My half yearly appraisal has not gone good at all. I had tried to work hard, and I indeed worked hard for at least as long as I was present in office. I discussed with my supervisor, and I was informed that my growth curve in the first half of this financial year has been a downward progressing curve - my performance was not up to the mark! I was just amazed, and simultaneously taken aback also.
Well, my being taken aback or getting upset doesn't matter to these people at all. After all it is a private company that I am working in. So I decided to do an analysis of my experiences in the past two years of working in this company.
My analysis and what I have learnt in my professional life of just two years is summarized below:
1. It does not matter how much you work and how much you perform and how many critical issues you solve, the value added to your rating is in arithmetic progression. However, the number of leaves taken by you (no matter how distressed you may be) counts very distinctly, and contributes to your rating getting diminished in geometric progression. ( I had to take almost a month's leave to get my father treated at one of the best hospitals in India).
2. It does not matter how much overtime you have worked, and how much time your supervisor has wasted in useless gossip about nude girls, and abusing his boss, and all sorts of similarly ugly stuff (all during office hours), he will always rate you lower than himself, no matter how big a moron he himself might be. After all he is your boss - he is somebody SUPERIOR to you, and that needs to be proved!
3. Whatever good work you do is never reported by your supervisor to the management. However, just commit a single mistake - the issue is immediately escalated and an entry is made into the performance record file for the employee for the same.
4. For any good work that you do, you have to maintain your own records and keep on reminding your supervisor about that. However for any small mistake that you commit, which might have little or no impact on the actual production environment, the supervisor immediately makes a record of the same in his register and keeps on reminding you about it all the time to negate all the good work that you might have done, and eventually lowering your confidence in your work, which is even better for him, because that is an additional negative point which he can highlight during the appraisal process, and of course that is the result of all his hard work of keeping only all your bad records.
5. The moment you ask for a release from your project, your importance gets lowered in the team. You may do something outstanding, but that is rated as just very ordinary work - something anyone can do! However, you will be made to work like an ass, treated like a pig, and eventually you will not be released from your project - you will have to resign from the company itself.
6. Your supervisor will speak with you in whatever tone he may like, and whenever he wants to in that tone. However, just try to retort once in the same tone that he is speaking in, and hell comes down upon you. You may also be threatened of being handed a pink slip. (Well, that does not matter - all those threats are empty).
7. Your supervisor will be the biggest coward that you will ever see. Raise an issue that might result in challenging your supervisor's peers or his boss, and your supervisor will never appear at the scene of the fight. He will always have some useless meeting at that time - he will suddenly become very busy within seconds of getting any premonition that he might have to speak against his boss or his peers for some employee from his own team, even though that might be for a just cause. After all he has to maintain a good image. He cannot hurt his image for a member from his own team, because he also cares for his own appraisal. He will literally curl his tail in between his two legs and vanish from the scene just like the ghost from Alladin's magic lamp used to vanish in the twinkling of an eye. And if by any chance he is forced into the scene, instead of protecting you, he will humiliate you publicly, and make the just cause unjust.
8. Even if you have an accident and your colleagues come to know of that, there will be only one or two in a few hundred who will be ready to take you to the hospital in his/her personal car or motorcycle. After all burning petrol will drain out your colleagues' hard earned money. You might even see more brazen people who will take you to the hospital and charge you for petrol that was burnt in doing you this much of charity.
And I supposedly work in an IT company that is considered to be one of the best of its kind in employee welfare management. God knows what is happening elsewhere!
