I created a system to automate performance reviews
Ace your performance review as a software engineer. Beat recency bias with this 3-step brag doc system to track, refine, and quantify your daily impact.
It’s this time of the year again, and I’m not talking about Christmas.
Performance review season often brings what writers know as the fear of the blank page.
Your manager asked you to provide a list of highlights of your work this last year. You stare at a blank doc and try to recall what you worked on eight months ago. Your memory is not reliable. You suffer from recency bias and only remember the tasks from the last three weeks. You also suffer from hindsight bias: You overlook the difficult engineering work on projects that got canceled because they did not launch, or had unsuccessful business metrics.
We have to shift from viewing the brag document as a static chore to do when talent reviews are coming.
Some other people fight against this by introducing new entries in the brag doc upon project completion, or when important milestones happen. The problem here is not knowing when it’s the right moment. Take a look at this brag doc entry:
I led the design and implementation of [Feature…