counterpoint: the harder he tries to provide value to the business, the business typically only offers the exact same basic salary value to him.

sure, there are exceptions -- but they are exceptions.

my career has taught me that adding as much value as you see the potential for adding is a surefire way to get a promotion, complete with an extra 2% salary and the new expectation of you continuing to work at 110%.

oh yeah, and you get a good reference.

but seriously give me a break. if you're in a position to add so much value to a company, you should be elsewhere in another company, two levels up. good companies don't leave easy pickings hanging.

It’s all virtue-signaling in the end, and a manager from the same background is going to be more receptive to virtue-signaling from their own cultural background than from someone with a different background.

Formal reviews distill virtue signaling into a standard process with explicit rules rather than an informal set of norms that individuals may or may not be aware of.

I think there are a lot of ways to make the rules explicit that don't require formal reviews. A formal review process can be equally biased by incentivizing people to game the system by targeting easy wins rather than tackling harder, more important problems.

For instance, tackling existing bugs or documenting code often seems to be undervalued compared with writing new code, when writing new code often just introduces new bugs and requires new documentation. If you start tracking bugs, people will benefit from creating and tackling easy bugs, while tackling harder bugs is effectively a punishment.

Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Regardless, defined performance metrics are better than none at all. You have to create the formality around performance evaluation or else you end up with those who understand the informal rules outperforming those who don’t simply because they grew up in a certain environment. I don’t think anyone would claim that’s fair, but that’s how the “meritocracy” works when you don’t define these things formally.

On the flip side, when you do define these things formally, you end up with those who can and will game the formal rules more effectively outperforming those who don't. This isn't fair either, and there are probably all sorts of biases in who is willing and able to game such metrics (for example, I have seen men game them more often).

Evaluating performance is tough. Evaluating performance without greatly distorting incentives is much tougher. I agree fairness should be a consideration, but it is not the primary purpose of a business.

By not defining them, you leave the priorities of the business up to what amounts to a popularity contest with each manager. Raises and promotions thus get handed out to the people who are most likable.

Senior executives (usually VP and above) at major companies typically sign contracts explicitly outlining their goals for the next 12-24 months. They are incentivized or fired based on meeting those goals. And it’s the executives who demand this, not the companies.

Point being, if the executives are demanding clear performance goals for themselves, it’s probably good practice. Managers typically are not responsive to demands from below, so guess where the mandate has to come from.

You can signal virtue by actually being virtuous, or you can just talk about it.

Give me somebody who can actually do the work instead of talking about how great they are — or about how unfair others are to them.

Once you start to manage people for real, you’ll realize that the truth is often very subjective and it’s easy to appear awesome to your boss without being so when he has 8 other people to evaluate.

Getting to the bottom of it all is hard, if not impossible given the power imbalance. So yeah, virtue signaling is important when different cultures teach you to show virtue in different ways.