I've been doing these for almost 2 decades and regardless of the amount of rationalization and propaganda thrown at me, I still believe they are worthless and a tool of corporate oppression. These ideas have been borrowed from something everyone should be able to hate equally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-criticism_(Marxism%E2%80%....
It doesn't really matter what you write there, as long as it's not negative. If it's negative, it can be used against you. If it's not negative, it can be spun as negative when the external reviewer of the self review adds their comments. It's a tedious exercise with little to no benefit for the employee.
They're a communication tool, and as such, can be used for good or bad purposes. If you already distrust your manager and organization to a large degree, yeah you won't ever see any value on them, but the problem is the inherent distrust and antagonism.
I've had plenty of good career dev chats with my manager (and my reports once I became a manager) following a review. This should be happening all around in 1:1s, but the semester or yearly review is a larger retrospective summary of the work we do, what we're proud of and what we feel could have gone better. If there's no trust however, this exercise is moot.
Even if my manager did not read it, writing about it has been valuable to me and makes me realize more clearly what I've done, whether I feel I'm being valued or not, and if it's time for me to move on.
Of course, the classic corporate oppression of "hi we're paying you $200,000/yr to write code... could you list out your contributions for the past quarter so we can evaluate your performance?".
I find it hard to believe you have 20 years of experience but don't see the point of performance evaluations. Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer the question "what are you working on"
It's very simple. They pay you, you do work. If they stopped paying you, you'd probably stop working.
Why would you expect that if you stop working, they won't stop paying you?
> Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer the question "what are you working on".
If they need an end-of-year self review to determine that, something has gone horribly wrong. They already know what I'm working on: they're the ones that assigned me to it, and I report on it regularly in standups. So what's the point of the review? If they don't already know what value I'm bringing, that's a red flag.
Sure it is. As long as the toilet works when you need it, you (a) don't actually have to check, and (b) the plumber is free to sequence their tasks in an optimal fashion.
The message from the plumber is based on the assumption that the default state of things is that the plumber has not done their job and things don't work. If you feel like that's the default state of things, you should choose a different plumber, not ask for notifications about which things don't work.
kqr: "Hi Mr. Plumber, could you let me know when 3-->4 happens. I need to use it once you're done, but I'm busy and don't have time to micromanage or continuously observe your work on the toilet."
(plumber's gaze narrows) "No. Fuck you, kqr. Fuck you, I'm not telling you jack shit. I have rights and dignity as a professional."
kqr: Wow, what a great plumber. I'd hire that person again.
>kqr: "Hi Mr. Plumber, could you let me know when 3-->4 happens. I need to use it once you're done, but I'm busy and don't have time to micromanage or continuously observe your work on the toilet."
plumber: Done sir! Your new toilets ready to go.
(6 months pass during which time the plumber completed some other work that was done satisfactorily and approved by the client)
kqr: I'm trying to decide whether I should keep using you Mr. Plumber. Please write me a few pages summarizing all the work you've done for me over the past 6 months. Make sure you emphasize how it has helped me move my KPIs, and how it helped me look good to my wife. Make sure talk about how the work you did contributed to our objectives as a family. Also make sure to add a bit about how you have developed as a plumber over the last 6 months and how you plan to continue to develop over the next.
Also, please write down what could you have done differently for an even greater impact to the KPIs. Don't hold back, it's important for you to reflect on your past decisions and make sure that next time you don't miss out on any opportunity to improve the toilet maintenance process when you're faced with similar situations.
If my toiletry needs were large enough to hire a plumber to spend 40 hours a week in my home, I would not expect the plumber to tell me when the toilet works again. I would expect the toilet to work, period.
Clearly, I would have two toilets for redundancy (much cheaper than 40 weekly hours of plumber time). In the rare occasion when both are broken at the same time I would expect the plumber to volunteer that information. The brokenness is the exception, the workingness the default assumption.
Since I gave them the work, I don't need them to summarize what I already know. Waste of time. I'd rather they continue working on their assigned tasks.
See my answer above. You're assuming is easy for management to know exactly what you're doing. This will vary from org to org and how many reports do they have, how complex the work is, how much autonomy everyone has, etc;
Sure, you can take the stance "they should know", but then don't complain when even well-intentioned managers can lose perspective or miss some of your accomplishments when is time to recognize your efforts (promo, raises, etc).
I consider myself a "well intentioned" manager, I care about my team and their work, try to keep up with the details, etc; but there's just too much going on at a large organization and I'm fallible. I may forget, or fail to see the complexity and value of something someone did (even my own accomplishments). There's nothing wrong with advocating for yourself and making your manager aware of your stance. If there's disagreement about how valuable something I did is I'd rather know when having that conversation. I may learn my manager cares more about x/y/z and not something I thought it was valuable but turns out is not important for the org or my manager for some reason I wasn't aware of.
> Why would you expect that if you stop working they won't stop paying you?
They aren't going to rely on someones self-written review to notice you haven't been working.
Chances are your manager could fill this out for you most of the time as they should have a good grasp of what you have been doing in your day to day.
Most of the time I can generate a list of what I have worked on via commit messages or ticket names to get a high level idea of what I have been doing. I still feel like my manager may have a better idea of what impact my changes have had then I do in some cases.
> Imo it's part of being a professional to be able to answer the question "what are you working on"
I do that almost every day during standups and every week during 1:1s. I have no problem with it. What I do have a problem with, is when I'm forced into making judgements about my work. That's for someone who gets paid more than me to do in the corporate context. My opinion about my work and all the other self-reflection stays with me. I don't want to bootstrap their work by coming up with all sorts of ways of rewriting history to match some artificial and arbitrary expectations which are anyway outside of my control. And so is the performance review itself, in the end. Some places even allow you to review what your boss said about your performance review and even 'contest' it. You know what happened when you did that? Literally nothing, except for a checked box saying that the employee disagrees. It's all pretend.
But they can, and in some contexts they do - it's just that they may see them differently than you see them. Perf review is a chance to share your own perspective.
Yeah, the process is _mostly_ useless, but a 'good' self-review is a handy cheat sheet your your manager and is worth doing well. At the margins, you're "helping them help you."
It doesn't really matter what you write there, as long as it's not negative. If it's negative, it can be used against you. If it's not negative, it can be spun as negative when the external reviewer of the self review adds their comments. It's a tedious exercise with little to no benefit for the employee.