[momothereal]

You write down some goals and discuss with direct supervisor. After 1 year, another meeting to see how well you did, and you get a rating like "Succeeded", "Succeeded+" or even "Excelled". Set some new goals for the next year, rinse and repeat.

For promotions, you give a 1-2hr presentation on the work you've done to a group of other developers and managers not directly working with you. Work done needs to match 51% of the competencies to go to the next level. Usually the pay increase is 10% per level (promotion).

It's practically impossible to get fired. Only way is up.

[gravypod]

That sounds pretty ideal. Where do you work? Has this scaled to a large size?

[momothereal]

Public service, in Canada :)

AFAIK every department follows this structure for performance[1], so that's about 200k employees.

The promotion system is a bit special for my department, since it's tailored for software engineers (about 40% of the department). The rest of the public service has a more competitive system, more similar to the private sector.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services...