
The Push Against Performance Reviews - dankohn1
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-push-against-performance-reviews
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kfk
I think it's good to sit and talk about performance and work every now and
then, I don't think it's good to write things down and put them into a system
for years. Also, I think it's horrible to have things like OLR where "leaders"
sit and talk about you and how well you do (from below to above expectations).
The thing is, most managers are bad, especially the middle ones, and their
opinions about their reports tend to be bad and flawed. Managers get overly
excited about extroverted people and the introverted struggle because they
don't show "leadership skills". However, in many fields (i.e. mine in
finance), you need a high % of introverted people because they are the ones
that usually perform the work, while extroverted spend time socializing and
"networking". This whole situation creates a continuous incentive to game the
system - instead of doing your job, you spend time working out ways to game
the reviews (there are many, the classic is when you are indispensable for
some mission critical tasks). The result of this is that you will get
politicians at the top, those that game better the system, instead than
results.

It's not easy, but definitely performance reviews and OLRs are not the answer.
I think 1:1's are a good idea, because they happen more frequently. As for
feedback from others than your boss, I think it would make much more sense if
that was on the whole team/department, rather than on single individuals (like
in OLRs).

~~~
pinaceae
"The thing is, most managers are bad, especially the middle ones, and their
opinions about their reports tend to be bad and flawed. "

oh bullshit. unless you make it broader and state:

"The thing is, most employees are bad and their opinions about their peers,
reports and managers tend to be bad and flawed."

or where do you think managers come from? bullshit mountain?

~~~
kfk
Nice tone. But if you read my comment you realize I make a point of bad
selection, that's where bad management comes from. Also, good managers end up
being bad simply because they need to game a broken system to stay afloat.
Mine is an opinion, though.

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analog31
_“Given what I know of this person’s performance, and if it were my money, I
would award this person the highest possible compensation increase and bonus;”
... “This person is ready for promotion today.”_

I was a manager through a few performance review cycles before I went back to
engineering. This is the first instance I've ever seen where the performance
review gathered information that was actually germane to the outcome.

 _Managers have incentives to inflate appraisals..._

Absolutely. My salary budget was incremented in the same way as our salaries
are, by getting the biggest raises possible. I was competing with other
managers for a piece of a fixed pot of money for these raises, and every
manager knew what was at stake.

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Intermernet
Performance reviews are a form-letter attempt at managerial automation. They
seem to suggest that a manager should only be monitoring the performance of
their team at certain points in the year. A good manager (a rare breed) knows
to a fairly certain degree how their team is performing at any time based on
the output from the team. If they don't know this, how are they meant to
manage?

I flat out refused to do performance reviews at a previous position. If the
company has an issue with my performance, then HR can talk to me directly. If
the company wanted to fire me for not filling out their performance review,
then I didn't really want to work for that company.

They never mentioned it, and I left the company amicably.

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perlgeek
The problem is, those existing systems were there for a reason. And I'd guess
the reason usually was that the previous, less formal system also had their
weaknesses. Most notably, they are very probably very subjective.

IMHO performance ratings and deciding who gets a promotion simply are very
hard problems, and no good solutions. So people are always dissatisfied with
the current approach, and so add rules and layer to fix it. Eventually, the
system becomes unworkable and bloated, and are stripped down to the basics
again. Which we currently observe.

But I wouldn't be surprised at all if the cycle continues, and more rules and
formal processes will be added.

~~~
yuhong
I do think trying to quantify performance into a number is flawed for anything
other than factory work and the like.

~~~
perlgeek
Yes. And the dilemma is that there has to be one number (the one on the pay
check), and it'd better correlate with performance in some way.

~~~
yuhong
I think a better approach is to give the same salary to an entire team.

~~~
solomatov
The more creative the work, the higher the difference in performance. It seems
to, it's unfair that people who do substantially more, are paid the same
amount of money as underperformers.

~~~
solipsism
Do you take this position when dining at a restaurant? When your food is
amazing, do you pay more for it? When it's poor, do you pay less?

Probably not. If you care a lot about the restaurant's quality (maybe it's
your neighborhood place), you might offer some constructive criticism in the
form of yelp reviews or feedback cards. If that fails, you'd probably
reluctantly sever your relationship with the restaurant.

Why should this kind of relationship not apply to employees? The only
difference being an employer should probably do more to try to get performance
up before severing the relationship.

~~~
solomatov
>Do you take this position when dining at a restaurant? When your food is
amazing, do you pay more for it? When it's poor, do you pay less?

Actually, I do. I leave tips depending on the quality of food and serving.

>Why should this kind of relationship not apply to employees? The only
difference being an employer should probably do more to try to get performance
up before severing the relationship.

It applies to employees as well. Employees might leave for a place with a
better pay, actually, I know a lot of software developers who change the job
once in 2-3 years to make it more market because their employees don't think
they need to pay more. If employer is doing something which is quite unique,
and people need to learn this on the job and it takes a lot of time, not
paying good performers is detrimental to the business.

~~~
solipsism
You leave tips depending on the quality of the food? At only a minority of
restaurants do tips get shared with the cooks. You're doing it wrong.

~~~
ild
> At only a minority of restaurants do tips get shared with the cooks.

I think they often do get shared with cooks, but not to the extent to anyhow
influence the quality.

~~~
logicfiction
Is this a regional/local situation where you live? I've worked at a handful of
restaurants in the Northeastern US in the back-of-the-house staff and never
once did cooks get a cut of tips.

~~~
ild
Not sure, I just heard it from "friends friends"; the region is Midwest.

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HelloMcFly
I try to make the case like this in my organization (and have in my previous
one as well): we can easily quantify the _enormous_ amount of money -
particularly but far from exclusively the financial value of time - we spend
on our performance review process. But what we don't really know, and what
very few organizations really know (because "performance" is usually a very
troublesome criterion) is what value that process is delivering back to the
organization.

One of the problems is that most organizations want their process to "Do It
All." They want it to be development for the employee while also being the
primary determinant of administrative decisions. Further, they want it to
support _all_ administrative decisions: who's great at their current job, who
is most capable of succeeding in their next job (i.e., who should we
promote?), how should we distribute our pay raises, what do we do with this
year's STI and LTI, etc.

It's broken, and expensive. Maybe it can't truly be fixed, but at least we can
save some money, time, and frustration. That doesn't mean nobody gets
feedback, or that we don't set and track goals. But it doesn't have to be the
way we make it. If we put half as much effort into making managers better at
leading people I have no doubt the impact would be much more clear.

~~~
eitally
Imnsho, at most companies the process only serves as 1) an atta boy for the
high performers, to justify raises & promotions, and 2) CYA documentation to
manage out the lowest performers. These extremes cover about 10% of any org,
max, and the rest are all completely unserved by the process.

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LoSboccacc
people optimizing for the metric instead than getting better at working?

color me surprised.

this has been know for a while by now: if you try to put down hard metrics for
creative jobs they just backfire.

also managers using reviews to favor their protege and as favor exchange
across other managers to partition their resources shouldn't come as a
surprise to anyone having worked with humans.

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dbg31415
Without a formal time for review, how will they build a formal time for pay
evaluation and bonuses?

I can't help but think this is like the latest cell phone craze... yes, your
bill drops down slightly, but you are going to have to pay for your next phone
and when you do your bill will actually increase. Suckers.

Stack Ranking was and is fucking horrible. And getting rid of that for honest
360 reviews should be the goal. Reviews from your peers with project
completion, reviews from your manager with year completion... those are both
important and can help you grow.

Not to mention get a raise.

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solipsism
The yearly performance evaluation is a joke. Any company which respects its
employees as humans and which takes seriously its responsibility to its
shareholders will promote the ongoing evaluation of employees based on close
1-on-1 relationships between manager and direct report. And the quality of the
performance evaluation at any company that does this is only as good as the
quality of those managers. If all your managers are people who are out to make
themselves look good, or out to keep their own jobs safe, no system could
possibly get the most out of your employees.

If your managers are motivated to care about the company and to make its goals
their own, and if you provide the proper training and evaluation of their
management to ensure they know how to manage the right way, you have a chance.

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lectrick
In a creative job (such as programming) it's extraordinarily difficult to
evaluate how valuable someone is, but I would suggest some sort of human
valuation ("you know it when you see it"), a LIGHT metric used only as a data
point (goals and whatnot, any measurable impact on bottom line, or website
performance, or some other numbers), and some means of simply measuring how
much someone cares about their job, company and career. I think I can tell how
much the people I work with care about their job, company and career, I think
I could trust most of them to know that about me, and I think that's a good
place to start.

Metrics-wise perhaps a "spread spectrum" approach that covers so many things
that most signs of being "productive" would end up at least reflecting in the
numbers, yet would prevent "gaming" of the numbers since so many things are
measured. Used only to inform and not base hard decisions on.

This would catch both people who care about their job but for whatever reason
aren't producing anything measurable, as well as people who have produced but
perhaps could produce even more if they were more engaged.

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solomatov
It's very easy to criticize performance reviews. Does anybody know about more
sensible alternative to this system?

~~~
greggman
I'm curious too. One company I worked at had me privately rank coworkers. No
Idea if it worked. It seemed like it might identify top and bottom performers?

------
VLM
“This person is ready for promotion today.”

I would wager the percentage of employees working at a firm that still
participates in promotion culture is low and dropping. In other words "ready
for a promotion" for most people in 2015 means they're going to quit soon and
get a higher level position at another firm. I'm sure there still exist
individual companies and maybe unusual and rare fields where promotion culture
still exists, but it seems very rare and unusual.

Meanwhile in most areas outside SV/NYC computer programming during bubbles,
there is a large excess of qualified workers vs positions. For example in K12
education the state-U system graduates twice as many teachers as there are
open positions for all new and past grads to apply for. It doesn't matter if
they are in the top half that got hired because they are the best, or the most
politically untouchable, or the most attractive, a year after hiring at review
time they're still going to be that top half. So there's nobody to give a hard
time to in a review, because that lower half or lower 3/4 or whatever in any
professional field are already working at Starbucks or as a waiter or
bartender. The world has "needs improvement" kindergarten teachers, but they
don't work at your neighborhood school, they never got a job in teaching and
they serve you beer at the bar, for example. The economy is in permanent
contraction and the general population and higher-ed sector are in permanent
expansion for many years now, outside bubble segments of the economy, so
hiring one of the bad workers strongly reflects on a managers interview
skills, making it even harder to admit anyone is below "excellent".

Meanwhile increased labor mobility for the few that are employed means a
review a couple years back, is a couple employers ago, so it is inaccessible
and irrelevant, so its not like the wasted effort today will pay off in ten
years. Maybe a review in 1950 would come in handy at the same employer in 1960
to select a new director, but the firm has no loyalty to the employee and
therefore the employee has no loyalty to the firm, for at least three human
generations now, so its been culturally bred out of us.

So the folks at the top of a team will interpret an attaboy as "start applying
for higher level jobs elsewhere" and economic realities mean you don't have
truly low performance employees to crack the whip upon, making the whole dog
and pony show a waste of time for all involved. This leads to an attitude of
just pencil whip the process to get the meaningless metric of "accomplished
reviews" up to 100% and be done with it. Once the folks who've been pencil
whipping it for their whole careers make it up high enough, its finally
politically possible to discuss getting rid of the waste of time. So here we
finally are.

~~~
solipsism
_Meanwhile in most areas outside SV /NYC computer programming during bubbles,
there is a large excess of qualified workers vs positions_

This is simply not true. There are many, many industries requiring high-
skilled employees who are hard to replace. You mentioned one example of an
industry with high supply vs demand, and it happens to be the one most obvious
example. You'd have to come up with lots more examples to show that this is
the norm.

The[0] evidence[1] shows[2] otherwise[3].

[0]: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/emsi/2013/03/07/americas-
skilled...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/emsi/2013/03/07/americas-skilled-
trades-dilemma-shortages-loom-as-most-in-demand-group-of-workers-ages/) [1]:
[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/20/survey-shows-growing-us-
short...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/20/survey-shows-growing-us-shortage-of-
skilled-labor.html) [2]:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/business/economy/stubborn-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/business/economy/stubborn-
skills-gap-in-americas-work-force.html) [3]:
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/small-business-owners-work-to-
fi...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/small-business-owners-work-to-fill-job-
openings-1404940118)

~~~
collyw
> There are many, many industries requiring high-skilled employees who are
> hard to replace.

Searching for jobs recently, plenty of people want senior / experienced devs,
but want to pay intermediate level wages.

------
markbnj
I'm happy to see this become a topic of conversation. The formal performance
review is emblematic of the key difference between small and large
organizations. A small organization will usually rely on ad hoc information
gathered from the process of daily interaction and observed results. Opinions
form, are solidified, and ultimately business decisions are made as informed
by these ad hoc impressions and the resulting attitudes. For the best small
organizations these approaches work very well. Managers have enough personal
oversight of the company's operations to feel like they have a good handle on
what's happening.

Once an organization grows to a certain size management begins to lose that
level of personal oversight. No one person or even a small group of persons
can comprehend the scope of the company's operations. More levels of hierarchy
have been introduced; there are more managers responsible for more people. Now
it is probably possible that those same ad hoc approaches that worked in the
small organization could continue to work at some unit level of the larger
organization. Managers could maintain personal oversight of their unit, the
observed results could percolate up the hierarchy, decisions could be made
based on those results.

Unfortunately, the insecurities of higher level managers will not usually
allow this to happen. Lacking that personal oversight at the operational level
they attempt to compensate for the risk of a bad outcome by developing rules
which ensure a good outcome. This happens so reliably as organizations grow
that the emergence of rules is nearly synonymous with the concept of growth.
However, and I think this is the key point, it seems to me that developing
rules to ensure that an organization is managed to a good outcome is a little
like trying to develop rules that ensure a baseball team will win a majority
of its games in a given season.

Rules of this sort actually cast in concrete a specific view of and response
to a set of conditions that exist or existed up to the time when the rules
were created. They stifle the ability of the organization to react to changes
in conditions that may not have been anticipated. And for whatever reason,
probably due to essential human nature, they seem nearly inevitable once an
organization reaches a certain size. It would seem to make sense to act more
like the baseball team: acquire the absolute best people, give them the
absolute best training and resources, make the mission absolutely clear, and
then reward or punish based on results. But to take such an approach requires
waiting for those results to come in before you can know whether you were
successful.

Which is, interestingly, how military organizations have to handle field
commands. When battle looms the hierarchy (and not inconsequentially the
troops) has to put its faith in the people in command on the ground, whom they
have put in place, trained, and supported. The tides of battle change too
swiftly, and the outcome of poor or slow decision making is so brutal, that a
top-heavy approach to governance simply doesn't work. In some ways that is the
essential story of the way the war in Vietnam was fought, for example, as
contrasted with previous conflicts.

