There is a new system that has annual reviews rather than biannual reviews. It slightly changes the expected rating distributions and introduces a "meets most" rating that is between the old "needs improvement" and "consistently meets expectations" ratings. There is no expected PIP rate. It was developed in 2021 and rolled out early in 2022. The ratings changes were small compared to process changes, which are intended to make the entire system take way less time for everybody. The rollout and tooling was a disaster but it will hopefully improve over time.

People then leap off a reasoning cliff and assume that this means that everybody who is rated "not enough impact" or "meets most" in February will be fired. This would have required some pretty legendary economic foresight by the execs and it would require them to have done a lot of unnecessary work to redo the entire performance review process rather than just changing the ratings system.

I have no idea if Google will do layoffs. But the idea that GRAD was created to facilitate layoffs is fucking stupid.

From what I've heard - It's been changed to a yearly (instead of twice a year) and apparently there's been pressure to rate people at a higher standard with a simple 5 level impact score. 'Not enough impact'. 'Moderate impact'. 'Significant impact'. 'Outstanding impact'. 'Transformative impact'. This feels kind of like something akin to a bell curve with the peak in Significant. I assume the culling will be from the 'Not enough' and possibly 'Moderate' bins. For a complete picture we would also need to understand the old performance process. A Googler could fill us in as this change has happened only this year.