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  • reminds me of a self-evaluation i did at a job once i stopped caring. i had been there 10 year at this point.

    the self-evals were super annoying busy work and ostensibly tied to "merit raises" which ranged from 0% - 2% based on arbitrary budget bullshit. so if you had a perfect performance review, you might get 0% or up to 2%. totally pointless, as i learned after 10 years of perfect evals with garbage raises while inflation climbed +15%.

    we were supposed to rate ourselves and then paste a justifying narrative explanation of all our projects that had executed over the previous year alongside key performance indicators/ metrics we had to develop, all of this not mattering at all, because nobody read it, we never received feedback or comments. just a nice self-critical analysis project taking hours to pull data together and frame into a narrative that matches HR lingo about playing well with others and the highest ideals of blah blah blah.

    of course, if the institution was actually funding us, i could see going through this theater as budget justification, but they weren't. we were all externally funded by project partners with their own reporting requirements that we had to satisfy and supplement with other funds we had to go out and apply for, those also having their own reporting requirements. love 2 write 3 progress reports for 1 project because austerity means no single entity wants to pay for any human labor time associated with provisioning the public goods regular people insist upon, so now 33% of project labor time can be eaten by administrative overhead compiling reports to 3 different institutions on 3 different fiscal timelines with 3 different tracking/progress requirements.

    so literally, this self-eval was entirely a waste of time, money and effort at a time of year we were already busy doing our jobs for the community groups that did pay us.

    so this one year, I just said, "fuck it" gave myself highest level marks across every category and left all the narrative justification blank, click submit.

    eventually i get this message from my doofus boss being all passive aggressive about how "its difficult to justify highest marks with no justification."

    so i responded, "i bet it is" and accepted his minor reduction of like 2 points with no rebuttal and concluded the entire performance review... because whats 2% off a maximum of a 2% raise? $20/year at most?

    that was well worth the rounds of laughter i got from coworkers when i related the story and showed them the emails to prove it.

    the only rational answer to the question of "how good are you?" when there's nothing at stake is "i am literally jesus christ."

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