I'm against the concept of performance reviews on principle for two reasons: 1. No matter how friendly and "two-way street" the manager tries to make it, the e

I'm against the concept of performance reviews on principle for two reasons: 1. No matter how friendly and "two-way street" the manager tries to make it, the engineers are still captive audience with their jobs on the line while the manager holds all the cards. Even if the engineer is encouraged to, and does, provide feedback, this feedback is, at best, in the air. 2. No matter the feedback, the outcome is pretty similar: negative feedback encourages the engineer to look for other options because of the desire to be valued better. Positive feedback encourages the developer to look for new horizons that might be more challenging and/or more rewarding. Of course, I don't have a solution, because the closest alternative I can think of also has its own problems. That is, for the team to be completely self-managed so engineers encourage each other by deliberately highlighting and logging the teammates' achievements and for these achievements to be rewarded eventually by management. Regardless, if performance reviews are inevitable, this article is a nice, if maybe too optimistic, approach. Ultimately, I'd bet that the number of the engineers he manages who considered that his reviews were, at best, the best of a bad situation is more than zero.