Just a quick post: some of you enjoy posting information relevant to your review, both looking at numbers and a critical view of the message given to you. It has started to happen a bit in the last post so I'm just going to capitulate and put this small post up for the 2009 Annual Review share and compare.
Oh, and obviously grab yourself a few grains of salt. Folks seem to like this format:
- L# (promo'd?)
- (Exceeded|Achieved|Underperformed) / (20|70|10)
- Bonus $K
- Stock $K
- (Promo $K)
- Optional comments about Division / Group, discipline, impression of review
The promotion budget is significantly less this year meaning that if you got promoted you're really at the top of the heap. If you didn't, well, you're going into a long line.
And as we know: no merit raises this year (though you will get a raise if you're promoted). But bonus and stock awards are the same, ensuring we have the flexibility to reward our top performers.
I would expect that the Underperformed Microsofties have already been managed out. If you are an Achieved/10% then I'd expect you're given a very short term idea of what success looks like and can expect to be closely managed. Great time to update that resume and see what else is going on.
I found a bunch of old reviews of mine recently. Flipping through the review forms started with refreshing simplicity from over a decade ago, rapidly turning into confusing churn (company value ratings and all that crap), to now a fragmented collection of task-driven thoughts. While it's nice that the review form has pretty much stuck to the current form now and we don't have new components coming and going (yeah schema?) it really doesn't compare to the first couple of reviews I did at Microsoft.
Of course, I had great managers who knew how to give concise feedback, both daily and as part of my review. Where you don't have demonstrated collective excellence, you have process.
