Job is good but frustrating and desperate environment lately - Anonymous employee Arista Networks Employee Review

> Areview - it is called a review by peers but it has actually become > a review by managers. The Arista management team has a responsibility to conduct comprehensive employee performance reviews, just like at any other company. This has always been the case --- you are right that at the end of the day, our process is "review by managers" . However, our process is also based upon the rank-list, which is generated from the rankings submitted by the peers. Rank-list generation is based on a tournament rating algorithm and does not involve any management judgement at all. The rank-list serves as the foundation for level assignment, tweaked as needed by the management team. Areview has worked like this from the very beginning. Thanks to Areview, we are able to gather far more information about an employee and take that into consideration in the review process. It is one of our core strengths. > This worked really well when the company was small, now > half the people don't understand it. ... The managers > literally come back and poke people questioning their rankings... Put your two statements together, and I hope you'll see that the purpose of having managers question rankings is to help out when employees don't understand Areview. We ask our managers to look for rank lists that don't make sense to them, and to please make sure the employee understands what we are asking them to do. If so, then the rank list stands. The employee should only change their submission if the employee decides that their original submission was based on misunderstanding. For example, we have had people submit rank lists upside down. Surely it's worth helping people to recognize and correct this sort of error? > in 50% of the cases end up affecting the person and get the ranking > changed according to who they think is better. I believe when managers ask questions about rank lists, they are either trying to help spot and correct mistakes and misunderstandings, or are trying to gather actionable feedback on behalf of the person being reviewed. I don't think our managers are trying to unduly influence rank lists, but you're right that if managers are doing this, it's wrong. If you are aware of specific cases, I'd appreciate it if you brought them to my attention. Thanks, -Ken Kenneth Duda CTO & SVP Software Arista Networks, Inc.