[ereyes01]

My first performance review came 6 months after I started at IBM. I was basically told that I did everything perfectly but I still got what amounted to a middling "satisfactory" rating. My manager told me that I will get a better score next year if I change nothing about my performance, and the "satisfactory" rating was due to company policy and my not having worked there a full year yet. I later learned that managers have a budget of how many good/medium/bad ratings they can hand out, and the choice of who gets what is 100% arbitrary and up to the manager. Big company politics I guess <shrug>. I proceeded to have many much better years after that, fortunately.