Comment by epage

> If everything you provide is at best a no-op and at worst a negative, and there's never an upside to it, stop providing. Write much, but say nothing.

One of my best managers would help collect unofficial feedback and give it to us while providing a filtered version for the official record.

> If you take nothing else away from this post, take this: a sufficiently skilled manager can take the same body of work and make it work for you OR against you.

One of my "better" managers gave me a middle-of-the-ground review when I felt I had done great work. Reviews were supposed to be calibrated for job title and tenure but my manager instead rated me for the job title that I was working on being promoted to (which I never got and dealing with all of this was a major reason I left). Even in that, I felt he was short-changing me. The only feedback they gave about it was that I didn't complete a specific goal. I pivoted mid-review cycle because it was going to be a train wreck to complete that goal without doing something else first. We had regular one-on-ones and we discussed this and he never raised a concern over the pivot. The pivot didn't just unblock that goal but was a major process improvement for my team and a lot of other teams across the company. The problem was that the original goal was a tool mostly focused on helping management. In other words, because I didn't do a death march or sacrifice the productivity of the company for his sake, he used the review process against me.