How to give Great Performance Reviews

I recently had a performance review at work, and it got me thinking about what makes a really great performance review. I’ve been on both sides of the performance review process, and I know it’s not easy to pull off. You want to strike a balance between providing “constructive criticism” vs. simply calling an employee on the carpet and delivering a laundry list of their shortcomings. Chances are, if you’ve done your hiring right, the employee is already painfully aware of these. Here are a few suggestions for making the most out of the performance review process:

1. Don’t wait until the performance review to provide feedback.

This is a very common problem: many managers will withhold information critical to an employee’s success until the performance review, at which point it’s too late for the employee to alter their behavior. Hold regular 1:1 meetings with employees to establish an ongoing feedback loop with them. It’s a lot easier to correct problems before they become engrained as habits.

2. Employee self-assessments are a waste of time

I’ve never found these to be particularly useful. The main point of the performance review is to provide management’s perspective to the employee. Use the 1:1 meetings as opportunities for employees to give you their input.

3. Establish clear metrics for performance early

Too often, the first time an employee gets to see the criteria for their performance evaluation is at their first review. These metrics should be presented within the employee’s first week on the job, and should be revisited as the nature of an employee’s assignments change.

4. Get input from the employee’s “customers”

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5. Use objective rather than subjective criteria where possible

An employee should be evaluated primarily on their ability to perform their job, not on how well they are “liked”. An employee may have some personal habits or cultural practices that managers find objectionable, but at the end of the day, what matters is, did they get their job done? Of course this is somewhat different for “customer facing” roles, where one’s personality does come into play, but even then, the review should be mostly about numbers – task turnaround time, # of bugs generated/complaints vs. compliments issued, etc.. If personality issues are becoming a problem, again, this should be addressed in 1:1 meetings, not performance reviews.

6. Accentuate the positive

Everyone needs a pat on the back now & then. Always remember to acknowledge the positive things an employee contributes. Remember, “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Setting up an antagonistic relationship with your employees is in neither of your interests.

I’m sure there are more good ones out there. Please feel free to add more!

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Naomi Oreskes, you go woman!

Today a very intelligent co-worker whose opinions I generally respect went into a rant about how global warming is a hoax, Al Gore the biggest con man in the history of the world, etc..

Taken aback a bit by this, I went looking for some information, and came across the work of Science Historian Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego (where I also attended graduate school). In the video below, systematically and with great academic discipline, Oreskes first shows the overwhelming evidence (dating back over a century) proving that humans are, in fact, dangerously destabilizing our climate, and then exposes the political motivations behind the American Denial of Global Warming. She shows how the same individuals promoting the denial of Global Warming were also involved in defending the viability of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative as well as the Tobacco Industry. In other videos presented by Canadian organization How to Boil A Frog, Oreskes explains the connections between these efforts. It’s great stuff, very well researched.

I won’t bother to show these to my co-worker though. After all, he has the root password on our network!

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Radio Shack gets customer service right

Radio Shack could teach a lot of the big retail outlets a thing or two about customer service.

I had an amazing experience at my local Radio Shack today. I went in to see if they had a charger/FM transmitter for my iPod. A knowledgeable, friendly salesperson immediately directed me to the products I wanted. No waiting in line, no blaring music, no in-your-face TV wall, no idiot “filler” staff, no wading through aisles of lousy appliances, crappy stereo equipment, music and movies and junk food and whatnot. Not only were their prices lower than Best Buy (did I mention how much I hate shopping a Best Buy?) but they actually insisted that I test the unit with my decrepit “3rd Generation” iPod before purchasing it. It turned out not to work (big surprise), so I didn’t buy it, but guess where I’ll be buying one when I finally upgrade my iPod? NOT Best Buy, and NOT the Apple Store. (Oh, and even though they SELL iPods there, they didn’t pressure me to upgrade mine.)

Speaking of which – am I the only one who doesn’t get why Apple stopped making the “classic” iPods? I really don’t need or even particularly WANT a video iPod. I just want a solid, iTunes-compatible MP3 player that holds around 20G. That’s plenty for my needs. I really don’t need the 80G “classic” – at $250, a bit steep – but I need more than the 8G “nano”. And I don’t really see the point in getting a “touch” – at that point, might as well get an iPhone and be done with it.
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A Wonderful Week in Minnesota

Last week, my family went on our annual summer pilgrimage to the Twin Cities, where we spent a lovely week reconnecting with family and friends. The Twin Cities are a fabulous place in the summer – almost makes up for the nearly unendurable winters!

Some highlights from the trip:

– Saying Kaddish for my grandfathers with my parents, uncle, and kids at the Temple Of Aaron (the beautiful synagogue which my great-grandfather helped build, and the site of my parents wedding, my Bar Mitzvah, my wedding, etc. etc.).

– Watching my son steer my uncle Bill Andler’s houseboat on the St. Croix river near Stillwater (and great talks with my extraordinary Aunt Mary)

– Swimming, kibbutzing and noshing at the Oakridge Country Club

– Playing with my incredibly cute nieces at my brother’s home in St. Louis Park

– Watching movies with the kids at my cousin Suzie’s house

– Eating lox & bagels with cousins and their kids

– Enjoying the Minnesota Orchestra and watching amazing fireworks over Lake Minnetonka in Excelsior

– Getting wet & wild at Cascade Bay Water Park

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– Exploring the Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden with my kids

– Getting up close & personal with a grizzly bear at the Minnesota Zoo’s new Russian Grizzly Coast exhibit.

– Getting a good look at the underside of a stingray at the Mall of America’s amazing aquarium

– Going through old photos from my mom’s collection.

It’s hard to describe the feelings such trips bring up for me. It’s powerful stuff, this heady mixture of nostalgia and summer – old memories and new lives. Minnesota – especially in summer – has a uniquely exuberant and upbeat character, and having grown up there, it exerts an undeniable gravitational force. Dori and I sometimes joke about being the only people on earth who want to retire there. I certainly can easily imagine us in one of those gorgeous homes on the shores of Lake Calhoun. Maybe some day, if we play our cards right.

Hey Pandora: Show us your genes!

I’ve been a big fan of the Pandora digital music service for many months now. However, as I’ve tried to “fine tune” the service, I’ve realized that what I really want is direct access to the taxonomy of musical attributes or “genes” that supposedly drive the system. Being both a musician and software engineer, I’d really love something like an SQL interface – a Music Query Langugage, if you will!

Pandora says on their blog that there are only 400 attributes. That’s really not that overwhelming. I can easily imagine a user interface that would make this quite manageable. Something like a graphic equalizer, where you select the attributes you want and adjust the relative strengths of each.

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Digital Video for the Mac, on the “cheep”

Over the past several months I’ve researched video camcorders fairly extensively. My requirements were pretty simple, I thought. I wanted something mainly to film my kids’ memorable events, basic home movie stuff. I did a lot of reading on line, checked out tons of reviews on Amazon.com and many other sites. I almost felt compelled to spend the $26 for a subscription to Consumer Reports, but that seemed like overkill for this particular purchase.

After looking at the various options, I figured I wanted to spend less than $300 if possible. I knew I wanted a Hard Drive-based recorder, since they can record for a REALLY long time, and I REALLY hate dealing with tape. Those Flip Video things are sexy as hell, but they don’t have the recording time I need, and the convenient YouTube upload feature isn’t really necessary.

Having identified the basic type of camera I was after, I ventured into BestBuy several weeks ago, only to be reminded of what a useless waste of real estate those brick-and-mortar stores have become. Typically there was only one salesperson who knew anything at all about the camcorders, and he was trying to help 3 customers at once while a bunch of his blue-shirted lackeys sat around staring into space. After finally getting this guy’s attention, I settled on a refurbished unit that seemed workable, only to discover that they couldn’t actually find all of the parts. You lose, BestBuy!

Over the following weeks, I waited for a deal to show up on line, and sure enough one did, thanks to Twitter. I started following Albert “The Cheap” a few weeks ago, and sure enough he posted a link to the Sony Online Store that had just what the doctor ordered! $250 with free shipping! Cowabunga! Really glad I jumped on this, too, since they are out of stock now.

Now, the only gotchya with these Sony Handycams is, if you’re on a Mac, you need a few extra pieces of software to be able to play and convert the videos. Also, it’s not immediately obvious how to get the video off the camera and onto your Mac. So here are a few tips that I hope will be useful to someone. I hunted for this info for quite a while.

1 – You *can* mount the Handycam DCR-SR42 (and probably other similar USB-based models) directly on your Mac. You do NOT need to run a Windows emulator and the crappy video transfer software Sony provides with the camera. Just plug in the USB cable to your Mac, turn on the camera, put it in “disk” mode, and it should come up as a drive in the Finder. The video files can now be accessed directly from the Finder as shown below.

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For converting the files to QuickTime, MP4, etc., you will need the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component from Apple ($20), and the Streamclip video converter. I think it’s pretty lame that Apple charges $20 for this component, but it doesn’t support MPEG-2 audio.

For playback only, I suggest the VLC media player. You do NOT need the Apple MPEG-2 component to just play back the files.

Now, some purists will be concerned about loss of quality when converting from MPEG-2, but I’m not too worried about it. For those folks, here is the list of cameras supported by iMovie 8. For whatever reason, these cameras are all a lot more expensive than mine. Maybe they’ll add “native” support for my SR42 some day. Until then, I don’t think my mom will notice the difference. 🙂

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From Javascript to Java and Back

Wow – two techie posts in one day! Sorry, non-techie family & friends!

At work, I needed a way to get Javascript array data in and out of my Tomcat Sessions. Given the fragmented state of web development, I was not really too surprised to discover that this extremely common problem does not yet have a simple/common solution.

After a bit of searching, I found this library, which looks pretty cool, but it was way more than I needed. I don’t need full blown RPC, I just need to pass data in and out of my Java Sessions.

So I ended up rolling my own solution: a Struts action (which could just as easily be a Servlet) that takes key/value data from the request and writes it into a named Collection in the Session (if a PUT/POST request method is used), or returns said Collection as a JSONArray. It deletes values as well if you pass “action=delete” in the request params. Returns a 404 if you ask for a Collection it doesn’t know about. Very seemple, very eeessy. If you’re interested in the source, shoot me an email – my boss probably won’t mind!

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What about you PHP guys – is there something even slicker in PHP for doing this?

Incidentally, I finally, totally grokked the true raison d’etre for JSON today: it’s the easiest way to pass simple data structures from a Javascript context to and from a server-side environment. Because JSON *is* Javascript, you can just eval() a JSON string to create a Javascript Array. Pretty nifty!

GWT: First Impressions

Last Friday, I spent the day playing with the latest release of the Google Web Toolkit, or “GWT”, thanks to a great boss who believes in giving developers time to stay current with new developments in the ever-changing web dev world.

I must say, this experience was a very refreshing change from so many other web development “frameworks” that have sprung up in recent years. Unlike others we’ve looked at (e.g. Struts 2 and Grails), GWT is extremely well-documented; the tutorials are well-constructed and easy to follow, and the class documentation is very complete and logically laid-out. The toolkit itself is quite mature and so far, everything works “as advertised”. By contrast, other web dev frameworks have spotty documentation written by early adopters and scattered all over the Web. The importance of good documentation for web frameworks cannot be overstated.

GWT seems clearly aimed at Swing developers wanting to create rich web applications that deploy in a browser. It allows developers to write all of their UI code in Java, freeing them from dealing with the plethora of incomplete javascript frameworks such as prototype and script.aculo.us. It lets you lay out your application programmatically with Widgets and Panels, which is old hat for Swing developers, but is probably a big hurdle for web designer types. Indeed, GWT is all about designing web applications. It’s overkill for marketing-oriented web sites that just want a little interactive “sizzle”.

Here are Google’s answers to the question “Why translate Java code to JavaScript?”. I happen to completely agree with all of them!

  • You can use all of your favorite Java development tools (Eclipse, IntelliJ, JProfiler, JUnit) for AJAX development.
  • Static type checking in the Java language boosts productivity while reducing errors.
  • Common JavaScript errors (typos, type mismatches) are easily caught at compile time rather than by users at runtime.
  • Code prompting/completion is widely available.
  • Automated Java refactoring is pretty snazzy these days.
  • Java-based OO designs are easier to communicate and understand, thus making your AJAX code base more comprehensible with less documentation.

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For me, the most compelling features of the GWT are:

  • Really simple RPC – To communicate from your web application to your web server, you just need to define serializable Java classes for your request and response. In production, GWT automatically serializes the request and deserializes the response from the server. GWT’s RPC mechanism can even handle polymorphic class hierarchies, and you can throw exceptions across the wire.
  • Browser history management – No, AJAX applications don’t need to break the browser’s back button. GWT lets you make your site more usable by easily adding state to the browser’s back button history.
  • Real debugging – In production, your code is compiled to JavaScript, but at development time it runs in the Java virtual machine. That means when your code performs an action like handling a mouse event, you get full-featured Java debugging, with exceptions and the advanced debugging features of IDEs like Eclipse.
  • Browser compatible – Your GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.
  • JUnit integration – GWT’s direct integration with JUnit lets you unit test both in a debugger and in a browser…and you can even unit test asynchronous RPCs.

    For those interested in diving in, I highly recommend reading the Overview first. There are some very important basic concepts to get your head around. For instance:

    GWT applications can be run in two modes:

    • Hosted mode – In hosted mode, your application is run as Java bytecode within the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). You will typically spend most of your development time in hosted mode because running in the JVM means you can take advantage of Java’s debugging facilities and remain within an IDE like Eclipse.
    • Web mode – In web mode, your application is run as pure JavaScript and HTML, compiled from your original Java source code with the GWT Java-to-JavaScript compiler. When you deploy your GWT applications to production, you deploy this JavaScript and HTML to your web servers, so end users will only see the web mode version of your application.

    Google has added a lot of built-in support for Eclipse. Since we use IntelliJ, I was interested in trying out the GWT support in IntelliJ, but I hit a major stumbling block right off the bat. The JetBrains guys created a nice video tutorial to show off their GWT support, but it’s based on an older version of IntelliJ. The method for setting the path to the GWT SDK is completely different in 7.X. There is no global GWT IDE setting; instead, you have to open up the Project Settings and configure the GWT “facet”, as shown below.

    All in all, I’m very impressed, and looking forward to building something “real” in GWT soon!

yet another potential revenue model for Twitter: clickstream collection?

There have been many posts recently about potential revenue models for Twitter. So I figured I’d throw another one out there: clickstream collection.

Every time you include a URL in a “tweet”, Twitter could very easily convert that URL into one that forces you to go through a redirect script hosted by twitter.com first. This script would have access to your twitter.com cookies, so it could easily capture which Twitter users clicked on which tweets. This information is extremely valuable to marketers. Such a business model is not inconsistent with Twitter’s current privacy policy, and would not be hard at all to implement.

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