Performance Reviews

I almost posted this as part of my own performance review as a critique on performance reviews themselves. But I thought about having to explain this to my manager, the one who will read it, and thought I should not include it.

Franz Kafka wrote about "isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers" according to wikipedia. His most famous work is about a salesman waking up to find himself as a giant bug. Kafka also prophesied workers becoming their own auditors. Since feedback is also gathered from managers and coworkers during performance reviews, there is an implicit incentive for me (and others doing their own review) to grade myself lower than what I deserve. The author Mark Fisher put it best: "The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don't worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing self-flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing."