As I said, I get why this might in fact be necessary. I simply find it dehumanizing and arbitrary and so I choose to avoid such situations. At the hospital wher

As I said, I get why this might in fact be necessary. I simply find it dehumanizing and arbitrary and so I choose to avoid such situations. At the hospital where my wife works their review categories are graded from 1 - 3. So yeah you have a paper trail, but how useful can it honestly be? For a manager who is interested in knowing an employee's real strengths and weaknesses it's nearly useless. For a manager who just needs to fill in an upstream form, or quickly find a numeric justification for a decision, maybe these numbers make sense and are useful... but how would you feel if a decision on promoting you were made on such a basis, or if it went against you because someone graded you a 2 and another person a 3 in some category? And for what it's worth performance reviews are not a remedy for cases like Balwani's. Anything like that which said something different from what the CEO wished the perception to be would simply have been rewritten/squashed/ignored. At least in a small company you can get a clear perception that this kind of thing is going on and get out, or make a conscious decision to stay because you think you'll be showered in filthy lucre or whatever.