, in next year's review start the session with "Really loved the suggestion made last year and here's how...blah blah".

It wasn't even a serious remark, they just wanted to say something. They forgot all about it. But here you are fully remembering it and acting upon it, which is somebody nobody does.

And this is how you corner your manager.

lowercased• 4 years ago

I was at one place where I kept a public blog about day to day stuff. I mean 'public' in the sense that it was internal, but I shared it with the team.

Meeting notes, any issues I hit, resolutions, etc. It wasn't necessarily something I posted to every single day, but at least weekly. Ended up being around 2-3x/week. Notes on why certain decisions were made, other options tried, etc. I had originally put some of this in comments, but was working some place where "comments in code are bad - remove them all - should be self-documenting" so... I needed to put them someplace.

I was lightly teased for keeping this log. Then I quit, and a couple folks told me they were still looking up things in my blog months after I left, as they couldn't tell why certain things were done. "Couldn't use X because person Y indicated we weren't paying for X, so I had to build a smaller Z version instead" - that type of thing.

It 'helped' some because we got a new dept manager in, say, June, and July was the time for all the 'end of fiscal year' review stuff. Dept manager had to do 10-12 staff reviews in... 3 weeks? He had no ability to contextualize most of anything, but I had a running history of months of issues, resolutions, meeting notes, conversations, and more.

I will say that was... over a decade ago, and I don't think I've been that diligent since. It was useful, but definitely more work than I would feel comfortable committing to again, at least with current workloads. The workload there was surprisingly... light enough such that I could keep docs as a regular part of week to week work.

gofreddygo• 4 years ago

For sure maintain a "Accomplishments 20XX" file.

I also have a section in that file for buzzwords from team meetings, town halls and broader presentations.

I fill reviews with 3 things

- "I did ___ and ___ and ___"

- "Last year I said I would do ___. This is what I did for it ___"

- "Next, year I plan to ___"

accomplishments are microscopic, aligned to broader team/company goals.

future plans are high level, things I can contribute to but not own like "Improve documentation culture" , "Increase user engagement for ___" never actually committing to any deniable numbers cz priorities change, that document from last year does not.

Last, remember this stuff may seem strange but the next hiring manager in your org will read it. They will instantly see your soft skill to blow your own trumpet.

kennedywm• 4 years ago

I found it useful to keep a text file with organizational and personal goals and to record my accomplishments each day. It helped a ton when review time rolled around, but it also helped me keep in mind if my actions were best serving the organization’s goals.

Prior to that, in ignorance, I thought my productivity and contributions would be self-evident. That is not a great strategy for someone who isn’t inclined to self-promotion.

twblalock2• 4 years ago

The cheap cynicism here is not just sad, it's also bad for your career.

At worst, self-reviews take up an hour of your time per year -- at a full time job, that is about 1/2 of a percent of the total hours you work in a year. You spend more time on a lot of other stuff that is more annoying and less beneficial to yourself.

Do you want to get promoted? Do you want to make more money? Do you at least want to avoid getting laid off? If so, it is your job to demonstrate that you deserve those things. In many cases, the people who make the decisions do not know who you are and will only ever see your self review, peer reviews, and your manager's review of you. Even small companies often have this problem.

This is not hard. List your achievements and good personal qualities in a way that highlights their value to the business.

Your manager can't fight for you to get a raise or a promotion if you don't provide any ammo. So you should care about your performance review and put some effort into it.

Don't have a manager like that? Leave, and find one.

At companies with annual reviews you will almost always get annual raises and/or promotions. At companies without reviews, you often won't. Much like an "unlimited vacation time" policy, a policy of going without reviews is often actually worse than having a defined process.

stavros• 4 years ago

I agree with the comment, but you got the hours off by an order of magnitude. It's 0.05%, not 0.5%.

someweirdperson• 4 years ago

take up an hour of your time per year -- at a full time job, that is about 1/2 of a percent of the total hours you work in a year

For an ok-paying (yearly income) job that needs only 200h per year (1h being 0.5%) I would happily spent two 2h of unpaid time for that.

booleandilemma• 4 years ago

Self-reviews are bad but when a company asks you what your goals are, that's worse.

Why do we have to pretend I'm not just there to do a job / make you richer in exchange for less money than I know you yourself are making? It's so patronizing.

I don't ask my plumber or my doctor what their goals are and the world carries on.

BaseballPhysics4• 4 years ago

Why do we have to pretend I'm not just there to do a job / make you richer in exchange for less money than I know you yourself are making? It's so patronizing.

Because some managers and employees want to work on career development that might benefit you in your current role, a future role at the company, or a future step in your career elsewhere.

If you don't care about your career, fine.

But it's not patronizing. It's literally doing our job by trying to help you advance. If you don't want that, just say so and your manager will stop wasting their time by asking.

thunky2• 4 years ago

Because some managers and employees want to work on career development that might benefit you

Then they should be doing that throughout the year because it's part of their actual job.

Not once per year by mandate via a stupid questionnaire.

BaseballPhysics4• 4 years ago

Jesus, that's not how I use self-reviews at all

I keep my own notes over the year from 1:1s and so forth and use those to build the review.

The self-review is a way for me to get my staff member's perspective and to identify gaps so we can talk about them.

If a manager is so lazy they need the staff member to remind them of what they did, they shouldn't be a manager.

Edit: to be clear I am not a fan of yearly review cycles, but we aren't always in control of how reviews are conducted. But if I have to do a yearly review, I'm going to take it seriously and do it properly.

nitwit005• 4 years ago

Relate your accomplishments to company goals

Frequently impossible. The annual goals they set are often both vague, and fail to encompass much of the activity at the company.

You can try bullshitting something, but I'd just remind them how either the company and/or customers depend on what you're doing.

voakbasda2• 4 years ago

This year, I asked ChatGPT to describe the value that my general position brings to a company, and it rattled off a bunch of abstract qualities that fit the bill. I distilled that down to a single sentence and used that to describe my “contribution to the business goals”.

My final answer wasn’t total bullshit, but there’s no way I would have come up with it on my own. I think part of the reason is that we often are “in the weeds” of the organizational hierarchy and lack sufficient perspective about how we fit into the bigger picture.

ai_ja_nai• 4 years ago

Starting from the assumption that self reviews make sense only in companies where you are left with full freedom;in places where you manager actually tells you what to do, they are meaningles.

That said, in the former kind on company (the one that allows you to break you neck as you wish), I find extremely educational doing self-reviews, especially if you do them incrementally as the year passes by so that, by the time the review is needed, you just need to "JIT" the document and serve it out. It provides a way to tell in advance if you are working on something that feels like bullshit on paper.

Writing good performance self reviews

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