Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time
Defending performance reviews is like cheerleading taxes -- automatic way to accrue downvotes here, but bear with me.<p>I&#x27;ve lived through unfair, biased and unhelpful perf reviews, I know what it&#x27;s like to have this sky beam open up out of nowhere and vaporize you over absurd nonsense, but in a company of &gt; 100 people you need a paper record of performance.<p>If you&#x27;re a VP and suddenly someone asks, &quot;Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?&quot; What are you to go off of? Just a manager&#x27;s recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?<p>Unfair performance reviews are usually a byproduct of bad managers. For ex: I knew fellow managers who never told reports what they were doing wrong, they&#x27;d wait til the end-of-the-year review and write vicious stuff. Why? It was hard to say face-to-face.<p>That&#x27;s cowardly and not good mgt: you meet weekly or biweekly to discuss all issues, a well-run perf review is a boring rubber stamp on the 25 things you&#x27;ve been discussing all year.<p>This author suggests that employees present managers  &quot;handwritten notes&quot; of their performance &quot;in a notebook every 6-12 months.&quot; Guess what-- that&#x27;s a performance review! As if the problem w&#x2F;perf reviews was the formality of the process and not the human judgment being applied.<p>Again, I get it: performance reviews suck. But I think it&#x27;s not the paperwork or the process, it&#x27;s that management can be very inept at evaluating talent periodically, regardless of how that process is run.<p>Unfortunately, it&#x27;s hard to run a company of &gt; 100 people without written records of performance (especially if someone sues).