Ace Your Performance Review
Understand the importance of review and how you can make your review better.
Importance of review
Once a year, a software manager has to write reviews for all their employees and try to state how they did on an intrinsically abstract job using objective and quantifiable terms.
Attempts to quantify programmers’ performance have never gone well. For example, the junior manager might try to measure how much code a programmer writes. During Apple’s get-it-done push to ship the Lisa computer, managers decided to track each programmer’s lines of code written each week. Bill Atkinson reworked a good amount of the graphics code, making it simpler and much faster—and also shorter. He logged negative 2,000 lines of code for the week. What does a manager do with that?
Of course, that’s our manager’s problem mostly. It becomes our problem when it’s our performance they’re trying to measure and our paycheck that’s affected. When it’s time to review our performance for the year, we have one essential goal: we need to give our manager the best information possible, so we get the best review possible. This has nothing to do with greed; it’s a way to make sure that the manager is aware of our accomplishments for the year. You’ve worked hard, so you should get credit for it.
Performance review mechanics
Companies do performance reviews because they want to identify who’s doing great and who isn’t. They want to reward the great, and…we’ll get to the other side later.
Raises in salary are usually tied to the ...