Performance Review Q&A and Videos

Our manager assigned a colleague and me both of us junior developers to a repository we have no experience working on, with no help or prior knowledge provided. We asked our senior for guidance, and she told us we need to reach out to two other teams to get a knowledge transfer.

We have 10 days to complete the task, but there’s already been a delay due to code reviews. Our manager refuses to understand the situation and told us that our jobs and especially our performance reviews are on the line.

Should I consider switching to a different org, or is it time to leave the company?
(I really don't like posting question like this)

When I worked at Facebook (Meta), one of the most lively groups was "PSC Memes for Procrastinating Teens."

This was a group to share memes for procrastinating employees working on their performance reviews (self reviews, peer reviews, manager reviews).

I'm going to try to share some memes which captured the spirit of that group, but please drop links to your go-to memes that capture the feeling of dawdling on an important task.

I want to highlight the good work a coworker has done for me by helping me out a lot and being really attentive and on top of things.

Per , I want to let their manager know. We don't have ThanksBot, so I'll be thanking via email.

Do I CC my peer, or just my own manager in my email to my peer's manager? Or do I address the email to my peer and CC their manager and my manager?

Thanks!

Historically, my managers have never been willing to commit to a set of performance criteria (i.e. what it looks like to meet criteria, exceed criteria, or be promoted). They usually defer to company guidelines without specifying what I can do on my project that would meet their bar. I get it, as they want to hedge their bets and motivate me without committing to anything. My career has gone well anyway and I ultimately get good enough reviews and periodic promotions. However, I often get feedback that high performance or promotions require me to do things that I am already doing and including in my review. I do not know what else to do to get stellar reviews.

I have been asked to lead a large, risky, technically challenging project with a scope and time horizon significantly beyond my level. The project sounds interesting but like a huge amount of work and stress. If I take on the role, I would like to be rewarded for it. Whether successful delivery leads to a promotion is a big factor in my decision. My manager will not commit to what succeeding in this project means for my career.

In general, is there a way to get more concrete criteria and commitments from managers? In this case specifically, what should I do?

Recently had my performance review and received meets expectations with the baseline raise. I feel like I'm firing on all cylinders and outperforming my peers but it all seems to not mean much which is pretty demotivating. My manager is thankful for my contributions, says he's learning alot from me, and I'm on the higher end of the meets expectations end. Looking around me I feel my work ethic, contributions, and team impact outweights the majority engineers around me.

I have a generally pretty good relationship with my manager so he was very transparent that I'm the highest paid engineer on the team and shared that the engineers in our org that received exceeds do work with more visability and participate in activities outside the team like a volunteer oncall rotation, interviewing, new hiring trainings, etc. Basically makes me think excelling at the team level has little value and I need to seek org level problems to own which seems like an antipattern to me.

My plan going forward is to schedule a call with my VP and try to take ownership of upcoming org level problems and try to start doing not engineering activities like interviewing. I'm also thinking about setting up a followup call with my manager to express frustration about my rating and press him further about the work that will lead me to get higher ratings.

Overall, I think I'm positioned pretty well to excel at this company in the future but is there any other recommendations that can help ensure I'm successful?

Some context:

• I've been at the company 1.5 yrs
• I led our 3 biggest projects last year. Two requiring multiple engineers and cross-team planning and coordination. Delivered high quality solutions on time.
• My manager says I know the systems better than anyone on the team and has called me his righthand man.
• I'm the engineer who hops on any fires, diagnose the root cause quickly and push up the fix.
• I revamped how we do project discovery, grooming, and planning. This has led to big impact in how we deliver and has increased team confidence in what we're building. This was evident in a recent engineering survey which my team scored the highest on in this category in our org.
• I went out of my way to improve team processes, knowledge sharing, and I'm usually the engineer that jumps into a new internal framework for an upcoming project
• I've made significant impact on reliability and monitoring of our system which is my org's #1 goal.

I have a new manager now who is wonderful and dedicated to leveling me up. He's asked me to prepare answers for these 4 questions before our next 1-1:

• Goals & Expectations – What do you want to achieve?
• Current Skills & Experience – Where are you now? What strengths do you have? Any gaps?
• Challenges & Roadblocks – What’s holding you back? What’s been difficult for you?
• Success Metrics – How will we both measure progress?

Taro has had a bit of an upgrade since I last used it and I just wanted to go through all resources to make sure I answer these questions well. So far I've collected:

Courses

Individual Videos

I will definitely go through these as I carve my answers but also wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any other valuable videos/courses. I'd also appreciate any advice for the questions my manager has presented as well!

Thanks!

What role does good feedback received in a 360 review cycle have in the promotion / salary hike conversation? How to make the most of good feedback?

Thanks a lot for the wonderful content at Taro. It really helps me understand the expectations as a software engineer.

Both Alex and Rahul had a wonderful salary increase from 100k to 750k in 7 years. After each performance review cycle, did you explicitly have to ask your manager for a salary increase, or did your manager automatically increased your salary every time?

If you do explicitly ask for a salary increase, do you generally ask for a specific number, and do you ask only when you get "exceeds expectations" rating?

I will be interning at Meta for a summer internship. After watching the intern success series videos on Taro, I learned that there will be a midpoint and final review for interns.

I would appreciate any specific advice regarding how to best approach the midpoint review process. Is there anything in particular you would recommend I emphasize during the review meeting?

I believe it is common for interns to write a self evaluation of their performance before the review meeting. From what I have heard, impact is something that is highly emphasized during the evaluation. Besides highlighting the key metrics, I was wondering if you had any tips regarding how to sell my impact and express it in a way that is easy for others to understand.

Recently started a job as a new grad at a fast paced company. It's not unusual for priorities to change and for previous work to get scraped off. Recently I spent a few days working on a ticket trying to do something that is not possible to do (ie the ticket requirements itself was faulty, the ticket was made by a senior engineer). We only realised the ticket was faulty few days into the task so I had already "wasted" a bunch of days, writing a whole bunch of code, that stayed in my local machine and never got pushed. How do I get "credit" for the work I did that week? Because I don't have any tangible output to show for that week.

This example is a minor example as it only involved a few days. What if it was months instead? What if company focus shifted and whatever you worked on never makes it to prod (or worst case it just stays on your local machine). How do you deal with these situations, particularly when performance review time comes up? Because from what I know, most companies/managers pull the stats from github and use that as a strong indicator of someone's performance.

I will be interning at Meta for this summer. After watching the videos on Taro, I learned that Meta engineers are evaluated according to four axes: project impact, direction, engineering excellence, and people impact.

I was wondering if a similar criteria is used to evaluate the performance of interns. From what I've observed, I feel the direction axis may be less relevant for interns since it involves setting the roadmap for the larger org.

If possible, I would also appreciate any examples of common failure modes to avoid for each criterion, as they would help us better understand potential pitfalls.

Thank you so much for your help!

I'm a staff security engineer and my team was rescoped to Software Engineering. I'm nervous that I won't be able to keep my high performance as a software engineer at similar level because its not what I've been trained in. I've expressed this to my manager whom is also a new manager himself. I'm not sure how to handle this, do i just quiet quit and spend my time training until I'm let go or still contribute in hopes that I will make it through next round of interviews?