This past week, we had to fill out performance reviews: five forms, for myself, my manager, and three peers. I think this is the worst I've procrastinated since college--every time I tried to start writing, I found myself completely unable to focus. I was able to spend a lot of time thinking about what to include, and created bulleted outlines, so that's something, but the actual writing all took place during crunch time, roughly 2PM to 7PM on Friday.
Because reviews are not anonymous, and we're able to read the feedback from our peers, I felt some pressure to be more specific and generous, to do people justice and not offend anyone. I get along well with my coworkers, and they're pretty solid engineers for the most part, so it was easy enough to talk about their strengths and provide examples. But I had no idea how to give advice on what to improve on, and I feel like unsolicited advice is never taken well anyway?
I was initially real anxious about the self review, because I knew my productivity had declined drastically over the course of the pandemic. But I guess there was still (barely) enough to write about. My main issue has been lack of engagement: I'm much more motivated when I'm around enthusiastic peers, but online interactions require much more effort and forethought than office chatter. And because I don't really tie my identity to my industry career, I'm not super ambitious or proactive about pursuing new responsibilities--pretty okay working 9-5 and prioritizing stuff outside of work.
I found myself most engrossed in work when (a) helping someone, (b) teaching something, or (c) facing a technically challenging problem, e.g. parallelizing an ETL operation, writing a Rust procedural macro, or debugging an Azure SNAT timeout. But all three are relatively rare circumstances for a younger engineer: while working at a startup definitely gives me more free rein, we're continually hiring more employees, and the organizational hierarchy is only going to ossify with time.