Are you having a mostly positive or negative performance review experience?

Current job, fine. But a while back this happened:

I was working for a BigTechCo who shall remain nameless. At my first performance review near the end of year one, I was rated "Meets Expectations" on a scale that went "Needs Improvement" -> "Meets Expectations" -> "Exceeds Expectations". OK, fair enough.

At the end of year two, my manager calls me in for a performance review, and proceeds to tell me:

A. he thinks my performance has improved from the previous year (when I got a "Meets Expectations")

B. my evaluation this year is "Needs Improvement".

Huh??

Yeah, that's what I thought too.

The purported explanation was that he changed the criteria he judged me by. Mainly that meant that instead of being compared to my peers, I was compared to people in the next higher band, managers (I was an IC), and people who had been with the company 15+ years.

Huh?????

Yeah, that's what I thought too.

Still, the only real fallout from this would nominally have been a slightly smaller bonus, and a bruised ego (I never get "needs improvement" ratings, damnit!). But I could live with this and go on.

And then we got a new VP of our group, and this guy apparently has some hard-line "I only want TOP performers on my team" shtick. So he goes over all the department performance ratings, and decides he can't have me around. So I get PIP'd.

Now here's where this gets even more fucked up. I started looking for a new job immediately (because we all understand that a PIP is generally a "soft firing"). But I knew I had some time and could afford to be selective, so I didn't rush out the door. So I hung around until the end of the PIP period... and MET all of their criteria, by their own admission. My manager signed off on my having successfully met the PIP criteria and everything. And then a few days later he came back and said "the higher ups want you to do a second PIP". LOLOLOLOL. Luckily by then I was just a day or two away from having an offer from another company, so like three days later I go to my manager and tell him "Yeah, I'm out."

But seriously, if anybody doubted that the whole PIP thing is bullshit, that should serve as a pretty strong indicator. It wasn't about me improving my performance, it was about somebody deciding they wanted me gone and they were going to get their way one way or another. I guess if I'd stayed and successfully completed the second PIP they would have just made up some bullshit and fired me outright. Or somebody would have put their finger on the scale to make sure there would be not possible way to successfully complete the second PIP.

Anyway, the moral of this story is, performance reviews are generally a political game playing process and PIP's are bullshit.

user:	wmhmccarty
created:	October 3, 2023
karma:	4