Ask HN: It's annual review season, how do you remember what you did last year?

I usually just look for concrete artifacts to remind me of things. Go back through your email from the previous year, look at your Slack/Webex/MS-Teams/whatever chat history, look at commit logs, Jira issues, whatever "things" you might have left a mark on. I can usually get enough reminders from this stuff.

A related question I have is "how does anyone remember answers to behavioral questions that start with `tell me about a time when . . . `?

I have a few thoughts on that:

1. Don't wait until interview / review time to come up with answers to those. There are plenty of books / websites / etc. where you can find lists of the most common ones. I recommend finding such a list and sit down and start working up your answers well in advance.

2. It's not so much that you memorize exact answers to exact questions... the trick is to learn the broad categories these question fall into, and recalling a handful of episodes that can be used as the answer to many of these that are closely related enough to effectively be the same question. And remember, you don't need every little detail of the situation, just the broad brush strokes. Hopefully that will act as a memory recall trigger and you'll be able to fill in enough of the details as you recount the episode, so that it makes sense.

3. Don't worry about answering the exact question that was asked. If you get "Tell me about a time when you X" and the best you can come up with is "a time when you Z" and Z and X are pretty similar, just roll with it and be a hand-wavy and vague as you need to be.

Remember, most interviewers / reviewers aren't very good at interviewing / reviewing, and then chances of being called out on this (unless your answer is just really gratuitously off-base) are pretty slim. Chances are the person interviewing you got the question from the same book/website you used and don't really "know" what kind of answer is desirable other than in the vaguest / most generic terms anyway.

Pretty much anything other than "Uuuuhh... uuuuuhh.... I mean, uuh.... uuhhh... um, gulp, eerrrrrrrrr, ummm... I ah... I dunno" is probably going to pass the bar for most people who ask these questions.

On a related note, specific to review-time... there are books written for managers to tell them what to do in performance reviews, and what kinds of language to include in performance reviews. Chances are your manager is being informed by one of those (or has been). Buy and read them and learn to use the exact kind of language they're looking for. Make it easy for them by giving them your input in the language they need, instead of leaving them to translate for you.