The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving in the quiet hum of the office after everyone else has gone home. That rhythmic, judgmental pulse at the end of an empty sentence in a text box labeled: ‘Key Accomplishments, February.’

February. What even happened in February? There was a project, the one with the blue folders. Or was that March? The mind sifts through a year of digital sediment, trying to find a fossil worth displaying. You’re not trying to remember for yourself; you’re trying to remember for an audience of one who will likely spend 13 minutes skimming your words before a calibration meeting with other managers. A meeting where your year of work will be flattened into a single number, a word. ‘Exceeds.’ ‘Meets.’ A label that has less to do with your actual performance and more to do with a predetermined distribution curve sent down from on high. It feels less like a review and more like an autopsy on a year that’s not even dead yet.

I used to get so angry about this. I’d spend 23 hours crafting the perfect self-assessment, a masterful narrative of my professional triumphs. I’d list metrics, link to documents, quote positive feedback from emails. I saw it as a broken process, a colossal, systemic failure to recognize human contribution. A bug in the corporate operating system.

The Slicing Ceremony

Think of it this way. The company has already decided the budget for raises. Finance locked that in months ago. Let’s say it’s 3.3%. That’s the entire pie. The performance review isn’t a tool to determine how big the pie should be; it’s the elaborate, ritualized ceremony for slicing it. Your manager isn’t an advocate fighting for your worth; they are an administrator armed with a spreadsheet, tasked with distributing a fixed resource in a way that causes the least amount of organizational friction.

The Legal Archive

Its second, and perhaps more important, function is to create a paper trail. A clean, legally defensible record for the inevitable. When the time comes for a reduction in force, or when someone needs to be managed out, that collection of vaguely disappointing, lukewarm reviews becomes an ironclad defense. ‘As you can see from the documentation from the past three review cycles, performance has not met expectations.’ The language is sterile, impersonal, and legally bulletproof.

For years, I completely missed this. I thought I could beat the system with overwhelming evidence. One year, I logged every single accomplishment, every compliment, every extra hour, in a 13-page, single-spaced document. I had charts. I had testimonials. I built a case for my own excellence that felt as solid as one of Ahmed’s welds. I handed it to my manager with a sense of triumph. He looked at it, impressed by the sheer volume. ‘Wow, this is incredibly thorough,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a great year.’ Then came the inevitable turn. ‘The merit pool was set at 2.3% for the department this year, so we had to make some tough decisions.’ My 13 pages of evidence were annihilated by one number from a different department.

That disconnect from immediate, real-world feedback is what makes the process so demoralizing. We crave the kind of clarity Ahmed has. We want to know if the weld holds. Instead, we’re left trying to decipher the subtle difference between ‘consistently demonstrates’ and ‘frequently exhibits.’ It’s a language of shadows. This abstraction sends people searching for concrete truths elsewhere. It’s why so many of us have taken up hobbies like baking, gardening, or carpentry. You know immediately if the bread has risen, if the tomato is ripe. You don’t need a manager to tell you. It’s also why people will fall down a rabbit hole of research on the most random, tangible topics, suddenly needing to know the definitive answer to a question like sind kartoffeln gemüse. The search is for a solid fact in a world of corporate fog. It’s a small act of rebellion, finding a piece of ground truth that can’t be re-calibrated in a meeting you’re not invited to.

The system isn’t designed to make you feel seen; it’s designed to make you feel measured, categorized, and, if necessary, disposable, all under a protective legal shield. It has perfected the art of making a subjective, emotional, and deeply human process look like an objective, data-driven, and fair assessment.

It institutionalizes recency bias, rewarding the project that finished in October over the one that saved the company $373,000 back in March. It encourages a specific kind of performative work-the kind that is easily visible and quantifiable, even if it’s not the most valuable. It quietly punishes the steady, reliable people who prevent fires, because preventing a fire doesn’t show up on a list of accomplishments. Extinguishing one does.

So what do you do? Stop trying to win the game. Stop writing the 13-page manifesto. Recognize the machine for what it is. Pour your energy into the work itself, into your craft.