That’s pretty sad and disempowering. For what it’s worth at companies like Facebook it’s completely the opposite. If you aren’t taking any initiative you will not meet expectations at performance review.
I just had a good chuckle at this. I’m skeptical, to say the least. I don’t have direct experience. But I do work at a company that has poached several FAANG employees this past year and whose thoughts...differ from yours.
I can second dkasper's observations -- the PSC cycle is engineered to reward initiative. That said, depending on the team, the practice does not always follow the theory, so it makes sense that the FB employees your company could poach may have been the ones unsatisfied with the way their team rewarded initiative.
Kent Beck became a former Facebook employee because he wasn't in to proving he was moving the needle on Facebook's key metrics. He was only giving world class mentoring to young Facebook engineers and improving the development culture.
Likely you were able to poach them since they didn't thrive in that environment. Or you got them from the more traditional top-down Microsoft, Apple or Amazon.
That sounds like academia, where people are also expected to be constantly innovative on demand and, when the majority just can't pull it off, they invent BS research and produce worthless papers which clog the system.
