Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users submit content to the site, which is then voted up or down by other members. As of 2023, Reddit ranks as the 10th-most-visited website in the world and 6th most-visited website in the U.S.
Performance Review Overview
| Name | Talent Review |
| Frequency | Once a year |
| When | July |
Latest Performance Reviews
| Level | New Salary | Equity Grant | Bonus | Rating | Promoted? | Date |
|---|
| Level | New Salary | Equity Grant | Bonus | Rating | Promoted? | Date |
|---|
Ratings
Not meeting the expectations for your level (doing very poorly).
Not meeting the expectations for your level (doing very poorly).
Evaluation
See relevant discussions involving Reddit engineers on Taro.
Software engineers are evaluated on the following 6 pillars:
Expertise
You are regarded as an expert with a trusted opinion in critical areas. You may be the Subject Matter Expert (SME) for one or more domains within your team or org. Does everyone on the team come to you for certain types of problems? Do you get added to a lot of pull requests (PRs) that are already approved, since people want your feedback?
Strategic Thinking
You have an intentional thought process behind the work you're doing, and are you able to take into consideration the critical inputs and factors in a decision. For example, in design documents, are you able to anticipate issues that may come up in the future?
Execution Initiative
You are trusted to deliver your work reliably and with high quality, and you take accountability for the work you have committed to do. Instead of being handed work to do, you have the ability to start something on your own and create scope as needed.
Interpersonal Skills and Communication
This is how collaborative you have been and how able you are to improve processes and projects and meetings. Clearly communicate your work and tailor the messaging based on the audience you're presenting to. How well do you interact with other people (run meetings, answer questions, etc)? Work to bring many different voices together to do well in this dimension.
Breadth of Influence
You are positively impacting others in the company through your work. For example, do you have a productive relationship with a mentee, and are you able to work through cross-functional (XFN) teams?
Training and Quality
You leverage your unique specialization and domain knowledge to have an impact on the company. For example, you might have improved build times by making a technically complex improvement.
For more junior engineers, expertise and execution are the most important pillars. For more senior engineers, strategic thinking and influence become more important.
Feedback
Feedback is written in Lattice, which doesn't enforce a word count limit. We recommend checking with your manager to ensure your self-review and peer reviews are of the appropriate length.
All feedback at Reddit is written in a free-form style. As a general rule, it's better to provide concrete examples when explaining an accomplishment or behavior change.
Self Review
The self review should document your major accomplishments and collaborations in the past cycle. We recommend framing your work in terms of your main projects, or to start with the 6 pillars listed above, and describe how your work ladders up to each of those pillars.
Peer Feedback
Most engineers will get 2-3 reviews from peers on their team, and 2-3 additional reviews from colleagues outside their team. More senior folks are expected to have more influence across the organization, and therefore have more peer reviews.
Manager Feedback
The manager will provide formal feedback as part of every performance review cycle, but this is heavily influenced by the input coming from other parts of the packet (namely, peer feedback).
Visibility
All peer feedback will be visible to you. Beyond that, your peers have the option to choose how visible their feedback should be based on 3 layers:
- Only visible to you
- Visible to you and your manager
- Visible to you and the entire company (shown in a Slack channel).
This decision is chosen, and the feedback circulated, at the time of writing.
Reddit is very unique in this culture of sharing peer feedback directly and openly. At most companies, the default option is deliver feedback only to the manager, but at Reddit it's impossible for you not to receive the feedback directly.
Compensation
After each performance review, employees receive a salary increase, an equity refresh (in the form of RSUs), and an annual bonus.
The formula to determine the compensation adjustment is unclear, please reach out if you have more details on how Reddit computes this!
- Salary: The base salary at Reddit is competitive with Big Tech companies. Adjustments can be up to 15% depending on performance or promotion.
- Bonus: Generally, the bonus payout at Reddit is small compared to peer companies, less than $5K-$10K even at higher levels. However, Reddit also gives out spot bonuses for strong performance which are one-time payouts that are on top of the annual bonus. These are usually $10K or less.
- Equity: Grants for Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are over 4 years, with an even vesting schedule of 25% each year.
Performance Improvement Plan
Unlike most Big Tech companies, Reddit doesn't target to remove the bottom 5-15% of low performers every cycle.
PIPs are rare at Reddit. A recent change in the rating scheme was to introduce a 4th rating for "Does Not Meet" expectations; previously there were only 3 ratings.
- Receiving a "Does Not Meet" expectation puts you in the danger zone for receiving a PIP.
- It's up to the manager's discretion, but you may also be placed on a PIP if you receive the "Inconsistently Meets" rating several times.