Writing Your Own Brag Sheet

Across my long run at Google there were two reviews a year, and I remember almost every one running on a different method, a different combination. Reorgs were frequent on top of that — my team would stay put while the roster of the manager meeting I sat in changed completely. So it wouldn’t shock me to learn it’s done differently now, in the AI era.

In Korean, assessment and evaluation collapse into a single word — pyeong-ga — even though in English (and in practice) they split into two stages: assessment first, evaluation after. Here I want to gather a few notes on the first stage. Evaluation I’ll save for another post.

The season opens — self-assessment

The first step of review season was submitting your self-assessment. It was the first homework handed to each individual, and a great many companies open this way, with some form of self-written report. Mostly you treat it as a chance to brag about what you’ve done — stitched together, in my case, in shallow English. If you’d had a big piece of work in the window, it flowed; if not, you scraped things together by force. The company goes half-paralyzed for a few days, and around the deadline it tips into overload. Every time I finished, a small despair would set in: this is all I did?

As a manager, once you’ve read your reports’ self-assessments, you get your own homework — the manager assessment. Often you fold a first draft of the evaluation in here, while assembling the material you’ll need for the bigger war to come: calibration. And since it’s a problem if you can’t make sense of a report’s self-assessment, this is frequently where you end up talking with them more.

Writing yours

First, obvious as it sounds: keeping notes as you go helps enormously. There are weekly snippets, your personal OKRs, the team’s weekly reviews; there are CLs — Google’s changelists, pull requests by another name — issues, launch calendar entries. Prepare regularly, in the hope that you’ll have something to brag about, and the assessment goes down easier. Does anyone actually keep this up? I know perfectly well how rarely it happens.

Get Chaesang Jung’s stories in your inbox

If you’re a team lead or tech lead, write and share the team’s assessment first. It separates the team’s accomplishments from any one person’s ahead of time, and it gives you something with authority to cite when you have to argue an individual’s results to another team.

Write against the expectations for each level. A senior engineer is expected to have influence through design-doc proposals and analysis more than through code; a junior can speak to execution done well. Small things — volume of code, test cases added — can be dressed up as quickness on your feet. Getting all the way to autonomous is usually the bar.

If a promotion rides on this cycle, do it seriously; if not, you were often encouraged to keep it lightweight. A promo case means hard peer reviews and plenty of fights ahead, so you keep the rest short and bank the energy for the evaluation to come.

Assessment in the AI era

Some companies probably skip this entirely. A very early-stage company might, and I’m told some hold a deliberate policy to pour even this energy back into the actual work. The very highest-level people may find the whole exercise beside the point — you can just tell who’s good, can’t you? There’s truth in that. The side effect, or the backlash, is a quiet homogenization under whatever the founder happens to value.

And if AI writes better than people do — if it already knows everything I do at the company? Assessment is exactly the kind of area where AI’s efficiency would run very high. There’s even an upside: the things you’d want to exaggerate get quietly filtered out. The gap between the people who did a lot and the people who didn’t would split starkly — useful, I think, and a little suffocating at the same time. It would mean the pressure of assessment, all year long.

Part of Lessons from the Company — first-person notes from inside engineering organizations, from my years at Google and after. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/167