[elmerland]

I'm confused about this article. On the one side I agree with his point on constant and timely feedback. On the other side I disagree with his dismissal of yearly reviews and weekly meetings.

You need these more formal environments to quantify the performance over a longer period of time. In doing so you can correct for biases, and get feedback not just from the manager but from everyone you work with. Additionally you can aggregate the data company wide to see patterns and hopefully try something new. I'm sure plenty of people do it wrong and that might be a different conversation.

Maybe what the performance improvement was missing was a human touch. Giving feedback without caring for the person can feel cold and calculating.

[CydeWeys]

It's also not clear to me how pay-for-performance and promote-for-performance is supposed to work without some kind of systematized performance review system. And I will say that, at least in my personal experience, pay-and-promote-for-performance is hugely important in getting the most out of your software engineers.

[walshemj]

Performance based pay and the whole hr infrastructure around it is designed to lower the pay quanta it has < 1% to do with rewarding performance.

[CydeWeys]

Why do you say that? And what exactly do you mean by "pay quanta"? Rewarding and incentivizing high performance seems to obviously be in the business's best interest, so why do you say they don't focus on it, even for the companies that do it explicitly for that reason? Are you claiming they're lying as to their motivations?

[walshemj]

quanta is hr speak for the increase in pay budget and yes in practice PRP is used to depress pay