Extremely Lame

Is there anything more ridiculously dishonest than performance reviews? The inanity behind them is just staggering. The ones at my workplace have seven different ratings, running the gamut from “You Suck” to “We’re Not Worthy.” Seven different ratings, so naturally, everyone got the one right in the middle. EVERY LAST ONE OF US. The guy that steals stuff from work? Yep. The guy who is more concerned with recycling than with paying attention to the plant? Yep. The guy who goes way above and beyond what’s required of him? Yep. They’re all the same. Why even bother with the charade if everyone’s going to get the same review?

At least it’s better than last year’s reviews. These are just the six month reviews. The ones from six months ago, they made us fill them out ourselves! It completely defeats the purpose of performance reviews if, you know, YOU DON’T ACTUALLY RATE OUR PERFORMANCE. How are we supposed to improve our work if you never tell us what we’re doing wrong?

Even after we turned in our performance reviews, they were changed each step of management so they could justify the amount of raises people did or did not get. A nice side effect of this nonsense was that we had read through and sign the same performance review with different marks three separate times. Hell, why even bother with improving our performance? What impetus is there for improving ourselves when you show us just how arbitrary those numbers are?

Performance reviews in the military were every bit as worthless. It was deemed from on high that you could only have so many 5s (Early Promote), so many 4s (Must Promote), and the rest were 3s (Promotable) unless you were a real screw-up, in which case you could get a 2 (Needs Improvement). Hell, they even have it in writing (pdf). The problem with this is that these percentages trickled all the way to the lowest unit. You could have a division of lazy boors on one boat, every last one of them not worth the uniform he or she is wearing. Despite that, at least one of them is going to get a 5.

Across the pier you have another boat, only their division is full of people who exemplify what it is to be a sailor. All of them are so knowledgeable that they make salty master chiefs look like nubs (non-useful bodies). Every last one of them could have their uniforms so starched that someone could cut themselves on their creases. And yet? Fully half of them will be simply ranked as “Promotable.”