this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
359 points (96.6% liked)

Asklemmy

44166 readers
1735 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy πŸ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Just out of curiosity. I have no moral stance on it, if a tool works for you I'm definitely not judging anyone for using it. Do whatever you can to get your work done!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I use it to write performance reviews because in reality HR has already decided the results before the evaluations.

I'm not wasting my valuable time writing text that is then ignored. If you want a promotion, get a new job.

To be clear: I don't support this but it's the reality I live in.

[–] DickFiasco@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is exactly what I use it for. I have to write a lot of justifications for stuff like taking training, buying equipment, going on business travel, etc. - text that will never be seriously read by anyone and is just a check-the-box exercise. The quality and content of the writing is unimportant as long as it contains a few buzz-phrases.

[–] zebus@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just chiming in as another person who does this, it's absolutely perfect. I just copy and paste the company bs competencies, add in a few bs thoughts of my own, and tell it to churn out a full review reinforcing how they comply with the listed competencies.

It's perfect, just the kinda bs HR is looking for, I get compliments all the time for them rofl.

[–] DickFiasco@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Work smarter, not harder, lol.

[–] BobbyBandwidth@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you please elaborate on your experience of HR people deciding the results before the evaluation? Just curious

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sure!

It happens behind closed doors and never in writing to keep up the farce, but usually I'm given a paltry number of slots of people I can label as high performers. This is really a damn shame because most of my team members are great employees. This is used as a carrot to show that we do give raises and promotions after all, but the proportion is so small it's effectively zero. I'm very clear to my team that trying to becoming a top performer to get a promotion is a bad investment. I do my best to communicate the futility without actually saying it literally in such a way that it could get me into trouble.

Next, they use a spreadsheet to figure who they can probably underpay based on a heuristic likelihood that person would actually leave vs current market rates. These automatically become the low performers ahem satisfactory. You're penalized for being here longer or specializing in something with a small market. Everyone else falls somewhere between satisfactory and above average which makes little difference.

The performance reviews are merely weak documentation to show that somehow HR was "justified" by selectively highlighting strengths or weaknesses depending on the a priori decision of what your performance level was to be.

It's a huge tautology with only one meaningful conclusion: you will be underpaid, and it gets worse over time.

[–] BobbyBandwidth@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks. This is great insight and tracks with some personal experience or experience of friends.

You could make a whole post about this topic, but I was curious what’s your advice to an employee that wants to do good work, but who doesn’t want to be taken advantage of?

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago

The truth is you have to do good work for yourself because you care about the quality of your work. You work for you.

You separate the factors. You do good work for you because you care because a life doing things you don't care about is less meaningful.

Separately you look at pay. You leave when it's no longer worth staying, which for most people is about every two to three years at least for your early career.