“This person is ready for promotion today.” I would wager the percentage of employees working at a firm that still participates in promotion culture is low and

“This person is ready for promotion today.” I would wager the percentage of employees working at a firm that still participates in promotion culture is low and dropping. In other words "ready for a promotion" for most people in 2015 means they're going to quit soon and get a higher level position at another firm. I'm sure there still exist individual companies and maybe unusual and rare fields where promotion culture still exists, but it seems very rare and unusual. Meanwhile in most areas outside SV/NYC computer programming during bubbles, there is a large excess of qualified workers vs positions. For example in K12 education the state-U system graduates twice as many teachers as there are open positions for all new and past grads to apply for. It doesn't matter if they are in the top half that got hired because they are the best, or the most politically untouchable, or the most attractive, a year after hiring at review time they're still going to be that top half. So there's nobody to give a hard time to in a review, because that lower half or lower 3/4 or whatever in any professional field are already working at Starbucks or as a waiter or bartender. The world has "needs improvement" kindergarten teachers, but they don't work at your neighborhood school, they never got a job in teaching and they serve you beer at the bar, for example. The economy is in permanent contraction and the general population and higher-ed sector are in permanent expansion for many years now, outside bubble segments of the economy, so hiring one of the bad workers strongly reflects on a managers interview skills, making it even harder to admit anyone is below "excellent". Meanwhile increased labor mobility for the few that are employed means a review a couple years back, is a couple employers ago, so it is inaccessible and irrelevant, so its not like the wasted effort today will pay off in ten years. Maybe a review in 1950 would come in handy at the same employer in 1960 to select a new director, but the firm has no loyalty to the employee and therefore the employee has no loyalty to the firm, for at least three human generations now, so its been culturally bred out of us. So the folks at the top of a team will interpret an attaboy as "start applying for higher level jobs elsewhere" and economic realities mean you don't have truly low performance employees to crack the whip upon, making the whole dog and pony show a waste of time for all involved. This leads to an attitude of just pencil whip the process to get the meaningless metric of "accomplished reviews" up to 100% and be done with it. Once the folks who've been pencil whipping it for their whole careers make it up high enough, its finally politically possible to discuss getting rid of the waste of time. So here we finally are.