The blue light from the monitor is currently eating my retinas while I stare at a dropdown menu that offers four variants of the word “Satisfactory.” My hand is cramping-a dull, rhythmic throb in the base of my thumb-from clicking through 41 different sub-tabs of a talent management system that was clearly designed by someone who hates both talent and management. I have been sitting here for 111 minutes trying to justify why a human being I like and respect should receive a 3.1% raise instead of a 2.1% raise, and the only way to do that is to pretend I remember exactly what they said in a meeting back in February.

It is a lie. We all know it is a lie. But we perform the liturgy anyway because the HR gods demand a paper trail that can withstand a deposition. I recently tried to build a DIY ladder shelf I saw on Pinterest-one of those ‘simple weekend projects’ that promises rustic charm but delivers only splinters and a profound sense of personal failure. I followed the instructions. I bought the reclaimed wood. I even used a level. But the final product is leaning at a 11-degree angle, and if you put more than two books on it, the whole structure groans like a haunted house. My performance review process feels exactly like that shelf: it looks like a functional system from a distance, but the structural integrity is a complete fabrication.

Take Sage K.L., for example. Sage is a mattress firmness tester. It’s a job that sounds like a dream until you realize it involves laying on 51 different prototypes a day and assigning a numerical value to ‘supportive yet yielding.’ Sage is brilliant at it. They have a calibrated spine. But how do you put ‘calibrated spine’ into a corporate competency framework? You don’t. You tick a box that says ‘Technical Proficiency’ and then write a paragraph about ‘proactive communication’ because Sage forgot to CC a director on one email back in March. That one forgotten CC will now haunt Sage’s compensation for the next 12 months, not because it matters, but because I need a ‘Development Area’ to make the review look balanced.

If I give everyone an ‘Exceeds Expectations,’ the system flags it. The software literally turns red, as if I’ve committed a digital sin. So, I have to find reasons to demote people’s reality to fit the fiscal constraints.

I’ve caught myself doing it. I’ve sat there, looking at a brilliant employee, and thought, “If I give her a 5, I have to give someone else a 2 to keep the average at 3.1.” So I look for flaws. I manufacture them. It feels like a betrayal, yet the bureaucracy demands it.

And let’s talk about the recency effect. My brain is a sieve. I can’t remember what I had for lunch on Tuesday, let alone how my team performed 11 months ago. But because the system requires a full year’s narrative, the events of the last 31 days take on a disproportionate weight. It’s the ultimate gaslighting. We tell employees we value their long-term contributions while judging them on their most recent stumble.

This lack of transparency is where the bitterness starts to rot the foundation of a company. When systems are opaque, trust evaporates. People want to know that the metrics they are being judged on are real, not some arbitrary 9-box grid designed to justify a pre-determined bonus. In a world where you just want to know what you’re getting for your effort-much like when you’re looking for a clear price tag and technical specs at

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-the corporate performance review offers nothing but fog and mirrors. You wouldn’t buy a TV based on a vague ‘satisfactory’ rating from a guy who hasn’t seen the screen since last winter, yet we expect people to base their entire career trajectories on exactly that kind of data.

The irony is that real feedback happens in the hallway. It happens in the 31-second Slack message that says “that slide deck was killer.” But the formal review kills that honesty. The moment a document becomes a legal record, the truth flees the room. We start speaking in ‘HR-ese’-that weird, sanitized dialect where ‘difficult to work with’ becomes ‘could benefit from diversifying interpersonal approach strategies.’

Sage K.L. told me once that the hardest part of testing mattresses isn’t the firmness; it’s the expectation of consistency. A mattress changes over time. It sags. It settles. Humans are the same. We have months where we are 11/10 and months where we are 4/10 because our kid is sick or our DIY Pinterest shelf fell on our foot. A performance review tries to flatten that human oscillation into a single, static number. It’s an insult to the complexity of human effort.

If we were honest, we’d admit the review is for the company, not the employee. It’s a defense mechanism against lawsuits. It’s a way to document ‘underperformance’ so that when layoffs come, there’s a paper trail that looks objective. It’s a mechanism for social control, ensuring that people stay within the narrow lanes of ‘corporate culture.’

I’m looking at my Pinterest shelf right now. One of the brackets is held on by a single screw that I stripped because I was in a rush. It’s the perfect metaphor for my last 11 performance reviews. They are held together by stripped screws and hope. We keep adding more ‘competencies’ and ‘values’ to the forms, thinking that more data will lead to more truth.

What if we just stopped? What if we decoupled compensation from the annual ‘talk’? What if we treated people like Sage-experts in their craft-and gave them the tools they needed when they needed them, rather than a report card once a year? The anxiety that builds up around ‘Review Season’ is a massive drain on productivity. For 21 days every year, the entire office enters a state of performative busyness, everyone trying to look as ‘Essential’ as possible. It’s a theater of the absurd where the tickets are paid for in stress and the reviews are written in invisible ink.