
Hopefully fair performance reviews for software developers - 2bluesc
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/performance-reviews-for-software-engineers/
======
SamuelAdams
As a developer who has worked at several billion-dollar (non FAANG) companies,
the only thing I get out of performance reviews are one of two things:

1\. You're doing a great job. Keep at it.

2\. You're doing terribly. We are going to start a paper trail to fire you
(aka performance improvement plan).

The only reason performance reviews exist at companies is so they have an
established way of firing people. Even if I do a great job, top marks across
the board, I only receive a 2-4% increase in salary. On the rare occasion I
__might __get a bonus. So there 's zero incentive to go "above and beyond" or
otherwise improve in a way that benefits the company I am currently employed
for.

Now, I continue to improve every day by learning new skills. But these new
skills rarely relate to what the current company needs - these are simply
things I am curious about. However, these skills will never end up in a "core
competency plan" because those plans, by nature, only list skills that benefit
the company. Because the target / competency plan only benefits the company,
the performance review (which is based off the comp plan) feels very one-sided
/ binary.

So instead of focusing intently on those competencies, I do the minimum
necessary to fulfill them (less than 2 hours of work) and spend the rest of my
"self improvement time" learning things I'm genuinely curious about. Then,
when I have a marketable understanding of these new tools / tech, I jump ship,
usually for a higher compensation package.

If you want performance reviews to actually matter, allow people to set goals
that do not always benefit the company. Understand your employees have many
different interests and give them space to explore those interests.

~~~
harimau777
Did you mean to post this a second time?

~~~
rileymat2
It is a completely different user.

Based on history, the other one seems to be regurgitating comments.

~~~
dang
Those spammers must be at it again.

Edit: if you guys notice accounts doing this, please let us know at
hn@ycombinator.com. Flagging them doesn't really help since the comments
themselves are innocuous, it's the spammy duplication that's bad.

------
CoolGuySteve
When was the last time you sat down with your spouse or someone else you spent
a large portion of your day with and gave them a really fair and objective
performance review?

Make sure to frame the negatives along with the positives and use concrete
examples: Honey, I liked that casserole but the way you did the dishes could
use some work, I found a spot on my glass the next day. I'm hoping you'll
improve by Q3.

No. Performance reviews are not how humans are meant to interact. Even slight
negatives will be blown out of proportion in peoples minds, that's how we're
hard wired.

So why create this drama intentionally in your company? If the person is
really bad, then you have an intervention or possibly terminate them, but most
people are just okay.

Regular 1:1 meetings should be the only 'performance review' needed, a way to
make sure both the manager and subordinate are on the same page about
everything.

~~~
decebalus1
> When was the last time you sat down with your spouse or someone else you
> spent a large portion of your day with and gave them a really fair and
> objective performance review?

About a year go, a user on Blind wrote a post in which he explained how he and
his wife were doing yearly mutual performance reviews wrt their marriage. It
was satire, of course, but everyone had a blast putting things into
perspective about the toxicity of this practice.

~~~
Cactus2018
>> My wife and I write each other annual reviews. Need advice.

> My wife and I are competing our annual reviews of each other. One of the
> challenges I’m facing this year is we didn’t agree on OKRs and I have a lot
> of qualitative feedback but don’t like how the KPIs look. I’m worried her
> annual review of me will be similar. We both aligned that we’d max out
> 401ks, move for promotions and end a car lease. But her career moved faster
> and we don’t have joint accounts so I failed to enter a savings goal. I’m
> going to suggest she didn’t save enough to see if I can get insight. Also
> the household itself did well this year we deceased our order in rate by 15%
> while moving to a good mix of organics and non frozen items +20%.

[https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-wife-and-I-write-each-
othe...](https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-wife-and-I-write-each-other-annual-
reviews-Need-advice-eEzsioRp)

~~~
jimktrains2
Just a random not: frozen vegetables (and probably meat) are as healthy as
fresh and probably healthier than store-bought canned vegetables.

Frozen meals on the other hand...the salt alone could kill you.

------
kqr
Nobody has mentioned Deming yet, so here we go.

Team members generally all perform around the same level, at least within a
couple of standard deviations. The reason for this is simple: individual skill
does not determine performance in a team as much as the rest of the
environment does.

 _The system a software developer works in shapes their performance so much
more than individual differences._

So if you're going to assign promotions and bonuses on individual results,
make God damn sure these results are truly off the charts compared to their
peers.

If you don't, you're basically running a lottery. Except you don't call it
that, so your team will still try to actively do things to try to win this
lottery. And these things will not be in line with what you want your team to
be doing, because they will try those things first and see that they don't
work. Because it's a lottery they have very little ability to affect, so
obviously nothing will work.

What's worse, you might very well also create internal competition, where your
team stops working as a team. They will realise they can't win your lottery by
doing great work, so they will start to prevent their teammates from doing
great work instead.

Performance reviews are so stupid.

Just talk to your people. Have a conversation about how they are doing. And
then let the entire team have the bonus(es). It can be so simple.

~~~
freepor
This doesn't describe why, in effectively the same system, almost everywhere
I've worked has had people vastly outperforming others. I say this as one of
the perennial bottom quartilers.

~~~
kqr
Sometimes there are significant individual differences. Sometimes some people
have figured out how to work "in a different system" that is more effective.

Good use of manager time is to figure out what those people do differently and
then have them teach their ways to the others. This will, in effect, "improve
the whole system" as someone else put it.

Put another way: when there are individual 10x performers on the team (note
that this is 10x the average, not 10x the worst), there is also massive
untapped training potential, and management has already failed to make use of
this. If anyone should have a bad performance review in that situation, it
sure isn't the individual contributor who didn't get the tools they needed to
do the job! It should be the manager who didn't give them those tools.

 _That said_ our business has a tendency to overvalue individual contributions
over team contributions. My going example is that a person that spends all day
getting other people unblocked on their issues might well be the greatest
facilitator of productiveness in the team, but they will appear to be the
person that never gets anything done.

~~~
paxunix
> Good use of manager time is to figure out what those people do differently
> and then have them teach their ways to the others.

What if the greats do that, and the others just don't care enough to learn,
like this is a blue collar job with white collar pay to them?

They could be greater than they are; they think they're great already, but
they're nowhere near the true greats on the team.

You can't make them care and you can't make them want to be great.

~~~
kqr
Given how little most managers actually care about creating a great workplace,
I'm not surprised things like "you can't make them care" are assumed to be
true.

In a great workplace, people start to care. They feel pride over their
workmanship and social responsibility with other employees. (In general. As
always, there are outliers that need to be handled differently, but they're a
small minority.)

------
commandlinefan
The best discussion I've ever seen on performance reviews was Joel Spolsky's
observation ([https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/03/incentive-pay-
cons...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/03/incentive-pay-considered-
harmful/)):

"Negative reviews, obviously, have a devastating effect on morale. In fact,
giving somebody a review that is positive, but not as positive as that person
expected, also has a negative effect on morale. ... Most software managers
have no choice but to go along with performance review systems that are
already in place. If you’re in this position, the only way to prevent
teamicide is to simply give everyone on your team a gushing review."

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Joel Spolsky is awesome.

As a manager for many years, I feel I did well in this arena. I was able to
keep a team of highly intelligent, experienced engineers together for decades,
under...interesting circumstances.

In the last fifteen years or so, our HR started to show a type of attitude
that I think is prevalent in the modern American HR culture; that the
corporation is always "on top," and that the employee/job applicant is always
in a subservient position, in some way.

I was instructed to word and score my reviews to (in my opinion) enforce this
mindset. The scores generally got lower (did I mention that my team was "high
functioning"?). I was actually told to lower my scores a few times.

I made up for this by giving very "gushing" wording on the reviews. The
employees knew the score. HR was applying their "alpha dog" mindset in all
types of ways, so we all knew where this was coming from.

It really didn't make much difference on salary increases. The range was
generally tiny, and the score barely made any difference (Salary was not a
real motivator).

Don't even get me started on my own reviews. Several years, I got none at all,
and that suited me fine, as the ones I did get were obviously quickly thrown
together, using an SaaS "fill in the blanks" app.

~~~
cushychicken
>...a type of attitude that I think is prevalent in the modern American HR
culture; that the corporation is always "on top," and that the employee/job
applicant is always in a subservient position, in some way.

I note this attitude as well. Where do you think it comes from?

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I can't speak for other companies, but our HR was run by the corporate Counsel
(lawyer). I think that's increasingly common, these days, as the job of HR is
generally to protect the corporation from its own employees.

Lawyers have a naturally adversarial mindset. They never pass up any
opportunity for an edge, as that edge can give them some leverage.

That's not really a good or bad thing. That's their job, but it can be a bit
jarring, when you encounter it.

~~~
cushychicken
Makes sense to me!

------
guessmyname
I had a performance review once… The only thing that I decided to change was
my attitude in the office: I started smiling more, wearing nicer clothes,
cleaning my desk, saluting my co-workers in the morning and wishing people a
nice day in the elevators. All of a sudden my next performance review was
labelled as “great” and I got a $5k bonus followed by $10k four months later.
Nothing related to my workload changed.

My theory is: either my co-workers, manager, human resources or all of them
were concerned about my facial expressions and personality being always
neutral, doing just what I was supposed to do in the office: work. My co-
workers did not have anything special to say about me, nothing bad nor good, I
talked with them just enough to do my job, almost never said anything about my
life, family or the things I did during the weekend. Many people draw mental
images of you using the information you give them about what you do in your
life outside of work, so I assume they unconsciously translated the lack of
personal details as _“this person is not good for me”_ and somehow this ended
up in the performance review that almost fired me.

Years later, here I am, still playing the psychological game at work. It is
tiring but it works.

~~~
CPLX
As a founder and manager I would gladly pay more for people who have a great
attitude and improve the general vibe and morale of the team.

~~~
HeroOfAges
Does this mean you would pay a premium and possibly promote a software
developer that doesn't contribute to the product by writing code, but
remembers people's birthdays and plans team lunches?

~~~
travisjungroth
“I’d pay more for a quarterback who creates a positive image for the team
during press conferences.”

“Does this mean you’d pay extra for a quarterback who never completes a pass,
but is always chipper?”

I’m pretty comfortable saying the answer is “no” here.

------
reggieband
I absolutely hate reviews. There is little I dislike more in formalized work
culture than the annual review process. I recently worked at a place that did
mid-year and year-end reviews and it was twice the hate. I worked at another
company that had a massive job competency matrix distributed in excel with
nearly 100 cells to fill in. I've had managers change my self-evaluations to
ensure I used the exact language necessary to allow them to give me a
raise/promotion that they felt I deserved. I've also been in the mid-level
management hell that is stack ranking where 10 TLs get put into a room with
senior managers and argue what order devs are relative to each other.

But as a TL I've managed devs who are eager for this feedback. I don't
understand it since I hate it. I also ensure I do 1:1s frequently and I focus
on career topics during those discussions. Despite my inability to understand
I've witnessed it many time: some people not only want reviews they feel like
they need the review. This is especially true the younger a developer is. My
theory is that they are still in the after-glow of university and they are
used to the idea of regularly getting grades.

So while I find reviews to be little more than justification for adjusting
renumeration while providing legal cover, I respect as a leader the genuine
need of many to receive a clear and useful performance review at least once a
year.

~~~
asdfman123
Young people who "need reviews" do not actually need reviews but validation.
Giving them a mixed review is not going to help their performance or their
morale.

Imagine your wife or SO came to you and asked "Am I pretty?" and you told
them, "Well, you've made some good efforts, but I think you could definitely
dress a little nicer and lose some weight. I know we can get there after
enough effort, though. Be a team player!"

~~~
reggieband
> Young people who "need reviews" do not actually need reviews but validation.

I think that is cynical and I believe that you are generally incorrect. Every
engineer is individual and has their own needs. It is my belief that good
management attempts to understand the needs of individuals and will provide
them what they need.

Maybe you have managed people who were seeking validation during the review
process, I have no doubt they exist. But I have personal experience with team
members, to whom I have had the responsibility to deliver reviews, and they
were looking for clear feedback.

------
southphillyman
Unless you work for a FAANG, in fintech, or some other company where raises
and bonuses are a real thing these reviews tend to be useless.

A lot of managers are busy and just throw something together at the last
minute, subordinates realize the process is just a formality and stop putting
much effort into it as time goes on, etc. Sometimes these meetings are
actually counter productive because you end up arguing for a tiny slice of the
bonus pie having to "sell" yourself to an individual who knows well what you
have contributed. I have witnessed multiple people quitting shortly after
feeling underappeciated in a performance review.

------
Nursie
I'm a contractor these days, I work with clients for a few months to a year or
so at a time and then switch company, project and everything else.

One of the major reasons I switched from regular employment to this model was
not having to deal with bullshit like annual reviews, personal development
plans, coming-year-business plans etc etc and other corporate nonsense.

Maybe it works for those organisations, I don't really care, it always been
just a waste of time for me. Particularly the annual reviews where you're
supposed to show how what you achieved this year matches up to or exceeeds the
plans agreed at the beginning of the year. Without fail those plans became
irrelevant within a couple of months and I'd done something entirely different
to the plan for the rest of the year. The review result thus always came down
to how much management liked and appreciated what you _had_ done for the year,
which is a metric they would have used anyway and without the need for a
tedious process.

------
JustSomeNobody
If you're in a position to review employees, never ever ever let them go into
a review not knowing what is going to be on it. How do you do that?
Communicate. Communicate constantly. Talk about their wins. Talk about their
non-wins. Talk about their skills. Talk about what needs to be improved. Talk
to them about what they want to learn. Talk to them about what they _have_
learned. Talk to them all throughout the year.

------
duxup
The yearly performance review system at most places I worked seemed to be
largely formalized process laid out by HR to determine raises .. or paths to
firing someone.

That's it... the fact that it involved me seemed entirely unnecessary as
mostly it was between HR and my boss and/or his boss as to what if any actions
came of it. Sometimes not even my boss...

Whatever work I did day to day if my manager had an issue I sure hope he would
come to me and we'd work it out right then and there.

At smaller companies things like raises and moving on were just determined
largely as needed. I changed careers recently and managed 5 or 6 raises in
salary in about a year's time (this was largely because I had no past career
experience programming so I came in pretty low).

In the meantime a coworker was politely invited to look elsewhere (more of a
situation where everyone knew this wasn't the environment for him and not so
much anything he did 'wrong' and they let him work while job hunting) after
about 3 months of work.

------
oxfordmale
Performance reviews are a waste of time, there has been plenty of research
that shows they add little value to a company. Unfortunately is an easy
process for HR to justify their existence and makes putting people on
performance management a lot easier. Even worse are 360 reviews. Research has
shown that peer review are generally inaccurate and often politically
motivated.

------
luord
I'm against the concept of performance reviews on principle for two reasons:

1\. No matter how friendly and "two-way street" the manager tries to make it,
the engineers are still captive audience with their jobs on the line while the
manager holds all the cards. Even if the engineer is encouraged to, and does,
provide feedback, this feedback is, at best, in the air.

2\. No matter the feedback, the outcome is pretty similar: negative feedback
encourages the engineer to look for other options because of the desire to be
valued better. Positive feedback encourages the developer to look for new
horizons that might be more challenging and/or more rewarding.

Of course, I don't have a solution, because the closest alternative I can
think of also has its own problems. That is, for the team to be completely
self-managed so engineers encourage each other by deliberately highlighting
and logging the teammates' achievements and for these achievements to be
rewarded eventually by management.

Regardless, if performance reviews are inevitable, this article is a nice, if
maybe too optimistic, approach. Ultimately, I'd bet that the number of the
engineers he manages who considered that his reviews were, at best, the best
of a bad situation is more than zero.

------
gwbas1c
I find performance reviews are better at confirming management problems to
employees than reviewing employee performance.

In once case a manager complained that I wasn't working on a component that
wasn't my responsibility. (I was always happy to help!) I had to get the CTO
involved, and then my manager stopped dragging me into this component. (Edit:
It was SSO, and I wrote the browser part. About 95% of the bugs were server-
side.)

In another case, a project failed because it wasn't managed. My manager
basically said something like, "I'm surprised to learn..." At this point, I
realized that he wasn't paying any attention to the project.

------
makecheck
The problem is the idea of an “annual” review itself, such as:

\- arbitrary annual review times almost never coincide with the most useful
times to summarize contributions (e.g. try handing out bonuses the day after a
big project ends, not months later)

\- similarly, arbitrary review times disadvantage new employees; you
essentially “waste” a few months on tasks that won’t end up counting _this_
year (“not enough contributions yet”) and that won’t count next year either!
(oh those tasks were from _last_ review cycle so...)

\- most systems I’ve seen will force you to summarize your worth in just a few
broad strokes, and so much valuable work falls through the cracks in such
systems

------
cutenewt
The biggest problem with performance reviews: managers are too scared to give
feedback throughout the year, so when the feedback does come during the
performance review - the employee is in utter shock.

Generally, there's no perfect time to give others' feedback. Most people hate
criticizing others. But as a manager, I find that it's necessary; otherwise
the performance review experience is less than desirable.

I have been using some performance feedback generators, and it's been helpful
in helping me figure out how to phrase feedback so it's specific and mentioned
in a way that's not careless or thoughtless.

------
dvtrn
Of all things, this stood out to me:

 _I 've read reports of hazing, students being yelled at, forced to do
pushups_

Have any of these reports been publicized anywhere? I have a morbid curiosity
to read about this and what people's responses to those moments were, compared
to what my (a US Army veteran) response would be to someone who isn't my
commanding officer telling me to get on the ground and push[0].

[0] It wouldn't be very polite, and it may contain a few expletives.

~~~
brlewis
I think this was intended for
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971223)

~~~
dvtrn
Oops, major mistake on my part there, had both threads open in different tabs.
Thank you.

------
zackmorris
Good article, but I thought that the linked "shields down" article about what
triggers an employee to leave a company was equally insightful:

[https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-
down/](https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/)

In my experience, that's happened at most jobs that I've held, and with most
people who left. I find it kind of sad that with all of the work that goes
into building a company, and all of the resources and expertise available at
their disposal, that managers and employees can't really talk about what's
really going on. Most interactions at a company are a delicate dance to
preserve the thin veil of hope that makes capitalism possible.

In the end, it really truly is just business. So I've found it helpful to
treat it as such, and not get too wrapped up in the emotion of it. Something
that really helped me was watching the entire Mad Men series, to get an idea
of how this all works. I know that's old news today, but that show arguably
had as much effect on my career as stuff like The Secret, manifesting things,
The Pick Up Guide about neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) that circulated in
the late 90s, and moving furniture (which taught me that all manual labor is
exploitive because the lion's share of profit always goes to the people held
in high esteem not the people who do the most work).

That said, I'm a highly emotional person who wears my heart on my sleeve.
YMMV.

------
x0x0
Oh god, another info product written by some new manager who has a whopping...
three years of experience as a manager. Of small teams.

It's the same as all those 2 year developers who discover a pattern or two and
gush advice on how they're the canonical authority to write MVC in rails.

Try waiting for year 10 or so before dispensing your wisdom. Because the first
part of dispensing wisdom is having the wisdom and experience to dispense.

We can do better than Eternal September for advice.

~~~
CarelessExpert
So do you have anything constructive to add to the conversation? Alternative
resources you've found useful in your, I assume, long tenure as a manager and
coach of staff?

I mean, we can't do better than "Eternal September" here on HN if talented,
experienced folks like yourself don't share the wisdom you've acquired over
your long and illustrious career.

Right?

~~~
x0x0
Yes, I constructively added this guy has no idea what he's blathering on
about, and is definitely not letting that stop him from pretending he's an
authority and dispensing advice.

Now, you have a choice on where to learn things. You can learn eg development
best practices from people who have 10 or 20 years of development, or you can
ask someone who's built small greenfield projects. You apparently think we
should value advice from noob's equally; good luck with that there.

Since you don't know how to use google, try going to barnes and noble and
asking them to get copies of Camille Fournier's or Michael Lopp's books.

~~~
CarelessExpert
> Yes, I constructively added this guy has no idea what he's blathering on
> about, and is definitely not letting that stop him from pretending he's an
> authority and dispensing advice.

Okay, well, so... examples?

This sounds an awful lot like a simple appeal to authority to me. But "noobs"
may have useful insights, just as "people who have 10 or 20 years of
development" might have bad habits, biases, or misconceptions.

Look, I think we can all use our brains and determine if this post contains
some value or not. Personally, I've been a manager of staff for about five
years, and the more regimented, structural approach outlined in this post
illuminates some ideas that I might explore in my own practices, and dovetails
well with how I've been trying to improve myself in this area.

Am I going to take what this guy has written and follow it as though it's the
bible of staff management?

No, of course not. Again, I have a functioning brain, and in general I try to
use it.

But, I will read this post with an open, thinking mind and decide for myself
if there's value to be gotten from it.

That said, I come to these comment threads to find commentary or discourse
that might touch on things I've missed when reading this material for myself.

Ideally, that would include _constructive_ criticisms of the content so we
can, as a community, learn both from the post itself and from contributions
from folks like yourself.

If that's not what you're here for, and you'd rather just tear the author (and
this community) down, I guess that's fine. But it seems like a waste of your
time, not to mention an unnecessary expenditure of emotional energy. HN
comment threads are really not worth getting worked up about.

Anyway, I hope you have a good day!

~~~
x0x0
So you think that appealing to authority is pointing out the author has
extremely limited experience in matters he's discussing. Interesting.

~~~
CarelessExpert
Yes, or rather it's the inverse.

You appear to be using the author's relative inexperience to then conclude the
author's statements or claims are false, irrespective of the content of those
claims.

This is the inverse of an appeal to authority where you use the author's
experience or credentials to then conclude the author's statements or claims
are true, irrespective of the content of those claims.

