I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

It's really hard. Facebook managers get super stressed and spend weeks on them every year trying to make them fair and people still don't feel it's fair. I can touch on a few points that Facebook does: 1. Require specific examples in all feedback instead of general statements. e.g. rather than "Susan is always reliable when there are bugs!", "Susan jumped in to help me fix 4 important bugs in the past month, and one of them was a hi-pri bug impacting 10M users". 2. Make it mandatory to have a certain number of peer feedback submissions during the performance cycle, that have specific examples. 3. Create high level guidelines that try to match specific examples of work to behaviors listed in certain performance buckets and/or job levels 4. Most importantly, have a calibration process across different teams and different departments. This happens after all the initial evaluation is done to make sure that in that half and that cycle, people who performed similarly have the same rating and outcome across the company. This is the key step to keeping the process fair. You might disagree with the outcome, but if someone else who performed the same got the same outcome, it's still fair.