[dwhitney]

A good friend of mine once told me, "I often feel like my purpose as an engineer is to give business dudes a reason to have meetings."

That statement always rings true to me during performance review and goal setting seasons. This stuff is mostly bullsh*t. "Goals" - as described by OP - don't exist at small startups. It's clear what the goal is: build a product, get customers, grow revenue, etc. The goals of a FAANG company aren't different. If "goals" were actually important, they'd exist ate startups too. Because they don't, it's pretty clear that the pessimistic comments in this thread are correct: they give HR a concrete way to avoid legal liability when it comes to raises/bonuses/promotions/terminations.

It's totally frustrating. I understand OPs sentiment. Unfortunately, the only way to avoid this red-tape nonsense is to join a startup.

[pxue]

Goals absolutely exist at startups. In fact I'd argue it's MORE important to have OKRs at small companies that reflect how each person contributes toward companies KPI.

Leadership's job is to help employees do the best work that aligns with the company goal. If devs don't understand what long term goal they should set to help a company grow, that's a huge red flag.

[wonderingdev]

How would that help precisely? You should put more effort in hiring, if you're worried about developers not understanding how to help a company grow. In the past I worked for startups and very small startups. The wannabe-corp ones have goals, the real ones don't. They want to stay afloat and grow as well, but transparency is enough motivation for devs to do their job: we need the MVP or we sink, all of us.

Genuine question: do you have experience in management with OKRs? Do you have some examples proving they helped in your career? Even made-up examples, just to understand what people expect from OKRs.

[dwhitney]

If only Tom had implemented a good set of 360 performance reviews and growth plans, then we wouldn't even know who Zuckerberg is.

[dwhitney]

90% of startups fail. OP is talking about annual 360 performance reviews. If your company may not exist next year, why would you do this? I say this as someone who has sold a startup.

OP is not talking about the "goals" I mentioned a startup having: revenue growth, customer growth, product development. These are things that startup leadership should keep track of and communicate regularly. OP's definition of "goals" are more akin to "take a Coursera course on machine learning". These are the "goals" that employees create for themselves with a manager when that company has gotten somewhat large. They are BS goals, that people who want career growth should be doing anyway.

[ghaff]

"Take a relevant MOOC course" actually seems like the perfect sort of thing to put in a 90-day (or whatever) work plan. It communicates to your manager that you want to spend some time on professional development and your manager may even that, if you like, they're happy to pay for a course somewhere.

In general, I sort of like having a somewhat informal workplan like that. And it's perfectly fine if, over the course of the quarter unplanned projects come in, you just document that. It's useful documentation, not much work, and you should probably have at least a vague mental plan anyway.

[dwhitney]

The issue I'd take with "take a relevant MOOC course" is, what if actual work picks up and you need to drop the course to meet some deadlines? You've failed to meet your "goals" by focusing on the company's "goals", and that red mark may stand in the way of you getting that raise/promotion. The incentives are misaligned.

As I've said, I totally get OPs frustration. We were hired to achieve a "goal". Why are we inventing other "goals" that are often misaligned?

[_y5hn]

Useful to whom? Who reads that fluff?

Sorry, but unless there's a larger multi-year strategy, which would be ill-suited for ICs, this is just HR incompetence at work.