That is so true. Probably why people leave every couple of years. I hate performance reviews. They try to be objective and yet so many personal feelings involved.

Finding a good manager is hard. Someone who understands tech and gives frequent objective feedback. That’s really really hard.

Most managers I’ve seen go into Management because they don’t like coding. They then want to be far away from it. That creates problems because they don’t understand why things are constantly regressing. They blame it on their engineers and start handing out shitty reviews when the actual problem was there is just a metric ton of code debt that they don’t want to hear about.

The other thing is they like being people managers. All the way up to Group managers (managers of managers). They truly enjoy re-orging people around. I guess that’s how they feel important. But they forget it’s the product that matters. As the org gets bigger, less and less people actually give a shit about the product as a whole.

I have yet to find a manager that takes code debt and product seriously. I’m on my Manager #10.

If you are a manager, I kindly urge you to listen both to your customers and your engineers. Get a reverse performance review. The world will be happier.