Deliverables or no deliverables

It's been a long day...and yet it has gone by pretty fast. Hehe...I'm contradicting myself again. I guess what I mean is that I have done a lot today (or perhaps much has taken place in one day), but didn't really feel the time as it flew by.

I'm on a half-day leave today, but even that was no rest. And after lunch, back at work, there was a meeting and then continued by another meeting...and before I knew it, it's already 5pm.

The first meeting was a semi-short one - but that's because it's really a performance review rather than a meeting per se. And it didn't really go too well in my opinion. I would say it was kind of expected but still it doesn't go down well when your manager tells you that on the "Opportunity" side, you need to increase productivity and that your deliverables for the past few months has been low. When he said "Opportunity", it was merely a nice way of saying "weakness" - management talk and all. I know this because a few minutes earlier he just gave me his comments on what he saw as my strengths - always start with the positives, right?

Haha...anyway, I said I expected simply because I was having a hard time ramping up with the feature development I was assigned to work on. Though it's not to say that I have not done anything this year nor does it mean I haven't delivered anything. Just that - at least it seems to me - my manager seems to put more weight on deliverables from solving issues and other technical related stuff. And after speaking to two other colleagues about their performance review, I guess my assumption isn't far off.

Well, to cut a long story short, I kind of gave some reasons (valid ones, of course) for my so-called low deliverables and he seemed to accept it. So I guess I have like 1-2 months to ramp myself up and get better visibility in terms of handing in these "deliverables". And you know the funny thing? I'm going to have a new manager for my next performance review. In total, this is going to be my fourth manager this year alone...brilliant! How the hell do they even keep track of what I have done for the whole year? I guess it'll be down to those quantifiable and visible deliverables again - which means improving my technical competency and resolve issues in a shorter period of time. Boring...

OK, I'm ranting...but the only solution to my problem is to give up on being a development engineer and try moving on to say, something like program/project management. But I hate giving up...though I guess I'm nearing my threshold of being patient...so we'll see when I get my yearly performance rating at the end of this year. Might help me decide better.