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Ugh spot on. I actually quite enjoyed the work I was doing at the Big Cos and Unicorns, and wouldn't mind doing it to this day. However, the culture that performance management wrought was so awful, it makes me not want to work in tech at all. The incentives they create are so perverse, it's sad how much they crush otherwise fun and innovative environments.

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Small companies with better aligned incentives (equity incentives vs. bonus and promotion as the primary upside), indie work (and unrelatedly thereby also not giving away 80-90% of the value you create to the founders and VCs), or being a founder, is the answer, at least it was for me.

> Small companies with better aligned incentives

My previous company (~50 employees) did not have performance reviews at all; Instead, employees were handed out a blank spreadsheet with names of every personnel, and asked to fill who should get how much fraction of the bonus pool.

The numbers were aggregated by CEO once a year, and bonuses were paid out accordingly.

I liked the system when I worked there, because it served as a yearly check on how I was perceived. The results were sometimes brutal, though.

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