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by mercutio2 3272 days ago
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".

1 comments

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.