Today (Friday 13th) is a day off for me due to the 9-80 alternate-Friday-off schedule, whatever you want to call it. So it’s a nice long weekend. At 6:30 pm, my boss calls me to ask if we can do my performance review for last year. I’m not jazzed about it, but I agree because he tells me that he has to get the form submitted to HR by January 15 and it’s a firm deadline. I’m a team player, after all. He says I need to log on for a Microsoft teams meeting so I can see his screen. I do it.
He tells me that my performance is “pretty solid” but I have a gap in “building trust”. The examples he cites are two instances over the past year where he has gotten a call in the evening hours because I have a document due and didn’t properly extend the due date. The system identifies these documents as “overdue” at midnight, so there’s always some try-hard supervisor that checks for documents about to go overdue in the evenings. My boss had to log into his work computer to adjust my due date.
My boss told me that my raise and bonus will both be impacted because of this negative performance. So I’m getting an annual merit based raise that doesn’t even match inflation. Then he asked if I had any comments or questions.
“Just one question”, I said, “so you’re saying that it doesn’t look good when other people have to log into their work computer after normal working hours or on a day off to help me avoid having something go overdue?” Silence.
On average, I prevent 2-3 consequential errors per week in my quality reviews of engineering work. I’ve identified design errors that would cost the company millions of dollars if they had been issued as written. But I had two documents almost go overdue. So they slash the raise and bonus.
That’s my rant for today. I need to forget about work until Tuesday morning. Thanks for reading.