#performancereview

I recently returned to work after taking FMLA leave. Within my first week back, my manager began closely scrutinizing my schedule, availability, and office presence.

He asked me to specify my working hours, identify my usual desk location, and notify him whenever I sit at a different seat. He has also questioned where I am and made comments about my availability. This level of monitoring feels noticeably different from how things were before my leave.

More recently, I was verbally reprimanded for taking time off using my remaining PTO. On the first day of return from FMLA I did mention I may need to use my PTO and I gave him 3 weeks of notice for my PTO. He said as a new director (I was hired as an individual contributor) in the team, I should explain what happens to my projects when I take time off. That I should obtain his permission before applying for leave. That I should come up with a strategy and plan on how my work should be done and who should do it. I’m new to the team (6 months).

I explained that I already gave him a heads-up on my first day of return, and I'm an individual contributor, not a manager, and that I am entitled to use my available PTO. I understand that I have a responsibility to document project status, communicate outstanding tasks, and provide handover information. However, I felt that the conversation was more about making me feel guilty for taking time off.
He hasn't given me a great performance review this year.

The working relationship was already strained before my leave. Now I feel constantly watched, questioned, and evaluated. I dread going to work and find myself overanalyzing his messages and interactions.

Could this sudden increased scrutiny indicate that the manager together with HR is documenting to let me go?

Are dogshit. I’ve been labeled a high performer for over a decade and even got ranked high in our old system before the previous one. Now all of a sudden I just “meet expectations” in the new rankings despite hours spent working like a dog into the late evening hours and on weekends, taking on even more work after all these layoffs to make up for the management committee’s poor judgment and lack of understanding of how their own organization works.

This is an obvious ploy to reduce bonus $$$ across the board because they are too scared to do more layoffs right now because they know morale has completely collapsed and so many parts of the organization are bare bones skeleton crews or outsourced.

They are banking so hard on AI clearing out their labor costs while not thinking about what happens when AI runs everything instead of humans: no differentiated investment perspective, AI slop marketing and ads, AI slop internal communications, AI “ client services” that are the exact same as every other AI at every other asset manager.

I truly don’t think TRP can dig itself out of this hole, it is way too far gone. And it will take a large portion of the Baltimore City and County tax base with it. Yet our government leaders have nothing to say about one of Baltimore’s largest employers becoming essentially a hollowed out shell? If I were the mayor I would be having some discussions with Rob Sharps right about now.

Been with Verizon for 22 years. The only year that we had to complete end of year appraisals in November, was 2025 and we lost a HUGE number of employees. Is that what is happening again? We used to do appraisals in January, now we are doing them in November again.

Is achieves expectations the new successful? Joined this team three months ago and only worked with this manager for two months, received achieves expectations but comments seemed negative unsure why..

So let’s review recent rifs in our area:

People who were rating 1 or 2 were impacted.
AND
People who were highest earners got impacted

So this tells me you don’t want to be asking for more and more $ (and shooting for 4 and 5 ratings) because that will put you on top of the cut list for being too expensive. And then you don’t want a 1 or 2 rating because that is easy low hanging fruit for them to cut you.

The sweet spot is to be a rating 3, keep your head down, and just do your bare minimum work until the job market improves.

Just my 2 cents

New this year, all employees will receive a performance rating as part of the year-end review process.

Is this really new?

As a former manager that got out, I will definitely not miss the super toxic year-end antics that go into performance review cycles. I'm sure it must have gotten worse, with the fake less-than-meets ratings that ruin career trajectories, forced stack ranking, and the peacock level posturing that the brown-nosers have mastered.

Enjoy, Wells Fargoers!!

to managers - what has changed about performance rating process this year vs. past w/r/t determining ratings since now we have so many more categories of performance tiers to handle. any info on what the new tiers really mean big picture? any correlation to amount of work place excellence compliance?

I'm getting pretty tired of the games management plays. They sell you on some big project or exciting change, making you believe it's an opportunity to prove yourself and move up. In reality, it's often just a way to squeeze more out of you while their favorites are quietly positioned for promotions. You're told that taking on more responsibility, expanding your scope, and delivering beyond expectations is what it takes to get ahead. So you work yourself into the ground, believing the promises. Then a year or two later, promotion time comes, and the same favorites get rewarded. At some point, you realize the game was never fair, and the hard work was never the deciding factor.

Title - Haven't heard anyone in my org get this news, most performance reviews were given out already just hearing SPs and EPs. Few folks were only staying for 4 hours a day with no issues

Last year zero people in our group (25-55 people) received promotions. These are people who ‘exceeded all or most’, met deliverables and in previous years would have been a shoe-in. Given the hole we as a company are going to continue digging out of, does anyone see any reason top performers should think DW won’t completely give us all the shaft again?
True, nothing is guaranteed, but I can’t even pull the energy to write the damn things when they are shown year after year to be utterly meaningless unless you got him in your DMs.

I heard that your rating has a merit range tied to it and getting an exceeds could affect you more negatively than a meets dollar-wise. I'm trying to understand how that even works.

And how do the calibration sessions work? Can a team of 10 only have 1 exceeds and has to have 1 not meets?

...surprise! They did NOT 'centrally manage' the RTO numbers due to the fire as they promised they would.

I'm missing all 5 days from my number. This place... It's almost comical if it weren't directly tied, at EOY review time, to your overall performance.

Another poster mentioned, in another thread, that Comcast NBCU may try to reduce headcount through the annual performance review process.

I’m concerned this is happening to me. Last year, I got a glowing year-end review from my manager but my mid-year review was mediocre.

Has anyone gone through this? Is there anything I can do to protect myself? Would I be eligible for severance, if I were managed out? What would come next (a PIP)?

I would have never joined this company, if I knew this is how they treated employees. I’ve never received a bad review in my professional career and am overqualified for my role (my boss is insecure). I made the mistake of taking this job over another offer.

Is Northwestern Mutual using “career progression” and resume accomplishments as a convenient way to screen out experienced, older employees?

Years of delivering measurable business outcomes, solving complex problems, and consistently producing results should matter more than job titles, promotions, or how well someone navigates internal politics.

Yet there appears to be an increasing emphasis on visibility, popularity, and perceived career trajectory rather than actual contributions and business impact.

This raises a serious question: Are experienced employees being unfairly disadvantaged because their resumes don’t demonstrate the kind of upward mobility leadership expects?

Performance should be measured by outcomes, not popularity. Experience should be valued, not penalized.

Are others at Northwestern Mutual seeing similar patterns in hiring, promotions, or performance evaluations?

If this is a widespread pattern disproportionately affecting older employees, could there be grounds for a class-action age discrimination lawsuit? Would others who have experienced similar treatment be interested in exploring their legal options together?

Warning to all engineers: if you are ranked with global projects they will use you to fill the bottom of the forced distribution. The narrative in global projects is currently that engineers add zero value only executing “project management professionals” as they call themselves deserve high assessment results according to GP. GP employees are vocally saying in meetings things like:
“engineering is just something to get out of the way so the real work can start”
“The way to finish a project is to demobilize all the engineers”

Avoid assignments on Guyana projects, expat assignments, UNCON anssignments, any project assignment or assignment where you will be in the same rank group as GP employees.

I have been told that there will be no pay rise in 2027, even its been a successful year. 3 years since last rise for DQ but 5 years for Innovex. I think this shows Innovex do not reward performance.

Identify another 10% staff for layoff in 2027. This is in addition to the 5-7% staff rated 4 this year.

So it’s pretty clear for 99.9% of workers we are going to get “Successful” or less. My question is what percentage is that? The manager that had our meeting said it’s 4% and can go to 2% with bad Points. But every one I’ve talked to said it’s actually 3% and down from there if you have points. 4% percent is all ready bad enough as they promised 6 for tenured works that dedicated their lives to the company. But 3% is an absolute joke that doesn’t even cover inflation

My manager emailed me to say that they want to review my self-evaluation draft before I submit it in the system. DO NOT SUBMIT IT UNTIL I REVIEW IT A, I was told.

What is this cluster fu-kery? In over 10 years here I've never had a manager ask me to do this. Has anyone else experienced this?

Middle to end of October 2026 is when the self evaluations are sent to mismanagement in the form of a Google Slide. Then you are required to put in your self evaluation in Workday as mismanagement have performance calibration meetings to decide who to put on a PIP an fired. A nonstop nightmare. The only good thing is even those at the VP level and up Senior VP have to face stack rankings too. It feels good !!!

F* Capone.

Saw a post here - they are claiming hittting 300%_ quota, led their team, and still got rated "Successful". They say their director was told not to give anyone Exceptional... obviously I can't verify that. But another poster says their mgmt team had to push back against rating someone "Developing".Are managers being given quotas for each rating? If you beat your goals, what does it actually take to get "Exceptiona"?

Comments here say a rolling inoffice average may afffect ratings or promotions, but vacation time is added to the data later. One senior person said they could not access their teams dashboard. If this number matters - employees should be able to see it, check for errors, and know how leave is counted before reviews are decided.

Has anyone been shown their own average or a written policy?

Does XOM has a minimum active-service requirement for annual performance assessment in US?

Who else is over this split in year end conversation?
Thanks for the lovely words, but how does this translate to finances?

year end self evaluation has to be completed by Oct 30…whats the point in starting that now…they could have opened it after next week😂

It's funny that leaderships claimed that layoff is performance based.

I think, the moment that was announced, the performance review process would have become compromised.

Review result decides the victims, so do you honestly think managers only judge based on actual performance? That's so funny.

How can supervisors game the system? Rank system is so sc--wed up. Seems like the best approach would be just to cycle everyone through the assessment categories and take turns being PIPed. Would need to keep people with enough years in their current CL high to try get them their CL promotions as quickly as possible somehow.

How much do you think this will weigh in on reviews and lay offs? I'm sitting around 57% for the year but have hit 60% each month since the new roll out. One month in Q1 was terrible for my family with sickness, school closings, and car trouble so had very bad rto numbers. Now I'm starting to worry that one sh-t month is going to sc--w me.

manager has been giving me weekly performance check ins and says i haven't been improving.

Do you know what happens next? I am guessing bad rating at year end and then getting corrective action warnings and fired early next year? is it possible to be fired sooner than next year or be fired without corrective action warning?

location usa

Clearly it is a lie that each year you get a fresh start when the first conversation with my new supervisor is about the past three years of rankings they reviewed in CareerConnect. No such thing as a fresh start.

I am interviewing for jobs because I'd like a raise of about 30k from my current ~90k salary, but I'd rather stay on this team because the work is great, we're always busy, I enjoy my colleagues, and our manager/directors/VPs advocate for us. How do I get my leader to give me this raise? I don't think this is a promo year for me since we haven't had those discussions, but I am constantly excelling at my work, got a 5 on my review last year (with a 3% raise -_- ), and have presented on leadership calls and town halls about the impact of the work myself and my team are doing. I've never really been in a situation where I have wanted to stay in my role instead of jumping to a different role. Any advice?

I debated whether to post or not, but my boss said it was the first time sitting through a calibration meeting. All the ratings were done the week before our year-end evaluations were done. What's the point of bragging on your accomplishments if they did the ratings before you submitted them.

My team is full of horrible people and they genuinely are impossibly difficult to work with. Is there any benefit to giving them a low grade on peer feedback for review season? I don’t expect much will change, but I want them to receive a lower bonus because actually did the same to me last year

I recently got laid off from Atlassian. I was a SDE 2. I have about 5 years of exp in SW engineering and honestly I never thouht I'd be in this position... especially after having worked at Microsoft before this. I left a good team at Microsoft for more $$$ and now I'm sitting here unemployed for over a month wondering if I made the biggest mistake of my career. Not sure but it looks like it...

I was working at what I thought was a normal pace... doing my job, completing my work and expecting a performance rating of 3. Instead my manager pushed my rating down to a 1 and told me I wasn't being proactive enough. And the reason???? Apparently I wasn't working 10 hours a day like everyone else. Seriously... since when did putting in a normal workday become a performance problem????

What makes this soooo frustrating is that I left Microsoft where I was actually happy with my team and the work I was doing... all because I thought moving to Atlassian would be a better financial decision. More money, better opportunity... you know how it goes. Now I'm questioning that decision every single day. I guess sometimes the extra money just isn't worth it.

And now the job market is making things even worse. I've been unemployed for about a month and I'm honestly willing to take a paycut at this point... I have several EMIs and loans to pay, and I'm the ONLY earning person in my household. But smaller companies look at my previous CTC and tell me they can only offer HALF of what I was making... and some aren't even interested in interviewing me because of it. Meanwhile the larger companies aren't calling me for interviews either.

So basically I'm either too expensive for the smaller companies or not getting noticed by the bigger ones... despite having Microsoft and Atlassian on my resume. How does that even make sense????

I've also been dealing with some personal problems and depression, which makes this whole situation even harder. I'm preparing for interviews every day... studying, practicing, trying to improve my chances, but there's always that fear in the back of my mind. How long can I afford to be unemployed??? What happens if another month goes by... or three??? The loans aren't going anywhere and the bills certainly aren't stopping.

Sometimes I keep thinking maybe I should've worked harder at Atlassian... maybe I should've just done those 10 hour days like my manager wanted. But then I wonder whether that would've actually changed anything or just delayed the inevitable.

I know layoffs are happening everywhere but it's a very different feeling when you're the one without a paycheck and other people depend on your income... I wouldn't wish this uncertainty on anyone.

I'm curious whether other Atlassian employees have experienced something similar, particularly SDE 2 engineers. Are managers really expecting 10 hour workdays and giving low performance ratings to people who don't meet those expectations? Has anyone else been pushed from an expected 3 rating to a 1??? And for those who left Microsoft or another big tech company for more money... did you end up regretting it?

Looks like it's still broken. Lots of negative accelerators for teams that are exempt from negative accelerators. Missing orders, broken backlog.

When do they seize JC's bonus for this catastrophy?

So if your management has you tracking your daily work, upload those sheets there and have CoPilot use them to write your self eval. That way your data is based on hard numbers that you sent to your manager/worktracker/sl--------r, not AI guesswork.

Let's go everyone! The mid year farse has begun. Pointless exercise after pointless exercise. How about we spend time doing a mid year review when these useless id--ts can spend time taking care of their employees.

Let’s here how good people got it and how bad people got it

TIAA created a governance program to safeguard the retirement products it manages for millions of Americans. Two Black women designed and ran it. According to a federal lawsuit filed September 24, 2026, both were pushed out within four months - and the work kept going without them.

The complaint, lodged in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges TIAA terminated the worker who operated the program under a rationale its own internal communications contradicted the very next day.

The worker joined TIAA in August 2023 after two years at J.P. Morgan, according to the filing. She was recruited by a colleague - a Black female Managing Director hired in 2022 to create the company's New Business Initiative Assessment program, known internally as NBIA. Together, the two-person team developed the entire framework: an enterprise-wide governance and control system designed to ensure regulatory compliance and operational readiness for all new and materially modified products offered to TIAA's retirement and wealth management clients.

The program was no back-office exercise. According to the complaint, TIAA's executive committee approved it, internal audit cleared it in the first quarter of 2025, and the company formally submitted it to the New York Department of Financial Services as a "key mitigant" for product safety and soundness risk. The pipeline grew from 22 initiatives in 2022 to 57 by mid-2025, the filing states, supporting business lines projected to bring in over $25 billion in additional assets.

Over 31 months, the worker received no documented performance criticism of any kind, according to the filing. No improvement plan. No discipline. No warning.

Then her colleague went on approved medical leave in late July 2025.

The complaint alleges that a senior manager - who the filing says had "no knowledge of the area" - immediately tried to pressure the worker into gutting the program without the colleague's knowledge. On the first night of the leave, he emailed her: "we will need your leadership to determine, practically speaking, which activities to curtail or eliminate," according to the filing. The worker refused, citing the program's regulatory importance, and added her colleague to the email chain so she would see it on her return.

Within weeks, a covering manager was installed while the worker was on approved leave. According to the complaint, this manager - who is not Black - launched what the filing describes as "a sustained campaign" to disparage the NBIA program as "confusing" and "duplicative." The complaint alleges the covering manager badgered the worker in meetings, excluded her from others, portrayed her as dishonest in writing before senior colleagues, and pressured her to alter approved committee minutes that had been reviewed by TIAA's legal department.

The worker refused to change the minutes.

The complaint alleges the worker raised concerns to TIAA's HR business partner on multiple occasions between August and September 2025. According to the filing, HR took no corrective action. Instead, the complaint states, the HRBP sent the worker a lengthy written reprimand for raising those concerns and instructed her to trust in the covering manager's "positive intent."

The worker's response, according to the filing, was pointed: she asked what outlets were available to speak up "if HR no longer feels able to listen."

According to the complaint, the HRBP dismissed her concerns entirely, writing that senior leaders were being asked to "break bureaucracy" by streamlining processes and driving efficiencies.

The colleague returned from leave in October 2025. One month later, on November 17, 2025, she was terminated, the filing states. The publicly stated rationale was eliminating "duplicative" processes - offered, the complaint alleges, without documentary support and contradicting the program's own institutional history: a program TIAA had created to fill a governance gap, approved by its own executive committee, submitted to regulators, and cleared by internal audit only months earlier.

The worker learned of the termination by phone while she was overseas on approved leave, according to the complaint. The covering manager told her to stop communicating with the terminated colleague about anything TIAA-related - even though the colleague's official employment did not end until January 2, 2026, the filing states.

From there, the complaint alleges the treatment intensified.

The covering manager demanded a list of every stakeholder meeting the worker held, a demand the complaint alleges was not made of any similarly situated employee. In early December, the covering manager verbally requested a report needed for a December 10 meeting, according to the filing. The worker delivered it on December 9. The covering manager reprimanded her in writing for not having it by December 8 - a deadline the complaint states was never communicated and fell during a period of approved leave.

Then came the vacation cap.

In January 2026, the covering manager informed the worker for the first time that she should "baseline" at approximately 20 days of annual vacation, the complaint states. That cap did not exist. According to the filing, the worker's offer at hire included unlimited paid time off under TIAA's written "Responsible Time Off" policy, which contained no maximum. When the worker asked for the policy basis, the covering manager sent a screenshot showing a 20-hour New York Paid Prenatal Leave entitlement - a provision the filing describes as bearing no relationship to the worker's circumstances and concerning hours rather than days.

In the same exchange, the complaint states, the covering manager attached a report of the worker's complete time-off history going back to 2024, before her management even began, signaling that past use of an unlimited benefit was now under retroactive scrutiny.

Then came the performance review.

In January 2026 - weeks before the only negative review of her tenure - the covering manager's own chief of staff sent the worker formal written recognition. According to the complaint, he praised "the clarity and depth of her presentation as truly outstanding" and described her "leadership and subject matter expertise as invaluable assets."

On January 29, 2026, the covering manager delivered the year-end review over video call, the complaint states. She read the colleague's overwhelmingly positive feedback aloud, then mentioned she had added her own written comments and told the worker to read them after the call. The negative portion was based on approximately three weeks of actual observation, according to the filing. The electronic sign-off deadline was the next day. The worker submitted a written rebuttal. When she asked for examples to support the claims, the covering manager could not provide any, according to the complaint.

On February 3, 2026, the worker attended a company-sponsored, invitation-only Black History Month event at NASDAQ organized by a TIAA business resource group, the filing states. While she was at the event, a "time sensitive" report was demanded with a same-day deadline. The covering manager then reprimanded the worker in writing - copying a colleague - and instructed her to report her whereabouts when away from her desk, according to the complaint.

On March 26, 2026, TIAA told the worker her role was being eliminated. The rationale: NBIA processes would be "integrated" into strategic governance functions. The next day, according to the filing, the covering manager sent an email to a broad internal audience instructing staff to continue performing the same NBIA work, using the same process and tools. She asked recipients who had previously met with the worker to redirect their questions to another employee - one the complaint describes as having no working knowledge of the NBIA program.

Also on that final working day, the complaint states, the worker received a request through the NBIA management tool to reactivate an initiative the covering manager had previously ordered placed in the "dead folder." The filing describes this as an attempt to avoid admitting the worker had been right to keep it in the pipeline.

At termination, the worker's base salary was $147,900, according to the complaint. She had also received $43,500 in incentive compensation the previous month.

The lawsuit brings claims of race and s-x discrimination under federal, state, and city law, along with claims of retaliation for raising discrimination complaints and for whistleblowing. The worker alleges she was punished for refusing to dismantle a regulatory control program and for flagging concerns about how she was being treated. She seeks compensatory and punitive damages, back and front pay, and attorneys' fees.

Her former colleague has filed a separate action against TIAA in the same court, the complaint states.