Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I love reading commentaries. As a result of that love, I've come to spot populist messages. To me, a populist message is one in which most all of the listeners are going to feel like "heck yes!" while they are reading it.

Populist messages have a tendency, however, to fall apart upon further inspection. There is no doubt that people hate performance reviews -- managers and employees alike. There's no doubt that in most cases they cause and create behavior that nobody wants.

I think he misses the boat right off the bat with the purpose of the review. The purpose of the review is to make sure the manager is doing his job with the employee, knowing what's going on in the employee's work, having an interest, offering to help, seeing where the employee and the company's interests can be aligned. Some of these conversations are tough, and if you didn't require them, a lot of employees would never have the chance to say no, I don't want to be a tech lead, I'd rather get into teaching (or something similar). To view the review process as primarily raise and checklist based is to see how it's done instead of seeing what it's supposed to do. A common argument in populist writing is to say "since X is commonly done very poorly, X is therefore a bad idea altogether"

He gets even further into the cool-aid with this comment "I'm sick and tired of hearing about subordinates who fail and get fired, while bosses, whose job it was to ensure subordinate effectiveness, get promoted and receive raises in pay."

Sounds good -- as long as you think bosses should always be able to make/help subordinates be happy and productive. But while managers are definitely super people, they're not superman. Things happen in life. People get accepted at jobs they will never like. Companies take directions employees simply can't agree with. There are lots of reasons why somebody can get fired while management is not responsible. I'm not even sure that most times management is responsible, but I know that it's not all of the time. Generalizations are always false: including this one.

</Rant>

"The purpose of the review is to make sure the manager is doing his job with the employee, knowing what's going on in the employee's work, having an interest, offering to help, seeing where the employee and the company's interests can be aligned."

If performance reviews were that useful, why are they done only once a year? I feel like this should be a weekly conversation. Employee growth needs constant attention, but unfortunately it only happens for a handful of hours once a year.

My attitude is more pessimistic. I feel like these reviews are only useful for HR, so that they have a paper trail in place in the event that an employee needs to be terminated.

Edit: Just so my intentions are clear, I'm a cofounder of ididwork

Absolutely!!! Where I work we try to take on the attitude that the review is a formality: the employee should already have a good idea of what's coming. The reality falls short of that, but give us credit for trying :-) The review covers everything from what you did during the year to what you need to do next year. Basically we have a set of core competencies that you must have, depending on the kind of work you do and one of the reasons for the review is to make sure you get the training you need.

My personal take, and what I try to do with my reports, is to give periodic feedback, good or bad. That way people have plenty of time to either bask in the glory or improve before the final review is upon them.

I like your strategy. Would you mind my pinging you for your thoughts in the future?

Your profile didn't have your email listed - if you could shoot me an email at gupta[at]ididwork.com I'd really appreciate it!

Not every idea that is popular is populist. Evidence of popularity is not evidence of dubiousness. Populism plays to people's prejudices, but when people are the objects of some experience which they perceive negatively, it's something different than populism.

No doubt the idea of the performance review was meant to create a additional channels of communication. But human beings are human beings and things don't always work out the way they're intended (Communism being a supreme example).

If we are empirically honest, we should conclude that performance reviews don't work, whilst avoiding undue judgement of managers who are still compelled to do them.

Not all popular commentaries are populist, agreed.

To critique something, you first define why it exists. Maybe I missed it, but in my opinion this was treated extremely lightly in the article. Instead it was all about the execution -- a sure sign that the point isn't a real discussion of the thing, but the popular feeling about the thing.

I must agree, however much I have a knee-jerk reaction. And I think my knee-jerkiness has to do with what gives rise to populism you describe: the belief that something which is negatively experienced was designed to be negatively experienced.

It's a short leap to complete anti-managerialism once one sees malice (I am often guilty of this).

You're right: it's easy to drag out the guillotine without asking honest questions.

>A common argument in populist writing is to say "since X is commonly done very poorly, X is therefore a bad idea altogether"

I'd say "since it's a bad idea, it is therefore commonly done very poorly" instead. It's not a demonstration, but a cue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com