Matt Levine, Columnist

Performance Reviews and Bank Historians

Also marijuana vending machines, fake scams, long headlines, rich people and unicorns.

March 10, 2017 at 2:27 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Perpetual performance reviews.

A consensus has developed over the last few years that annual performance reviews are terrible. This consensus is entirely correct. But the human-resources industry seems not to have drawn the obvious conclusion (get rid of them), but rather the Peter-Thiel-Pyrrhonian-skeptical conclusion: What if the problem with performance reviews is not that they're terrible, but that they're not terrible enough? So JPMorgan Chase & Co. is augmenting its annual performance reviews with continuous performance reviews: "Moments after a meeting or project is completed, a manager can ping participants for reactions on how a specific employee performed," and "workers can also request written critiques or give unsolicited reviews about their colleagues."