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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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 bounced back from a few mediocre performance reviews, the most effective way I've found is to switch managers and/or positions.
A lot of the performance review is going to be about how you are perceived relative to the other employees under that manager. If you are with a bunch of high performers you're screwed. If your manager just kinda doesn't get along with you as well as their other direct reports, you are also screwed. Not "screwed" as in doomed, but just that you are getting screwed over by your circumstances.
Also many tech companies do a sneaky and kind of bullshit thing where they pressure their managers to "normalize" reviews. So if a manager has 5 employees the HR department might imply something like "we expect you to have one good employee, one bad employee, and three mediocre ones." Managers can push back on this if they are competent at office politics, if they like their whole team, and they have a backbone. In the 9 managers I've had in my career I've only ever seen all three of those factors converge one time. I'd say only two of them had the political acumen + backbone combination.
My overall advice is it is a good set of habits to ask for feedback and try to improve yourself. But performance reviews are 25% about you, 50% about your team/manager circumstances, and 25% about your company.
Do what's best for yourself and try to align the 75% that's not about you to be in your favor. Try not to beat yourself up too much. If they aren't giving actionable advice on how to improve there might be nothing to improve.
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