Thanks, I haven’t experienced that. How painful. I agree with other posters here when I read about your problem in these comments. Personally I think of my manager and performance review more as symptoms or results of a process, rather than the source of anything. Promoting myself - Github, LinkedIn, trainings and brown bag sessions for my coworkers, program completion emails, those are part of my job just as much as personal learning, architectural planning, and writing code. In fact because I don’t want to fear for my job, they are almost more important. Perhaps it’s not the ideal. But it’s the job description. There are so many pluses to what is essentially a god-level nine to five grind: freedom, intellectual work, lots of money and benefits, etc. I just accept that some of these non-ideal extras are part of my deal. Hope I’m not preaching, trying to help.

Thanks for sharing!

I loved giving a brown bag on Raspberry Pi project to my teammates. I know it's not a great work related topic, but installing and using linux and tips on securing it was at least tangentially related.

I have to say, I wish I made lots of money.

> someone else must be given a low rating to balance that out, even if they don't deserve it

I wonder how this kind of thinking starts. Is there any rationale for this?

In my company, employees grades have to follow a normal distribution (HR rule). Most people must be ranked average, some must be ranked above, some must be ranked below. Otherwise all managers would give above average grades to most people, because it makes them look better, avoid conflict, and everyone is always convinced they're above average. So HR forces managers to find some losers.

If a coworker is given an above average grade, it means I'm much less likely to get one.

But in practice it doesn't matter too much because managers tend to distribute grades depending on time since last promotion/significant raise, to be able to justify the next one.

The thinking is based on the budget and also to make managers show "managerial courage" that they are capable of delivering bad news.