Year End Curve

It's that time of year again---year end reviews at work.  Towards the end of each year, we get our performance evaluated to determine our potential raise and year end bonus, although for some reason we actually don't get our year end bonus until the April of the following year.  Of course, there is a corporate buzz word for the affair---they call it "calibration".

This is the first real job that I've had since finishing school so I'm not sure how other companies do this or if they even have a a similar year end review.  The part that I'm really not enthusiastic about is that the "calibration" is curved.  everyone in your level is divided into pre-determined percentile buckets such as "top 10%" or "bottom 10%".  The issue that I find disturbing is that a bell curve distribution is forced so that there is always someone in the top or bottom bucket.  It's something that I've found disturbing even during college when professors would curve their classes like this.  I have no problem with a gaussian bell curve when there's a large enough sample size, but in a small class or group of employees I think the model fails.  What if everyone in your department performs equally well this year?  Why does someone have to get punished?  This tends to make everything even more competitive since everyone is fighting for the elite top percentile.

Of course, this doesn't even start to take into account the different managers politicking to promote their own.

Or how to distinguish if you work hard but you're unlucky and your project fails for other reasons.

Or the fact that, in theory, all of the bottom 10 percenters have been let go during the many layoffs this year.

Although I'm not a big fan of this, I suppose that there does need to be some mechanism to recognize and reward the better employees.  The problem is that "average performance" is determined by comparing everyone to each other, which results in a moving average of sorts.  I would much rather there be an absolute measure, for example if your performance was gauged by particular objectives set out at the beginning of the year.  If everyone meets their objectives then everyone performs well, just like if everyone gets 90% on their exam they should all get A's.