That assumes most managers are skilled / engaged enough to correctly judge the quality of work put out by the individuals working under them.

My personal experience puts that at about 2/4 as far as previous managers go.

Sometimes the disconnect is that your idea of quality work is different from your manager's. Although at the end of the day, that's your manager's fault anyway (because keeping that alignment is literally the manager's job).

Sure, correlates highly, but not perfectly.

Some people just don't get along. It's a fact of life. Managers are humans, and they detest working every day with people who rub them the wrong way.

Couple that with upper management at Netflix pressuring managers to hit firing quotas, and you can be sure who is chosen to be sacrificed on the altar of that particular metric...

Further, to that point, any manager that dislikes a report is likely going to have a very difficult time getting quality work out of that report regardless of how talented they may be.

Ergo, the report's performance may be suffering, but entirely because they're being poorly managed.

Very true.

A pattern I've seen when relationship between employee and superior goes south is similar to disfavored step-child:

They get less praise for doing well, and more blame for any mistake.

This tends to escalate over time, and very often the employee's performance will degrade (since they won't get any credit anyway) which escalates the situation.

Often they "patch things up" a few times, but if they really aren't compatible, it's just a tenuous forced balance that will eventually break and plunge the relationship to even deeper depths.

Of course in this situation, all performance reviews for the employee are anywhere from slightly to heavily distorted in their disfavor.

This will always result in one of them eventually leaving the team, typically the employee.

It sucks that it’s not commonplace for managers to be accountable to their reports.

Google has kinda structured things in this way, at least as far as I can tell from the outside. Managers can’t decide who is hired or fired and performance reviews are done by committee.

Seems pretty egalitarian but I’m told that even still, politics becomes an issue.

I haven't worked at Google, but from what I've heard, politics becomes an even bigger issue. If you're only worried about your boss (and your boss's boss, presumably), that's like two people to impress. If you're going to get graded by a committee, not only do you have to do good work, you also have to make sure everybody on the committee knows you're doing good work; and you have to fight people on your team to get the opportunities to do visible good works.

This is all true, and usually means the report would do much better in a different management situation. Unfortunately for the report, it's more convenient to reassign (or fire) one report than bring in a new manager (who may have trouble working with all the other reports). Fair? Not traditionally. But in a capitalist sense, yes, it is.

This is so always the case.

Sometimes a business that is not a pure meritocracy may have managers who got the management gig because they’re someone’s relative or from some non-work-related connection. They may be afraid they’ll be exposed for not really being that qualified for their job.

If they have a report that produces really high quality work, they may be intimidated and hold off on the praise to avoid placing attention on the report, and on their own self-perceived inadequacies.

In addition to holding off on praise when it’s warranted they may also even write the report up for trivial things such as being 1 minute late to work. So the net effect for the report is more negative reviews than would otherwise be, and less positive ones than deserved.

Human nature is a hell of a thing.