Appraisals are daunting. Even in the most relaxed work environments, appraisals can be nerve wracking and they lay bare the power dynamic between a manager and a reportee.
I’ve been thinking of ways to make the process more transparent; and whilst I was trying to do so, I’ve come to realize about the greatest folly or great/non-toxic workplaces - your performance isn’t discerning.
In a toxic workplace you will always feel that your work is shit, but in a great workplace you’ll always feel that your work is exceptional and either of this isn’t great.
One of my central tenants of starting Fuze was to build a workplace where I personally have fun - I get to work with great people and build great things. Crafting such a workplace means that appreciation is always public, criticism is private and often we’re getting things done without major setbacks.
If everyone is doing a fairly good job, how do you discern if someone is truly exceptional? How do you distinguish between the great and the good engineers?
It’s a rhetorical question, because you always know who is exceptional.
The folks who don’t need to be managed, those who find work that needs to be done without prompting are the truly exceptional people.
Exceptional engineers generate work. They peek into the hood of code and figure out what requires fine tuning. They talk to ‘business’ to figure out what generates revenue. More often than not, the managing that they require is orienting their compass to the most critical issue to be solved because they will try to solve everything and go down rabbit holes.
The folks who take great pride in the work they do. The code they write is thing of beauty.
These are the engineers who love tinkering with code and believe that their code is art. They will get things done on time and in an extensible manner which makes it easy to add more use-case in the future, but more often than not they would not care about the ‘business’. The revenue is important but not without great code.
Finally, the people who get the job done. It’s good honest work that meets the expectation.
There is nothing wrong about it, everyone has their priorities in life and meeting expectations is what you were hired for.
Obviously, I won’t be talking about people who don’t want to work because they self select out of this process.
There is nothing wrong in being any of these personas, after all you’re having fun building something great and the work you do is fruitful. You just need to be self aware about your personal and work priorities.