Performance Review

Well, it’s that time of year again for the end of the year performance review. This year really takes the cake for how insane the whole process has become. But before I go into it, I must explain how things used to be - for it cannot be fully appreciated without a brief history of the performance review process here at the Shitshow.

A few years ago, your performance review form was filled out by your manager, who would then print it and call a meeting with you. In principle, the purpose of the meeting was to go over the past year’s performance, set goals, and identify areas for improvement. Most new hires would spend the entire 30min discussing trivial issues like career goals and making their managers aware of their accomplishments, under the presumption that this meeting actually meant something. The more experienced engineers knew better –the only purpose of this meeting was for the manager to get your signature. Without that signature, the manager would miss one of his own goals for that year - which is to perform a performance evaluation for each of his employees. He didn’t want to get a bad performance evaluation from his own manager.

So the experienced engineers would simply come in, sign their performance review form, and leave. Afterall, every judgment that has been made of you was already on that sheet of paper. Even if a blatant mistake was made, the manager would be too lazy to fix it and print out another form. He’d just say, “Oh, that doesn’t matter. I’ll remember to fix that next time. Just sign it here.”

One day, some manager had the bright idea that performance reviews should be done electronically . Apparently working two weeks out of the year was just too much for the functional managers and it would just be a whole lot “easier if things were automated.” Now whenever you hear that a new tool is coming out and that “things will be automated”, it means the engineers will have more work to do. And that’s exactly what happened. With the new electronic forms, the engineers had to fill in their own forms with goals from a list of pre-approved goals. All the managers would have to do then would be to give you a rating based on each of those goals, and then send it back to you to get your electronic signature.

After using this new electronic system for about six months, it got scrapped. Apparently the managers didn’t know how to use it or it had too many bugs. So we went back to the original paper forms. Then 6 months later, we went back to the electronic forms again. Apparently the bugs got fixed, but managers were still complaining that it was difficult to use –even though the engineers were doing most of the work filling out these damn things.

So today, a new directive was issued. We, the engineers, have actually been instructed to go into the electronic system and ….rate ourselves. That’s right. The managers are so clueless as to what we do (or too lazy to care) that they are telling us to rank ourselves. Once we do, they will review our rankings and make any adjustment that they see fit. What a joke. I look forward to giving myself a “this guy walks on water” ranking.

By giving myself only the highest rating possible in all categories, I throw rocks.