I have never gone through the same performance review process two years in a row. And despite all the tweaking and rejiggering, and employer changes, none have

I have never gone through the same performance review process two years in a row. And despite all the tweaking and rejiggering, and employer changes, none have ever been able to capture a meaningful metric for performance. Nor have they ever resulted in a salary increase that meaningfully competes with moving on to another company. The only positive thing I can say about it is that it's less stressful than the interview process, which is my only reason for staying somewhere that I'm not particularly happy. The only meaningful self-appraisal is "can I make more money doing the same work for someone else?" And the only meaningful goals are "build my resume to make myself a more valuable employee for any company, not necessarily my current employer." It has always been a waste of time to require the employee's participation in the review process. We are perfectly capable of appraising ourselves, and when we do it, we are always doing it in the context of the whole job market, and not just one company. But no one is ever going to admit "my goal is to jump ship for your leading competitor within the next year and get 20% more pay for doing exactly the same work." We will happily tell the current employer "I plan to increase meaningless metric X by Y% of completely subjective measurement units this year." We might even put that on our resumes, and pretend it's not bullshit in an interview. It's pants-on-head stupid. Just hire managers that know how to assess the performance of their reports for whatever it is they specifically do, and trust them to do it to the best of their ability. The amount of cargo-culting used to prop up those who are completely incompetent to assemble a working team and keep it humming is ridiculous. Eventually, these companies are going to have to promote more tech workers into tech management, because they'll be the only ones that actually know what good tech work looks like. Slapping on the same performance appraisal process used by the sales department from the top-down just isn't going to get around that.