There is a new system that has annual reviews rather than biannual reviews. It slightly changes the expected rating distributions and introduces a "meets most" rating that is between the old "needs improvement" and "consistently meets expectations" ratings. There is no expected PIP rate. It was developed in 2021 and rolled out early in 2022. The ratings changes were small compared to process changes, which are intended to make the entire system take way less time for everybody. The rollout and tooling was a disaster but it will hopefully improve over time.
People then leap off a reasoning cliff and assume that this means that everybody who is rated "not enough impact" or "meets most" in February will be fired. This would have required some pretty legendary economic foresight by the execs and it would require them to have done a lot of unnecessary work to redo the entire performance review process rather than just changing the ratings system.
I have no idea if Google will do layoffs. But the idea that GRAD was created to facilitate layoffs is fucking stupid.
I've been managing a team at Google for like six years now. I'm doing GRAD ratings literally today (spending too much time avoiding it on HN). I have not been told of an expected PIP rate either explicitly or through innuendo. In fact, I have never PIPed a single report in my entire time here and I've never even got a whiff of people being concerned about that.
From what I've heard - It's been changed to a yearly (instead of twice a year) and apparently there's been pressure to rate people at a higher standard with a simple 5 level impact score. 'Not enough impact'. 'Moderate impact'. 'Significant impact'. 'Outstanding impact'. 'Transformative impact'. This feels kind of like something akin to a bell curve with the peak in Significant. I assume the culling will be from the 'Not enough' and possibly 'Moderate' bins. For a complete picture we would also need to understand the old performance process. A Googler could fill us in as this change has happened only this year.
Google perf ratings have always been this bizarre thing where "Meets Expectations" was considered a bad review and you better get your act together. (Shame on you for just doing your job.) That curve doesn't sound too different, just new names for same old same old. Like a 1-5 where you'd be disappointed with anything below 4 but the names always had euphemistic cheerful names even when it was a shit review.
People then leap off a reasoning cliff and assume that this means that everybody who is rated "not enough impact" or "meets most" in February will be fired. This would have required some pretty legendary economic foresight by the execs and it would require them to have done a lot of unnecessary work to redo the entire performance review process rather than just changing the ratings system.
I have no idea if Google will do layoffs. But the idea that GRAD was created to facilitate layoffs is fucking stupid.