[bartread]

This sort of bugged me as well. Why was the review done in April but the review period ended in January?

Whilst the article is (as I've pointed out elsewhere) only one side of the story, GitHub isn't that big a company, so how crap do your management processes have to be that you only get around to reviewing somebody 3 months after the review period ended? It doesn't sound like the scheduling of the review was a surprise to Coraline: she saw it coming, it wasn't late, etc. So why didn't it cover the period up to the date of the review?

Bashing somebody with months old feedback when they've been working with you to improve against goals that you've both agreed specifically related to that feedback is an extremely poor way to operate, and obviously hugely demotivating to the reviewee.

Problem is, as I've already said, we've only read one side of the story.

[mercutio2]

Do you work at a big company? If you do, take a look at your last review, comparing when you received it to the period it technically applies to.

In my experience, both as a manager and an individual contributor, the periods will be offset by 2-4 months. The delivery of the review, while it feels like the start of something to the recipient, is the end of what's often a long and stressful period of planning, writing, and distributing reviews that lead to raises, bonuses, and promotions.

So nothing seems odd about that timeline to me, unless her manager failed to explain "this is a review that applies to the period before you made marked improvement".

[bartread]

The last time I had to worry about this I worked for a 300-ish person company, so a little under half the size of GitHub.

We used to do 6 monthly reviews but scrapped them in favour of more regular meetings every 4 - 8 weeks, largely for the reasons you've stated. That being said, in my experience reviews are one of those tasks that take up as much time as you give them. If you only give yourself a month to gather feedback and prepare them you'll find a way to get it done, and I always wanted to work off the most current information available when meeting with members of my teams, hence doing the prep as late as possible.

As I said, GitHub is not a large company at around 700 employees, so I'm not really sure what their excuse is. The largest company I've worked for, as a contractor this time, was around 400k employees, and they seem to have much better processes around this with regular one-to-ones in the place of annual reviews, at least for permanent tech staff.