Performance Reviews

Ruby and I both have been through quite a few rounds of performance reviews now. Each of us earns high ratings, and our bosses spend the majority of time praising the extra time we put in, the quality of our work, etc. But the one thing we have yet to leave a performance review with, is real feedback as to how we can improve ourselves.

In college, when you earn a grade on a math exam - the professor (or more likely his or her underpaid TA) marks the questions you missed in a red pen. You review your mistakes, and you learn how to correct them next time. If you still don't understand it, you can even ask the professor (or TA) for additional explanations and help. Without getting the results back, the test would be more or less worthless to your personal education. It is a system designed to build up the knowledge base and performance of any student who wants to improve, even though the professor's career isn't really founded on your individual performance (ie, if one student fails for whatever reason, it's not like that is going to have any impact on his or her life).

Fast forward to the real world, where my company directly profits from my increased performance. There is a dedicated process at almost every company to take out the hypothetical red pen and mark up the last year's exam results. And being the perfectionist that I am, I get genuinely excited that the weak points I may have overlooked will be highlighted so that I can improve myself in the next year. But for whatever reason, they end up being a dog and pony show instead of a real review.

The first year, I get that a boss may not have had enough time to really judge my performance but may still feel uncomfortable about giving me a perfect score. Honestly, in the first review at a company, I expect to get something along the lines of "just keep learning, and you'll be great" unless I'm doing something incredibly wrong. But after that first review, I go in knowing things I feel I need to improve (nobody's perfect), and I expect my boss to have seen at least these items, if not others. So when I get another round of "just keep doing what your doing" feedback, I get frustrated.

What's even worse is when you get "just keep what you are doing" feedback combined with anything less than a completely perfect rating. Both Ruby and I have been rated on scales whose top scores are something along the lines of "exceeds expectations" and have always gotten at least one "grade" in our review that is just "meets" instead of "exceeds".  The first time I came across this, I thought this meant that this was where I could take action to improve. But when I asked for feedback as to how I could improve, I was told that he could only tell me how to meet their expectations and that he would just know if I had exceeded but couldn't tell me how. The only feedback that I got that year (after pressing hard) was that I could be "more accurate", because I was averaging one typo per every couple of pages of documentation when it went to my peer reviewer. In my opinion that was a load of BS, because the typos were not related to technical quality- and they weren't even part of the final product. Compared to the list of things I felt I needed to improve, I felt as if this just showed how little my boss knew about what I was doing.

So supervisors, if you are listening, some subordinates really do want actual feedback from you. And I'm not talking about you-never-show-up-to-work-maybe-we-should-have-fired-you-months-ago feedback. I'm talking about honest feedback to improve each and every employee regardless of how independent she is or how high of a performer she already is.

And engineers, if you get actual feedback at a performance review, don't take to take it offense. Getting honest feedback is the beginning of improving yourself professionally, and it shows that your boss values you as an employee and as an individual with a strong future.

Cheers,

Vanessa and Ruby