Comment by thrwaway1985882

Funny enough, those 5 line items are almost precisely how my company manages performance.

The only thing I'd highlight here is the importance of salary with scoring/calibration. As your salary changes, the distribution of scores changes too. Almost no time is spent talking about juniors/engineers. The most junior of developers tend to bottom out at a 3 no matter how good they really are because they're so inexpensive. You have to be near malicious to land a 2 or 1.

But I'm a senior director of blah blah now. I could move heaven and earth and triple my companies' ARR next year and I'll still get a 3 because there's no budget to make VP of blah blah, and giving me a 4 means giving my peers less and my boss won't want to do that or else they'll get mad.

I don't like tying perf to comp, but as long as everyone understands the deal they're making, it tends to work out.