Basically every company I’ve worked for has had some sort of rubric like this. I don’t think that’s inherently bad, it can be quite good for consistency.

I have quit companies that made their performance review systems too onerous/frequent/intense. It’s exhausting to constantly be justifying your existence and having to sell yourself instead of doing the real work.

At one point I was at a 50/50 ratio of time spent documenting/justifying my work vs doing my work, and that was miserable. My level of anxiety reduced my job performance, which created a very unhealthy cycle. Pressure creates diamonds but it also suffocates and crushes most things.

That’s why seeing things like in-context sampling in the article make me suspicious. I don’t think I would be happy at all being interrupted as I’m in flow state to be asked if I could be more productive. I also feel some of this like speed (“time to 10th PR”) or working on new stuff is creating bad incentives.

Fundamentally the most important metric is how hard your boss will fight for you. The second most important metric is whether you can meaningfully discuss areas of improvement honestly and safely with your boss.

If either of those two are out of whack you should question whether to make a change. If I’m missing those I’m not going to be able to do my best work, so it cuts both ways.