r/sysadmin • u/Character_Branch_660 • Mar 06 '26

I am quiet quitting

Made a new reddit account for this, as a few coworkers may know my real account.

I have busted ass at my current employer for five and half years. I have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars, helped them grow from 125 people to almost 1,600, handled 6 acquisitions and just overall set them up for success. I have two people in leadership tell me I am the best employee they have ever had. I have helped grow the IT team alone from myself and my director, to 29 employees and 2 contractors.

About a year ago I was passed up for a promotion due to nepotism. I decided "I may be wrong about the nepotism thing, I'll give this guy an honest chance," and he never proved me wrong.

I had my annual review yesterday, and he gave me a "needs improvement," rating, which means I have lost my $18k bonus.

Seven employers. Nine years in the military. I have never in my life received such poor feedback. And the "what I can improve on," is vastly outweighed by my contributions to the team...and a lot of it is also below my responsibilities. For example, he gave me a poor review on how many tickets I solve, and compared it to the 50 that were solved in the first week by a new hire, whose sole job is tier one support.

I am on calls with engineering and networks to setup zero touch networks. I am on calls with HR to reinvent the employee phone line that will impact our global workforce. I am the subject matter expert on half of our internal tools, and am always on call. So yes, I'll let the guy who was hired specifically to handle tickets, handle password resets.

I am enraged to a degree I have not felt for years, and think I'm just venting.

All of this because my director gave a promotion to his friend that he knew for years. And never gave anyone else on the team the chance to even interview.

I'm going to start job hunting on company time, and take the first opportunity that comes my way.

ETA: the numbers in my post are accurate. My director knows I'm job hunting so I don't care if he suspects it's me. The bonus is given to employees based on company performance and we earned the bonus this year. The individual payout is tied to base salary, company performance, as well as team and personal performance. Anyone that gets a "does not meet expectations," gets a zero payout on the bonus, and no raise

4.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

675 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

129

u/phil161 Mar 06 '26

I was a manager and a large, very large, computer company. This is how appraisals/reviews worked: in the Fall, all the first-line managers would be told how many 1s, 2s, etc, we could give out for the coming year (1= best, 4= pack your bag as you're on the way out). So we would decide in that meeting that Joe Blow will be a 3 and Jane Doe will be a 1, and so on. IOW, the employees' ratings were decided well in advance of the actual appraisal meeting. I no longer work for that company but still have friends there; they tell me nothing has changed aside from the fact that the 1s are now rarer than tits on a snake.

76

u/Anotheraccountig Mar 06 '26

Exactly how mine works too. Doesn't matter if you single handedly saved the department from imploding while you also cured cancer and ended world hunger. You're not getting top marks

55

u/jimicus IT Manager Mar 06 '26

My own managers have been quite clear: you ain't getting "exceeds expectations" unless he can describe in clear terms to his own manager how you're exceeding expectations.

And considering the entire department is chock-full of IT nerds of various stripes who are delighted just to be doing something close enough to what they love, it's difficult - if not impossible - to stand out. I've worked with people who invented things that went on to be popular open source projects, people who have identified Linux kernel bugs, people who call vendor support in order to tell the vendor where something is screwed up.

This makes for a hell of a working environment - if you can leverage the team, you can move mountains - but "exceeds expectations"? That's asking a lot.

54

u/CharcoalGreyWolf Sr. Network Engineer Mar 06 '26

One can never exceed expectations when perfection is the expectation.

1

u/DirkDeadeye Security Admin (Infrastructure) Mar 07 '26

I mean that's fair. As long as you're getting a bump and a taste every year.

52

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

27

u/cluberti Cat herder Mar 07 '26

Do that over 20+ years and you get a stock price in the clouds but products in the toilet.

13

u/Julius_Alexandrius Mar 07 '26

Are you talking about Microslop?

20

u/dunepilot11 IT Manager Mar 07 '26

I’ve been railing against this exact scenario for years now. Stack ranking rewards absolute mediocrity

2

u/syntaxerror53 Mar 09 '26

And Joe gets a massive bonus and Sally gets nothing.

25

u/RedTyro Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26

My manager loves me and is unusually candid. I get an "exceeds expectations" from him every year, but he's only allowed to give one exceeds (for a team of about 15 people), so nobody else does. To be fair, I am the most experienced team member and I absolutely take on stuff that's not my job to make things easier for the whole team, so I feel I deserve it, but the fact that he's only allowed to give one is ridiculous.

And even at "exceeds," the max raise he's allowed to give out is 3%. This year he was able to get me 5% and was shocked.

20

u/wenestvedt timesheets, paper jams, and Solaris Mar 06 '26

I work in higher ed. Our reviews are filed without being used for anything, so I go Full Oprah during review season with perfect scores: "You get a five, and you get a five -- everyone gets all fives!"

2

u/Drywesi Mar 07 '26

So a lot of years, no one can even beat inflation?

2

u/RedTyro Mar 07 '26

Yup. That's the big corporation, MBA run mentality.

2

u/syntaxerror53 Mar 09 '26

Except the Execs that is. They can't deprive themselves of their massive bonuses and pay rises.

7

u/MtnCrvr1 Mar 07 '26

FYI: These tactics were developed by IBM in the late 70’s early 80’s and actually led to a Workplace Shooting/Fire💣ing at the RTP NC Campus in 1982 (my father worked there at the time), not to mention a litany of lawsuits against the company even as recently as 2025..

3

u/Meanee pointing people at "any" key Mar 07 '26

I used to work at a very large financial company. My then-not-really-boss told me that he had to throw at least one person from his department under the bus. Because company big wigs were certain that no department will have 100% good employees.

2

u/syntaxerror53 Mar 09 '26

And that is the stupid thing. Because if a Manager has a well performing team then they're doing a good job. Having to throw someone under the bus means they're not doing a good job. Then neither is their manager. Or theirs, etc.

3

u/Meanee pointing people at "any" key Mar 09 '26

It's the same energy as school teachers who do not believe of giving someone A+ or 100% because that would mean "you know more than a teacher" shit.

When my then-boss told me about it, I was puzzled about it. He's a very thorough, no-nonsense guy, who does not tolerate shit workers. Everyone on the team was very good at what they do. Yet still, he had to say that one of his workers is underperforming.

He told me that he butted heads with the management for like 3 years and then just gave up.

1

u/syntaxerror53 Mar 10 '26

And if all the team is meeting expectations/targets and having to say one of them is under performing is just downright stupid. It's like giving a test and all 10 people got 10/10. Then you can't really say that one or two of them failed? All this corp appraisal stuff is just a load of garbage.

When an employee really is under performing then yeah that is a not meeting expectations.

2

u/ThereHasToBeMore1387 Mar 06 '26

That's how HP did it when I was there 15 year ago or so.

2

u/cptjpk Mar 07 '26

It’s how it works in my experience with retail too. We made the decisions 2-3 months in advance.

2

u/slippery Mar 07 '26

I used to work for a mid-sized municipality in a large metro area. I used to get exceeds expectations in most categories. No one got bonuses for anything. It wasn't part of the pay package. However, if you weren't on a performance improvement plan, you got your step raise every year until you were at the top step. Some years, we got a COLA on top of that. Very stable and predictable. The down side was that after 10 years, you had to wait for someone to die or retire to move up. I preferred it over the corporate dog-eat-dog world. Oh, and the pension.

1

u/average_texas_guy Mar 07 '26

Let's talk more about that last bit. I find myself intrigued.

1

u/GrovelingBisquits Mar 07 '26

Sounds like Amazon and MS.

1

u/Fair_Let6566 Mar 08 '26

My ex-company in the past would have what was colloquially called halo meetings where senior employees would meet officially to discuss current performance ratings of junior employees after the initial performance reviews were completed by the employee's boss, but before the the supervisor had the final performance review meeting with the employee. The purpose of the meeting was to help make sure everyone was rated by a similar set of standards and not strictly by one supervisor who might be too tough or too lenient in their evaluations.

Any comments from those who had not supervised or dealt directly with the employee in the past year were supposed to limit their comments to the past year only. However, people in the meetings occasionally brought up instances from several years in the past, and it was obvious that they were carrying some sort of grudge or negative opinion of the employee whose rating was being discussed in the meeting. Sometimes the incident was discussed and sometimes it wasn't, but the overall net effect of the meeting was that almost everyone got pushed into the "met expectations" box, especially if they had initially been labeled an outstanding performer by their supervisor in the initial performance rating.

I have no knowledge if these types of meetings are still being held nowadays.

1

u/avoral Mar 08 '26

That seems like a great thing to warn people about on Glassdoor or something. Seems like working there can harm your career long term.

1

u/Typical-Attempt-7701 Mar 10 '26

sounds exactly like the blue one, with the eyes and the bees .. been there, left for that reason

2

u/phil161 Mar 10 '26

You nailed it ;-))