Kris "Justise" Gray

So its that time of year again.

My experiences with this practice are limited, as I have only had to fill out one of these before in my professional career. So my maturation process in writing these documents needs to be quite substantial this year.

Last year I took my usual timidness into my self review, trying to be meekly honest about my performance, modest about my skills and positive twoards the company. In my meeting with my manager, it turned out be a decent review overall, I had just gone through a nasty development cycle smelling pretty good and so they had positive things to say about my performance.

This year, I’ve been bitter about somethings for quite a while and took my self review as my opportunity to really chew into the meat of these issues (In addition to a few asses). I can’t tell you about the post review meeting with my manager yet as I haven’t had it, but I do want to go over some of what I put into it and my afterthoughts.

• Slightly Jovial

On some of the sections I just didn’t feel like making comments, how much do I really need to say about how good I am at Teamwork? Heck I said I was good at teamwork last year, and I think the manager downgraded my grade, so on these fuzzy topics, who really cares what goes in there?

So for better or worse, I made a few light hearted comments. I’m hoping they won’t think I just didn’t give a serious review, because I was quite serious, but I just didn’t feel that anymore needs to be said.

• I’m so good.

So in our review we have a few sections like Quality, Teamwork, Attitude, etc, that you need to grade yourself as either Exceptional, Strong, or needs Improvement. Now if your being reviewed–and lets be honest, we know money is on the line here–and you need to rate yourself, why would you put anything less then a glowing review of yourself? If you seriously need help with something, I could understand, but if your strong in any subject why would you not rate yourself Exceptional and have your manager bring down to what their ratings of you are.

• Give me my 10 things

My employer really is great to work for, they do so many wonderful things that it almost seems wrong to be critical of them. Yet things aren’t going to change without some kind of push, and this review was the perfect time to launch such a push.

If you want to know what I mentioned, go read this post.

• Help me, help you.

I know I still haven’t blogged about my adventures to a become a senior dev, but that quest is not dead. I did want to let my employeer know that they have not given me any indication what areas I need to improve upon, so I’m kind of flying blind. I’m thinking I’ll learn the cool stuff that is out there, make sure I pretend to be a senior dev and think happy thoughts.

I’ll post a follow up once I’ve had my meeting. I would love to hear about some of your experiences of self evaluations. Did anything work really well for you?

Implementing Scrum has setup a new forum at http://www.implementingscrum.com/forum/! I know its kinda empty right now, but I think it’s a really good idea to get this thing going strong, so lets all band together and post our brilliant thoughts. (Or mundane if your not quite as brilliant as I am.)

So at our company we are utilizing the Scrum development process. As currently only my friends are reading this blog, and none of them have any clue what Scrum is, I feel I must include the obligatory short description of what Scrum is.

Scrum is a management system that says a team works for 30 days on the most important tasks for the product. At the end of those thirty days, you should have a finished product that your ready to ship, which is harder then it sounds. Anyway, back to what this has to do about me.

Today, at our daily stand up meeting, before I even knew what was happening, our sprint was canceled. We are a little stretched thin personnel wise and bodies from our team (namely me) were needed elsewhere to help keep the company on track. There are two ways to take this, one, being that this is a knee jerk reaction by the company to throw resources at their problem. The other is to think of this as addressing a problem in its infancy so that there is not a major screw-up down the road.

Currently I’m on the latter, but others on the team were of the opinion it was the former. This change seems like something an Agile company should be able to accomplish, but in my view, software development is just not able to be truly agile. Going from one task to another, requires huge amounts of knowledge transfer, gathering a mental image of the structures and environment this task. With this built in margin of time between switches, is it possible for a programmer to be all that agile? Is he not more lumbering?

So if we thought of developers instead of agile lithe dancers, but lumbering mainframes, would we be more cognisant of the productivity and limits of a developers output?