[torben-friis]

I've come to realize a lot of business trends can be reduced to "higher ups are now convinced that x is not actually necessary".

See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.

To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.

[bigtex]

What is funny is the Adobe executive who proved that yearly employee review process is no longer needed over a decade ago but for some reason the trend never caught on across the corporate world. Seems that some trends just don’t catch on for some reason.

[paradox460]

Getting rid of sadistic reviews of underlings? And take aways their fun? What's wrong with you?!

[aworks]

I was a manager of engineers and manager of managers. I've never heard the word fun used in conjunction with reviews.

It's a system and process put together by others, with forms and criteria that were flawed. It required real effort to do it even half successfully. It's not clear it ever had much impact on future behavior. and it had to be done on a timeline that interfered with doing the regular job.

If someone had a real performance issue, there were better approaches to the problem.

Yet every company I worked from from tiny startup to large Silicon Valley company insisted on it every year.