I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed the absence of a couple of friends. I met one of them on Saturday, and he’d been laid off from the company where he used to work. He explained it was due to a low score on his performance review, and then he was out in the next round of layoffs. Now he’s going to take a break; he got a decent severance and can take the time to reflect on what to do next. He looked tired and somehow older.
His partner was with him, and she was worried about the instability of the games industry. She told me that she doesn’t know what he should do. Her eyes, though, suggested that the answer lies outside of the industry. And yes, if you look for stability, games are probably one of the worst fields in tech nowadays.
Performance reviews are fundamentally biased. First of all, I’ve always noticed certain affinities within companies that inevitably lead to better reviews. Second, we are not cyborgs (at least, not yet). You join a company for a specific project, and then you are moved to another one you don’t really like. But a job is a job, and you have to go on. Then you witness questionable choices or no choices at all being made. And you are expected to stay there, with energy and motivation, performing.
Well, to me, it just doesn’t work like that. Performance reviews should be normalized by taking into account the real motivation of teams toward a project. Very often, especially big companies embark on odysseys to basically copy existing success stories. That is something that brings entire teams down, and of course, there are casualties—people who simply cannot continue working as before on something they clearly don’t believe in.
This friend was one of them. I know it because last year he told me something like, “The project is clearly going nowhere, but you know: it’s a job.” Which is the normal thing to think when they put you to work on something you don’t believe. You cannot just refuse to employ your mind on that game that is going nowhere. You have to push, but if the forces abandon you it’s not your fault.