It's appraisal time again

Come October a new calendar year begins, at least for our company. But not without a chaotic September prior to that. I am just not talking about the book closing activities of finance department(I do not want to get into nitty-gritty details of that, but take my word for it, during these days finance guys see nothing but numbers in dreams.) but about something which affects us more tangibly: pay hikes and promotions.

It sounds strange but a few of us do not know which manager will evaluate us until the last minute of the last date, sometimes well beyond the deadline. Upon repeated reminders from HR department, the manager, finally takes note of the fact that he has a lot of engineers whose appraisal is not done yet. Engineer does the self appraisal and manager does the final evaluation. Later this goes through normalization, the technical name of a process, which is designed to screw up the given ranking. I think this is a common practice in many organizations.

I would like be to the HR manager for a day to understand how they actually manipulate these numbers and rankings and try to get us convinced.

I heard this year there is a new process, I wonder how it will turn out.

It's no secret that a lot of us work for money besides enjoying the feeling of doing something meaningful with the faculties we have been provided with or developed. So it will be an interesting first week in October. And I hope it will be a good one.