It doesn't matter much how they measure if it's empirical. Once they say the scoring system, all the work that scores well gets done, and the work that resists measurement does not get done.
The obvious example was writing eng docs. It was probably the single most helpful things you could do with your time, but there was no way to get credit because we couldn't say exactly how much time your docs might have saved others (the quantifiable impact from your work). That meant that we only ever developed a greater and greater unfilled need for docs, but it only ever got riskier and riskier to your career to try to dive into that work.
People were split on how to handle this. Some said "do the work that most needs doing and the perf review system will work it out long term." Other said, "just play the perf game to win."
I listened to the first group because I'm what you call a "believer." In a tech role I think my responsibility is primarily to users. I was let go (escorted off campus) after bottoming out a stack ranking during a half in which I did a lot of great work for the company that half (I think) but utterly failed to get a good score by the rules of the perf game (specifically I missed the deadline to land a very large PR and so most of my work for the half failed to make the key criteria for perf review: it had to be *landed* impact)
I think I took it graciously, but also I will never think of these companies as a home or a family again.
The obvious example was writing eng docs. It was probably the single most helpful things you could do with your time, but there was no way to get credit because we couldn't say exactly how much time your docs might have saved others (the quantifiable impact from your work). That meant that we only ever developed a greater and greater unfilled need for docs, but it only ever got riskier and riskier to your career to try to dive into that work.
People were split on how to handle this. Some said "do the work that most needs doing and the perf review system will work it out long term." Other said, "just play the perf game to win."
I listened to the first group because I'm what you call a "believer." In a tech role I think my responsibility is primarily to users. I was let go (escorted off campus) after bottoming out a stack ranking during a half in which I did a lot of great work for the company that half (I think) but utterly failed to get a good score by the rules of the perf game (specifically I missed the deadline to land a very large PR and so most of my work for the half failed to make the key criteria for perf review: it had to be *landed* impact)
I think I took it graciously, but also I will never think of these companies as a home or a family again.