A Performance Review Example for Software Engineers (from an engineering manager)
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- Опубликовано: 28 июн 2024
- We'll go through how to write your self-review for performance reviews: the structure, contents with an example. Resources & templates:
- Performance review template and example (downloadable, tailored for software engineers): blog.pragmaticengineer.com/pe...
- Work log document for software engineers: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/wo... (highly recommend that you keep one!)
- Writing a Performance Self Review for Software Engineers - With an Example: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/pe...
- Other useful templates for software engineers and engineering managers: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/te...
Connect with me on other platforms:
- Twitter: / gergelyorosz
- LinkedIn: / gergelyorosz
- Newsletter on software engineering: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/ne...
Books I've written (and am writing):
- Software engineering resumes: thetechresume.com/
- Building Mobile Apps at Scale: mobileatscale.com/
- The Software Engineer's Guidebook: www.engguidebook.com/
- All books: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/bo...
Thank you so much! It's so hard to find how to write a self-evaluation from the engineer's prospectives. Your material is pure gold!
Watching this right before writing my own performance review for this year. :)
That's awesome!! :D
Awesome! Quite useful, straight to the point and very (ironically) pragmatic . Thank you for sharing!
Thank you, I am working as a Software Engineer for 4 years now but I haven't really ever wrote down anything in terms of goals or expectancies. I will pick up this habit now, it just makes sense! Very informative and straight to the point 🙏
Gergely, thank you so much for sharing the template. I can see my team and myself benefiting from it in the next review :)
I've worked as a software engineer for a while, but it's always a mystery to me how things look from my manager's perspective. In one video you said that managers want their employees to succeed and get promoted because it makes them look good. This makes sense to me, but is not something I would have known otherwise, although it's probably super fundamental! I was wondering if you could do future videos on how managers think, what their goals are, how to make them happy, what power they do or don't have to help engineers, anything along those lines. Looking forward to new videos the ones you've made so far are amazing!
if you manager does not aim to make you better, grow, s/he is doing the wrong job.
This is great content, thanks a million for sharing, I will share for sure with juniors because that is exactly what I wished I knew back then.
Great info! I can’t wait to share this with my Junior Engineers.
Thanks I will come back to this in my review coming in July!
Very professional, clear, to the point preparation and presentation. I i was the manager of the people who prepared this much and spend this amount of time for preparation, this would be a good start. But there is very important aspect here. This is a very long presentation. If i catch anything any word or expression in whole presentation to be wrong, i mean if i now that is the opposite, then everything changes to be negative. I would feel that this guy is telling me wrong things and trying to affect my view. I have experienced this many times and made my team member that i know the real story. On the other end, if everything is right, but the content or effort is not super high, i value such people very high. Because they respect me, respect their work and try hard to achive their goals. I always always value character over technical abilities....
this is gold standard!
Great tips, thank you!
Should I talk about my concerns at the performance review? Things that worry me, whether they are my personal challenges or relate to the whole team?
I would recommend taking about these outside the perf review: e.g. on your regular 1:1 (assuming you have one).
Thanks Gergely. Using this + another article to ask for a raise. If that doesn't go as planned, I also bought your book on resume writing. Go 2021! Can't wait for your next book.
Haha, love the hedging and thanks! Now is a definitely a good time to ask for a raise - hopefully you managed to ask before budgets & numbers were finalized!
At large companies ("Big Tech") this works very different to smaller ones (small ones have much more flexibility, large ones have bands and managers often have little wiggle room). I'll have to do a video on this as well.
This is great! Any plans for video of writing impact resume? The most successful 1000 words to write 😞
Hey Kaia - you mean the Uber impact resume format? Not sure how applicable that one is outside of Uber. And I thought there were really good trainings - I held one myself in Amsterdam a year ago :) :)
Is putting citations from chats with who told you "thanks" a good idea? Looks very odd.
Can you do a video breaking down how good you have to be for different salaries, levels, etc, with examples for each (code, projects, examples of work done)? I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to actually find this information online, let alone from a reliable source, and I have no idea what kind of level or salary band I should be applying for as a result.
What does a €30k/year junior developer actually _look_ like? What is their ability level in tangible terms? What about a €100k/year senior engineer?
What about a €70k/year senior developer at a random startup? What about a €70k/year _junior_ at somewhere like Google? Do the two actually have very similar ability levels?
How much better is the code of a regular developer than a junior? What does that actually look like, in real code from a real project (not just the crappy single-function toy examples most RUclipsrs construct). What kind of projects & contributions would a Junior have on their GitHub, versus a mid-level dev? What kind of project would immediately put you above a junior level, and what would put you at a senior level? Would certain types of open-source contributions mark you out as "this guy is a senior even though he only has two years' experience"? (For example, if you were a frequent contributor to PyTorch. Or maybe it's the level of complexity of your contribution? But that just raises more questions. What is expected?).
Perhaps also, how productive is each band? How much code does a €30k/year dev write? Perhaps it should be quantified in terms of features shipped. How many features do they ship? What are they likely to ship? Or perhaps just, what kind of work do they _do_ and how much of it are they expected to do? What should you expect, as someone who's going into the industry at a particular level? What are you actually expected to produce?
The whole thing seems totally mystifying to me and there are barely any resources out there to help, and it's making job searching very difficult. I'd really appreciate someone just bluntly breaking it down with no BS, and this channel seems up that alley.
Thanks for the suggestion! Added it to my list.
Unfortunately, I couldn't do a video on this topic that will be right, as it would assume that every company paying, say €30k for a junior expect the same.
This could not be further from the reality. Companies can have wildly different expectations for what a software engineer can - or should - do. Ironically, the places where expectations are mostly the same is towards the top of the market: these are the places that can hire good (and sometimes) great, and technical managers, put career paths in place, and set more realistic expectations.
On this channel - and on my blog - I'll talk more about these places: the places with good and healthy engineering culture that would e.g. score high on these questions: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-developer-culture-test/ . It's also the topic I'm writing my next book about: www.engguidebook.com/ . The good news is if you gain the skills you'd need to work at some of better companies, they should help you anywhere.
This is because these are the places I have experience at, and they're the type of work environments I'm hoping more companies shift towards, over traditional and hierarchical setups that plague much of the software industry (blog.pragmaticengineer.com/what-silicon-valley-gets-right-on-software-engineers/).
It's a good idea to talk about what different levels are expected to do: I can do this for the types of places I've worked at (or have had good exposure to).
Thank you for the reply!
I think the fact the expectations are so different is part of the problem for me. It makes it even harder to get a baseline.
If you would be up for explaining your experience (or even explaining how much things vary, frankly), that would be amazing. Knowing what the best of the best do strikes me as most important anyway - that sets the baseline I should use to evaluate all companies (within reason).
Thanks for the links. I'll check them out now. It's very cool you're writing a book on this.
RFC : request for comment (a type of design document we used at Uber: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-engineering-teams-via-writing-things-down-rfcs )
Link is broken
@@rstankov Indeed. Until he edits you can manually remove trailing parentheses
@@rstankov Thanks - just fixed it! Trailing parentheses :)
Hawk eyes - thanks!
@@mrgergelyorosz No worries, Great video btw - very useful. Copied the template :)