I’ve noticed the “employee vs management” mindset pretty much everywhere I’ve worked regardless of industry. I think that one main issue is with the word “peer”. It seems that management is placed on a sort of pedestal providing insulation from the review process. Realistically, management works for staff in a symbiotic relationship. Knowing this, it is sensible for management to receive feedback from their staff. How else would a manager truly understand their performance? Consider this - would you rate the performance of an MVC based app solely on its views?
Imagine one of those space warfare games where you have to assemble a fleet, and you have a certain number of points to spend. Do you want that Rigellian Battlecruiser at 1000 points? Or do you only have the budget for a handful of Denebian escorts at 50 points each? Hold that thought...
Your peers should have a reasonably good idea of how valuable you actually are. They review your code, they see you help fix problems (or fail to), they see you volunteer to fix unglamourous bugs (or decline to). There should be some way of capturing this. Written peer feedback is mostly meaningless, as you pointed out, but I wonder if there is some way of deriving a numerical score for a person, based on the (anonymous) marks that their peers give them, and weighted by some metric of how closely they collaborate. Your final total reflects some weighted average of how well they people you work with appreciate what you are doing. This total affects promotion and compensation, but it also determines your price on the internal market. A manager looking for new team members can get you by paying a cost based on your current rating. (This means that people who are overlooked by the system, and rated lower than they should be, may turn out to be a potential bargain for someone else.)
I can think of all kinds of objections to this, of course. It smells a bit like stack ranking. It's probably open to gaming and manipulation. And people may not like being reduced to a number (although that's what compensation is, really.) But at the same time, I think we need to solve the problem of the kind of peer reviews you describe, where everyone is just basically nice. Their ought to be some kind of cost to the ratings that you give out. Overrating or underrating someone should have some kind of consequence.
It explains long work hours in the case study as a result of performance reviews and other management practices that create anxiety about professional competence. Even if you don’t agree with all of the conclusions I found it fascinating to read a sociologist’s analysis of something I’ve lived through.
This is a problem I could never solve. I've been in large (>1,000 employees) tech companies for 1.5 year total, out of 13 years career so far - all the rest, at startups with less than 15 people (some of the time, as founder or CTO).
In this 1.5 years I've been through 3 performance reviews (every 6 months~). My reviews were great each time - great feedback and high satisfaction from managers and willing to promote me.
Yet, I hated every moment of it. Filling the tedious forms, playing the politics of selling my achievements, showing how my KPIs performance align with OKRs and WTF just let me work and leave me alone.
I hated it so much that I quit big corp to go back to small startups.
There, I can just do the work without the bullshit.
And in small startups you have visibility on all the team, you know whether someone is doing a good work or not. No "review" needed. This environment is fun for me - no bullshit, only quality work.
A good leader will appreciate the merits of their employees. However, this is often not the case. Some leaders are too preoccupied with their own work to conduct fair and objective evaluations. They base their judgments on their personal feelings towards the employees.
I once had a leader who always favored someone. I was in that position at one point. It did not matter what we did, the outcome was always predictable. The leader’s preference determined the results.
I have not encountered any effective performance review methods so far. Developers should consider changing their jobs or companies, or starting their own ventures in the meantime.
Paraphrasing Camus: “The employee should be happy knowing their fate is determined arbitrarily”
I work at a place where after everything is said and done your chances at promotion are based on: tenure, how much of a nice person you are and your partner’s (most senior manager) largess at the time. Once this truth is understood, performance management process throughout the year can simply be disregarded.
I’ve noticed the “employee vs management” mindset pretty much everywhere I’ve worked regardless of industry. I think that one main issue is with the word “peer”. It seems that management is placed on a sort of pedestal providing insulation from the review process. Realistically, management works for staff in a symbiotic relationship. Knowing this, it is sensible for management to receive feedback from their staff. How else would a manager truly understand their performance? Consider this - would you rate the performance of an MVC based app solely on its views?
Imagine one of those space warfare games where you have to assemble a fleet, and you have a certain number of points to spend. Do you want that Rigellian Battlecruiser at 1000 points? Or do you only have the budget for a handful of Denebian escorts at 50 points each? Hold that thought...
Your peers should have a reasonably good idea of how valuable you actually are. They review your code, they see you help fix problems (or fail to), they see you volunteer to fix unglamourous bugs (or decline to). There should be some way of capturing this. Written peer feedback is mostly meaningless, as you pointed out, but I wonder if there is some way of deriving a numerical score for a person, based on the (anonymous) marks that their peers give them, and weighted by some metric of how closely they collaborate. Your final total reflects some weighted average of how well they people you work with appreciate what you are doing. This total affects promotion and compensation, but it also determines your price on the internal market. A manager looking for new team members can get you by paying a cost based on your current rating. (This means that people who are overlooked by the system, and rated lower than they should be, may turn out to be a potential bargain for someone else.)
I can think of all kinds of objections to this, of course. It smells a bit like stack ranking. It's probably open to gaming and manipulation. And people may not like being reduced to a number (although that's what compensation is, really.) But at the same time, I think we need to solve the problem of the kind of peer reviews you describe, where everyone is just basically nice. Their ought to be some kind of cost to the ratings that you give out. Overrating or underrating someone should have some kind of consequence.
Talking about the anxiety aspect of performance reviews, I found this paper quite interesting: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ofer-Sharone-2/publication/292499150_Engineering_overwork_Bell-curve_management_at_a_high-tech_firm/links/5cd039ef458515712e95ab3b/Engineering-overwork-Bell-curve-management-at-a-high-tech-firm.pdf
It explains long work hours in the case study as a result of performance reviews and other management practices that create anxiety about professional competence. Even if you don’t agree with all of the conclusions I found it fascinating to read a sociologist’s analysis of something I’ve lived through.
This is a problem I could never solve. I've been in large (>1,000 employees) tech companies for 1.5 year total, out of 13 years career so far - all the rest, at startups with less than 15 people (some of the time, as founder or CTO).
In this 1.5 years I've been through 3 performance reviews (every 6 months~). My reviews were great each time - great feedback and high satisfaction from managers and willing to promote me.
Yet, I hated every moment of it. Filling the tedious forms, playing the politics of selling my achievements, showing how my KPIs performance align with OKRs and WTF just let me work and leave me alone.
I hated it so much that I quit big corp to go back to small startups.
There, I can just do the work without the bullshit.
And in small startups you have visibility on all the team, you know whether someone is doing a good work or not. No "review" needed. This environment is fun for me - no bullshit, only quality work.
A good leader will appreciate the merits of their employees. However, this is often not the case. Some leaders are too preoccupied with their own work to conduct fair and objective evaluations. They base their judgments on their personal feelings towards the employees.
I once had a leader who always favored someone. I was in that position at one point. It did not matter what we did, the outcome was always predictable. The leader’s preference determined the results.
I have not encountered any effective performance review methods so far. Developers should consider changing their jobs or companies, or starting their own ventures in the meantime.
Paraphrasing Camus: “The employee should be happy knowing their fate is determined arbitrarily”
I work at a place where after everything is said and done your chances at promotion are based on: tenure, how much of a nice person you are and your partner’s (most senior manager) largess at the time. Once this truth is understood, performance management process throughout the year can simply be disregarded.