<
https://chelseatroy.com/2024/03/29/how-do-we-evaluate-people-for-their-technical-leadership/>
"In February some years ago, my then-manager surprised me with a damning
performance review.
He had just returned from parental leave, having departed in September. Before
he left, he had proposed ambitious end-of-year goals to the executives above
him. What he hadn’t done before he left was
tell his team the goals, or
appoint a backfill for his position. I spent a lot of time that autumn being
the backfill we didn’t have to keep existing projects moving. I suspect it
won’t surprise you to learn that, when the manager returned to his team in
December, he found his ambitious goals unmet.
During his absence I had, in his estimation, merged an insufficient number of
lines of code to the repositories that my team maintained. This cardinal reason
headlined my lackluster performance review. At this organization, reviews run
late by about six weeks; the manager puts them in, then a lattice of other
steps happen, and finally your manager meets with you in February about a
review covering your performance through last December.
The week before the meeting, I had finished up and merged a long-awaited
structural refactor—one that answered a number of the team’s complaints about
the repository. Due to the size of this refactor, I had done a lot of team
socialization prior to merging. From start to merge, those changes took about
five months. By “start,” I mean a period of observation to understand how the
team used the existing system. That step preceded one-on-one interviews with
teammates, socializing a solution, and finally building it. The building
step—the step visible to Github—took about three weeks and came, of course,
last.
I suspect it won’t surprise you to learn that I disagreed with my manager’s
estimation of my contributions. More importantly, though, I disagree with the
proxy used to estimate them."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
