Performance review

Performance Review is a process that companies promote as a fair way to promote career growth and share benefits among employees. In fact, this process is far from fair and disadvantageous for employees for the following reasons:

1. The system is closed to employees. You cannot see the results of your colleagues' reviews, you cannot influence the final grade. It is not uncommon for you to receive the majority of positive feedback from your colleagues, but all it takes is one negative review for your manager to make an “objective decision” to lower your rating. Sometimes just the opinion of your manager is enough for him to lower your final grade, regardless of positive feedback. PR only creates the appearance of a collective assessment of your work, but in fact its result is formed by your manager, who is forced to pursue his own KPI, and you have no way to influence this.

2. There are no objective assessment methods. The process in which you tell management what you did during the reporting period is counterintuitive. The entire period the management was busy with some of its own affairs, and now you need to tell us what you did that was valuable for the company. And the main problem here is to show the result of the work visible to management. This means that your colleague who wrote a new service from scratch is in a much better situation than your edits to legacy services, the code of which has been supported since the 1990s. Even if they help save the business a lot of money in the long run. You can, of course, assume that your management is objective and knowledgeable enough to understand the complexity and necessity of your work with legacy code and to appreciate you. But then why does such management need PR if it is already aware of your contribution to the common cause?

3. PR understates your market value. So you want to increase your salary. The company offers a solution – for this you need to show a score above average at the next PR. If your work tasks allow it, then this may be a good option. But getting an estimate above average is usually harder than getting an offer from another company for the amount you want. There are also company policies that say you cannot increase your salary above a certain threshold, as, for example, in Ozone. Bottom line, if you choose the PR route, you get more work done for less pay. If you believe in the fairness of PR, then for companies this is a very effective tool for reducing your value, and therefore their own costs.

4. PR is often used to justify cuts. Because the process is closed, it's entirely possible for you to get good grades year after year only to suddenly get a bad grade because the company needs to make layoffs. We know of such cases in Dodo and Avito, for example. The most disgusting thing about this is that the company may not recognize the fact of layoffs, and will justify all layoffs by the ineffectiveness of those being laid off. It seems like this is exactly the tactic chosen in VK.

Do you really want fair evaluation of your work? Unite.