[yttrium]

I recently moved from a large (40k employees) company to a small one (600).

Performance reviews at the large company always involve a lot of paperwork, self reviews, and hoping that your manager gives you good feedback. Reviews are rated from 1-5 where 3 is the midpoint and is considered 'acceptable'. Tbh, I started as an intern there, and I can recall three or four times someone scored 4+ off the top of my head. Getting a 3 was so trivially easy it was almost insulting. Getting a 5 once required a lot of work outside of the office and usually meant you wouldn't be able to get it again the following cycle.

Most of these incentive systems are just focused around being the best personal brand manager anyway, because they incentivize employees to sign up for the shittiest projects and then make a lot of noise and throw around a lot of money and bullshit to make sure everyone knows that they're singlehandedly saving the company.

At the small company, we mostly do small one on ones, and you set some yearly goals for each fiscal year that you get evaluated against. There aren't any 'metrics' involved, and it seems mostly like it's aggregation of subjective reviews from superiors and coworkers. This approach seems to work well for everyone. We have a really technical developer who doesn't really do the social game (and he's remote) and he does excellent every year. I'm more of a mix (I like to communicate with endusers and so on) and I did well this year too.

Frankly, I think the biggest thing is just getting out of big corporate environments. They're tough for mental health, and they're tough to get ahead in.