Something I learned about the game industry is that the top leadership come from food manufacturing. So they bring the practices of running their industry into another simply because they had the money and past experience with a specialization.
So I have to wonder if the people who focus so much on evaluations are maybe like automobile executives or other such manufacturing who don't understand developer culture

i want to lick don's sweaty feet

why the FUCK is every dev doing/getting reports MONTHLY??? i do those retrospectives fucking biyearly
that is a hemorrhage of time, tally up all the projected work hours spent on it and tell those fuckers it's not very agile of them
that you actually do want devs to work, on other things

or don't, because i have no idea what the structure of your company is and whether they put all that stuff to work
but it's definitely not THE way to do management

The individual evaluations are excessive and would make me want to leave that place. Some of what your outlining would fit into the Agile process I am used to but a lot of it on the individual Dev side seems excessive to me. I'm used to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), so I'll give my feedback based on that.

>Monthly self-eval: Devs must submit a detailed monthly self-evaluation
>Manager evaluation: Dev’s manager evaluates them monthly too.
>Each dev's “buddy” (more senior dev they're partnered with) performs a monthly evaluation of their performance too
These 3 are the excessive ones. Maybe if it's a junior dev or the employee is on a pip (performance improvement plan) these could be barely justified but otherwise it's a complete waste of dev and manager time. These sorts of metrics can be taken from yearly/bi-yearly peer feedback, coupled with the normal sprint metrics. If your Jira space is setup and maintained well, it should be easy enough to sort people by stories or story points completed and see "under performers". This still isn't a great system as if the stories are being pointed "right", they are a measure of how difficult the team thinks the story will be. So any under performers are relative to the team. But management and bean counter types, like to equivocate points across teams and assign points some time value; both of which are wrong and just lead to "good" dev teams inflating their story points.

>Weekly team evaluation: Dev's direct manager evaluates the "team" as a single unit every week.
This one is bad but not as bad as the other 3. Normally a team evaluation is done at the end of a sprint, which is a 2-4 week period depending on the team and desired update/release cadence.

>TL assesses sprint quality after each sprint.
>TL's manager reviews sprint quality too (non-technical manager)
Assuming these people know their roles, this is pretty normal. Sometimes this process is part of the retrospective/retro so the whole team can be in on it.

>Quarterly upper management review: The direct manager’s manager steps in every quarter to assess the team as well.
This sounds normal too, just part of a program increment planning (PIP) that happens about every 12 weeks, so every quarter.

>>3058
hi ainz thank you

>>3058
>SAFe
Isn't that just agile principles reframed into a waterfall that PMs could swallow?

>>3060
Atleast for me it's more like pretending to be waterfall to PMs so devs can be Agile, but yes.
A lot of business process peoples like it more since it gives them the illusion of planning out stuff each quarter.

>>3055
>Something I learned about the game industry is that the top leadership come from food manufacturing.
What do you mean by that? The games industry is a big industry.

you have way too much fucking management and processes

yeah you should really look into getting someone to manage all that management and process

We could just simplify managing these process by creating a system or a new manifesto tailored to our specific use case

>>3064
>yeah you should really look into getting someone to manage all that management and process
I'm the manager... But I'm not allowed to change the processes as it's a huge company that has been "working fine" this way since 10 years ago and my boss thinks I just want to "work less" when I point out to him the devs are annoyed with all the reports and performance reviews.

>>3054
>productivity means creating more processes
The more work there is to do, the bigger the department needs to be.
The bigger the department is, the more power its leadership holds.
Streamlining is only good when it requires picking up completely new tasks as a prerequisite, even better if those tasks come from "integrating" with another department.
Never reduce work on a procedural level because that leads to reduction of heads, reduction of funding, and reduction of political weight.
If you must improve things, improve them unofficially by quietly skipping steps while producing the same output on paper.

this thread made me physically ill

>>3068
stinky neet

ill sager

>>3069
i really really wish that was the case
i stopped being one a year and half ago
while not a dev i work in IT support and this whole review corpo talk reminded me of my own reviews (i'm the one being reviewed though)

360 noscope reviews

>>3071
OP here.
You reminded me I also get reviewed:
- Every quarter: by the client, my manager, my peers, PMO, people from other areas (finance, IT, account managers, etc) and also by the devs that report to me.
(Also every week I'm audited by PMO for process compliance)

What a wonderful world!!!!

>>3073
That sounds like some strait up East German or Elan School petty control.

The few times I was ever given a self review I always would put just the maximum score for everything, because it was time wasting and they were going to knock me down a peg and tell me what they want me to do anyways.

>>3054
>The few times I was ever given a self review I always would put just the maximum score for everything, because it was time wasting and they were going to knock me down a peg and tell me what they want me to do anyways.
That's what I always do because I know for a fact that salary reviews are directly linked to these scores. I also know for sure that my manager never gives me full marks, no matter what because "nobody is perfect"

>>3054
Realistically how would I probe the interviewers to know how much redundant bureaucracy will be affecting me? I've seen quite insane things (that were double downed on) beyond just software development but I'm still clueless.

>>4667
OP here, maybe I can help.
At least at my insane company, I know that during interviews they ask candidates how they feel about working for a "process-driven company," and they keep hammering this phrase throughout the entire interview: "we're a process-driven company" (among others like "we're a diverse company", "we're a big family").
If I were you, I would try to work around how processes function with these questions:


1. "How flexible are the company's processes?"
2. "How are developers evaluated, and how often?"

By the way, one of the interviewer's jobs is to try to make you "buy in" and accept the job offer if you're the selected candidate, so they often try to make the company look as good a place to work as possible, but at the same time, they can't lie (too much). To give you an idea, here's how my insane company's interviewers would answer these questions:

1. "We strictly adhere to processes as a means of achieving excellence—but don’t worry, there’s always flexibility for special cases or when it makes sense to tweak things."
See how the cockroach interviewer casually brushed off the question about flexibility, saying it can be done for "special cases"? That pretty much means 97% of the time you'll have to follow the same kuso processes as everyone else.

2. They say: weekly, daily, monthly? They're insane. Quarterly is ok.

(I can't believe it's almost been a year since I created this thread complaining... by the way. Things just got more insane over the last couple of months, but thankfully, I started skipping steps in some of the insane processes that aren't audited and nobody noticed so it's all good and I haven't gone insane yet).

Man, this is depressing. What the fuck are all of these evaluations, what the hell is self-eval? you look at the mirror and say "yep, that's a stud right there"?
I don't think I could ever deal with this even for the crazy cash you get, and I w*rk a pretty laborious job for not a whole lot above min wage.

>>3054
>Because if so, I’m tempted to just go wild creating even more pointless processes—like they seem to want—and drown everyone in surveys and meaningless reports.
DO THIS

office space and its consequences on those who completely misunderstood it have been a grave blow to corporate structure everywhere

>>3054
>Is this really what management is supposed to be?
bad management, yes.
But most management today is generally somewhat awful, once you scale beyond a certain scale of company.