[jecxjo]

I worked for a large global company and this matched exactly what I was seeing. I had projects with year or more development cycles before something was deliverable so "meets expectations" was difficult when you had nothing to show for your work as they only cares about final results. We even had an unwritten rule where everyone must have at a minimum two "needs improvement" because "everyone should be working on making themselves better." This lead to a dark rabbit hole and a lot of engineers leaving.

With such a messed up evaluation process engineering demanded direct, documented process for doing evaluations. Instead we had managers trying to gauge output based on defects fixed and lines of code committed. You could tell management had no clue.

[goatinaboat]

This lead to a dark rabbit hole and a lot of engineers leaving.

But, I bet, a large and well-resourced HR department, which was the real goal. Who invented the system, after all.