[NAHWheatCracker]

I hated performance reviews. My manager would always keep stuff vague. He tried to protect people and he didn't really observe my work. His feedback was based mostly on emails asking people what I'm good and bad at.

Every three months for 5 years, he would send me some blurb that basically said "NAHWheatCracker is a great engineer. Sometimes he's difficult to work with." We would have a one-on-one to review the performance review. I would ask about the "difficult to work with" part.

My manager wouldn't say who said what. He wouldn't discuss circumstances. He wouldn't facilitate having a discussion with whomever for specifics. It could be an issue that came up once, a chronic problem, or a minor complaint on a bad day.

I wanted something specific to improve on. It wasn't hard to make assumptions, but assumptions aren't clear. Non-clarity drives greater wedges between people. I shut down in conversations lest someone say something to my manager.

The idea of it being made more dehumanizing by having an AI slop out a performance review seems even more depressing. That said, I think bad managers will ruin this process regardless of AI. You can't get much worse than being less than useless.

[icedchai]

In over 25 years of working, I've never had a useful performance review. If more people pushed back on them, perhaps it would stop.

[codr7]

Me neither, 27 years and counting.

It's not what's said either, it's the whole idea of someone turning my performance into a silly numbers game.

I'm pretty sure performance reviews were invented for much the same reasons as democracy; but instead of the illusion of a choice you get the illusion of progress.

[haiku2077]

My team has pretty much admitted to each other we're using AI to write reviews so we can get back to real work

[danenania]

Management involves a lot of difficult tradeoffs, and this is one of them. Asking for feedback privately creates the feeling of "people talking behind your back" that can erode trust. But if you instead try to have full transparency and facilitate direct/open feedback, you can either have open conflicts/retaliation or (more likely), people hold back and don't give honest feedback, causing problems and resentments to never be addressed.

[whatnow37373]

I am not going to analyze my peers’ abilities for my manager. That is literally his F job. It creates unnecessary tensions and again, his job.

Why do so many people roll along with this?

I see engineers often bad-mouthing each other. Why do it for the managerial class? Surely you realize they are herding us like cattle.

Just do your job. Nothing more, nothing less.