Rands in Repose on performance reviews

Since we've been talking about finding a job, I thought it might be interesting to balance it out with something that (often) happens once you have a job for a little while: a performance review.

Rands in Repose, one of my favorite blogs, just had an excellent post on this topic: No Surprises. 

There are a whole lot of good and useful nuggets in the above blog post.  It's worth reading the whole thing.  But here's one that stood out at me, because the HubSpot engineering team is so full of stars that this is actually a real possibility:

See, your boss has you and a bunch of other yous who are all allegedly kicking ass, and all of that ass kickery is tricky to monitor, especially over an entire year. It gets even worse when one of your team members is not kicking ass. Legitimately or not, that's actually where a lot of your boss' attention is going. You read that right: someone else's failure is distracting from your phenomenal year.

One way we try to mitigate this is that I meet with every member of the engineering team once a month to talk about this review sort of stuff.  It eliminates surprises, for the most part.  And it lets me take notes during the year about how things are going.  But most importantly, it shortens the feedback cycle.

We do the formal written evaluation thing once a year.  But I think once a year is far too infrequent to get or give feedback.  Once a month may be overkill for some people, but it usually feels pretty good / right.  At least to me.  Maybe it's a personal preference?

In many cases, there are few (if any) substantial updates from month to month.  So it's a quick cup of coffee, or lunch, and we have plenty of time to chat about other issues, including non-work stuff. 

Anyways, I'll stop rambling.  Rands in Respose writes better, and if you care about this blog, you will most likely want to subscribe to that one.