[blacksmith_tb]

Hmm, I am trying to picture how it would be different to pretend to solicit my honest opinion of my work for the last year, versus my managers' doing even the most rudimentary sort of pass/fail appraisal. It all requires a lot of earnestly looking the other way - did I do some good work, sure; some clever things, yes, here and there; did I also slog through mountains of work that seemed obviously dumb/wrongheaded/not-long-for-this-world? Did I ever, but we won't talk about that. Even if I try to think of my best-ever 'save the day' moments, or the biggest screwups I've made, none of that really makes it into the reviews, or if it does, it doesn't seem to change the outcome. It'd be sort of nice to have simple points-based scoring, doing the basics gets you X, doing something excellent/hard/very profitable adds a few points, making a colossal screwup costs you some points, raises and/or bonuses doled out accordingly.