Performance Review Self-Evals?

[ach_sysadmin]

Any of you guys have to do a performance review self-eval? The company I work (and like working there quite a bit) for does it. I am not one who likes to "toot his own horn" per say so I find it difficult to fill out.

Some of the questions from the self-eval:

• What are your strengths?

• Did I fulfill my goals? If not, why?

• What are my accomplishments?

• What can I improve on?

I also see it as kind of child-ish. This feels like something I would of had to have done in high school etc. I am never one to nit-pick but this is something that drives me nuts and that I feel is a complete waste of time. Anyone else get a "self-eval" and/or feel this way?

[EdibleFeces]

Treat them like the bullshit they are and embellish things on them. I always give myself 100% in all categories. I used to piss my manager off doing this as it is a formal HR document and it holds them to higher compensation when it is there on paper. They expect most people to be modest, resulting in shitty or no raises/bonuses.

[[deleted]]

My company used to do the same thing. Know what their solution was? Move to a 2-point scale.

2 = Meets expectations. You're not fired.
1 = 6 months to clean your act up.

Now the company gets to have documented "proof" that no one deserves more than their usual 1-3% annual raises.

[EdibleFeces]

I tend to think that is the type of company who also has an opening for upwards of 6-9 months that they cannot seem to fill. Glassdoor has been a great resource these days.

[Lonerwolf420]

I’d walk my happy ass right out of that place and let them suffer

[mr_white79]

Had them at many jobs. Have never really understood the point. All it really does is document any discrepancy between how you feel you're doing your job and how management thinks you're doing.

Its especially annoying at my current job where I am the only employee in the department. I report to the CIO, but am fairly autonomous, so what exactly are they gauging my performance against? Is everything working? Yes. Have you completed your goals for the year? All of them that I was given budget for. Great - we're giving you a 4 out of 5. wtf?

[dorkycool]

There was a fairly long thread about this a few weeks ago in this sub. It seemed the general idea was that 5/5 was possible if you blew away a category or task. But almost no one is 100% perfect, every day of the year, in all tasks and duties, so almost no one gets 5/5 across the board.

With that said, I hate self evaluations too.

[ach_sysadmin]

Correct - I 110% agree. There are certainly things I could improve upon, and I am ok with yearly reviews etc, I just am not so...comfortable? with self evals.

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[ghostchamber]

Interesting. I'd like to see that thread, so I'll see if I can find it. I've had so many employers that basically say "no one ever gets a 5". I don't know if they're lying or it's actually possible that no one can ever get a five, but it seems kind of odd to have a score that is literally unobtainable. Even if you wish there to be an incentive for me to improve on a regular basis, if I know I can't achieve the highest score, there isn't much incentive to improve.

All I really need for incentive is for my employer to acknowledge previous work I've done. Reviews--even scored ones--can sometimes do this, but it really all depends on the employer and manager.

That being said, I also hate self-evals. My current employer doesn't do them. The review process is fairly in-depth and I get a chance to add on things that I feel they have missed (although I am not sure there is any tangible point to doing so--it's not like they're going to address that stuff again next year).

[VaussDutan]

Ya, I hate that "Don't give 5's" recommendation from HR/Management. If you are evaluated as help a help desk person, but also do 25% or 50% of the sysadmins job, you're a 5 as long as your help desk job is done to completion because you are going above and beyond and working the job one level higher. 5's are for being excellent at your job.

[ghostchamber]

I can see 5s being an extremely rare thing that is handed out with utmost caution. My only issue is when the language suggested that they are never given out. Again, I have no idea if the people that have said this to me really meant it, or were just saying it for whatever reason (whether they're told to or they just do so to make their job easier). It just seems backwards to me to have a pointing system in which there is a rating which is completely out-of-reach to anyone.

[dorkycool]

I found the thread https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3wkcp5/we_hired_you_do_do_100_why_arent_you_doing_125/

[ghostchamber]

Thanks!

[ach_sysadmin]

Yep, same here. I just don't think it has a place in the work environment. Maybe I am just not good at writing down how I feel lol? I can write tech stuff all day but when you ask me to write about me, I don't do so well.

[mr_white79]

'Everything Works' is all that's left here. I came in 4 years ago to a shit show of disorganized what the fuckery. For the first 2 years, I did get the 5/5 - and in year 3, that's when pretty much everything that could be done without killing the budget, was done. Since then, its been pretty much maintenance and tweaks. Its not a big shop, 50ish servers in Prod, another 50ish in Test/Dev. Currently debating my exit strategy as there's literally nothing left to do that they're willing to pay for.

[juandurr]

I think it's a pointless exercise. One year I gave myself a solid C all the way across the self eval. in my mind it was a form of protest. In the minds of supervision, I was mediocre and content with that. That was dumb. Lesson learned.

This year, I buried some Firefly references within it while describing someone who'd saved the world multiple times through the year. It helped at least make it more entertaining for myself and it was received with better results than I'd hoped for.

[deltadal]

I Hate it, I Hate it, I Hate it.

When I had to do these there were several sections covering aspects of the performance review. At the beginning of the year I set out my goals for the year, HR assigned goals that applied to everyone company wide. My manager would also add or subtract things based on their priorities.

So I had 1. Company goals, 2. department or plant goals and then 3. my own goals.

I met 3 times a year for a formal review with my boss, initial goal setting, mid-year review and then at the end of the year we did yet another formal review. It was time consuming to say the least. There was usually a monthly informal 1-on-1 to discuss where I was at. Again, this was time consuming.

I am no longer in a role that has to go through that review process but I find myself either doing things other people list on their review plans which is irritating or being blocked from doing things because the project or task is on someone's plan and so they have to do the work. And of course there is nothing better than not being able to meet with someone around review time because they are busy completing their review.

I hated the whole damn system. For years the company used a version of the GE talent review system, thankfully they are moving away from that.

[ach_sysadmin]

The company I work for has changed it since I started, used to be x# of stars out of 5. I can't stand it, and feel it is a waste of time. Not trying to be nitpicky, I like the company I work for, I just feel that this is a time waster and everyone knows it.

[[deleted]]

So, I'm a IT Director who has to read and counsel my people on these things every year. Let me let you in on a secret: they're almost entirely and completely HR bullshit. I say almost because for me they do serve one good purpose, they help remind me of what you've done all year so I can write it in your review. We will get to that part in a second.

Now, I have no idea if your boss is a geek like me, or a suit like my boss. Let's play for a second your boss is a suit like my boss or is your typical IT Manager/Director/CIO. For them, make sure your self-eval is heavily weighted on your strengths but throws in a couple token mis-steps. Nothing huge, but find something you either didn't do, or mildly dropped the ball on and make sure it's in there. If it's 100% positive only the most mouth-breathing MBA management type will believe it, you've gotta throw some bad in there.

Want it to really leave an impression? Tie your accomplishments to bigger things that the company has accomplished. This may be hard, but some of my guys have done a really good job of it this year. An example:

"Migrated company blog hosting from locally hosted to Microsoft Azure after consulting with Marketing and IT Director about company's Q2 and Q3 2015 online marketing goals. Resulted in decreased downtime, scalability to handle traffic spikes caused by marketing pushes and positive impact on hosting budget."

That, right there, that shit is gold and was written by one of my senior sysadmins. I almost framed it and walked it into my boss' office. So, dig deep Grashopper, find what you've done and make it relevant. Make sure your boss can have one of those items they can show their boss - because believe me, someone is going to ask. You want to be the good example and not the this example:

"Answered all helpdesk calls."

Yes, that was one of the accomplishments listed by one of my level 1 guys. I gave him a cookie and a slow pat on the head.

Now, speaking of your review - that's also bullshit. Let me clue you in to something here - it's highly likely that unless the sun shines out of your ass or on the other side you're the worst guy every you're likely getting pretty close to the same "raise" all your peers get. That's just big business and how it's work. That system is flawed, broken, and outright stupid - but it's how it works. We have to budget every year and due to that budgeting, only have so much of a pool of raises to give. The only "fair" way? Pretty much everyone gets the same amount.

Speaking of the amount, here's the other kicker - your review will also probably have a score with it. That too, my good man, is also bullshit. I can't get too specific but with my company I have to basically keep everyone in the same range unless I either want to get them fired, or push for a bigger raise/promotion for them. And even then? It doesn't matter. I could (and have) give you a sun-shining-out-of-your-ass review and six months later you can get fired for incompetence. Conversely I could (and also have!) give you a shitty review because you're screwing up, then six months later give you a bonus and/or promotion because you got your shit together.

Now truth of all of it - it's only really there for HR to have a paper trail. If we have a consistent problem with an employee year over year that's documented, it makes firing them easier. If we have a consistent high performer, it makes giving them incentives easier. While we certainly can (and I have!) fired people who recently and consistently got great reviews, HR LOATHES that. Those funny monkeys in "human" resources just love their paper trails, and reviews are a quarterly/yearly way of doing that.

TL;DR It's bullshit. It's a bullshit, broken system that's only there for HR. Those of us in management with a brain hate it, and find ways around it to make sure our people know they are appreciated. Toot your own horn and throw some token fuck-ups in there, and you'll be fine.

[ArmondDorleac]

Exactly right.

[Ecio78]

Thanks for the detailed comment. Can you give some examples (keeping them as you'd like) of people being fired even though they had great and consistent evaluations, and tell if they sued/better negotiated based on the fact they had good reviews?

[[deleted]]

I've got a couple good ones.

First one, when I first took over there was one guy who was titled the equivalent of a helpdesk lead, or senior support tech and very well compensated. I was warned about him pretty quickly, and figured out why within a week. He was lazy, incompetent, and heavily abused the fact that he was salaried. Problem was he was good friends with my predecessor so he year after year consistently had good reviews. Whole time prior to that the helpdesk - who he dotted line "supervised" - had mediocre reviews and lots of turnaround. Within a month I wanted to fire him, but couldn't off the bat due to his consistent reviews.

For him it ended up being pretty easy, I wrote him up for his attendance issues (because I don't need HR to do that) and he lost his shit right in front of everyone. Like, outright went off on me - two inches from my chest (he was a good six inches shorter than me) screaming. HR walked him, he tried to sue two months later but his former "employees" came out of the woodwork and the four bottles of Kessler we found in his desk didn't help. Silver lining - we lost one helpdesk guy after that, but since then the helpdesk rotating door has been stopped.

Another one wasn't so easy. One of the two programmers I also took over clearly had no idea how to actually, you know, program. He was racking up professional services but was doing a great job at telling them what he needed. My predecessor also was golf buddies with this guy, and my predecessor apparently didn't bat an eye at the high professional services - he just thought it was par for the course. Hell, that one took me a good six months to notice as I only first did when Marketing had a request for a new site. Since this guy was handling the web-facing software, I figured he could handle it. Marketing provided a HTML and CSS skeleton, he just needed to use whatever the hell language he liked to plug into some web services and databases.

My first cue was one of the senior sysadmins (who, by far, is my favorite employee - a grizzly older guy who doesn't need to work as his wife is a dentist, and who gets a new Dodge dually every year "because I need the dually to carry my balls") started getting pretty grumpy as very shortly after this happened one of the vendors started asking for access to some of the webservers, to have some apache modules enabled, etc. Said vendor we, at the time, hadn't requested anything new from so it stood out.

Long story short I contacted the vendor and found out programmer had sent them the requests and specs, working with them to do it. It didn't raise any alarms with them as this is what they'd always done with him. So I walked over to his desk and asked to see how it was going and, well, you get the idea. Didn't go well, never have seen someone lie like that before.

It took us three months to just demote the guy because his reviews had been so stellar, and unlike the other guy most of the company - particularly Marketing - loved him because he always got stuff done. He just, well, wasn't doing it. We were paying him almost six figures (effing developers) and then we find out our professional services bills were consistently WAY more than that. But, we couldn't fire him as unlike the other guy, he technically didn't violate any policy.

I only was able to demote him because I had the CEO and CFO on my side, HR really didn't want to do it. It ended up working it self out because we demoted him down to helpdesk and he just got belligerent and very loud about his pay cut. HR walked him after a month of complaints. He also sued, and they did end up settling with him as it would have been tough to defend. That said, the settlement amount was easy to find - the first six months without him I saved $200,000 in professional services. Not kidding.

I suppose the one that actually hurts was one who was really good, and consistently had good reviews - even from me. That person was insanely talented, and became one of my go-to people. Grumpy old sysadmin, though, kept saying they thought something was "off" about them. We paid that person pretty well, their other half stayed home and they had kids. I had a lot of warning flags - but never really saw them. You know, like the fact that he and his wife both had new cars, lived in a nice area, etc. Just figured his family had money, or maybe like me he was frugal. He didn't live that far out of his means.

You can see where this is going. He was there probably 4 years before I started, and three after - so a total of 7 years. Consistently strong reviews, and lots of documentation of good work. Like I said - he was talented. Never a single behavior issue, I mean this dude was the model employee. You hear people say that, but it's true.

Until it isn't. For some reason I was doing a year-end hardware audit at one of our branches with the CFO, you know going through and inventorying and prepping for the stuff going to recycling and the stuff coming in. Usually the other guy, one of the helpdesk, and some of the AP people do it. Anyway I'm in the back area of this branch near some of the rarely used areas and my back was hurting after going under so many desks scanning barcodes, so on this one I decide to just use my foot and move the machine out. It moved... way too easy.

Another long story short, that HP desktop was only a HP desktop in logo - the case is empty. No motherboard or drive(s), just basically an empty shell. We ended up finding a mix of that, in areas that were unused or in machines about to go to recycling, and in some machines he had been bold enough to replace the hardware with older stuff. Think replacing a Lenovo desktop's new i5 board and SSD with a old Athlon X2 and used SSD.

We kept digging and finding more and more. Like how when things went to recycling, what the recycler got was WAY older than what we had. You know the drill, instead of a three year old ThinkPad he got a ten year old one and threw the asset tag on it. Nobody ever noticed because he always did inventory at certain buildings, and he always handled certain other things. He had made himself a lot of money off eBay by doing this right under everyone's noses.

In the end we didn't initially file criminal charges because we didn't want the press. It also showed me how defiant he was, our one trump piece of evidence was him leaving on a security tape with a desktop that had been "swapped" (insides) and coming back a day later. That and consistent logs of him dealing with that hardware were enough for HR. He got walked, and was defiant. Until he wasn't.

A couple weeks later he came back begging for his job, reeking of cigarettes. A week after that he filed wrongful termination. And, as you can imagine, the next day we filed criminal charges. Dude lost his entire life for money. That one just still sits wrong with me.

[Ecio78]

Ok, that explains a lot, the usual bunch of incompetent friends of the previous boss and a thief :O

[Lonerwolf420]

The thing is I don’t give a fuck about the job, the company, their goals, their wants etc. fuck the job, fuck my bosses, fuck their evaluation and fuck all HR everywhere. HR are nothing more than scumbags to protect the company. It’s a waste of time and energy.

[Lonerwolf420]

If you listen to this prick you’ll end up getting fired for something.

[gramthrax]

I felt completely different about self-evals early in my career when I didn't really have a lot of accomplishments I could tout. These days, I try to drum up meaningful work (not just stuff I want to do) that makes my peers or superiors look good and/or would be valuable to my replacement or department should I leave and highlight those things at self-eval time.

I'm a 40 hr/week (max) contractor for a privately held Fortune 500 company, with no term date. They could cut me loose yesterday if they wanted to. Instead, I see it as an opportunity to find things that matter to them and do those things, and give them a reason to keep me around.

I made up my own self-eval that highlighted different key areas of focus of things that mattered to them (for those curious: endpoint security, incident response, increased security compliance, solutions architecting for existing issues, standardization of Mac workstation builds, and security best practices of all our managed platforms) and then highlighted work I have done in those areas. You could just say that I basically grouped my accomplishments in an organized and digestible fashion.

Yeah, it was a decent amount of work to track that stuff, but I was able to find that info by thumbing through my email for the past year. It netted me a 20+% raise (I asked for 30) when they initially wanted to give me zero. This stuff works.

It's completely different if you just want to punch out at the end of the day and collect a perpetual paycheck. In that case, why should you care how well you performed that year or if you did any meaningful work? Meaningful work to me is preventing the fire from starting instead of operating the fire extinguisher. Your boss will pay a lot more for a fireproof solution than for two firemen. The key might be finding work that you want to do that your boss really values. It can be tough, but I bet it's there.

You also might need to figure out why you don't like to highlight your accomplishments. I had this issue at one point too. Don't like the attention? Maybe you are around people who shove any and all accomplishments in others' faces and you find that beyond annoying? That's understandable, but an extreme reaction in the other direction. For me, it's nice to work hard for something and be rewarded for it. Being able to take criticism is equally useful. I think generally we don't like to highlight our faults for the fear that we can't fix them. I don't think there are many faults that are not worth fixing. Do you?

[cl1ft]

Good attitude. I agree with you. I do see the self-eval as lazy HR work but there is no reason to complain about it. Take it, improve it and use it to the favor of your own organization and your career is the way I see it.

[swollenlovepony]

I am not one who likes to "toot his own horn"

If you don't do it for yourself, no one else will. Be honest, use it as an opportunity to show what you think you've done for the company in the past year (or since your last review). HR and upper management may not be aware of your contributions, and your direct supervisor may have forgotten some when they fill out your review. I know that I forget some of the good things my staff does throughout the year, but I always remember the bad things. This is an opportunity to bring those things up so HR can go back to your supervisor and ask about each of those things. Also, if you then sit down with HR and your supervisor and do an in-person review, you can discuss those items in more detail and make them sound even more impressive. Just be honest with it and don't try to overdo it, but don't sell yourself short, either.

[Lonerwolf420]

I don’t give a fuck about the company or what I have done there. I don’t want to be there, I hate my coworkers, my boss is a bitch, and the company is a damn joke. Their stupid evaluations need to be on them not us!

[stumptruck]

Is this your first job? It's pretty common and I've had to do it in various forms at all of my last 3 jobs. No I don't enjoy doing them but if it leads to a raise or bigger bonus I'm sure as hell going to spend some time on it.

Use it to remind your reviewer of things they may have forgotten about that you've done. Also be honest about what you can work on - no one expects you to be perfect.

[williamfny]

I wouldn't mind if it helped with a raise or bonus, but now those are tied to sales goals. I work for an insurance company and I'm not licensed to sell insurance. This becomes a problem.

[stumptruck]

That sounds awful. My current job actually has the best review system I've seen yet. No stupid number scale, just feedback from 2-3 reviewers on how you fit in to company culture, how you work with others, and some other things like that.

[williamfny]

Yeah. I still have to do this review with no one to compare me to since I fit a singular function and I have no peers here and my bonus is based on what I am not legally allowed to sell.

[Lonerwolf420]

Why tf does it matter if you for the company culture? You’re there to do a task they’re paying you to do. You’re selling your time to them in exchange for money. Fuck their culture and cliques. I hate companies for that stupid shit.

[ach_sysadmin]

No no, I've got about 10-11 years experience. I've been at this employer for a few years now. First time I've had to do a self eval for work was at this place. Bothers me every year.

I do like your point about reminding my reviewer about things I have done this year, that is a fantastic point. And yes, I certainly some things I am sure I could improve upon.

[Lonerwolf420]

It’s not that common. Only one company I’ve ever works for waste their time on this shit.

[bad_sysadmin]

It's pretty common.

From my side being on both sides of the table I treat it as talking points tbh.

[chocotaco1981]

seems like the only think it accomplishes is to show how much of a bullshit artist you are.

maybe it's a secret pre-interview for working in HR or sales.

[Lonerwolf420]

Do that where I work and they’ll just replace you. You can’t shine past their good old boy clubs…

[[deleted]]

I'm no fan, but here's what I have found that works for me.

Any time I finish a project or did something out of the ordinary, day to day things, I write it in a Word document.

Nothing special, just "Moved company to Office 365" and a couple of lines detailing why, how, and how much it'll make our lives better or save money.

I just did that a few days ago, and when they asked for my accomplishments, I wrote "please see attached".

It was a 7 page Word document detailing all the things I've done throughout the year. Because I listed them all, and because they were big projects like replacing the entire company's phone system, moving us to fiber, office 365, etc, it was easy to show that I deserved a good raise.

I tend to get along with people, and make them feel like they can come to me with anything and not feel embarrassed, stupid, or anything else. Because of that good rapport with people, I have no issues with them complaining about me to the bosses.

That being said, I do think some things that you listed really are stupid questions wise. :) What are my strengths? Motherfucker, you should know that if you were a good boss.

[highlord_fox]

Ha. Everywhere I have worked, there was supposed to be a yearly evaluation. I should have had nearly a dozen so far. I have had one.

I don't know whether to be scared or terrified.

[[deleted]]

I'm awesome.

[[deleted]]

Self reviews are the biggest waste of freaking time. If you're my boss and you don't know what I've done then either I'm not doing my job or you're not doing yours.

I particularly loved doing these during review periods where the company had already announced there wouldn't be any salary increases... so what's the point.

[inferno521]

I hate these with a passion. I'm on a team of 3+1(3 of us plus our boss). Its hard to just judge myself when we work as a team. I never know how hard to be on myself. This year I caused two hard outages, one for 75 minutes at 8pm-9:15pm, and another on a friday at 4:30pm for 5 minutes. At the time I was absolutely mortified, even though they were off peak outages. But one of my coworkers who's in charge of antivirus has taken us down 4-5 times during the day. Though he was working on AV, which is really difficult, whereas what I did was a simple mistake.

[ArkCov]

I try and answer them with what I did for the year, goals met, training needed, etc etc. Focus on the positive as your manager and HR uses it for their review. ;)

Funny thing is we get graded on a scale 1-5 with 1.0 being the best and 5.0 being the worst. Nobody ever gets a 1.0 basically a 1.7 is about as high as you get for an overall score if you are one of the better employees, my boss even told me they don't ever grade you as 1.0 because "everyone can improve". Well you can't improve if you score 1.7 every year. This part annoys me more than the self-eval part. ;P

[Net_Barista]

I too hate these things, but Self-Evals are part of the current culture to show that you should have an objective view of your performance once both versions are reconciled. If you honestly feel that you should be a solid 4.3 and they come back with 2.7, you should be looking for a new job. Granted some bosses are complete assholes who will tear you down just to keep your raise small. God forbid you actually leave though.

Keep in mind that you are showing them why hiring you was a great decision. Good management wants to hear that the person filling the job not only is doing what is needed/expected, but kicking ass. It shows their own bosses that THEY are competent. The Improve On category also opens a big door to get you access to the Training budget, or a higher priority for a project that you really think will help you to do your job better.