The question your performance review won't ask
Story one: “My review said I was doing great. I hit every target. I got the raise. And I was bored out of my mind.”
Story two: “I thought I was doing great… until my review blindsided me with ‘concerns’ nobody had mentioned once all year.”
Very different outcomes, same root problem: most performance reviews only ask if you’re doing what the company needs. Even when you are asked to review yourself it's usually a performative exercise about what you can do for them.
They rarely ask if the work is doing anything for you.
If your last performance review felt like checking boxes on a form, you're not alone. Most companies are still asking the wrong first question: "Did you sit in front of your computer for 40+ hours a week?"
The good news: plenty of companies have moved past that. They've figured out that seat time is garbage as a metric. In a remote world, "always green in Slack" just means you're good at keeping your mouse moving. Outcome-based reviews were the upgrade: Did you ship the thing? Hit the target? Close the deals?
That's better. But it's still not enough.
Because when companies only measure outputs, they quietly punish the people who make those outputs possible.
Your metrics probably don't reflect the 20 minutes you spent walking a junior dev through a bug instead of saying "just read the docs." They definitely don't track that you quietly cleaned up a broken process so everyone else could go faster.
None of that shows up on a dashboard. But it's the difference between a healthy team and a high-performing team sprinting toward burnout.
Good review systems should cover outcomes, yes. But they should also deliberately surface contributions that don't ship as features: mentorship, knowledge sharing, raising risks early, improving systems and so on.
To have a truly great review system, there's a third layer that most companies completely skip: whether this work is actually worth it to you.
What skills did you build this quarter? What problems are you proud you can now tackle on your own? How did work fit (or not fit) with the kind of life you're trying to build?
If your review only asks company-centered questions, that's a signal. You might be performing well while quietly thinking, "This isn't who I want to become."
That's not just a problem for the employee either. Companies that focus only on "what can you do for me?" will end up giving rave reviews to their best employees... and then be completely blindsided when they leave anyway.
But the biggest pitfall of all is surprises.
If you sit down to a performance review and learn something for the first time, good or bad, the system already failed. A good review isn't a reveal. It's closing the loop on a conversation that's been happening all year.
The review should be just that. A review of things we both already know. To name what's been happening, capture what you've both been noticing, and decide together what comes next.
What to actually expect from a performance review that matters:
- Outcomes – Did your work move the business forward?
- Contributions – Did you make the team better in ways that don't always show up in metrics?
- Personal trajectory – Did this work move you toward the person you want to become?
If your review, or the one you're about to sign up for at a new company, doesn't cover all three, it's not really about performance. It's just paperwork with better branding.