The Great Performance Evaluation

For the past two hours you have been working on a bunch of self rating queries. You fail to comprehend the ones like " Rate yourself on your accountability"? Eh ? Nor can you understand how anybody can expect you to give yourself a rating of poor. So you unabashedly give yourself a rating of  good or excellent in nost of the categories. Still, despite your best efforts , you are forced to choose a poor for categories like "Rate your self based on th number of patents you have published". Finally you are satisfied .. you had to give youself a poor only for a couple.

After the two hours battle, you walk into the conference room, where your manager awaits you.. you smug and highly confident of your performance.Your manager smiles at you and says " So how do you think the past quarter/half year/year went by ? " You manage to mumble something like "It went great".

Manager - "You have been doing a great job. You have taken the opportunity given to you and delivered time and again in an excellent fasion. There is nothing much for you to worry. You have a very promising future. You are an asset to the team and the team members look upto you . Just continue like this."

You start swelling up with pride. Your eyes are shining. You start to feel you are the best s/w engineer in the planet.

By this time your manager has started going through your ratings and you hear occasional hmmm's and mmm's from him. Then
Manager - "You see this this and this cannot be rated as excellent. Neither can these be rated as good".

You wait.. You almost expect him to say "you cannot rate these as poor also". After a minute or so you realise that it  is not going to happen and he is waiting for you to react.

You  - " I have done this this this .... blah blah.. "

You speak non stop praising yourself for almost 5 minutes and you finally conclude with " I do assuredly deserve these ratings."

Manager - "Agreed.. But you still lack in responding to email within 2 minutes of recieving them. Your average is like 5 minutes. Also you lack in catering to 10 different things at a time . Plus you were not collaborative enough with team members who are 10000 miles away"

You have nothing to respond to this but ok, but you do end thinking how you can make youself omnipresent. So after 10 minutes of start of  the meeting you have almost all your excellent ratings pulled down to good, your "goods" pulled down to "satisfactory' and you "satisfactories" pulled down to "poor".You realise that the original "poors" could have been excellent as well. Wouldn't have made an iota of difference.

Next,

Manager - "Tell me, what do you think about the team. What do you think we have to improve as a team?"

You - "The cross team collaboration and syncronization is very poor." Some more of such stuff. " Also our team members in US do not  have a clue as to what we do here despite repeated trainings."

Manager -  "That is a good point. I  take it upon myself to conduct 10 more meetings a week for cross team syncronization. Also I give you an action item to prepare ppts so that you can train your colleagues abroad on our work here."

You sigh. You wish you had not opend your mouth at all.

Manager - "Anything more? "

You decide to try once more.

You - "The cross team interractions are so bad that sometimes two people end up doing the same thing. It is a total waste of effort. You feel dejected when this happens."

Manager - "You should not feel dejected. You should be more mature. Also you need to be more aggressive so that you get your code out first before the other person. Any other queries ?"

You - "Will I get my promotion this year? Also will the hikes be good?"

Manager - "That is not in my hands. You continue doing your job without any expectations. Also as I said you need to more aggressive.You should also try to prioritize and focus on you job. Not get into everything at once."

You start to feel as if you are listening to a discourse from Bhagvath Gita. Plus hadnt this guy just now told you , you should try to do 10 different things at a time ? You are now confused.

Manager - "So any feedbacks for me?"

You can think of numerous "interesting" stuff to tell him. But

You  - "No , nothing. You are perfect."

Manager - "Ok. So lets schedule one more meeting to close on this."

You - "I would be delighted to schedule one more meeting of this sort."

And with that both of you walk out of the conference room.

This my friends is what they call PERFORMANCE EVALUATION. Bah!! Gah!! Pah!!!

Picture - Courtsey dilbert.com from where I subscribe to daily comic strips.
Gah - Courtsey the numerous Enid Blyton novels I used to read as a kid.
Pah - Courtsey Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strips which I simply adore.

PS -> No, I did not have my performance evaluation last week.