Ask HN: Why are annual reviews so broken?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34896705

by sharemywin • 3 years ago

48 83 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It's seems to me that if companies drew a straight line between here's what you need to do to get this much of a raise or this much of a bonus, they could get alot more out of each employee. why waste everyones time and effort for stuff that doesn't matter?

ChildOfChaos• 3 years ago

My understanding from the company I Work with who have changed there process based on feedback, the issue is that different people want different things from it.

Some people want it straight, do this and get this, but we have gone to a way more mild approach where it's no longer an 'annual review' but more a 'wellbeing meeting' because some people didn't like the format and felt that they didn't want to sit and listen to being critised and that the metrics were unfair or not applicable to them.

So now what we have is much worse, last year, 30% of the team got a pay rise as is company policy, however we do not know how this was dedicated and most of us have barely spoken to those that do as our direct line manager was not involved in the decision.

Personally I hate them, I just want to be left alone.

softwaredoug2• 3 years ago

I think the problem is many employers focus on a one way, top-down relationship where the company has the power and the company/bosses word is all that matters.

Instead it should be a conversation around the two way relationship where both sides at least have the power to exit the relationship. Both sides should approach it as a conversation about the relationship and things that work / don't work from both sides.

kasey_junk• 3 years ago

Because it conflates at least 3 different things a) feedback on how to improve b) job leveling/retention and c) pay.

The first is best done by peers & management anonymously, the second by a fairly objective public rubric and the last is purely market driven (no matter how much companies wish it weren’t).

Collecting all the information the same way and using the data collected cross purpose leads to all of them being done poorly.

fnimick5• 3 years ago

the last is purely market driven (no matter how much companies wish it weren’t)

Why would companies wish it weren't? It lets them underpay people because "the market" broadly underpays them.

I've talked about this dynamic with leaders like that, who opposed salary transparency because they underpaid people who they knew the market would undervalue, where the actual contribution of the person in question is irrelevant. As they put it (grossly), if you're a minority that would be paid less elsewhere, I'm going to pay you less here because I can. Not because you're a minority, but just because that's the way the market works.

I've been in situations where the "market forces" are stupid enough that I've been paid more than someone nominally one level up from me (senior eng. vs junior). It's immoral as hell but what are you going to do? The company is always going to pay every worker as little as they can, and not a cent more.

kriops• 3 years ago

If your comp is at fair market value, your are not being underpaid, by any honest and reasonable definition of “underpaid”.

robertlagrant4• 3 years ago

It's not immoral, any more than you bidding lower as a house buyer is immoral. Your individual circumstances as buyer and seller are different, and you need to make a free agreement that fits those. If you can't, you walk away. If you can, great. The same forces (and morality) applies to salaries.

commandlinefan• 3 years ago

As long as I've been working (since around '92 or so), my varying employers have periodically insisted that we "set goals" some time around the beginning of the year, work toward those goals during the year, and then submit to evaluation against those goals at the end of the year. Every single year I've ever seen it tried, there were a set of initiatives that were perceived as being super important toward the beginning of the year, and everybody set goals around those. Then, around the middle of the year, those initiatives were scrapped, everybody pivoted to something else, and the goals that were set at the beginning of the year were meaningless. Every. Single. Time. The only thing that was more predictable than trying to set annual goals and have them remain relevant for an entire year being impossible was managements absolute inability to recognize and learn from this inevitability.

INTPenis• 3 years ago

The last few years I've had two managers simply check my goals as completed, regardless of results. They seemed as sick of the whole process as I was.

cassianoleal• 3 years ago

I think most line managers are sick of those processes. I had a manager once who explained to our team of 3 people how he had to fit us in a bell curve of performance and tie our bonuses and promotions to that.

Suffice it to say he started saying he was sorry but despite his efforts he could not convince the higher ups how stupid an idea that was.

softwaredoug2• 3 years ago

Same, even quarter to quarter goals are scrapped. Even professional development goals are often tied to what the company needs, and those need to be adjusted.

I don't know the solution, other than just have general expectations about assigned work and commitments as those commitments come up and change. Rather than having some performance conversation that's out of sync with actual project deliverables.

mattbgates• 3 years ago

My company, for the past 10 years, still requires this, and while I understand its nice to set goals... after a decade of working there, there's only so much "room for improvement" i can work on. I've slacked on certain areas of the job just to make up stuff "to work on" for my goals. It works to convince the higher ups who really couldn't care less about my goals, because they would rather find more ways to cut paychecks or lay off people for getting paid too much, so there's not a crazy lot of incentive to even take them seriously anymore.

MuffinFlavored4• 3 years ago

my varying employers have periodically insisted that we "set goals" some time around the beginning of the year

That's because their boss (or their boss's boss or whoever) is telling them to "get it done"/do that.

Seems like a lot of effort for the typical 3% raise most people get more often than not lol

If you work at a place for 10 years, is it really realistic to expect to get a $10k/yr+ raise every year? Goals or no goals.

willcipriano3• 3 years ago

If you work at a place for 10 years, is it really realistic to expect to get a $10k/yr+ raise every year

Inflation is at 6.4 percent right now. If you made 100k that would take you up to six and a half just for treading water, if you make 200k then and get 10k you are being paid less than last year.

coldtea2• 3 years ago

That's because their boss (or their boss's boss or whoever) is telling them to "get it done"/do that.

More like it for HR/managers to justify their presense by "doing something"

coldtea2• 3 years ago

If you work at a place for 10 years, is it really realistic to expect to get a $10k/yr+ raise every year? Goals or no goals.

If you aren't getting a wage increase above the annual inflation rate each year then not only you're not getting a raise, you're actually getting paid less for the same work (or, rather, for even more work, as your responsibilities will increase with the seniority).

For 100K wage that's like getting a 7K raise atm.

jvans• 3 years ago

Shiny object syndrome is universal

ngc248• 3 years ago

Exactly, every single time, the goals (in our company they are called Bold goals) are irrelevant after a quarter. The only time it mattered was in a company and that too for only 6 months, where we had monthly SMART goals. At the end of 6 months the whole process was scrapped :)

mdgrech23• 3 years ago

I would also add a lot of years I got goals that I didn't agree w/ technical direction. For instance if I get goal to switch some system architecture to X but that's a bad idea and I document and provide evidence why that's a bad idea and it doesn't happen maybe I shouldn't be docked at the end of the year? If anything I should be rewarded but some higher up will be pissed I poo poo'd on their vision and suffer.

scottLobster• 3 years ago

This. As an IC my goals are pointless if they don't align with stuff that is already/is going to be funded. Say I make a goal of learning a different piece of the codebase that I find particularly interesting. Well there better be a bug or new feature involving that code for me to get started on, and it better be funded to a level such that I can take extra time to learn, because it was originally budgeted for the relevant SME, who's toes I'll probably have to gently step on just to get access to the work, let alone pass code review.

Needless to say that rarely happens, and even when it does there are often no available followup assignments in the same area to reinforce the knowledge, so you move on to something else and forget 80% of what you learned.

number6• 3 years ago

My employees insist on having these goals. They want them to use it as a leverage in salary negotiations.

paiute• 3 years ago

Exactly, they are for employees who want to make a case for promotion or management to make a case for layoffs and firing. Always give your self good ratings.

flandish• 3 years ago

All employees should be able, and applauded for doing so, to explain how they’ve not only met goals of a time, but been nimble enough to pivot to management whims.

Your relationship with employees is through salary, that’s it. Not the comfy chair, the firewall rules, pool table, or “agile” training… but salary.

Let them talk salary and you will find they provide healthier boundaries. (Your comment gave me no indication of your opinion, I was just adding.)

jwestbury• 3 years ago

It's even worse, though. Setting concrete, achievable goals, and tying those to performance reviews creates perverse incentives. It encourages setting easy goals because you know you can achieve them, and it discourages emergent teamwork when it doesn't match your goals. Someone comes to you asking for help with something? Sorry, can't help, it's not part of the goals I set at the beginning of the year. Stretch project that will improve your skills and unlock a lot of value for your employer? Sorry, I might not succeed, best stick to the goals I've set that I know I can achieve.

giantg22• 3 years ago

I agree. We set goals every year. There always some high-level conceptual things set levels above us. Half the time they don't even apply to our systems. They also have us set personal goals, which are basically meaningless.

rqtwteye• 3 years ago

“ you need to do to get this much of a raise or this much of a bonus,”

In sales it’s fairly simple to set clear goals that can be evaluated in the review. I think for a lot of other people goals constantly change during the year. It’s hard to evaluate that. It could maybe work if management constantly gave you clear and achievable goals for the month but that would require a lot of effort by management.

In the end annual reviews are BS for most people. “Nice job last year. Keep sound what you did. We don’t have money for raises.”.

Dwolb2• 3 years ago

I'm working on a problem in this space and my current line of thinking is...

1) there isn't very good definition of what most jobs are.

2) the definition isn't pulled through all your human capital management systems (recruiting, onboarding, career management, performance management, and off boarding).

So, I'm working on building a product that pulls 1 + 2 together.

ravenstine2• 3 years ago

Isn't having ill-defined job titles an advantage to a company? If someone has clearly defined duties, that makes it difficult to extract more forms of work from them for the same pay.

Dwolb2• 3 years ago

In a zero-sum scenario, yes.

But the positive-sum scenario would be: employees will be more productive if expectations are clear.

kemiller2002• 3 years ago

It's simple. Raises aren't there to reward you for what you've done. They are they to keep you working at the same company. Meeting a goal of what you did last year is inconsequential to the business trying to keep you. You got paid last year to do what you did. The raise is to convince you to stay and do it again the next year. The business has to decide if you are worth investing in to further its objectives.

Here's an easy example. If you were going to get rid of someone in 4 months after their review, would you give them a raise? Of course not, you'd allocate that funds to someone else.

That's why it's hard. The business has to judge which people they are going to focus on keeping.

shmatt• 3 years ago

FAANGMULA and all companies inspired by them have a completely broken interview process, this is the root of everything

A normal interview these days is 38 minutes (45 minutes minus 2 minutes introductions and 5 minutes for interviewee questions at the end), times 5 or 6.

Some leetcode, some Jedi (cultural fit), a design sketching or 2. People just go hard on leetcode, grokking system design, and memorize a few situational answers in STAR format and they're good to go.

How good will they be at identifying why the Kafka consumer is lagging at midnight? Who the hell knows?

So a broken system brings in thousands of new employees, now you need to define success to all of them at the same time, and figure out how fast you can get rid of those who can master leetcode but not deliverable production quality code

zeroonetwothree4• 3 years ago

For senior (and especially staff/principal) jobs there is vastly less emphasis on leetcode.

itronitron• 3 years ago

> here's what you need to do to get this much of a raise or this much of a bonus

Because they can get more out of the high-performers by not giving them a clear threshold (which is why they are called 'over-achievers') and if the mid to low performers met the threshold then the company would have to pay out a lot more in salary.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

Goals for any situation more complex than commissioned sales are highly likely to change throughout the year.

SamuelAdams• 3 years ago

In my experience annual reviews are more or less a standardized way to fire poor performers.

If you run a company you know this, but for the uninitiated: there’s a lot of work to fire someone in the US. Technically most employees are at-will, however companies need to have non-sueable reasons for terminating employment.

If they fire you because of race, sex, or some other protected class, that’s illegal. The employee can file for unemployment and that makes your company’s rates go up.

So before terminating someone, companies get a lot of written paperwork in order. This is typically called a performance improvement plan (PIP). That usually starts at the Annual performance review - they’ll say you have poor performance in specific areas and write it down in traceable documents.

The employee tries to “improve” sometimes, but if the company is adamant on terminating someone it’s really just a matter of time.

Their goal is to have a strong case (aka paperwork) demonstrating poor job performance so that when you sue (or file for unemployment) they can push back with a 6 month history of documented issues.

urbandw311er2• 3 years ago

This isn't always done cynically. I don't know if I'm an outlier, but I can recall cases where I have put an employee on an improvement plan and it successfully led to their retention. In one case, the team member was really quite shocked to realise they were underperforming and actually quite grateful for the honest feedback. Rather than giving up they redoubled their efforts and we were all amazed at the transformation. In turn, we provided additional coaching, encouragement at the performance gains, and everybody ended up back on-track. The person in question was recently promoted.

I don't particularly like managing people, and it's easy to slip into a lazy management style where you avoid confrontation, but the truth is that I've found people respect honesty and a chance to course correct.

ARandomerDude• 3 years ago

the team member was really quite shocked to realise they were underperforming

That's a management fail, to be honest. The first time someone hears they aren't keeping up should not be because you started paperwork on them.

mschild• 3 years ago

If an employee is shocked to be put on a PIP, then something's going wrong during communication. Feedback should be a continuous process so people, managers and employee both, can make small adjustments to ensure they're in the right spot. This obviously needs trust and goodwill from both sides.

For example, my annual reviews aren't so much about setting and discussing goals as it is about how the year actually went, both from a professional and personal standpoint. We talk about projects we finished or didn't, how the company and team is doing overall, and big strategic decisions made by execs that we don't really have control over but impact us in one way or another. Goals are generally set pretty frequently and are achievable. I have 1on1 with my leads every 2 weeks and we exchange pretty blunt but constructive feedback on how we are doing.

justin662• 3 years ago

Your comments about filing for unemployment don't make a lot of sense. Someone who is terminated for underperformance can still file for unemployment. Failing to meet goals set in a PIP is not "misconduct" such that the employee can be said to have been fired for cause, which would make them ineligible for unemployment.

Even in clear cases of misconduct it's common enough to simply terminate.

fwungy• 3 years ago

The company is run by the BOD to return value to the shareholders, e.g. VC.

The assumption is they'll get more effort out of labor if they're uncertain about the outcome. No matter how valuable an employee is the company must always maintain a MAD type posture that no employee is too valuable to lose, because if that were true and the employees knew they would take the company over effectively.

Part of what the annual review is is a reminder that your job is not an entitlement. It is not supposed to be pleasant for the average worker.

ElevenLathe• 3 years ago

Yes, it's about reminding us that they have the whip hand. I have a theory that the rise of similar loyalty rituals like sprint planning and standups sprung up in the vacuum created by the now-extinct one of handing out paychecks every other Friday. Nothing says "We determine how well your family eats this week, and don't forget it." like the boss literally walking around with a box of checks.

ravenstine2• 3 years ago

Annual reviews have many problems, the main one being that the incentives behind them are usually flawed. In many cases, these reviews exist because management believes it needs them. That doesn't mean that said management will actually take said reviews seriously. Once the review has occurred, the job of the review is done, which is to say that management or the business owners succeeded in making themselves feel as if they have done their job and have created a pathway to greater excellence by providing feedback to their employees. It doesn't matter how vacuous these reviews are; just pretend like they're better than nothing, and you can feel good about yourself. If all else fails, you, the manager, will maintain your sense of superiority.

From the employee's perspective, there's usually little reason to take annual reviews seriously. The fact that they are annual and not more frequent subtly communicates that any negative (or even positive) feedback really is not that important, if at all, and savvy employees who care about maximizing their earnings should consider whether it's worth investing effort into "improving" when said improvement is unlikely to translate into a bigger paycheck or a fancier title. Some companies try to counter this by having employees self-review, but this backfires in a number of ways. For one, employees are incentivized to either exaggerate or downplay their strengths and shortcomings. "Always room for improvement", right? If an employee legitimately can't think of anything they need to improve upon, they're liable to make something up just so they don't stick out like a sore thumb. One way that this system does work out for employers is that it can encourage less savvy employees to work harder than they did before but for the same pay, but this may also cause burnout and higher turnover when these peons realize their station at the company and move on to better things.

In rare cases, annual reviews can be used in an effort to get rid of poor-performing employees. This is not as common as people think, and is even less common the bigger the company gets. Businesses want to maximize productivity, but that doesn't mean they care enough to outright fire the mediocre or even lazy employees. Mediocrity can actually work in the favor of the business because, if such mediocrity is permitted, they can hang on to employees longer than if they demanded the kind of extraordinary excellence they claim to in job ads. "We only hire the best." No, you don't.

d23• 3 years ago

There's just no simple way to make a review system that scales infinitely and doesn't have some sort of tradeoff. There's no perfect.

shartshooter• 3 years ago

Reviews require that people's jobs are confined to a given box.

Many people like to do things outside of that box, or hate being so constrained.

Companies also struggle to quantify the value of some of the things people do.

For example

- Employee 1: Sales rep, hits quota, shows up late, leaves early

- Employee 2: Sales rep, behind on quota, but everyone in her pod is crushing because she's spending extra reps helping them be better at their job.

It's likely that employee #2 is in the wrong role. But if you're a mega-corp manager, all you see is that she's behind on quota, and her annual review reflects that. Let's put her on a pip and find some more people like Employee 1.

It could be that Employee #2 isn't motivated by more money.

Telling her "Do more sales or you're fired" could end up being pretty bad for you.

You may end up getting what you want(employee 2 is gone) but not like what you get(decreased productivity for your other team members.

bradlys• 3 years ago

Because incentives don’t align. Once you make a rubric that people can actually attain - everyone will meet that bar. But that doesn’t work - you need to fire people because upper management believes that the threat of firing people will keep more unpaid labor coming out. (Generally true but it comes with a cost - lower productivity and mind wandering and doing things to not be fired… which doesn’t line up with some of upper managements higher goals…)

It’s the result of a low trust society. Yay.

GreedClarifies• 3 years ago

It sounds like you want contract work. That’s available. And maybe it Will become more common in the future.

Companies and employees form into these longer term relations in an attempt to reduce the burden of creating these types of task based contracts. Is it more efficient? Maybe, since it is more common than contract work.

ghiculescu3• 3 years ago

Most of the comments here are the generic "all business is evil" cynicism that's rampant on HN these days. The reality is not so simple. Here's my perspective, as someone who's actually done annual reviews and tried to build/retain a great team.

drew a straight line between here's what you need to do to get this much of a raise or this much of a bonus

This is really really hard to do. It's not a good idea (or even a practical idea) to plot out all the work that you want an employee to do in a year, or even in a quarter.

You can prove this to yourself. Try and write down all the things you would like to get done over the next year and how much of a bonus you think you should earn for each thing. If you're in sales this is easy - it's a sliding scale ratio between revenue won and bonus. If you're in product or engineering I suspect you will not find it so simple.

If you've read posts like "Being Glue" (https://noidea.dog/glue), they talk the importance of work that's impactful within the team but very difficult to measure. If companies tried to draw a straight line between visible work and raise/bonus, nobody would ever choose to be glue.

This isn't to say that everyone is happy with how annual reviews work. As engineers we want everything to be black and white. If I pass this unit test, I get a pay rise. As managers who used to be engineers, we'd love to be able to give engineers that clarity, because you're right, they would get hyperfocused on it and we'd get a lot more out of them. But nobody's worked out a way to make it work.

Believe me: if you can invent a technique (and make a product around it) that enables this, you'll make a lot of money selling it to every single software company.

thunky• 3 years ago

It's not a good idea (or even a practical idea) to plot out all the work that you want an employee to do in a year, or even in a quarter

I think it's possible as long as you define the work very generically.

For example, replace "finish task X" with "participate in more code reviews" or "improve documentation". Sure it may water down the review, but at least at the end of the year you can reflect back on your general performance and measure it in some way.

ghiculescu3• 3 years ago

This is true, but it also dilutes the usefulness.

If I tell someone "if you improve documentation, you will get a $10k raise", then I am tying a very well defined reward a very poorly defined task.

"Improve documentation" could mean fixing some typos. Or it could mean documenting every un-documented public class and method. Or it could mean refactoring code to make it easier to use so less documentation is needed.

These all have very different value. In a year's time, I'd have to justify why only one of them actually might warrant the 10k raise. It is *much* worse to tell someone "you were promised a raise... now you aren't getting it", than to never offer or give the raise in the first place.

zeroonetwothree4• 3 years ago

Even with general goals like that you might find priorities shift and you need to focus on other things.

ansgri• 3 years ago

A bit tangential, but

As engineers we want everything to be black and white

should not be true of "us engineers". Engineering is balancing trade-offs, and any moderately complex system is a big hairy ball of tradeoffs, some of them (in the best case) unarticulated. I get suspicious of boolean logic applied to real world, especially after working in AI for a long while.

That black and white thinking is characteristic of juniors, and some mathematicians dealing with models disconnected from the real world.

93po2• 3 years ago

It's funny because "As engineers we want everything to be black and white" is a very black and white statement. But people at large are like this. We see it all the time in politics. Whoever you don't like is either literally Hitler or literally Stalin

ghiculescu3• 3 years ago

You're right. Maybe a better wording is, as engineers we want to know the success criteria for everything.

sharemywin• 3 years ago

I get it soft skills pay more. but the problem is "people skills" demotivate most engineers that want to be engineers. I'm not saying tolerate assholes.

PragmaticPulp• 3 years ago

It's seems to me that if companies drew a straight line between here's what you need to do to get this much of a raise or this much of a bonus, they could get alot more out of each employee.

If we could predict exactly what work needed to be done and how long it would take a theoretical employee to do it, this would be great.

But we can’t predict the work with such accuracy, nor can we predict how long it should take to get done. If we planned all of the year’s work in exact detail and underestimated by even 25%, you’d be working 10 hour days every day for a year. It’s not uncommon for projects to take twice as long as estimated, in which case you’d be working 80 hour weeks.

Another problem is that once you set specific numeric goals, people will game the hell out of them. I worked at a company that decided to reward people by the number of bug tickets they closed. Suddenly, the number of bug tickets tripled! People were starting to ship code with known bugs because they knew they could get some easy bug fix ticket closes to raise their numbers. It made outcomes worse even though everyone now knew exactly how to get bigger bonuses.

Finally, there’s more to reviews than just the things that can be measured through metrics. If someone is crushing their tickets and committing a lot of features but they’re insufferable to work with, they shouldn’t be rewarded for that. Good managers should have their finger on the pulse of these softer aspects of performance, even though it will never be a perfect assessment.

dyingkneepad• 3 years ago

If they follow as you said and set this goal for everyone, then everyone (or at least a significant number of people) achieve it, then they can't reward everybody with promotions/bonuses, as they probably won't have the money to do so. Also, they can't decide what the goal will be for everyone, so some teams will have much easier/achievable goals, others won't, making things unbalanced.

It's a complicated problem and it's also more a social/relationship problem than really a technical problem. How people interpret what you've done is much more important than what you've actually don't.

Please don't try to come up with technical solutions for social problems, I see engineers trying to do this and failing all the time.

ergonaught• 3 years ago

It's communication, essentially, and humans absolutely suck at communication.

No one is on the same page about it. The purpose of annual reviews is unclear, misunderstood, and misinterpreted, leading to a broken implementation in practice.

Even when there is an attempt at clarity, emotional kneejerks interfere anyway. ex: Telling someone that they "Meet Expectations" when those expectations are very high just results in them feeling like you've called them "average" somehow, and people outside that process are absolutely going to misinterpret it as "Average" leading to a continuing failure to get somewhere constructive.

Most of the time, there aren't great ways to be usefully objective about performance, anyway, due to missing context.

leothecool• 3 years ago

Because at the end of the day, compensation isn't tied to performance, its tied to what the market will bear.

dboreham• 3 years ago

Question should be: given that they're not useful, why do annual reviews still exist?

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B• 3 years ago

It's a good question. I have been coding for more than 20 years and have yet to find a good manager with a useful annual review. It's always some bashing and makes you feel like crap, or it's a way to prevent raises, or getting bonuses if you quit the company. Psychologically, it's a real mess because the grievances are always unrelated to my job.

zeroonetwothree4• 3 years ago

It’s too hard to evaluate people’s work fairly. Any system is going to ignore valuable work or weight things incorrectly. Every employee is different and focuses on different things. We aren’t just assembly line workers that can evaluated in widgets per hour. How do you compare someone that ships twice as many PRs to someone that deep dives to fix that one critical bug every week?

And having everything be extrinsically motivated is horrible for job satisfaction. It would actually be better to hide the reasons for raise/bonus as much as possible so people want to do their jobs for their own satisfaction (obviously people want to get paid too but it’s best not to have thoughts like “if I fix this bug, what’s the exact $ bonus increase I get”).

0xcde4c3db• 3 years ago

In my experience, it's broken because it's theater. They've already made a top-down decision on wages, layoffs, etc. based on budget, revenue, and sales projections, but they need to pretend that the decision has some rational connection to the value provided by the individual employees, so they impose a process that produces the necessary documents to support that notion. As an IC or low-level manager, there's nothing you can put in the review that will actually change the decision because the purpose of the process isn't to inform the decision, but to justify it. You can't do anything to win or lose a review any more than Hulk Hogan can do anything to win or lose a match; you only lose by failing to put on the expected show.

Ruined4104• 3 years ago

At my company, all of our goals are ranked on a 1-5 scale. Where a "3" is doing your job.

I have been told by my manager that the only acceptable ratings are either a "3" or a "4" where a 3 is doing your job at 100% accepted capacity and a "4" is going above and beyond.

The only way to earn a "5" is to wear reed sandals and walk on water. A "2" means immediate PIP and a "1" means you are going to be escorted out the door.

Throwaway account...don't bother searching my history.

apple4ever• 3 years ago

Couple thoughts:

1. I really like 360 reviews, where you get feedback (anonymously) from other members of the team and even outside of the team. It's some work to do, but it can be worth it. 2. My company does semi-annual reviews, because 6 months is about the time people can remember things. That works well, and also because the review is only six questions. 3. As a manager and an employee, creating goals is hard, especially ones that are useful. I think a person should have at most two goals, one technical, and one personal. 4. My company also created a rubric for being senior, which while not perfect, is better than nothing. It makes creating goals easier. 5. My company also does not tie pay directly to the reviews. Pay increases happen once a year in a specific month, and the reviews are used to inform that, but no discussion of pay comes out of it. It lets everyone relax more. 6. Part of the problem is promotion is too hard, and a manager has to really justify that. Adding that rubric above helps a lot.

juancn• 3 years ago

One part is compliance, it leaves a paper trail, if you're a really high performer you could pretty much ignore them. They're not going to fire you if the form is not filled, but if you're not, they become justification for termination.

In any case, the important part for me is to make sure that when you have your yearly or quarterly conversation there are no surprises. If there are, communication broke at some point earlier on and you and your manager should work on fixing it.

Ask HN: Why are annual reviews so broken?

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