Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech

> "...as well as a handful of unlucky folks who deliver solid results but lack social grace and self-promotion skills."

Ironic that what was once the character archetype for geeky programmers have now become pariahs in the industry they pioneered. Now we all toot our own horns as loudly as we can, hoping to drown out our fellows, in search of the next bonus or job hop and devil take the hindmost. Introverted, have social anxiety, not neurotypical or simply don't like self-promotion, as is common among nerds? Yup, expect to get screwed good and hard.

The flip side to these performance cycles is all the time in between in which often very little actionable feedback is provided to engineers which makes the mid year and end of year reviews so difficult.

Across 3 companies and 8 managers, I have yet to receive feedback that was productive in helping me understand what skills or track record is lacking and what is necessary to move up. Managers are (often) bad at providing actionable feedback let alone any feedback which leads to lots of blandness in 1:1s which translates to lots of blandness in mid year and end of year review cycles.

I try and rectify this by finding quantitative data: impact on revenue (very difficult though most of the time), MRs merged, GitHub activity, tickets closed, projects led, initiatives taken, demos presented etc but this only goes so far.

All this leads me to believe that at the end of the day promotions are decided by various levels of managers getting together with a few beers, deciding how many total promotions can take place due to budget, and going through a list of names while deciding based on their gut but of course this can't be admitted as the official process.

It is frustrating that unlike other careers IE finance, law, medicine etc where performance can be directly tied to revenue (investment returns, client income, patient income) we have yet to design a standard for measuring impact for many software engineering roles.

For some narrow definition of problem - sure.

This article reminds me a bit of a 'ethics' issue in one of the top-name journals, Science or Nature, some years ago. Every article was about the ethics of sharing credit, granting tenure, awarding prizes, etc. Not a word about anything like the ethics of designing AI systems for the military to use in autonomous kill vehicles, reckless gain-of-function research with pathogenic microorganisms, etc.

So, here we have a discussion of how to reward and advance employees who are most aligned with the corporation's overall or specific goals, and certainly that makes sense, you want the best people in the right jobs - but everyone else is looking at Big Tech and wondering just what the goals are these days. There seems to be a lot of effort directed towards establishing monopoly power, avoiding the rise of market competition, ensuring a future of lucrative government contracts, including a big move into military AI contracts... whatever happened to 'don't be evil'?

Yes, it is not perfect analogy but it describes what team dynamics mean.

Which is to say that team members work "together" to achieve goals. They are not competing against each other - as evaluated by performance review processes.