In an effort to create some high-signal content on this thread that addresses your parent's concerns about the failure modes of the performance process I'd like to shed a little first hand light: TLDR it is broken. I'm a bit limited in respecting that certain things are proprietary, but so much of this is common to all "FAANG" companies that it's basically public domain. Joma Tech on YouTube knows all of this and does (great) comedy skits on it.

Longer version: companies like FB or Google can afford arbitrary amounts of qualified experts to study mechanism design, there are people at those companies who deeply understand complex incentive structures. It doesn't hurt that the ads business is like 50% game/auction theory to begin with.

But you only have to look at any political structure in sight to know that the wonk answer, the "right" answer via math, is rarely implemented, and basically never implemented by virtue of being "right". Adam Smith's utilitarian billiard balls are a very limited approximation to human beings. Mostly people want to do the "right" thing, but in large numbers respond to incentives, and the incentive for any bureaucracy is to continue to exist.

The Google "leetcode" interview and the Google "promo-packet" performance evaluation process are not optimal, they fall down in all kinds of ways. But they are better by far than a dart board, and pretty much all the big shops cargo-culted them. They're remarkably similar in being 1) well-intentioned 2) ostensibly quantitative and 3) in practice in 2022 basically a way to money-launder bias through a spreadsheet. A lot of people oversee this process, review it annually, tweak small parts of it and play down the error bars. These people have jobs, and career tracks, and where they can do some good in general, but it's a system.

FB has it's own tweaks on the "leetcode" interview and the "promo-packet" bi-annual performance evaluation, but it's still obviously a patch set on Google's shit. I've never worked at Google, so I can't be certain, but by my trained eye FB's is actually slightly more enlightened in a few ways (Google had an SAT score minimum for US applications for longer than they want anyone to remember), but it's still governed by humans, and apparently the only thing humans want more than food or sex is tribal affiliation: asking someone for something deep in CLRS in a 40 minute coding interview isn't a technical test, it's a "went to the kind of school I did" test.

So while we're all busy laundering classism, sexism, racism, and lots of other -isms through Floyd's Tortoise and Hare interviews? I'm fairly unmoved by laundering some downsizing through the same mechanism. It's the not the root of the issue.