Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?
If someone needs to be fired, you don't need to put them through a humiliating process. Explain what happened and why, give them a decent severance and a good reference, and say goodbye.
PIPs are a way for executives to externalize costs of firing unto the team (which has to deal with wrecked morale, an overtaxed manager, etc.) while claiming they "saved money on severance" by firing or force-quitting people for free.
In the case of average performers, reviews are harmful because they prevent a person from being able to reinvent themselves.
In the case of high performers, they are not really needed because they should know in other ways than being told, "You're a 4.3 and will stay a 4.3 as long as you don't annoy me", every year.
And for managers, they consume an inordinate amount of time and make people unhappy. No one wins but the highest of the higher-ups who profit by pitting working people against each other.
I don't think performance reviews should have a part in firings, and the metrics they use to rank/rate people are generally worthless, but it's actually nice to get feedback from time to time on how you're doing. I've had managers who I never heard from at all and that's not ideal.
If a company is thinking they have to fire someone for performance reasons it's way easier for them to have documentation showing what has been going on and that they'd given the employee time to improve. It's better for the employee too to understand what the expectations are they're not meeting and to have a chance to explain what the causes are. I think most people would prefer that over being told out of the blue that they've been sucking at their job and escorted out the building.
It really depends. I have never felt this way about a performance review. I like being informed about whether my manager and I both agree on what my job is. As an added bonus, the day after a good review is when you are least worried about losing your job and your livelihood. Honestly it seems like your beef is with the lack of social safety nets and not with performance reviews themselves.
It may be useful to further refine what we mean when we are talking about "performance reviews". Are we talking about regular discussions between Managers (or skip-level, or product stakeholders) and their reports, or are we talking about an HR-driven process that happens every x months? Personally (for whatever that's worth) I find the former helpful and the latter to be mostly a waste of time.
> How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job?
Just my 2¢, but I think most folks would acknowledge that it is easy to have a myopic view, and outside feedback is valuable. But, at the same time, I would expect most (non-junior) engineers (who have been at a company long enough to understand the business) to have some sense of how their efforts and contributions are going? Put more plainly, I know if I'm slacking, and I don't usually need my manager to tell me that I'm writing decent code or getting my work done. That said, this all surely depends a lot on the specifics of the work and the organization/teams involved. And also assumes some healthy and regular conversations between peers and between the Business and the development team.
