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Comment by ora600 | Hacker News Reader

I left my job at BigCo because I was part of a 8 person team where the manager was supposed to create a normal distribution out of scores from 1-5. I was one of two employees recognized for doing an excellent job, but my manager could rate just one of us as "excellent".

During a performance review, my manager talked for an hour about how much I'm contributing and what an amazing job I do. Then he ranked me as average. I was extremely disappointed because I wanted the awesome job I do to get more official recognition.

I started searching for a new job almost immediately and left shortly after.

So yes, review systems considered harmful.

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This is actually how almost every large company works. Scale is 1 to 5, average is a 3, 2 is exceeds expectations, "Nobody ever gets a 1."

The problem is that the grading is done on a curve, so that for every 2 given out, someone else must get a 4. If you get a 4, you are considered below expectations, and must be put on a "personal improvement plan," or managed out of the team.

Because of this pressure, nobody wants to give out anything other than a 3. So they resort to stupid tricks like giving out "high 3s" or "low 3s" instead of 2s or 4s.

The desire to model employee performance with data and manage out the bottom 10% has a crushing effect on the morale of any small technically focused team.

Even smaller companies can work this way. During last year's review, my manager (who is also a lead developer--heck, even the VP of engineering writes code on a weekly basis) told me that he wanted to score me higher, but some people frowned on such things because "people really can't be that good."

It doesn't bother me much because our department is fairly sane in how they deal with reviews, and management in general.

Agree. I work for a small company who occasionally like to act like a big company; we have a similar system which used to be hooked up to bonuses, but they eventually removed those. The explanation was pretty obtuse, but reading between the lines there were some employees getting bonuses even though they should objectively have been 4s or 5s on that scale - because of course everyone got 2 or 3 regardless.

I left a BigCo job for the same reason.

Interestingly enough, I learned in my HR class just last night that stacked systems are disastrous. Any modern HR dept. should not be using them.

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