Today was my annual review. It went about as I expected with me getting a decent rating for the past year. Not as good as last year but that was to be expected since I did get a promotion over the course of the year so the bar ended up being a lot higher this year to get a top rating. One thing I dislike about our ‘ratings’ is that they are a combination of both how you performed and how you performed relative to the people in the division. Meaning even if everyone within the group was doing a fantastic job only one (if any) can get a top rating. Normally I wouldn’t care that much since I’m not super competitive except that these ratings set the range for our bonus and raises that are coming up. So its a bit unfortunate that under this system even if you work you butt off over the whole year you might not see much of a reward if there is someone else in your group that worked harder. I guess thats life in the grown up world where sometimes you getting ahead means it might come at someone else’s expense.
My boss had some good things to say to me about my work and that he thought I had a bright future at IBM. He thoughts I was on the right track and I was definitely still improving my skill set and my visibility. The only part he kinda left out is unfortunately within my own group there is little room to grow. Since we’re an isolated group and there are a bunch of other guys senior to me I’m not going to be in a position to move upward unless i find a new position within IBM or those guys move on. At the moment I’m ok with this situation since I’m really not sure what my longer term goals are.
The other thing that came out of my meeting was that the product we were supposed to work on next has been shelved. So it looks like we’re going to be going back to building frameworks. This is kinda disappointing since I was looking forward to actually working on something that is sold and supported. On the other hand the new thing that we might work on could result in me getting travel more and meet with new people within the product suite I work on. So that may be good. Right now everything is kinda hypothetical so who knows where things will end up.
