It's pretty much the performance culture. Everyone is trying to work towards meeting the bar on their yearly perf review over everything else.

I naturally try to do what I think is best for the company and my team. So this kind of high pressure performance review system adds what seems like an unnecessary level of stress to me.

Expectations are also not clear cut. You're essentially "calibrated" or ranked against your peers. So there is no clear goal to achieve - you just work as hard as possible and hope you did a good job compared to others of your level.

From what I understand, having a great manager makes this all much less stressful. But my manager is pretty much hands off, so this means I really have to figure it out on my own and advocate for myself a lot.

I imagine once I have a few years of reviews under the belt, I'll know what to do and it will be less stressful. But I think the first couple years of perf reviews is very tough.