Comment by jmyeet

Performance reviews are incredibly toxic and do little more than to sideline anyone who is neurodivergent or has social anxiety of any kind.

The author is correct: it's not about your quality or quantity of work. It's about how you make important people feel and that's simply vibes. You can take the same set of facts and argue they under-delivered or that there were a lot of learnings from the project that didn't launch.

I also agree with not giving ammunition to use against other people. I'm surprised how many people don't get this. Your job, as an employere in a large organization, is to figure out who these people are and never give them ammunition. You certainly never tell them anything that they could use against you.

Any large employer will have quotas on various ratings too so you're literally competing to be "Exceeds Expectations" with your coworkers. More toxicity. Some will end up using this fact to tank other people. It's even worse with the current state of tech: permanent layoff culture. 5-10% of the employees will have to get subpar ratings (by the quotas set) and they will either be forced out (with lower bonuses, withheld equity, PIPs, etc) or simply fired.

Big Tech has gone 100% Corporate America at this point. Gone are the days when Google realized the most important factor in a team's success is psychological safety [1] as everything that now exists undermines that.

And the vibes that make up performance reviews are going to be largely beyond your control. People who went to Stanford will tend to like other people who went to Stanford. Same for MIT, same for CMU, same for UWashington, same for Waterloo. You will have a harder time in your 40s if your team is all 20 somethings a few years out of college because your interests and life stage will just be different, most likely. A mainland Chinese person will have a harder time in a team of Oregonians. And vice versa.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...