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Wellness Wednesday for June 7, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Does anybody have experience with bouncing back from a negative performance review in a software engineering job?

Just had mine recently and was somewhat surprised to receive a “Needs Improvement” rating. I can see some of my manager’s points but I mainly feel a bit blindsided because I constantly asked for feedback and only rarely received areas of improvement. He would give me certain things to improve upon, but during later check-ins he would say I’m back on track etc.

I don’t think my job is the type to treat this as a formality before being fired, but I would appreciate some advice from other mottizens who may have gone through something similar.

I do like the job and it pays well so I’m going to try my best the next few months to perform and constantly check in and be more explicit about asking things like “do you still think I’m underperforming” etc.

I have experience yoyo-ing with the performance level. I can attribute the negative reports to not putting in enough effort, ignoring tasks and emails, failing to show up to meetings and taking forever to finish projects. The upswings were a bit more surprising since I just felt like doing my job as I should have the entire time. I never got to the point of being put on a "performance improvement plan" which I understand is half literal and half a formality before being fired. My last review was negative but I do expect the next one to be positive again.

I should say that performance review at my company is based on (anonymized-to-me) peer feedback from fellow engineers, product managers, etc, and my direct manager only gets to deliver the news. This makes it a bit harder to be reviewed well just because you're likeable, which I'm very thankful for.

I’m going to try my best the next few months to perform and constantly check in and be more explicit about asking things like “do you still think I’m underperforming” etc.

I think this is the right attitude. I would also ask peers that your trust, if they think the performance review was fair, and more generally what they think you can improve on.