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by vonmoltke
4811 days ago
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> The problem is that most companies make it a lot harder to move internally than they advertise. They have ridiculous "headcount" issues and it's almost impossible to move in most firms without a top-20% performance record... but impossible to get a top-20% review unless your manager sees you as having staying power. So you have to play dishonest political games, in most companies, to get the one big-company benefit (lateral mobility) that actually matters. >In fact, most companies are so fucked up on the matter of internal mobility that the only genuine time at which transfer's possible is shortly after a promotion, but managers rarely promote people who seem to have any interest in mobility. This was the driving reason I left my prior employer. I had no internal mobility without some sort of advocate, despite the large number of open reqs. At the end I got hit by the political double whammy of not having any support for a lateral transfer from my manager[1] and being on the 800lb gorilla project that was trying to draw people in from elsewhere at the time I was trying to leave. The company got away with shit like this, though, because most people thought that was just the way it was at large companies, and small companies were too risky and flaky. [1] I even got labelled "disloyal" in the heat of the moment for expressing the desire once. |
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Here's probably more than you care to read on this topic. I just finished it this morning: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/gervais-macle...
The short version, as pertains to what you experience, is that companies have (since Enron made it fashionable) included performance reviews in the transfer packet as a way of enabling managerial extortion (for the sake of project expediency, although it's unclear that it achieves that) and passive firing, reducing lawsuit risk. The passive-firing infrastructure is supposed to be there to make low-performers look objectively unwanted (lawsuit issues) but the headcount limitations and transfer blocks actually end up getting used against high-perfomers that their managers want to keep captive. Google (which has Enron-style performance reviews) has a well-documented problem with this.