Danger! Offensive comments ahead!
Self Review forms suck…
OK, where I work we have to fill out these self review forms, then our managers fill the same forms in about us, then we compare.
I *HATE* that process. Here’s why. You are expected to rate yourself compared to the other workers in the company based upon a series of traits that my employer considers important. However, if you aren’t a manager (and you aren’t if you are doing this self eval), then you don’t directly see how well your fellow engineers do at this stuff, so how do you accurately rate yourself? The scale is relative, which means you need an idea of what “normal” is in order to determine if you are above or below average. If you aren’t a manager, then your idea of “normal” is going to be based upon most likely a very limited subset of what really constitutes normal and can actually be very off.
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April 28, 2003 - 6:37 pm
Also, the review forms have these ultra-silly questions, which wind up simplifying to “do you do your work?” in remarkably few steps. Even when they aren’t completely braindead, they tend to elicit responses such as “I procrastinate as much as possible so I won’t have to redo everything when we change our minds four times”. Ugh.
April 28, 2003 - 8:17 pm
Yeah, the questions could be good if asked properly, but there is a lot of room there to be doing the right thing while still answering wrong. I don’t envy any of the managers that have lots of people under them
And then they have this Goals section. So what are my goals? To get my work done maybe? I just put in one item for Featurezilla entries and another for bugzilla entries. I have a few others I put in as well, but in general a lot of what I do is in response to situations that come up, and you can’t put that in as goals.
April 28, 2003 - 8:53 pm
I can’t even come close to answering that section. I barely have any idea what I’ll *actually* be working on next week, much less next year. There’s the big looming question of “do you actually want us to integrate $ACQUISITION, or would you rather we tackle provisioning?”.
April 28, 2003 - 6:49 pm
What’s worse is all but *ONE* of the other SEs are here – the rest are elsewhere in the country. At least you have some locals to try to compare to. Me? I got no clue. For all I know the other SE’s are rock stars and I’m the roadie.
Or the bus driver.
And yeah, I missed one or two by a mile.
April 28, 2003 - 8:23 pm
Me. Local comparators? Not even close. There is only one other kernel engineer in Raleigh, and that’s Jeff. Michael is a manager, not a coder any more (by job requirement). Everyone else is either remote (more or less) or Westford.
Oh well, I’ll get my review in a little bit (I’m actually just now finishing my self review because of how long I’ve been out) and then we’ll see if I missed any by a mile
April 28, 2003 - 9:12 pm
True. With Michael managing and not coding (gods, there’s a damn shame. Michael rocks), you’ve got a good point. Urgh.
To be honest, I’d hate to have to compare myself to you or Jeff or Rik. OTOH, I ahve MikeW, Jenny, and Spot in my group. Which is just as difficult.
April 29, 2003 - 9:30 am
Well, most of the people in Red Hat *are* hard to compare against, for all of us
That’s a big part of what makes relative comparisons hard here because you have to try and guess what the average level *in Red Hat* is as oppossed to the average level of, say, the college students you went to school with (God I would rank high in that crowd 