Strange day at work today ...

It has been a strange day at work today. I had to write the staff performance review and it hasn’t been an easy task to do. I know, it’s part of the job and I use to do weekly performance review with all team members but … writing down a short summary (not longer than 4 or 5 lines) for a year of work is not the same thing.

…ain't the same ballpark,
ain't the same league,
ain't even the same fuckin' sport.

(Jules Winnfield – Pulp Fiction)

Sometimes it’s easier: have you ever written a performance appraisal for someone with outstanding performance? If the response is yes, you surely know what I mean (and you are lucky).

It’s a little more difficult to write a performance review for someone who is definitely a “C” performer, isn’t it? It’s surely unpleasant but is only a matter to find out the right words to summarize the bad performance.

But people doesn’t use to be consistent. To use the words of cite Alistair Cockburn:

1. People are communicating beings, doing best face-to-face, in person, with real-time question and answer.
2. People have trouble acting consistently over time.
3. People are highly variable, varying from day to day and place to place.
4. People generally want to be good citizens, are good at looking around, taking initiative, and doing “whatever is needed” to get the project to work.”

And again

• People need both think time and communicating opportunities.
• People work well from examples.
• People prefer to fail conservatively than to risk succeeding differently; prefer to invent than to research, can only keep a small amount in their heads, and do make mistakes, and find it hard to change their habits.
• Individual personalities easily dominate a project.
• A person’s personality profile strongly affects their ability to perform specific assignments.

(Alistair A.R. Cockburn, Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development)

Now I don’t want to bother you with my job...

Have a nice weekend!