Counter Measures — Going Nuclear In a Performance Review

Or, “Remembering that you’re always the most important person in the room”.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In an ideal world everyone would be honest with each other all of the time.

Unfortunately this would most likely end up with us very quickly murdering each other over the smallest things, for example the use of tabs vs. spaces, the eating of Rich Tea vs, Digestives, and the performance of actual meaningful work vs. attending vanity meetings.

Not an ideal situation, really, especially in the Grand Game of Software Engineering where us all staying alive is a major and important pre-requisite for us getting some work done.

So, assuming we’d all prefer to live, let’s go for “in a slightly better world” most people would prefer to be honest with each other.

The aim here is to cut out most, if not all, of the workplace performance based nonsense that we have to go through on a daily basis — the charades we have to play and the dances we reluctantly have to do just to get something we need in order to do our great work.

In this particular case let’s focus on performance reviews once again, those banes of a permanent employee’s life¹ where truth doesn’t matter, results don’t count (as no-one reads them), and rises depend pretty much on how the CXO² feels…