[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.