How we updated our Performance Review process to help engineers grow

September 06, 2024 ,

Performance reviews are often a nebulous topic. All companies do them and they can be incredibly important to growth and success, both personally and professionally. Yet they are often a bit of a black box. At Wealthfront, we believe that one of the core goals of the performance review process is to help engineers grow and develop their skills.

Over the last few years, we’ve been tweaking how we think about performance reviews to lean more heavily into the quality of the feedback and advice we’re providing. We do evaluations more regularly, started evaluating engineers more specifically across multiple dimensions, held ourselves (both managers and engineers) to a higher standard, and included an emphasis not just on evaluation against expectations, but more explicitly on guidance for growth as well.

In this post, we’ll walk you through what our performance review process looks like, and how it’s evolved to help ensure we’re providing regular and meaningful feedback to help our engineers excel both at Wealthfront and wherever their careers may lead.

Basics of the review process

In order to understand how we have methodically improved our review process, it’s important to know the basic logistics. Our official process is semi-annual. Every six months, we write self-reviews, peer reviews and upward reviews. Managers then use this information, along with other feedback and observations they have, to put together an assessment they bring to calibration. In calibration, managers ask questions, share opinions, and ensure that all engineers are held to the same standards. Finally, reviews are written and delivered. This basic, official structure has not changed, however much else has.

Mid-cycle calibration and feedback

The first major addition came a few years ago in the form of two additional un-official calibration and feedback cycles. We noticed that meaningful discussions of performance were sometimes only occurring during the official performance review process. This had several consequences. For these engineers, the feedback loop was quite long and not an effective way for them to learn, iterate, and grow. Additionally, their self-assessment would sometimes get out of step with their manager’s view.

To help alleviate this, we introduced mid-cycle calibrations. These calibrations are a bit lighter weight (engineers don’t need to write any reviews), but still serve to enforce that the manager gathers feedback, aligns with others in the org, and has a meaningful conversation about performance with their engineers. In addition to helping ensure engineers are receiving useful advice more often, this also helps to ensure managers are aware of their engineers’ accomplishments as well. And while we have found the addition of the process to help achieve our goals, we didn’t stop there.

Higher expectations

In Wealthfront Engineering, we strive for technically strong and self-directed engineers and believe that fostering an organization that values and emphasizes growth is paramount. While this has always been true, our assessment of these traits has varied a bit over the years. After a reorg into product teams about five years back (for example cash team and investing team, instead of web or backend), we noticed our evaluations sometimes focused a bit too heavily on how successfully engineers could ship product code and achieve sprint goals. Instead, we wanted to help our engineers grow into “whole” engineers: engineers who don’t just excel in one area, but in a more complete set of skills. We wanted to help grow engineers to be effective when on-call, nuanced in prioritization, strong mentors, and thoughtful code reviewers.

Multiple evaluation dimensions

To help accomplish this, we decided to evaluate engineers along two dimensions of performance. One of these dimensions is intended to capture technical ability, technical judgment, problem solving skills, subject matter expertise, and similar aspects. We call this dimension Proficiency. The other dimension is intended to capture communication, conscientiousness, judgment in prioritization, time management, and similar aspects of performance. We call this dimension Responsibility. An individual’s performance is now regularly assessed on both these dimensions. This change helped expand the breadth of feedback we provide.

Level expectations

Another focus for us was to have ambitious level expectations. When we evaluate engineers, we look at performance in a number of areas and evaluate each independently on whether it meets expectations of their level. In reality, most engineers will not be meeting level expectations across every single facet of their work. In fact, this can be true even of some of our most promising engineers. The result of this is that the most common evaluation against level expectations at Wealthfront is “meeting most” rather than all. While this can be a bit jarring at first, we generally view meeting most expectations as a positive, and it allows us to provide far more nuanced feedback and guidance. Response from engineers since we held ourselves to this high standard has also been very positive due to the more specific and nuanced advice we provide as a result.

Explicit guidance

While much of this post has been focused on evaluation, our evaluation process is only as good as the feedback and guidance that results. Having high standards and more nuanced dimensions are only valuable if we use them effectively to help our engineers grow and excel. As such, guidance is incredibly important to us throughout the review process and beyond. And that is what led to our most recent addition to the process.

In addition to incorporating guidance across various parts of the review, including on goals, level expectations, and even dedicated space to focusing on developing as an engineer, we now also explicitly discuss guidance as part of calibration. Previously, calibration focused largely on level expectations. Now, we dedicate an equal amount of time to discussing what guidance we are providing as well. No matter how well an engineer is performing, we ensure we always have advice to provide on how to continue growing. Gone are the days of the cliche “you’re doing great, just keep it up”. Whether it’s how to meet expectations or to expand beyond your level, all of our engineering managers now play a role in helping ensure each individual is receiving the best possible advice on how to grow as a “whole” engineer both at Wealthfront and in their career.

Beyond the review cycle

Additionally, while official guidance is provided at least four times a year, managers also regularly work to gather feedback for employees throughout the cycles as well, providing specific advice as frequently as possible. The result is that engineers receive timely guidance that allows them to adjust in real time, as opposed to only at the end of a review cycle. We believe feedback loops should be short and strive to make them as tight as possible.

Conclusion

At Wealthfront, we believe it’s important to have high expectations for our engineers because we genuinely want all of our engineers to excel, both here and wherever their careers take them. But high expectations are only as useful as the guidance we provide to help our engineers grow into them. Our review process and feedback more broadly are all intentionally structured in a way to provide high quality, specific feedback as often as possible. We talk a lot about how Wealthfront is an awesome company to kick start your career, and when it comes to helping engineers grow, we back it up with our processes.

If this is something that is interesting to you, either as an engineer or a manager, check out our open positions!


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