At Google, "Perv" history is part of the transfer packet, which means that people with average political-success (sorry, I mean "performance") histories become immobile, creating a low-morale underclass that is good for mailing-list drama but bad for the company. It turns average employees and no-fault lack-of-fit cases into problem employees who have to be pushed out. It's disgusting, and people who believe this is okay shouldn't be allowed to make decisions that affect other people. Or drive. Or breathe.
I know that practice is now typical in companies, but it's morally indefensible. Having "Don't Be Evil" as a motto is no excuse. I think Google is a great company in many ways and I have a lot of respect for the engineers I met there, but the people who designed "Perf" belong in jail for the billions of dollars of shareholder value that they torched for no good reason.
Have a bad year, get "underperformed". (I dare anyone to have a long career without having a bad year at some point).
Ding! Now it's really hard to move until you've scorched that badness from your record. Your mission is to get a bunch of good reviews, or get promoted, or find a sympathetic ex-manager who's willing to hire you anyway (this is why you need a network, and one reason why the "patron" mechanism emerged -- the patron model compensates for a broken review system and a bunch of busted policies that surround it).
I've been in the software biz 30+ years and I've had really horrible reviews 3-4 times. It can be devastating if you're in an organization run by robotic principles. [btw, I'm not a bozo. You only have my word for that, I know . . . but I'm not :-) ]
I believe you. Bad reviews have a lot more to do with politics than anything "performance" related.
Making the review part of the transfer packet is one of the worst corporate "innovations" designed. It's not just mean-spirited and immoral (because it gives managers a way to keep people captive). It also makes the review process totally pointless. An honest review needs to be between the manager and employee. Here's what you did right, here's what you did wrong. If it starts having long-term effects on the employee's career, then you can no longer have an honest review process because the stakes are too high. There are two options. (1) Give everyone high ratings they don't deserve, so your employees still like you, making the "review" pointless. (2) Give a few bad ratings, and turn no-fault lack-of-fit cases that would usually be resolved with transfer into outright wars that burn up a lot of time and energy and generally hurt the company.
What is wrong with a manager who is considering bringing you onto their team wanting to know about your past performance at the company? I bet that happens at EVERY company. It certainly did at Microsoft.
Because software development is not the 100 metres. You could spend weeks on a particularly elusive and obscure bug and change one line of code. While you were doing that, your colleague built 2 new 'oh wow' features, banging out hundreds of lines. There is no standardised measurement for 'performance' that can rank those two achievements objectively, so to assess performance, it comes down to the subjective opinion, motivations and political goals of the 'assessor'.
More to the point, if the subjective performance metric rewards the latter and punishes the former, the net result is more features AND more bugs.
Of course, the manager is going to want to know. People would rather have information than not have it, even if it's wildly inappropriate.
Microsoft was destroyed by stack-ranking and the global visibility of political-success review (I mean, "performance review") history. Are you seriously trying to use Microsoft to make a case?
I know that practice is now typical in companies, but it's morally indefensible. Having "Don't Be Evil" as a motto is no excuse. I think Google is a great company in many ways and I have a lot of respect for the engineers I met there, but the people who designed "Perf" belong in jail for the billions of dollars of shareholder value that they torched for no good reason.