(no subject)

[camwyn]

Annual performance evaluation today via video call. Not looking forward to this.

Not that I expect it to go badly or produce unpleasant results, I just have historically hated performance evaluations. I was one of those kids who had stomach kinking and eye twitches on report card day even though I got close to straight A's*, and it carried into the working world.





*Did you get graded on penmanship? Because I did. I went to five different schools in the years between the end of kindergarten and the beginning of college, and at least three of them included a penmanship grade on the report card. My universal worst subject, at least until I ran headlong into that pokkelijder excuse for an AP chemistry teacher, may Dr. Thomas Wallace have a toothache for every day he mishandled the education of students under his care.

Comments

[sdelmonte]

A. I also hate performance reviews and have been blindsided by them when I expected all As.

B. Really unfair to do a review at the moment anyway. No one is at their best.

[camwyn]

The review wound up going pretty well, but they did change one thing this year. Or my boss did, anyway. The section that normally involves checkboxes for 'meets expectations, exceeds expectations, fails to meet expectations', those kind of grades? Wasn't in the review anywhere this year. I suspect it was a little hard to really say ANYTHING about this year had anything to do with usual expectations.

The part I kinda hate the most about these things is that at this company we have to fill out self evaluations three or four weeks before we get our actual reviews. And part of the self evaluation process is to dig up our reviews from last year... because we have to say what goals we set last year and how we met them or had trouble meeting them, and then we have to set new goals for the next year. I am not an enormous fan of this, although it does at least allow us to say 'and X would be SUPER HELPFUL for meeting these goals, kthx'.

[sdelmonte]

Had to go through the same thing in my last, lost job. I hated doing a self-eval, hated trying to think of things to say about myself, and hated that I think was judged for not doing a better job on something we were told in one breathe was totally optional and not at all optional. Once I learned to essentially game the system, I did better on the actual evalutations.

And that "goals" thing ended up leading to a six month check-in to see if I was on my way to meeting the goals.

I guess your bosses and my old bosses subscribe to the same best practices for HR. I miss the days when the performance review was more freeform. (Also miss having a job, but at least I am not being evaluated this year.)