Ask HN: How are you doing performance appraisal at your startup?

Re:Ask HN: How are you doing performance appraisal at your s... by waseems on Thursday December 08, 2016 @10:02AM (#13130660)

We just did a round, very simple: both of the founders sit down with each and every employee individually and ask a couple of questions:

- what was the thing you did last year you have been most proud of - what is the thing you did last year you have been the least proud off - what did we do as a company that you think was great - what did we do as a company that you think was bad

We got great feedback and engagement on these sessions.

Now obviously this wont work if you have a decently sized head count but in our case it worked just fine over the course of a week or so.

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Re:Ask HN: How are you doing performance appraisal at your s... by hnhg on Thursday December 08, 2016 @10:18AM (#13130789)

I think what you're doing is a great exercise, culturally, but I wouldn't use it to assess anyone's performance objectively.

What happens if you have a great employee who finds it difficult to articulate on these points? Would you have to hear through the grapevine that they were doing great things? What if you have someone who is a poor employee but can talk the talk?

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Re:Ask HN: How are you doing performance appraisal at your s... by arethuza on Thursday December 08, 2016 @10:50AM (#13131016)

That's a good point - what you'd be evaluating there is how good people are at talking about their performance rather than their actual performance.

A lot of excellent developers I've known (in fact I might say particularly the excellent ones) were rather modest and often rather hard on themselves.

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