Performance Review Q&A and Videos

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Please assist with your advice.

I need some advice on how to navigate my situation. I have recently joined a staff engineer role and its has been 2 months. My manager mentioned today that I would be put under PIP. He mentioned that there is gap in the expectations.

To give a context, I am the only one person here and everyone else including manager (who is a director) are in different country (in europe), completely different time zone and it has been every hard to get any time from them to discuss anything. I have been left out of important meetings because of the time zone. Now, I am working alone here on a new project independent from others. When I created PRs, they were stuck for ever (sometimes a week or so). I posted in multiple channels, etc. Even sync meeting with team mates sometimes were cancelled because of they were busy and it has been hard. I have raised this with manager but nothing changed. For onboarding, I didn't have a buddy to begin with and manager was my buddy.

I am supposed to talk with HR tomorrow and discuss my options. PIP or mutual termination. I am not sure what should I ask HR and what should I do? Any advice would be greatly helpful.

Hi,

I am a mid level engineer. Recently I was given a task which had a tight deadline. I started looking at the task and was stuck as the results from the code run were not as expected while testing. I was unfamiliar with this area of code so tried my best to understand the code and investigate the cause of unexpected result. I raised this with the team and also raised this as a blocker. I mentioned that I did not have confidence in going ahead with the task without understanding the cause of the unexpected results. My team was unhappy with this as the code has been working okay so far without any issues and the unexpected results were likely because of a gap in my understanding. The team assumed that I did not want to do the task whereas my hold up was not wanting to proceed without having a clear understanding of what's going on.

Should I have approached the situation differently? How to work with an unknown or hardly known area of code on a tight deadline?

I have had issues in the past with the team because of performance and other reasons. I have recently improved my performance but fear falling back to the old ways.

Thanks

I joined Meta and my team in July of last year. I got an MA for this half. I am happy I at least got that, but it looks like a lot of people got exceeds expectations. The thief is making me less happy, and slightly worried. Should I feel good about this?

In one of the videos Alex mentioned that some devs get a culture shock when joining a Big Tech company from a smaller company. What kind of culture shock would that be? Do you have examples and methods how to prepare oneself for those?

Hello,

I am an Entry level Software Engineer( SWE 1) in my current team for a year now in a mid sized company. I have a matured tenure( 3 years ) SWE 2 in team who has been wanting to get promoted to a Senior Software Engineer for sometime now.

The situation is, in order for a chance for promotion, this SWE 2 was asked to lead a small feature implementation of 2 people where they ended up missing deadlines twice stating engineering complexity. Due to this situation, whole of the team, including Teach lead and SWE1s have swarmed in to help them meet the deadline which is almost a week from now.

The thing is, this particular SWE 2 has been calling me out in Standup and grooming meeting and in person to EM for not completing my story in time even though I am giving proper updates in standup and Tech lead hasn’t raised any concerns yet. According to this SWE2, the stories I have been working on should be completed in a particular x timeframe because he thinks so. They have not laid out any scope or plan where to make changes for it. Their argument is, unless I complete this task, the whole team is blocked because of me. They made it a point to convey it to EM along with PM. EM reached out to me in frustration and seemed content after I explained him the complexity and was able to deliver it next day morning. I had reached out to other senior engineers on team and they guided me properly to finish this task.

This particular SWE2 again called out my name again in my Tech Leads one of the PR and mentioned that other devs are blocked because of me. Tech lead gave a great suggestion to unblock others ( which he could have asked way earlier and implemented ) and others are unblocked now. When I reached out to this SWE2 asking an estimate for current story, in our 1:1 conversation he mentions go with your speed. We don’t really need your part to be unblocked. It will be a good to have. But he keeps on throwing me under the bus infront of team, EM and PM. This SWE2 lacks technical depth and keeps on checking with me everyday if I need any help. But they can’t explain anything properly and I consider it as a waste of time to even decipher their explanation because it tends to increase my confusion.

If it matters, we have our end year review next week and EM seems to think SWE2 is the one helping me (in fact not at all, can’t even explain a proper code change). This SWE 2 is one of the main reason I was given not meet expectations last time in our mid year review rating. I am scared of how much impact he has because of EM’s calling out, again on my review this year when in fact I have hardly worked with him this year. Please advise how to handle this situation.

I’d like to convert my internal system of progress into a checklist and then share it with my manager. For example, I’m learning about logging. A question to measure my own progress is to check if I know what information should be logged? What about security considerations? If someone asks me about logging in 2 months, can I unblock them?

Sometimes an engineer might not be performing up to expectations because their manager is unable to provide them clear expectations for their level. If they feel like that's the case in the face of a PIP, what courses of action do they have to push against the PIP?

I am an L4 engineer with decent knowledge of my team's stack.

What are some actions I can take to meet expectations in my current role for the next few years, while minimizing the amount of time I spend on work?

Given that I'm not shooting for a promotion, does that change how I should approach relationship building with senior folks on the team? There is a lot of advice on Taro about relationship building, but it appears to be aimed at folks who wish to promote quickly.

Hi everyone,

I recently had my bi-annual performance review in a FAANG-like tech company, where I was evaluated against four key pillars: project impact, craft excellence, direction, and organizational impact. However, the feedback I received was an overall "met expectations" rating without specific details on how I fared within each pillar for individual tasks.

I'm now looking to engage in a follow-up discussion with my manager to gain a more granular understanding of my performance. Specifically, I want to discuss:

• How I was evaluated against each pillar for the tasks I undertook (whether it was met expectations, below expectations, or exceeded expectations).
• Clarification on which tasks were aligned with each pillar and how my performance was assessed accordingly.
• Identifying areas for improvement and potential growth opportunities within each pillar.

Any advice on initiating this conversation respectfully and productively would be incredibly helpful!

Thanks for your insights!

tldr; I am a Tech Lead working in of the big tech giants, getting burnt out due to office politics and ignorant managers.

I am one of the few people (~20) who accidentally was made remote, this was the result of one of the irresponsible move from one of the tech giant.

Anyways, I was part of a team for almost more than a year and the company culture was a bit shocking to me as my manager refused to do 1:1, lack of quality work and ignorance because of me being the remote was evident.

Six months before I, including my team, was transferred to another team with a greenfield project (with little or no prior info), we worked really hard but after 3-4months, another reshuffling happened and most of the team was moved to other projects/team. After couple of months the team was finally dismantled, I thought we will go back to our original team but to my surprise, instead of retaining me, they hired two new lead engineers in their location. In between all of this I was surprised to know that my manager (previous) didn't fill my annual review, when I tried to contact him I didn't get any response. I also scheduled a meeting with him but he didn't show up.

Few weeks before, I was moved to another team, which I found was in the mid of big release. The Principal engineer who was responsible for the design and architecture of the system was moved out before I joined so there was no knowledge sharing per se. I tried to contact him but he is too busy to entertain me now. During the first couple of days, my new manager briefed me that I am the owner of this new project and I have to look after each and everything. The project in itself is very huge: It was in design phase since last 1 year, and it depends on 2-3 teams. Everyday I am pulled into random meetings where there is a lot of alignment going on with some crucial decision making as the project is going to be live in new few months. In the daily sprint the manager wants to make sure I have enough work assigned to me as well. In two weeks I am almost burnt out as I have little or no time left after hours of meeting and going through the random documents.

Recently I came to know that there will a week long in-person workshop to get an alignment on the various decisions on the current project and I am not invited, I pinged my manager for the same but there is a long silence.

As of now, I have little or no breathing space to prepare for the interviews and almost on the verge of burnout.

Few important points:

• To my surprise my official manager is still the same manager (first team) and he has still not filled up my performance review.
• I moved countries because of personal issues so leaving the company may not be easy as of now. I have a lot of financial responsibilities, plus the current market and immigration condition has made the condition worse.

I joined meta just a few months ago and didn’t get even one entire half.

I missed the TNTE date by 3 weeks so had to go through PSC which was excruciating.

My manager said I got a borderline Below Expectation (BE) due to the Eng Excellence axis. All other axes were either exceeds or meets.

It’s mainly because while I started some projects I didn’t finish all parts of it and the impact wasn’t materialized. But he said there isn’t anything to freak out about and rather he’s not quite worried about the eng excellence axis. He said my trajectory is good and that if we had psc in August I wouldn’t get the BE. He asked to rather focus on people axis as he doesn’t see a clear path towards meeting expectations there and it has fewer opportunities.

I asked what the implications are for this soft BE guidance, he said there’s none pretty much. No financial implications or any other changes. He’ll just be focused on brining up Eng excellence conversations in 1:1s every month.

How concerned should I be about this? Should I take his words and not worry too much or is there some reading between the lines that I need to be doing? Will he be talking to HR already about me?

I recently started a side project that could have an org level impact soon within this year. The feedback for the prototype is pretty good and I got a green-light to put more bandwidth in it.

I used to think once I get the good work done, promotion should come naturally. But both my manager and skip manager are telling me to leave proper documentation and communication as evidence for promotion - docs like PRD, roadmap planning, status update etc.

I usually do communications pretty well, so their feedback make me wonder if I missing something for a staff level promotion.

• What kind of evidence is being valued in a staff promo packet? Any differences between senior and staff promo packet?
• What do I need to highlight and keep track of if I'm creating scope outside of daily work?
• What kind of data I should keep track of to quantify the impact? How do you usually learn about finding the matrix to track?

Thanks!

Hello, I just wanted to get some advice last month I was terminated from my job after being placed on PIP/probation. When I first joined the company I had successfully completed training in React but was put on the team that didn’t use it. When the first review cycle came one of my teammates described my learning as flat and my technical skills as inadequate. There was even a time when I was ignored and tasks were passed over and one where I couldn’t come up with a plan. The junior who they assigned it afterward had the same issue couldn’t find and also didn’t need to come up with a plan but was allowed to work on it. Also, I was given noncoding tasks for a time or generic unit test tickets for functions that didn’t need it.

Eventually, I and the other junior got a task that was basic and miscommunication led to a delay and they complained about us both because of how it took. Then the assignment that sealed my fate was I had to implement a microservice and node API with a unit test in 2 weeks. There was a reference code but we couldn’t ask for help from senior developers. When my manager saw my progress he PIP'ed me and then when saw the demo he was underwhelmed and said I couldn't justify the code had a poor understanding of restful API concepts and my test didn’t meet functional requirements he wrote up the paper to basically have me fired.

Hi everyone! I want to understand what are some most effective ways to articulate your person goals and growth areas to your manager. What are some questions to consider? How do I measure success?

I want to maximize 1-1s as much as possible and I think this is a good starting point to laydown the roadmap.