
Ask HN: Do we really need performance feedback? - ali_ibrahim
Hi,
In companies i have seen 360 degree performance review system where coworkers rate each other. However, this activity is not useful as everybody remembers the most recent performance and give feedback based upon that and sometimes it is biased where coworkers rate each other well. There are continuous feedback solutions as well but just on organization level.<p>My question is: in order to grow professionally, is feedback &#x27;really&#x27; an importance factor in our growth? Is there another effective way to get it? Anonymous or known? Is this problem fixable because usually employees don&#x27;t really pay attention to it feedback obtained through such process
======
joshyeager
Yes, feedback is essential for growth. Without it, you can't grow any farther
or faster than your own ability to evaluate yourself and decide how to
improve.

Annual performance reviews aren't a good feedback tool. They are much too
slow, and usually also too big and generalized. What you really need is fast
specific feedback (within a week, focused on one event, action-focused).

With that said, if you want to grow, don't ignore your annual review. It may
be the only feedback you get from some people, so analyze it and extract
whatever information you can to help yourself grow.

If you're a manager and your organization requires performance reviews, it's
probably not worth the effort to fight them. Instead, work on giving your team
feedback fast, specific throughout the year to help them grow. And do a good
job on the annual reviews for their other purpose, which is recording
performance for salary and promotion decisions.

~~~
ali_ibrahim
Thanks for your insights! I generally agree that feedback is important.
Theoretically people should follow and gain from it. I started
pleasantfish.com, a skills feedback platform where people could get anonymous
feedback from their current and previous colleagues about their skills and
qualities. But i generally saw people are either not interested in getting
them reviewed much and even if they get feedback they are not much interested
in improving upen feedback(asked through user feedback) which actually brought
me to this question.

So i think somehow feedback has to be actionable and gives a plan of action to
user in such a manner that he effortlessly tries to improve those things in
his daily routine be it reading related articles or what. But users generally
tend to be lazy which is why feedback in the end seems to be useless for them.

~~~
joshyeager
Oh, ok. I was mostly talking about how an individual can get maximum benefit
from feedback. One of the biggest sources of growth for me has been actively
engaging and acting on the feedback I receive. For more on that, I strongly
recommend Thanks for the Feedback by Sheila Heen.

You're right that it's hard to get others to learn from feedback if they don't
actively work at it. You can make your feedback easier to understand and more
action-oriented. But if they're lazy or even just focused differently, your
feedback to them won't be very effective.

As a manager, I think it's still worthwhile to give as much feedback as I can.
Some of it might be heard and acted on, which will help the receiver grow.

~~~
10921809211
Where "grow" means "behave like the manager thinks is beneficial for the
company".

[http://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-
mind.h...](http://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind.html)

Probably better than "Thanks for the Feedback" by Sheila Heen.

~~~
joshyeager
Yeah, most feedback is going to come from what the giver feels is important,
and a manager will usually prioritize what the company needs. A good manager
will also prioritize the employee's own goals, but not every manager (or
company) is mature enough to do both at the same time.

But that doesn't mean that you as an individual can't get value from the
feedback you receive. You just have to process it intentionally, instead of
taking it at face value. That's one of my favorite points in Thanks for the
Feedback.

------
DoubleGlazing
Feedback works when it is fairly instant, friendly and most of all fair.

If you have to do X, Y and Z in n amount of time and you fail then a quick
chat about why failed is very useful whilst the issues are fresh in peoples
minds.

If you have to wait a few months for your next review then no one really
remembers the intricacies of the event, so you aren't really able to flesh out
what went wrong or what can be improved.

The friendliness part is vital too. Reviews can easily turn too formal and
intimidating, putting the employee on the defensive. Most employees don't want
to under performs so don't treat them like they are being accused of something
bad.

And I cannot under estimate the fairness part. Only review based on
established criteria. Be objective, not subjective. If you let other employees
offer feedback then force them to provide evidence and don't just accept their
opinion as provided. I was once told by manager that he was family friendly
and he was flexible about arrival times, so long as I put the hours in and got
the work done. When I took advantage of this for just one week I was given a
beating in my review for poor punctuality. When I challenged my manager about
his claim to be Okay with this his response was "Do you have that in
writing?". I resigned a week later. They begged me stay I refused.

~~~
0xmohit
> Feedback works when it is fairly instant, friendly and most of all fair.

Well said. I assume that by "friendly", you imply "constructive".

Also: "How to Offer Constructive Feedback & Recognition" [0] and "How to Give
Effective Feedback" [1].

[0]
[http://www.usc.edu/programs/cwfl/assets/pdf/constructive_fee...](http://www.usc.edu/programs/cwfl/assets/pdf/constructive_feedback.pdf)

[1]
[http://www.unh.edu/hr/sites/unh.edu.hr/files/pdfs/tool-2.pdf](http://www.unh.edu/hr/sites/unh.edu.hr/files/pdfs/tool-2.pdf)

~~~
DoubleGlazing
Yep, even if they are bringing up a serious issue they should phrase it as
positively as possible.

So, instead of "I'm really unhappy that you are missing targets." say "I
notice you're having a bit of an issue with targets, is there anything I can
help you with?"

~~~
ali_ibrahim
Constructive feedback is all what is needed and the only motive it should be
given is to enhance individual productivity and grow him as a better
professional.

------
koliber
I find that feedback is important, but there are better ways of doing it than
annual performance reviews. We need feedback because without it, we have
trouble objectively gauging how well we are doing.

To start, doing a performance review once a year leaves huge gaps in feedback.
Feedback needs to be immediate. Telling someone that they did something great
or sub-optimal 11 months ago is useless.

Second, everyone needs feedback. Feedback should not only flow from managers
to employees. I would argue that managers need feedback even more than
employees. Managers needs to know what is going on in their organization. The
are usually well aware of the core topics (sales if you're sales manager,
state of code if you're managing developers). However, good feedback should be
about everything, including how people feel, what else is going well or not
too well, if there is anything that they could suggest for improvement, or if
anything is blocking their progress.

Thirdly, feedback should not only be a one way process. All good feedback
should be a start of a conversation. People will listen to feedback better if
it is presented as part of a two-way communication process.

I am currently working with 15Five.com to build a better feedback platform and
to address the shortcomings of annual feedback systems.

~~~
ali_ibrahim
hey koliber, good work at 15Five.com . Basically i am trying to tackle the
same problem which is why i posted this question. I made a comment above
summing up all the good feedback in this thread. Your feedback will be
appreciated.

------
ochronus
I think (and have experienced from both sides) that feedback is very important
for growth and for mental wellbeing as well. Feedback should be continuous
though, yearly/twice a year is not enough. Feedback should be coming from
everyone you work with, not only your manager. Feedback helps you calibrate
yourself and also helps in setting goals that are relevant.

That said, you should definitely work on your self-consciousness so you can
start being more objective about yourself, but that can be a loooong journey.

It's also important to know the context of the feedbacks you're getting. If
you pissed off someone once and that person gives you a negative feedback just
because of one situation, know that it might not be unbiased. Also ask for
specific examples when getting feedback. It should be a live, active
communication rather some abstracted-out isolated way of communicating. If you
don't understand something or you see something you don't agree with just talk
to the person, ask for clarification, examples.

------
mikekchar
I taught in a high school for 5 years. I learned one very important thing: you
can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I only noticed after
that experience that in my previous 25 years as a programmer the vast majority
of people ignored my advice (even when they asked for it!)

Generally speaking, I've found that people have a preconceived notion of an
answer when they solicit feedback for something. Then they go shopping around
for the person who will answer with the feedback that they expect. When you
give unsolicited feedback the effect is even stronger -- people simply do not
want to believe that their expectations do not mesh with the real world.

The end result is that if you give good feedback and are saying things that
the person knows already, it's not very effective because they already know
it. If you give feedback and the person is surprised by it, they will
disregard it unless forced to confront it. Forcing people to confront their
incorrect understanding sometimes works, but rarely (Think... how many
students shape up after failing a test? Some do, but the vast majority simply
fall into a pattern of failure).

My most successful pattern of "feedback" is to simply provide support. If
someone requires feedback, I rather ask them what they think of the situation.
If it matches my opinion, then I encourage them to continue. If it doesn't, I
do nothing until the situation reaches a head -- then I offer my assistance to
help. Usually if the person is desperate they will also be open to new ideas.

Allowing people to fail is the best way to help them learn. Sometimes it can
be costly, though. If the cost gets to be too high, you might have to
intervene, but that's not a "regular feedback" kind of thing.

Just to clarify, though, most people require a different kind of feedback --
"You are a nice person. I enjoy working with you. I like it when you do X." It
makes them feel comfortable and able to do their work. That kind of
encouragement is often lacking in the workplace (and in schools,
unfortunately). It helps to make a point of saying nice things whenever you
notice them. At school I literally made a chart with all my students on it and
I checked off whenever I noticed something they did right (and commented on
it). If someone was missing ticks I would dedicate myself to watching them all
day to catch them doing something right (try not to be creepy about it ;-) )

Edit: If you are wanting to write software, I would _love_ a chart that I
could put all my colleagues on where I could write nice things when I saw
them. It would be awesome if it had alarms to tell me when I wasn't
encouraging certain people, etc. I'd pay money for that.

~~~
ali_ibrahim
hey mikechar, thanks for your excellent insights. I think we can agree that
whosoever wants to improve themselves they listen to the feedback given to
them and who so doesn't its useless to them. So if someone really needs it
there has to be a mechanism to be given to it (which basically i am trying to
address in my startup i mentioned above in the comment i did). I would love to
hear your thoughts on that.

~~~
mikekchar
If I'm trying to follow my own advice, I suppose now is the time where I'm
supposed to smile, tell you to do your best and offer you support if you run
into trouble :-).

It's true that some people are really excellent at listening to people and
incorporating feedback. I don't really know if those people find that they
lack opportunities for feedback.

Just to quote you:

> whosoever wants to improve themselves they listen to the feedback given to
> them and who so doesn't its useless to them. So if someone really needs it
> there has to be a mechanism to be given to it.

If you start with this assumption, then there is no need to ask your question
("Do we really need performance feedback?"), because you have assumed your
answer. I think you know that :-) Forgive me for what will seem like going off
on a tangent, but let me tell you a quick story about when I was teaching.

I taught English as a foreign language to Japanese high school students. Their
text book was terrible and I avoided it, but one section was not too bad. I
asked the students to bring in their text book the next day. I spoke English,
but it was simple English that they all knew and everyone seemed to
understand.

The next day, not a single person brought their text book. I asked them if
they remembered me asking about it. Out of 30 people, not one person
remembered me saying anything at all. Luckily, another teacher was in the room
when I had asked, so I could verify that it wasn't just me going crazy. I
_had_ asked them, and not one of the students remembered the event at all.

You might think (as I did) that at the very least the students might remember
me saying something that they didn't understand at the end of class. As it
turns out, that's not the way memory works. If you don't understand something,
or if your reject it in some way, _you are likely not to remember that the
event happened at all_!

In the same way, many people complain that they never get feedback. They feel
that this is the reason that they can not improve. If only someone would give
them feedback! However, I think it is likely that when people are poor at
receiving feedback, their brains filter out the events leading them to believe
that the fault lies with others. To be honest, I believe that this happens
with many other things as well ;-)

My personal suspicion is that by providing another feedback mechanism, you may
be serving a small audience which is already well served by traditional means.
Those people who react well to feedback do not seem to have trouble
cultivating it, in my experience. People who reject feedback think that it is
rare because they don't internalise it. They are probably the much bigger
market, but they are not a market that will benefit from more feedback. If it
were me, I think I might try to turn my mind to trying to find out what these
people need.

Hope that helps. Good luck!

------
drakonka
Feedback from my direct managers is fairly important for me. Anonymous
feedback from some peers helps with that as it gives the manager an idea of
what working with me is like to my coworkers. If I'm doing my job well I want
to know about it because it reminds me not to doubt myself and stay on course.
If I need to do something different I want to know about it early so that I
can course-correct before it becomes a problem.

~~~
ali_ibrahim
I have a rhetorical question here. When you say that anonymous feedback gives
manager the idea of what working with me is like to my coworkers, do you think
this information is useful for and should actually be allowed to share with
potential employers and recruiting managers? Shouldn't they have a right to
this information? For example: when a candidate mentions "references" on his
resume, they are always meant to give positive feedback about them which is
why again its broken. However, imagine of a platform allowing users to get
anonymous 360 feedback from former and current colleagues and this information
to be only shareable with recruiting manager of jobs they apply on. If a user
shows certain transition and improvements ij their qualities then that would
mean they're really working on the feedback they receive and as a hiring
manager i would definitely want to hire that guy. Problem with that is a lot
of people would never want this information to go out and made available to
the hiring comitttees as it will reveal too much about them. However, that's
the only way i find this fixable!

~~~
IanCal
That suddenly makes the comments I give someone in feedback vital to their
future job so being at all negative would be seen as a big punishment.

> For example: when a candidate mentions "references" on his resume, they are
> always meant to give positive feedback about them which is why again its
> broken.

Many jobs don't give any feedback at all. The purpose is to prove that you
did, in fact, work there with that title for that duration.

General question: are un-vetted reviews about someone by completely unknown
people a reliable indicator of future performance?

If places don't give reliably truthful reviews, why would you expect that the
360 feedback wouldn't turn into exactly the same thing?

------
maxxxxx
I think feedback is very important for growth. I listen closely to it.

The problem with 360s in my company is that when you give ideas for
improvement you can't know if the manager will make this a negative. This
happened to me once: I put a well-intended point of improvement into the
review of somebody I really like and respect. The manager made this (I was
told later) the main point of the yearly review and it impacted the coworker
negatively. Since then I have kept my 360s pretty bland and not really saying
anything.

Review systems can/could be extremely valuable but it's hard to implement them
in way that they really work. They work probably best where management is
genuinely interested in the growth of employees.

------
wsc981
I am not sure.

Perhaps for people that want to grow their roles in organisations, it's
important. As a freelancer, I am happy to live without this ritual. In the
past, before I became freelancer, I dreaded these reviews, as I suspected
often these performance reviews could be politically charged and not
necessarily deal with my performance (for example a manager might tell me I
need to improve some aspects for a raise - I might have to suck up to some
manager to get more chance for a big raise, when a limited budget is available
for a group of employees).

As a freelancer I am free to decide on the aspects I want to improve on and as
such I don't need a manager to help me with this. This makes me much happier.

~~~
asadjb
Having both freelanced and currently working full time, I feel that feedback
is a significant benefit of working full time. As joshyeager says in this
thread, "Yes, feedback is essential for growth. Without it, you can't grow any
farther or faster than your own ability to evaluate yourself and decide how to
improve.", and I agree with this.

This is something that is just missing when you are working by yourself as a
freelancer. I could be a good coder, but crappy co-worker and I'd never know
that if I just work by-my-self. Personally, I'm an OK programmer. But I used
to be crap at teaching people. I freelanced for almost 7 years before I joined
my first programming gig, and this is one of the first things I learned.
Without feedback from my colleagues, I would never even have found out about
it, unless I had gone out of my way to get myself involved in teaching.

And the way I look at it, feedback from your co-workers doesn't just improve
you as an employee, it usually helps you grow as a person as well, and fix
some error of your personality or character. For me, improving the way I try
to teach things to my peers made me a better programmer, and [plug]helped me a
lot while I was writing my book ([https://www.amazon.com/Django-Project-
Blueprints-Jibran-Ahme...](https://www.amazon.com/Django-Project-Blueprints-
Jibran-Ahmed/dp/1783985429\)\[/plug\]).

------
perlgeek
You need feedback, yes.

But perhaps not (or not only) on the annual review level, but rather solicit
feedback from peers and superiors on a per-project level (or if you work in a
Scrum team, per epos or something).

If you get such feedback maybe every two or three months, and then you get a
bad annual performance review, you might even use the feedback you collected
privately to influence the annual performance review.

~~~
ali_ibrahim
Exactly feedback has to be given on continuous basis and based upon the real
performances on the projects. Not just on annual basis.

------
codeonfire
In the real world performance review is useless. Would you trust Trump's
reviews of Hillary as a cabinet leader or Hillary's reviews of Trump as a
businessman? In the real world people just go through the motions of
performance reviews and management doesn't care about feedback until they want
someone gone. I have seen people completely delusional that they are so far
ahead of everyone else and are uniquely qualified to pass judgement on
everyone but not receive any. Their ability to maintain their belief is
amazing. It's part of their identity and their need to have power. People
cannot be trusted to give impartial feedback about their competitors. I had to
leave many of those people behind to advance my career. They continue on in
their low paying middle management or developer jobs.

~~~
boomlinde
If you work in an environment where it is somehow beneficial for you to view
your colleagues as competitors, maybe that's a problem in itself.

------
ali_ibrahim
Thanks for your responses guys! Some excellent answers were given. To sum it
all up:

1\. Feedback is great, it helps employees develop and improve themselves. 2\.
The way feedback is obtained in organizations is broken and somehow it acts as
a tool by managers to penalize the employees during their performance
appraisals meetings.

3\. Feedback has to be given in a very constructive manner so that the
receiver actually tries to improve it without feeling bad about themselves.

4\. Feedback has to be continuous and we cannot except feedback to be
delivered only on yearly or bi-annual basis. Real time, contextual feedback is
needed.

5\. Feedback not only on tech capabilities is needed but also on interpersonal
relationships, management/leadership style, professionalism and much more.

6\. Most important of all, feedback is a personal thing. It should be
requested by the user himself if the idea is to improve themselves and to
improve their performance and in no way it should be related to appraisals.

All this feedback is definitely used for improvement and growth and to make
yourself a better professional. I had similar thoughts in my mind when i
posted this question. Because my latest project that I posted
here([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142878))
and here ([https://medium.com/@aliibrahim_36896/story-of-
pleasantfish-a...](https://medium.com/@aliibrahim_36896/story-of-pleasantfish-
a-professional-growth-platform-c2d1364ff73b)) exactly tries to tackle the
discussed problems. This is as we know a not simple problem (and also not
easily understandable in the first go) so therefore my solution i believe is
far from perfect but to start I have separated feedback from organization
level to individual level just for personal growth purposes.

Also, to allow users to grow, i recommend articles/stories to improve those
skills.

I would like to thank you all as I have gained valuable feedback information
from this thread tech professionals and for growth feedback was a necessary
ingredient.

------
color2life
Performance feedback should be quicker and on the spot. we spent most of our
day with our colleagues it's hard to get honest and real feedback now a days.
Managers should focus on positive feedback too.

A good article about skill feedback. Don’t add your 2 cents
[https://t.co/TVo6TQ7SQU](https://t.co/TVo6TQ7SQU)

------
mathattack
Most great people I've seen have had great mentors guide them along the way.

Very few great tennis players do it without a coach. Same with piano. And
chess. Why should programming or leadership be so different?

This doesn't mean feedback is easy to give or receive, or that everyone
listens.

------
color2life
[https://m.signalvnoise.com/feedback-just-in-time-may-well-
be...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/feedback-just-in-time-may-well-be-just-too-
much-just-too-often-2f69ab3970c9#.63eagovak)

------
quantumhobbit
Informal feedback is very important.

Formal, 360 type, feedback in my experience almost never reflects reality and
is often very much counter productive. Demming made it one of his 7 deadly
diseases for a reason.

------
denzell
Would you like somebody to tell you if you smell?

Same thing.

~~~
ali_ibrahim
If the idea is to make them aware of it and help them get rid of it. Why not?
:)

------
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