The Futility Of Small Scale Appraisals

In anything but larger companies, performance reviews are an utter waste of both time and resources.

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It’s universally accepted within the Grand Game of Software Engineering, especially amongst the progressive software engineers therein, that the only people who’re interested in performance reviews are the people running them and the people whose own goals involve completing them.

For everyone else they’re an irrelevant box ticking exercise at best, and a stressful resented resource wasting exercise at worst — as I’ve covered previously in some depth.

Consider the following as a general basis for this thesis¹.

1. Many engineers switch priorities regularly and rarely know what they’ll be working on next week, let alone next review period.
2. As many of us are forced to work with the backward, haphazard, and poorly implemented agile “methodology” that has the chief tenet of keep moving and don’t worry about long term success, i.e. the end goal in unknown, then consequently longer term goals cannot be defined.
3. The “SMART” system was invented for use by managers², not technicals.
4. No-one other than HR actually reads the resultant reviews and being non-technical themselves, they understand very little about the content and therefore take…