Tag Archives: evaluation

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Every year around September I opine that there isn’t anything more useless that a formal performance evaluation. Every spring, though, I’m reminded that I’m wrong, because truly it’s impossible to imagine a more pointless “management tool” than the yearly midpoint assessment. It’s all the aggravation of spending time putting paperwork together and none of the remunitative reward of getting a performance bonus. Midpoints are a 100% paperwork drill out of which there’s no significant accomplishment. If I’ve been a turd for the last six months and management hasn’t said anything, they obviously don’t care. If I’ve been an all star for six months and don’t know it, than that’s 100% my own problem. All the midpoint process does is ensure my copy, paste, and update skills are just as sharp as they were a year ago.

2. Last week included new computer day at work. This week has involved a pretty extensive amount of trying to figure out how my own personal workflows will function in a Windows 11 environment. After two days of hunting and hoping and yelling at this computer, I’m absolutely not loving it. In fact nothing is currently working as seamlessly with this new system as it did with the old one. I’m not saying new tech is necessarily bad, just that when the powers at echelons higher than reality decide it’s time to roll it out, they very rarely consider much beyond “ohhh, new and shiny.” I’m sure this will all be functional at some point in the future, but currently it’s causing no end to aggravation. Truly it’s a death by a thousand cuts.

3. Breakfast. This morning breakfast was a “lower carb” everything bagel and precisely two tablespoons of reduced fat cream cheese. Breakfast used to be a proper bagel, slathered on regular cream cheese, a couple of eggs, cheese, and maybe a bowl of cereal. Sure, that’s the diet that has probably killed me, but for starting the day satiated and relatively happy. Look, I know I can’t go back to eating that way, but it doesn’t mean I’m ever going to be fully satisfied with this “reasonably healthful” approach to food.

Arriving at midpoint…

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In my twenty years of government service, I’m not sure I’ve done many things more useless than spending time typing out my “self assessment” as part of a mid-year review. That’s coming from a guy who has spent countless wasted hours sitting in every possible flavor of meetings ranging across topics that would alternately make your eyes water or send you deep into boredom induced coma.

I’ve always held the opinion that if we’ve gotten to the midpoint of the year and I’ve been fucking things up left and right, someone would have told me to get myself sorted out long ago. If I’m plugging along, getting things done more or less to standard, chances are the bosses are mostly leaving me alone – unless it’s to assign more work. Continually being assigned more work is a sure sign that you’re most likely on track. I was a boss long enough to know that I didn’t tend to take work from high performers and assign it to the local chucklefuck.

Anyway, I spent some portion of the afternoon carefully rewriting 2022’s year end self assessment to reflect half a year’s work in FY23. Since it’s not one of those things that impacts pay or benefits, you can rest assured that I gave it all the attention and focus that it so richly deserves.

Doing great work…

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A few years ago, my employer adopted a new pay system. Say what you want about the old General Schedule, but it was nothing If not predictable. Stay alive and employed for X number of years and you knew precisely where your salary would fall. This new system, riddled with administrative complexity and ostensibly based on the “pay for performance” concept, makes any such projection somewhere between impossible and useless.

The cornerstone of our new pay system is our individual written narrative – an annual self-assessment of what we’ve done and why it theoretically matters. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that kind of introspection… although by definition, the better you are at writing and telling your own story, the better you’re apt to do in the face of the committees charged with reviewing these self-assessments. Fortunately, in this system, as in NSPS before it, I do a reasonably good job of detailing why I’m absolutely wonderful. It’s not a system you’d want to work under if you’re in any way self-deprecating.

The theory here is that if pay is somehow tied to the value of individual contributions, people will be more engaged and work harder. I suppose it’s true up to a point. Once you’ve crashed into the upper limit of your designated “pay band,” the remunerative reward for working harder is pretty limited. Sure, you can qualify for a year-end bonus calculated using one of the more Byzantine formulas devised by the mind of man, but in raw percentage terms it’s not much… and 40% of not much is going to be immediately taxed back to the Treasury.

I’m only pondering the system at all, because I recently received the annual notice from the boss that it was time to send in my self-assessment. With so little at stake, it’s hard to imagine sweating too long or hard over the words than end up on the page. It’ll get done and I’m sure the writing will be lovely. I’ll assess myself as the ideal employee doing great work for God and country… and then the various committees and formulas will drive my scores towards the median and an appropriately middle of the road bonus will be awarded.

I’ll be forgiven, I hope, if I don’t find the process particularly motivational or apt to improve my performance in any meaningful way.

Taking stock…

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With less than 18 hours left to run in the Trump administration, it’s time to take stock. 

Besides firing off tweet-storm broadsides and creating a few new words, what’s to be made of this president’s time in office?

– Appointed a shit ton of vaguely originalist judges not just to the Supreme Court but across the federal bench

– Ended American participation in the appeasement of Iran

– Asserted that a rapidly strengthening China is an increasing threat to America’s global interests

– Entered into a new and improved free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico

There are more, but those are fine exemplars of the modest improvements, mostly around the margins, that we can attribute to the Trump Administration. The question, then, is what was the cost?

– Abandoning the centuries old traditions of American political life by subverting the electoral process and attempting to raise and insurrection

– A general foreign policy legacy best labeled “America only” that badly damaged relationships with our most important global allies and empowered some of our most bitter enemies

– An inexplicable failure to respond to the dangers of a new and deadly pandemic as it swept the globe and the United States

– Ratcheting up government spending and driving up the national debt to unprecedented and unsustainable levels

Even leaving out the sedition, historians would have eventually filed this administration away as inconsequential at best and a failure at worst. There was simply too little forward motion on priority efforts when weighed against how much was guided so badly off the rails.

The damage done to America’s standing in the world and the mortal division of our internal politics will be the work of generations to patch up – if the job can be done at all. The alternative, though, is simply unthinkable, so let us begin.  

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Performance appraisal. I’ve spent more time than I want to admit this week dicking around with the required “self assessment” section of my annual performance appraisal. It feels like a monumental waste of time. The “old” evaluation system was a pain in the ass too, but at least it was consistent. You could copy and paste big chunks of content from year to year, change some dates and key words and then move on with a minimum amount of fuss and trouble. Since the system we’re now under is “new to us” if not exactly new, it’s starting from a blank page… which translates into more time fiddling. Look, when you’ve been told, albeit in a roundabout way, that the system is designed to drive people to the middle and prevent too many from being way out in high performer land, the incentive to make the end product immaculate is pretty low. Instead of the time and effort going into this new evaluation, it feels like we could have been just as well served by accepting that if we were fucks ups, someone would have told us by now, and that our raise will in all likelihood be within a hair’s breadth of the average unless you’ve done something breathtakingly good or bad in the last 356 days. Going though all the added motions really just adds insult to injury.

2. “Upgrading” software. I don’t mind software upgrades that improve the function of my equipment or make it somehow more secure. I do mind software upgrades that fail to install on the first attempt and then run in the background indefinitely consuming system resources while providing no way to stop them from the user side. Sadly there is absolutely nothing I’m empowered to do about the low bidder equipment or substandard tech support we’re saddled with other than bitch and complain about it at each and every opportunity. So I guess I’ll either limp along as is until the aborted update grinds my system to a complete halt or the admins throw my machine off the network for not having received the update. If only there were a great big organization in change of electronic communications I could call on for help in these situations. You can’t see it but I’ve rolled my eyes so hard I’m currently staring at the inside of my head.

3. Thursday. Well, not just Thursday. I’m just really kind of over weekdays in general. I’m tired of dealing with people. I’m tired of the same bureaucratic and administrative Groundhog Day experience every five out of seven days. I want to sit on the living room floor dispensing ear rubs and playing tug with the dogs, drinking coffee, and reading books… and I’d like for that to happen without finding myself quickly driven into bankruptcy. The dogs have become accustomed to a certain level of lifestyle (and medical care) and I need an ever increasing amount of space for book storage, so that pretty much precludes any radical changes to how I spend the average weekday. Most of the time, the week goes by with a dull “meh,” but this week it’s more of a roaring angsty rage. Good times. Im glad we’ve had this chance to talk.

Annual history…

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It’s that magical time of year where you get to distill the essence of your professional accomplishments down to less than 1000 words and then try not to slit your wrists as you realize how you’ve spent the last 365 days. Whether you’re compiling the annual unit history report or creating a list of accomplishments for your yearly performance appraisal, the one thing they serve to remind you of is how much time you’ve spent working on stuff that you have no actual interest in doing.

I’m the last person on earth to recommend that you need to find personal fulfillment in your profession. As I discovered with my ill-fated sojourn as a history teacher, having a deep and profound love for a subject doesn’t a fulfilling career make. For as much as I love all things historical, I despised most other elements of the job. Still, I’d like to think I’m doing more than writing reports, enduring meetings, and building the world’s most complex PowerPoint briefings.

The beauty part of these brief moments of professional clarity is that they only come on once a year, so for the other 11.5 months I can maintain a blissful level of willful ignorance on the topic. I think in the end, everyone is better served when I’m ignoring just how much time I’m spending on mundane, routine tasks and just keep churning out reams of paperwork on demand… because really, if I were stop and think about it for any sustained length of time, I’d be tempted to run off and join the damned circus.

I’m glad a have a job that keeps me employed (almost) full time… but I’m even more glad I don’t mistakenly identify what I do with who I am.