Corporate Culture, Yearly Review, Constructive Feedback

A private jet landed at SF airport, breezing through the runway.

Delayed Flight

Yeah, my regular United Airlines flight was delayed. The storm was right on. Less did I know, that aside from the bad weather, I was heading into a personal life storm in those two weeks. This story will be reserved for another time.

A bit emotional, with mixed feelings - I sat back, opened the laptop, and started typing.

This letter is about my recent reflection on work.

What I have for 3 hours of self-distraction: a few audiobooks, a TV show (Reacher), and 7 work emails. The last work email was about the PTO limit reminder: I’m at 209 / 252 hours of PTO (Paid Time Off) cap. “Take PTO”, it instructed.

Almost every year started slow for me. The first month would be filled with yearly wrap-up summaries. Writing about the impact can feel more challenging than making the impact. It takes serious labor to document the success, but it’s part of the cooperate culture.

Performance Review

Since I spent at least 12 hours working on it, I might as well share some feelings about it. This thing is called, the performance review.

The performance review can be viewed as a side product of industrialization. The system evaluates its labor units to optimize for organizational goals. The outcome can be a promotion, a growth plan, an improvement plan, or in the extreme an exit plan.

I wrote performance reviews at 2 tech companies for nearly 8 years. With some luck, my reviews all resulted in growth plans or promotions, not the other two. We can’t talk about performance review without going into its consequences. But I assure you that this isn’t a story about layoff, but merely a warm reflection on this process.

Constructive Feedback

In my experience, this practice is a feel-good personal look back. There is also a meaningful step where we provide peer feedback.

  • Giving feedback to a strong engineer feels like a blast. It’s the same feeling as mentoring a superstar intern who did everything like a pro. You don’t have to articulate how they solved their shortcomings. You can focus on recognizing all the extra milestones they achieved on top of initial goals. You both get out of the process feeling refreshed.

  • Writing constructive feedback can be difficult. You need to provide constructive and actionable suggestions, without making it a complaint. Meanwhile, fairness is critical: maybe they had a hiccup but they resolved it fully already - we have to recognize the growth. The feedback needs to carry some weight, otherwise, it’s difficult for the receiver to ever improve. It also needs to foster positivity - y’all still work together.

Anomaly That You Can’t Save

There can be odd behavior cases where coaching does not work - your help would just end in vain. In my professional life, I have only encountered one extreme case at Amazon (LA), where the individual under-performed, refused to learn, ultimately did nothing, and was laid off. I already left Amazon when the layoff happened, but I would guessed it fair judgment.

At the time, I had wild guesses: is this dude someone’s relative so he just chilled without seeing the consequence? Was there any non-work crisis causing his underperformance? Was it Amazon’s occasional low bar or the dumb luck in Video Interviews that got him into the company? I have no means to verify how he passed the interviews. It happened. The performance review did its ruling.

That performance review feedback was the hardest ever. I already spent a lot of time in coaching (not as a mentor, just as a teammate), but all my efforts were taken like jokes. I knew that person didn’t care, but then I had to stay positive on feedback.

Among other reasons, that was one of the core reasons I accelerated my departure from that specific Amazon team. If I surrounded myself with a new-grad cruiser like that, I knew my career trajectory would be flat.

Later in my career, I understood that it was not my role to make teammates succeed or have job satisfaction. That’s something I want but everyone’s priority or standard varies. That role tho is more of a manager.

Even as a tech lead, it shouldn’t be my priority to make everyone happy to succeed to my standard. Most time, I’d focus on finding the opportunity, presenting the opportunity, and occasionally coaching where I’m eligible.

As peers, we can conduct risk management, but it’s up to the individual the succeed, exceed, or fail.

Sometimes, we can’t cure the anomaly. We mitigate.

Wrap

Performance review appears more critical since the 2022 layoffs. It reminded us that the stamp did have its industrialization power of ruling out outliers.

On a positive note, after I moved to the current company, the performance review felt so much smoother to write, 99% of the time 🤗

For my Mandarin audience, signal boosting the new video on Tips Communication in English at Work. Bilibili