Appraisals

We have tried different ways of appraising developer’s performance, but I think it’s pretty impossible to measure. As my Lead Developer always says: “you get what you measure”. For example, you wouldn’t want to measure someone by Lines of Code because this will lead to verbose, inefficient solutions, and would encourage bugs because then the developer can write even more code to fix it. You won’t want to measure by Code Coverage of tests, because you can achieve 100% Code Coverage, but still have bugs in your code.

We have tried teams filling in a form to give feedback to their peers. This was deemed unfair because people didn’t like saying negative things about others, and it wasn’t beneficial praising colleagues because you were competing with them.

We have tried just leaving it up to Managers to put people forward when they perceive them to be doing well. This was deemed unfair because some managers would be more vocal or lenient than others.

We are trying another form filling task, but you write about your salient experiences, then come up with a score 1-4. When I looked at the scoring system, I felt you couldn’t put the highest score without justification that your actions were way above and beyond your role. I thought that no one will put the lowest score because it’s supposed to be a form that highlights your abilities, not weaknesses. So I ended up putting 3 next to the really good ones, and 2 next to the decent ones.

Anyway, I was discussing my form with my manager, and they said to me that we can’t submit scores of 2 because that means I am under-performing. My options were to either change them to a 3 and submit them, or just remove them from the form.

Then I thought “hang on, we score them 1-4, but are only allowed to score them a 3”. Okay, maybe a 4 at a push, but still, that’s only two options.

I’d imagine they wouldn’t want to read everyone’s forms; they just want an overall rating. So they would just add up the scores and come up with an average; then use this value to compare people. But everyone in the company will have a rating of 3. So how do you know who is performing well, or who is under-performing? Well, you would have to read all the texts! Which is what the scoring system aimed to avoid.

I reckon when they had a meeting to come up with this ridiculous proposal, it would have gone like this following scene from the absurdist comedy “Nathan Barley”. There’s a meeting to brainstorm new ideas for their magazine.

Note: Dan is the only level-headed one, and he thinks he is working with a team of idiots (which obviously they are).

Rufus: We should give Nathan Barley a column.
Ned: Yeah, we should give Nathan Barley a column.
Rufus: Yeah like call it…”Nathan Barley’s Column”?
Ned: Hey, let’s just call it “Barley”, yeah.
Rufus: Yeah, man, or like “Nathan”.
Ned: Yeah, cause like, that could be like two columns.
Dan: (in disbelief) Two columns?
Rufus: Yeah, and like maybe one would be better than the other one.
Ned: Yeah, yeah, and you’d only read the good one.
Dan: How would you tell which one was the good one?
Ned: Check ’em out. Direct comparison.
Rufus: Like, you’d read them both to find out which is the best one.
Ned: Yeah, and then you’d just read the good one.
Dan: Are we gonna’ do this?
Jonatton: OK.

Or in my case:

Rufus: We could give the employees forms to fill out and they score themselves 1-4 Ned: But you are only allowed to score yourself a 3
Dan: How would you tell which employees are the good ones?
Rufus: Like, you’d read all the forms to find out who are the best staff.
Ned: Yeah, and then you’d just promote the good ones.
Dan: Are we gonna’ do this?
Jonatton: OK.