[ObviousScience]

I generally got excellents on performance reviews for my brief, entry level stint at Big Corp.

I still felt demotivated by the whole process, because it was a forced ranking of the system that wasted the whole teams time to say what everyone had already known: some of us did more work, some of us did less, and some of us were on a faster upward trajectory than others.

It turns out that it doesn't actually motivate any of your employees to throw social hierarchies in their face -- it only causes tension and undue focus on micro-social hierarchies (those heiarchies within a social class, eg, the hierarchy of entry level tech workers).