Your performance review might have biases when your manager delivers it to you. How can you spot them, and what can you do to counter them, and get a more fair review?

At Uber, as an engineering manager, I've done dozens of performance reviews. I learned about biases early on through unconscious bias training: and I was guilty of most of them. I'm sharing the most common biases I've observed, and my advice on countering them.

Read a longer blog post accompanying the video: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/pe...

00:00 | Intro
00:56 | What are biases?
01:50 | Types of feedback you could get on a performance review
03:43 | A trick to get more specific feedback from overly generic feedback
04:49 | The 8 most common biases on performance reviews and ways to counter them
04:55 | The recency bias and countering it (Bias #1)
06:18 | The strictness bias and countering it (Bias #2)
09:06 | The leniency bias (Bias #3)
09:34 | The Horns Bias (Bias #4)
12:15 | The Halo Bias (Bias #5)
13:58 | The Similarity Bias (Bias #6)
16:26 | The Central Tendency Bias (Bias #7)
17:07 | Fun fact: the reason why forced curves exist
18:47 | The Contrasting Bias
22:16 | On pushing your manager to give you better quality feedback

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Books I've written (and am writing):
- Software engineering resumes: https://thetechresume.com/
- Building Mobile Apps at Scale: http://mobileatscale.com/
- The Software Engineer's Guidebook: https://www.engguidebook.com/
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