[badcodehere]

We just finished our first year of formal performance appraisals (self-review, review by manager, etc).

The best thing I can say in favor of the current system is that the managers I know realize that it's a mess/work in progress. It seems like the poorly aligned official standards are being duly ignored for now. I'm not a fan of subjective evaluations, but they're better than completely random "objective" ones. We'll see how it goes in a year or two.

How is it a mess? Line engineers and managers had opposing goals (maximizing bug counts fixed, minimizing bugs--and those are terrible metrics even without the mismatch), individuals had goals that had no relation to their work, or which they had no power to affect.

Team leads had to give feedback, but there was zero structured discussion about standards: I had to ask a manager how to translate my evaluation of a developer into a numeric scale.

My manager had to stack rank 5 people on a 1-5 scale. This was theoretically not just ranking "first" through "last", but ranking from "exceptional" through "unacceptable".