if during the interview she asks how often you do performance reviews,
that means she doesn’t understand the startup culture
This is really stupid. All bosses, from a two person shop to a twenty thousand person shop, should regularly be sitting down with their employees and communicating what that person has been doing well, not doing well, what the boss wants to change, etc. You don't have to be a hidebound corporation with 100k employees to benefit from being explicit about the manager communicating feedback and from setting aside time for this to explicitly happen. Not to mention that many founders are learning how to be a manager, and often are far from clear about their expectations. Making them explicit does nothing but help the relationship. See also Rands' opinion [1], [2]. Communication doesn't just happen; it's something that is made to happen.
Justintv had similar experiences about the benefits of being really clear what a manager wants [3]. Protip: employees don't read minds. He found that this was the typical project workflow:
Vague problem definition: "Create an automated test suite for the website."
Employee defines it in some way that we didn't actually have in mind: "Create
an extensible, Selenium based framework for performing every action a user can
on the site."
Employee works on that for a while, sometimes months, without feedback: "I'm
making great progress!"
Manager checks on progress, has a "wtf" moment: "Wait, I just wanted something
that pinged five URLs and checked for 500s."
Massive micromanagement ensues: "OK, clearly you don't understand what we're
doing; I'm going to have to take over."
Massive employee disenchantment: "WTF just happened?"
Performance reviews aren't the same thing as feedback. Feedback and communication are essential; performance reviews are regimented checks that often completely fail to provide the needed feedback, because no one wants to appear to be doing a bad job when it comes time to talk salary.
For feedback to be effective is has to be mutual, constant, and constructive. Performance reviews are often none of these things.
performance reviews are regimented checks that often completely fail to provide the needed feedback, because no one wants to appear to be doing a bad job when it comes time to talk salary.
There are enough companies decoupling performance and salary reviews (e.g. 6mos apart) that there are already well-established techniques for dealing with the problem you mention. Beyond that, my experience is that companies bad at communicating by means of performance reviews (i.e. they're late/irregular, or not substantive, or tied to salary) are bad at communicating in general, and inquiring about performance reviews can be seen as a leading indicator in an interview about how communicative about important stuff they are in general. Don't mistake loud offices/people with opinions about the business to be the same as managerial communication.
Justintv had similar experiences about the benefits of being really clear what a manager wants [3]. Protip: employees don't read minds. He found that this was the typical project workflow:
[1] http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2011/10/11/the_rands_t...[2] http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/08/31/no_surprise...
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/three-signs-you-have-a-manage...