Welcome to mastering assessment accuracy! Even experienced engineering managers fall into predictable traps when evaluating their developers' capabilities.
These systematic errors can derail your leadership effectiveness, but once you recognize them, you'll assess with much greater precision.
Engagement Message
Recall a time you misjudged a developer's abilities. What early clue did you overlook?
The recency effect is the most common assessment mistake. We overweight recent events and underweight long-term patterns.
One production bug makes you forget months of solid code contributions. One great deployment makes you overlook ongoing code quality issues.
Engagement Message
Give one reason we tend to overweight recent events when judging performance.
The halo effect creates another dangerous bias. When someone excels in one area, we assume they're competent everywhere.
"Tom's great at backend development, so he'll be perfect for DevOps work." But these are completely different skill sets requiring different development approaches.
Engagement Message
Name two technical skills you have that are totally different from each other.
Personality bias compounds assessment errors. We mistake communication style for competence level, as we covered in our last session.
The confident-sounding junior gets too much independence. The thorough senior asking detailed questions gets too much direction. Both setups create problems.
Engagement Message
Which personality style do you find easier to assess accurately—bold or quiet?
Here's the speed trap: pressure to make quick assessments leads to shallow conclusions. You observe one code review and think you understand their development stage.
But accurate assessment requires multiple data points across different technical situations and timeframes.
Engagement Message
