I had the exact same experience, except that I had to do a self-review. Preface: In November of that year the org REALLY needed some important work done in a

I had the exact same experience, except that I had to do a self-review. Preface: In November of that year the org REALLY needed some important work done in a language that I didn't develop in. It was a super large update to a legacy PERL app that had NO TESTS WHATSOEVER. If it wasn't done by a deadline they would have lost their largest contract and very likely have been out of business. Did I mention that this org was part of a fortune 500 company? Since I was the ONLY developer left at the company who had any idea how things worked they pleaded with me to help them. Sensing opportunity, I rose to the occasion for a month of 60 to 80 hour weeks. I pulled off the release that would have been the nail in their coffin had it failed. A couple of months later we had to do self-reviews. It was my first one because for an unknown reason I hadn't received one the year prior. I was really proud that I'd pulled off the impossible so I gave myself a couple of fives in areas like "works hard" and "teamwork" or something. Then I had my official review with the C level exec of development, since they still hadn't replaced the director who was my former manager. He told me that we had to change the fives, because even though they existed the company felt you had to do something reeeeally awesome to get a five. Then he said fours were not impossible to get, but almost impossible to get, and since he was too busy running the company to really give me a review he'd give me the benefit of a doubt and reset the fives to threes. Next he knocked a couple of other stats down to twos, saying that I had too many threes. Then, he said unfortunately my average score was pretty much dead on the company average and that I only qualified for an average 2% raise. Aaaaand at that moment I realized that performance reviews were nothing more than a dog an pony show for HR to justify giving you a minimum raise, or documenting why you should be fired. I also realized that there was absolutely no reason to break my neck for them again, and the only way I was gong to improve my situation was to find another job. Which I did. Securing myself a 40% raise doing 1/2 the work in 25% of the knowledge domain.