Re:Unfortunate things about performance reviews
by musicale on Friday February 19, 2021 @04:56PM
(#26198547)
> Most people have no idea whether anyone is any good or not, and so they just kind of go with whatever the default is
> there's very little direct connection between the quality (and quantity, for that matter) of work done, and what happens in a performance review at these places. It's more about your attitude and how good you make your masters feel about you and that attitude
A challenge in a typical R&D organization everyone is doing different - and usually novel - things, so it's impossible to compare performance directly (vs. on an assembly line where people/robots may be repeating identical tasks, or in a course where students are given identical assignments or exams.) Ratings tend to be entirely subjective and non-comparable at best, and completely arbitrary/random at worst. As the author notes, they often are based on a combination of manager bias and employee ingratiation effectiveness.
> everything you provide is at best a no-op and at worst a negative, and there's never an upside to it
Matches my experience (both personal and observed) perfectly: at their best, they are a useless waste of time; at their worst, they provide perverse incentives and harm nearly everyone involved as well as the company.
> there's very little direct connection between the quality (and quantity, for that matter) of work done, and what happens in a performance review at these places. It's more about your attitude and how good you make your masters feel about you and that attitude
A challenge in a typical R&D organization everyone is doing different - and usually novel - things, so it's impossible to compare performance directly (vs. on an assembly line where people/robots may be repeating identical tasks, or in a course where students are given identical assignments or exams.) Ratings tend to be entirely subjective and non-comparable at best, and completely arbitrary/random at worst. As the author notes, they often are based on a combination of manager bias and employee ingratiation effectiveness.
> everything you provide is at best a no-op and at worst a negative, and there's never an upside to it
Matches my experience (both personal and observed) perfectly: at their best, they are a useless waste of time; at their worst, they provide perverse incentives and harm nearly everyone involved as well as the company.