Performance Reviews are EXHAUSTING for Developers!

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Hey folks, it's Monday. I'm just heading to the office. We're going to go to the experienced devs subreddit and says, "Mideyear reviews are so exhausting and stressful." They said, "I just spent four effing hours on a Friday evening writing a self- review, which is five questions and reviews for three others I work with. Three questions each. It's more tiring than work itself at this point. Is this normal? Am I overthinking this? Okay, so what was the amount of time? Four hours on a Friday evening. So, um, for me, this is really relevant because I am doing reviews and stuff with people. Basically, over the next few weeks, aside from the vacation I have coming up in a couple days, I have to do my own. Um, so it's that time of year for me at least and my team. So very uh feels very relevant to chat through this.

So a friendly reminder if you're new to the channel, you can leave comments below and ask questions and I will try to answer them if they're on software engineering and career development. Otherwise, if you want to be kept anonymous and or write more detail, you can send a message into Dev Leader on social media. It's my main YouTube channel as well where you can check out uh programming tutorials. There's a podcast with other software engineers and uh resume reviews as well as a live stream every Monday 7:00 p.m. Pacific except for this Monday coming up because I'll still be on vacation otherwise basically every other Monday. Okay, so it's a lot of time investment for a self- review, right? And I think that the probably the biggest issue here is like it's not like that's not a crazy amount of time depending on how often you do these, right?

4 hours. But I think it's the fact that it's like all at once and probably last minute because uh we're humans and we're really good at procrastinating. It's just a thing we do. So yeah, that feels like I get it. Um, you know, it seems like they're where they're working and I don't have context for where they're working, but it seems like there's a, you know, a push to be able to do help do like what we might call like a 360 review where you can review your peers and stuff and give feedback. So uh Microsoft we call that perspectives and uh the thing that you write for your manager is called a connect or write for a conversation with your manager is called a connect. I shouldn't say that you're writing it for them. So one of the sort of top comments that I think makes a lot of sense.

Uh I am super guilty of like not even doing this myself. So, um I try to be transparent like when I talk about things. I'm not saying here's what I recommend and I'm so perfect that I always do this kind of stuff. Um I'm a human too. I have things I can tell you I think this is what makes sense, but it's not what I do. Um and one of the top comments was essentially saying like don't do this all at once. Like you know this stuff's coming. it happens once or twice a year, whatever it is, where it's like more official and formal, you know what's coming. Like do little bits of it along the way, right? So once a week, bi-weekly, once a month, whatever it is, take some time and write some notes on the things that you're accomplishing because two really crappy things happen when you leave it, at least two really crappy things happen when you leave it all to the end.

One is that you forget all the stuff, right? You're like, "What was I doing 6 months ago?" Like, "I don't even know what I did two weeks ago cuz it's so busy." So, you forget things that could be very important or valuable to include for something like a performance review. And then the other thing is that you're stressed out about it because you're doing it all at once from scratch. But if you think about it, if you had a list that you've been making for the last 6 to 12 months, whatever the time frame is, and you look at that list and you're like, "Okay, these are all the things I was doing." Is it just about like formatting into the thing you have to submit, making it cohesive? Because that would be pretty awesome, right? You just add the latest notes. It's not going to take you much time if you've been doing it along the way.

So, um, that's one key point that I think that everyone can try to to leverage if you're finding that doing something like a performance review is completely overwhelming. Um, that doesn't solve the problem of doing the peer reviews. What I've been recommending to employees at Microsoft is like it's very common that when we have these connects that are due, there's a period of time where you get to write them and then you submit them and your manager will write back and you have a conversation about them. But this happens over, you know, a few weeks and it's very common during this time where the peer review stuff will come up again. So that's called that was called a connect for the thing you write with your manager and the other one is called a perspective at Microsoft. But it's very common that people will say hey it's a really good time to go send perspectives as well because everyone's reflecting on all this stuff.

But you know what's not a really good time to go send a perspective when everyone is already overwhelmed with all this extra stuff for performance reviews. So I often recommend to employees perspectives I think are really good getting peer feedback especially if you can write something genuine because when you request them they come with a default message or you can write your own and I try to tell people like hey like write something that says like I'm open to constructive criticism open to feedback how I can improve because if you're just getting stuff that says like Nick does a good job like what the hell are you going to do with at and I actually had a conversation with an employee recently and I thought it was a great question cuz I said hey look I know that people send these but I think a

lot of us are wondering like are we supposed to give like constructive feedback to people because if we do does that look bad for them like is their manager going to be upset or sorry maybe not upset but is their manager going to be like oh like you know you got something to work on here or or what because they don't want to screw people over and I thought that was very considerate um at least I said if they're reporting to me like my mode of operation is that if you have uh a perspective that comes to you so you've been working with a colleague or a you know partner on a different team if they give you feedback that's like something that you can improve on I'm not looking at that like oh like let's add that to the the list of things that you suck at and like that's going to really affect your performance review but to me it's an opportunity it's the exact opposite Right?

If someone was like, "Hey, Nick, when we're working together on this project, these things went well, but I think that you could do better by doing X, Y, and Z," then like I for me, I would certainly hope that my manager goes, "Great. There's some opportunity for you to improve, right? And you could have a conversation about whether you agree with it or not, but like that's opportunity. So, I wouldn't go to my employees and say, "Oh, you got some feedback that's, you know, constructive criticism. Too bad. I guess you can't get like rewards this year." It would just be like, "Hey, look, like that's great feedback. Like, do you agree with it?" Because I don't have some of the context that maybe they had with that individual. I need new tires, I think. Um, and that's how I look at it with my employees, right?

If they get some feedback, I'm just looking at that like, hey, if you agree with this and that's something that we can work on to improve, awesome. Let's focus on that. Let's make sure there's time for that. We'll see how we can come up with the next opportunity and then we can reflect and see, right? It's all about growth from my perspective. I don't look at these things like marks against you personally. So I told that to my employee they said that makes sense and then I gave them the caveat like for other people other teams like I would hope that's how the managers look at this kind of stuff but like the reality is with all this like you could have a manager that is from my perspective what I would call not a good manager and you know they're not even they're not even interested in this stuff.

they might not even see it or they're so detached from it that this is their only type of feedback. So they're thinking I don't even know how to gauge my employee. So like I'm just going to go by the peer feedback. So it's hard because I can't speak on behalf of every manager. But from my perspective, that's how I would do that. So, the prep that I mentioned a little bit earlier for doing things throughout the year, that helps for your written review, but it doesn't really help you get ahead if you have to do um you know, peer reviews. But if you're sort of in control of when those get sent out, I always advise people send them out as you're completing projects or working with people once you've built up some experience with them or completed something.

Because if you wait until the period where everyone's doing it, you're going to be sitting in that that person's inbox with like 20 other people that want a perspective when everyone's scrambling to try and do their normal work and write their connect and they're all scrambling to do it because they weren't taking notes throughout the year, you're going to get like borderline useless feedback or no feedback at all. So, just try to get ahead of those things if you're in control of it. If you're not, and this is just how it works at your company where it's all sent at the same time. At least prepping for your own can make time for other people. That's what I would recommend.

And you could even maybe in your um if you're taking like notes throughout the year when you're wrapping up projects and stuff, maybe you make a couple bullet points of the people that you worked with because with your feedback system, I don't know if they pre-select who they want you to give feedback to. I have had that situation before where I was just given a list of people that was like, "Hey, like what's your perspective?" um at Microsoft it's kind of a bit of a free-for-all. The times when it's not, I found are when managers are soliciting feedback for promotions like explicitly and they're looking for a little bit more concrete evidence. But anyway, getting ahead of it, I think, is probably the best piece of advice. Now, if you're like me and you didn't do that, right, here's Nick the Hypocrite. you should do this.

I didn't do that. And I have a vacation coming up. I'm running out of time. Not going to be good. But I am going to try this time because it's been recommended to me before. And um I'll talk about co-pilot now. So uh full transparency when I use co-pilot at work just the I'm not talking about for coding cuz I use co-pilot for coding at home and love it. Super helpful. I love it. You have different opinions. That's okay. I'm not telling you to go use co-pilot. Use whatever the hell you want. I like co-pilot when I'm coding. Copilot I'm talking about is built into Teams and asking it questions kind of like you would chat GBT. When I use that at work, I have lackluster results. Personally, right, I work at Microsoft. I'm just being transparent. I don't find that it's helpful personally. But there is uh a different application.

Well, it's in co-pilot, but there's an agent that we have. And um this agent takes significantly longer to answer questions, like on the order of minutes. But oh man, oh man, does it write really good stuff. Um and it cites it. So like sometimes I'm reading stuff and I'm like, you know that feeling when you're like, I don't know if I can even trust the AI anymore. like it wrote some stuff and you're like sounds good but like is it actually a fact? Like I don't know. Did it just hallucinate half this paragraph? I don't know. And I'm like this is important stuff. So like I can't just rely on this blindly and I would never recommend that anyone does. But because it's cited I can go click on the citations and then go and like check myself. And again, if you're using uh AI tools, it's site for you.

Like, please go verify instead of trusting things blindly. So, I haven't yet used that for uh writing my own performance review, but I plan to I plan on saying over the last 6 months. I got to come up with a good prompt, I guess. But I just want to use it for getting the things that I probably missed. The last six months for me were uh primarily this one really big project. So there's going to be even parts of that that I'm like I don't remember doing that. It was 5 months long. So again, most of the last 6 months, parts of it I'm going to forget, but then the other sort of uh fear I have is that I'm going to forget everything else that was outside of that. And I don't want that to happen. So, I'm going to try using um this agent we have to help with that.

And honestly, however it writes it, I don't really care like if it writes bullet points or writes paragraphs cuz you can also give it some direction there. I'm probably just going to be, you know, dropping it in myself with the formatting I want. Um, now I did talk to an employee that used this for the same purpose and um they were saying that they when they were reviewing it grabbed some answers that were for like some things that they they worked on apparently. They're like some of those things like I didn't work on but I happened to be in the conversation that it was like citing from so it made an association. So, at least for me, I'm for how I plan to use it, I'm okay with that because I'm gonna review it anyway, right? If it's like, "Oh, Nick worked on this thing." And I'm like, "No, I didn't." I'm not I'm not going to cry about it.

Like, I'll just remove it. Um because I just wanted to collect the ideas for me because a lot of it I forgot or I'm assuming that I have forgotten. It's like you don't know what you don't know. So I I plan on using co-pilot for that purpose. Um the other thing I wanted to talk about too is like in terms of time being spent on this kind of stuff, right? This person was saying 4 hours to go write their own do other people's like as an engineering manager I have I don't know how many people I have reporting to me off the top of my head. It's like 11 to 13 somewhere in there. Um, if I had to go spend like on my own, I go spend a couple hours and then every other person when I go respond to these, it's not it's not one question or three questions like this person said.

It's like I have to go respond to their entire thing that's similar to what I wrote. And generally how I do this is I will match the writing style that they're using um up to a uh minimum like sorry as low as a minimum threshold. So if someone's very brief, it's not a problem. I'm not I'm not using their connect for like grading their writing. Um but if they write very brief, then I'll try to make sure that I'm at least writing uh more than that. if someone's very verbose that I will try to match that because I just want to make sure that if someone's putting in time and effort in a particular style that I'm assuming it's because that's how they're thinking through things and I would like to match it, but um I think that some people overestimate how much like needs to go into the the writing style and all of that.

Personally, again, this might just be a Nick as a manager thing. I don't know. But I think a lot of people are focused on like I have to go write these this these paragraphs like it's got to be like I got to tell a good convincing story. And in my mind, I'm like look, if if your goal for your connect or your performance review is that you have to write it in such a way and that's the only way that's going to really talk about the the value you added. I'm like I start to question like did did you add a lot of value or did you did you have to add a lot of words to go make it look like there was value, right? Because when I'm reading through stuff personally, if you just had a bulleted list of stuff you worked on, that's good enough for me, right?

Like it's all about understanding like which things you worked on, which things you delivered on. Because what I'm going to do is we have a talent guide which is just a rubric and when I'm responding to these um obviously I respond like a human and then I add in something that's feels a little bit less human but what I'm doing is I take parts of the talent guide because it is a rubric and then the projects and things that people worked on. I will say this is an example of and then I will take a direct quote from the rubric. This is an example of where Joey was, you know, uh, writing code to highest standards and maintaining solid code cover, like whatever it happens to say, right? And I put it directly in there because what I want to do with all of my employees is build up this understanding that like your connect is this opportunity to showcase all of the awesome work that you've done.

All of the growth opportunities for things that maybe didn't go as you planned, right? all the things that you succeeded on. Awesome. And then I want to relate them to the talent guide or this rubric so that you can see how I am looking at this from a growth trajectory, right? If I'm able cuz my goal is that I want people to be able to get promoted. I think that's what other people want for themselves too, right? But I can't do that unless I have evidence that backs up the parts in the talent guide because that's going to be the measuring stick. That's what's used for everyone. So this works in my opinion has worked very very well up until what I would call like the principal level which is my level at 65. That's the first level that you have in the principal band. I would say it works very well up until this point.

starts to fall apart at principle. And that's because I've talked about this in other videos, at least for me, there's a lot more conversation with uh people that are um sort of outside of your direct organization. And the expectation is that the impact that you're having is visible enough to them. And that's your ability to have impact outside of your direct group, right? So, it's not about like I mean you could argue this, it's not supposed to be about like sch smoozing with the other leaders in the organization. It's about hey look I worked on something and delivered something that had such impact that like you should know. you should know because it was so impactful that I was the person that worked on this, right? Sometimes that means sending extra communication about this stuff, but people should know based on how big of an impact you had that you were the person responsible for that, not just your direct teammates.

But that kind of thing is not really captured on the talent guide. So that's why I'm saying at least for my case at principal level trying to go from 65 to 66 I find like that's a bit of a gap in the rubric. But um point being that when it comes to how you're formatting stuff, I think that that's significantly less concern for me. Right? If it's readable, if it's coherent, if you're able to talk about the stuff that you were responsible for and delivered on and some growth opportunities, I think that's good. Which reminds me, like I don't know what your performance reviews are like where you work. I remember crafting um sort of like a performance review uh template and before Microsoft we used it at magnet forensics but I can't I'm sure we must have included this because it it's something that

I think is really valuable but we want to make sure that like yes you have an opportunity to write down all the awesome things you did but we should take the opportunity to reflect and and find things that we can improve. And I think sometimes people get scared of this, right? It's like if I write anything that wasn't perfect, then all of a sudden, like that's an opportunity for someone to be like, "Oh, that's why you're not going to get promoted now." But again, like I was saying earlier with the perspectives, I only see this as opportunity, right? If you had something that didn't go as planned, like it could be completely outside of your control. Didn't go as planned. So what am I going to say? Oh, too bad. Like no rewards this year. Or is it an opportunity for you to instead talk about it, reflect on it, and then say, "Hey, in this circumstance, what I learned from this is X, Y, and Z.

So the next time this kind of thing happens, here's how I might change my behavior around it." Like to me, that's super valuable. I like I need people to be able to do that to help grow, right? Because otherwise, if they're not reflecting, they're missing out on that kind of stuff. So, again, my take on adding in things to your performance reviews, if there's a especially if there's a spot for it, like don't be shy. Um, our connect has changed a little bit over the past few years, like at least since I've been at Microsoft. There used to be a dedicated section that was talking about that. And I feel like now it's a little bit more a little bit less clearcut maybe. I have to yawn. I know it's coming. There it is. I knew it. What else from a time-saving perspective? So, let's recap though, right?

Timesaving tip number one was try to do it incrementally throughout the year so it's not all at once. Um tip number two was using AI tools for summarizing. I think that can help a lot. Tip number three is like the formatting part. You might be uh overindexing on how much effort you should put into that personally. Um, another thought too is like some people I think even in that Reddit thread were saying, "Oh, I use, you know, chat GPT or co-pilot, whatever you're using to to take the bullet points and like summarize them." Um, which you could you could do that if you wanted to change the format, I guess. But then people were complaining about how that's working. So, like, oh, it wrote it, but it sounds too robotic, so like I have to go edit it anyway. like, okay, then then don't use it that way.

I don't I don't know what to tell you. Like, if you just made more work for yourself, don't don't do that or prompt it more effectively. I don't have the answers for you there. But, you know, that's why I was saying the formatting might be something you're just overindexing on in the first place. I think those are my three major time-saving tips. Um, I don't know if I have any more to add to that, so I might wrap this video up here. I wish you all success in your performance reviews. I know it's a busy time for a lot of people. I know it can be hard to write about this kind of stuff, but take it seriously, right? Okay, I'll see youall next time. Take care.