I've never, ever felt like my performance designation actually matched reality, and this has spanned three companies so far.

When I got promoted, it was because I cut my hair (the owner was a very stodgy boomer-type person). When I got "partially meets", it was because I had been put on an impossible project and my pleas of "this is literally impossible in the time given, it will minimally take X+3mo" were apparently not communicated upwards and the project missing was taken personally by my manager-of-manager-of-managers who apparently ensured I was given that designation. I've gotten "exceeds" when I've known I was slow (because I had a 2-month-old and the US gives far too little parental leave), and gotten "meets" when I smashed things out of the park.

All of this extends to my peers I've known well. One of the best engineers I've known was managed out of the company outside of a performance cycle because he was a bit of a grumpy-type person (but not in a way that I minded at all, I found him pretty endearing).

I don't really know how to fix the system, especially since as an IC I'm kept blind to most of its inner workings and even my EMs have not had the full story.

The most I've managed to synthesize is:

- I like it best when my direct manager has >80% of the control over my final designation. They know my work best, and when there is little meddling from above (there is ALWAYS meddling from above, of course), this seems to work out best.

- Even with above, perf is mostly bullshit politics. It hardly matters what your actual work is like - if people like you, as long as you're marginally useful, you're probably going to be retained; if people don't like you, you're going to be hard-pressed to get promoted or not be the first one canned if things turn down slightly. Reality is highly malleable and people will craft whatever narratives they need to to get the things they want done.

The second bullet is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people like you, you'll get more work and the work you get will be more impactful. If people don't like you, people won't mind setting you to the annoying thankless tasks.

I think I want my next job to be a very small team. I've worked at 10k people orgs and 50-100 person orgs, but never one with <10 engineers. I wonder what it would be like to be in an org where everyone ~knows how everyone else's perf is going. I can typically identify when someone's going to be in hot water, but only if I'm close enough to their work.