Perf Reviews

I just got back from our annual RevOps team offsite (onsite?) in SF. It's perf review season and it tends to dominate my thoughts for a couple weeks. Here are some photos from the week shot on my Leica.

This is going to be one of those scream-into-the-void sort of posts, but I want to be clear this isn't about Vercel or even just my current role... My view is that all performance reviews at every company aren't really performance reviews... they're political capital checks.

Over the course of my career, I've gravitated towards organizations that claim to have a high talent bar. The Marine Corps, AWS, Vercel... None of these organizations promise a rose garden™, and I like that. Maybe it's just burned into my DNA that anything worth doing should be challenging. Maybe I'm damaged. Probably both, tbh. So why bristle at the notion in my middle age?

When I see a truck with a Marines logo and a photo of an officer with a sword that says "Earned, never given," I immediately think of a couple fat bodies that got passed though basic training or the school of infantry because that was the path of least resistance. Easier to pass the person than recycle them and actually getting them over whatever performance bar is required.

Same thing happens in Haleigh's high school; why fail a kid when you can just push them through the system?

If you've worked a day in your life, you've worked with idiots. The color of the collar may change, but no matter what environment I've found myself in, I've always encountered people that couldn't hack it, but manage to skate through anyway.

It's maddening when you actually care about improving your performance and honing your craft. There are always people that feel zero shame about being a tax on the people around them; pushing work around, farming out their cognitive load to people who are intellectually superior but organizationally inferior. This perspective is probably informed by my ties to a working class extended family and the officer vs enlisted dynamic in the military. I work for a living.

Several companies I've worked at say they don't do stack ranking. Not sure what they're calling the practice of assessing everyone and determining who is above/below each other, but my smooth brain calls that stack ranking.

Several companies I've worked for say reviews don't occur in a vacuum and are never a black box. But line/middle managers aren't included in every round of calibration to defend the ratings they submitted for their people. Sounds like an inky black box to me.

Several companies I've worked for have not had a clear system for goal tracking or any uniform way of assessing business impact. Yet at those same companies, you see the people who are good at politics succeeding, and the people who are good at work managed out.

These are broader injustices, I'm well aware. Life isn't fair, you have to play the game, leaders rise above the noise. Sure. I agree with all of that.

Thankfully (I think) I got my team members good reviews this cycle. While I don't feel like this is something I can fully control (because it isn't), this is the best possible outcome I can hope for heading into any perf review cycle as a manager. It means I led the team well (enough), gave them direction, advocated for their needs and work, and was generally not a shitbag. I want to say that at the end of the day this is all I care about.

But it isn't. I want to win. And that means getting a good rating for myself too.

Over my entire career, I've always received top ratings. Always maintained a first class physical fitness score in the Marines and made Sergeant before I was done, four years as top-tier at AWS, even got a top rating my first cycle at Vercel - and got promoted because of it. No one is harder on me than me, and I am acutely aware that that drive is what propels me to succeed in any situation.

I was rocked last cycle when I initially received a low score. Turns out you shouldn't air your frustrations with silly processes so directly. It eventually got fixed, because anyone that knows my work product knows I subscribe to the Ron Swanson School of Management:

Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing.

But the trauma of that review has stuck with me.

I've shipped a lot of great work this last half: mOperator is on pace to deliver ~70% of an FTE in efficiency gains by EoY, our autooutbound agent is influencing more pipeline than the entire marketing org, and we're shipping bleeding edge apps/agents/updates every week. On some level, I'm not actually worried about the performance rating because I know I've led an absolutely cracked team and personally shipped some amazing work this last half. I am well aware that I am, to use the technical term, hireable AF™.

But dammit, I'll still be so crestfallen if all of this work still translates to an average rating. It doesn't matter that I think the system is broken or that we've deviated too far from the classic "proficiency and conduct" metrics the military used (which modern corporate performance review systems were originally based on).

I want to win in this system anyway, and I can't fully tell you whether that's discipline or damage. What I can tell you is which scoreboard I'd tell my fireteam to watch, and it isn't the one in CultureAmp. Do right by your team, let the rest be noise.

... and do as I say, not as I do.