It's because it makes YOU look bad.After Google, I worked for a company with the most unethical management I've ever encountered. True evil. (Calibration scores are just criminal stupidity; not the same class.) Also, that company is notorious in NYC for having unethical management. Furthermore, I was there for 3 months... after a 6-month period at Google. Now that is a blotch on my CV.
I'm done worrying about cosmetic shit. I already fail on that front. Too much substance, and it's too visible by now.
I also don't buy into the "never make an employer look bad". If you're there for 2+ years, then I agree and would say that the rule applies, even if you were laid off or had a crappy manager at the end, because there's nothing embarrassing about a 2-year stint. If you are at a company for less than 12 months, either you or they like horrible. Make it them by airing enough to prove them the bad guys. (Then you still look bad, but not horrible, because you show it to be their fault.)
Can I ask a question? You keep complaining about closed allocation. What EXACTLY would you want them to have, instead? And I don't mean just say "open," say specifically what you mean, how you think it would work in practice. At a company with 55,000 employees.
Actually, being large makes it much easier to afford open allocation. If you're small, you often have real technical deadlines that put the business at risk, so full-on open allocation isn't always possible.
If you're at Google's size, your moral responsibility to your engineers is open allocation, because you can afford it. It's the 20-person companies that have deadlines and clients that have good reasons not to do full open allocation.
So, that's easy, at least for the engineering organization. That's where you start, and you branch out from there as you build a knowledge base.
Companies record what managers think of their employees. How ELSE would you want a company to do it?
Well... for starters, take that garbage out of the transfer packet.
Does this seem radical? Actually, the law is on my side, here. Until about 1995, most companies didn't have performance reviews in the transfer packet. At all. Those were separate and only came out when someone actually needed to be fired. Enron changed that. It was Enron that made stylish the "innovation" of making performance reviews part of the transfer packet, and Google is carrying the torch.
A manager who interferes with internal mobility is guilty of harassment (plenty of legal precedent here) because internal mobility is considered part of a worker's job performance, and interference with job performance is...? Well, it's one of the most common subcategories of workplace harassment. Ergo, a manager who communicates anything negative about an employee (except a breach of law or professional ethics) is guilty of harassment and can be charged.
That's why the calibration scores and manager-level-only feedback are secret. It's to allow Google (or, more specifically, managers) to break the fucking law.
Yes, companies need to fire severe underperformers, unethical people, and law-breakers. That's true. Performance review for mutual benefit also has some value. Creating a system where performance reviews are part of the transfer process is, while not technically outlawed, essentially giving managers the right to break the law.
When I say that closed-allocation management in the Google/Enron-style company is often extortion, I'm not exaggerating. It's technically civil rather than criminal extortion, but now we're getting into details.