Full Disclosure

I just one to let this out. One more time. I am so fucking angry at my fucking job right now. For those of you who aren't too familiar about what I do, I am working for a year-old IT firm that absorbed my old company last year. Upon absorption, I retained my status as Lead Analyst of the Java team, and it's all been good. Or rather it would have, except after being absorbed by our new company, the workload that was coming from our client company more than doubled. Meanwhile, our team increased by a magnitude of big fat zero. Simple math says, everybody had to take in double responsibilities, and half the normal rest time.

Frequent friction between our team and our client's side lead to the decision of upper management that maybe, to solve issues that stem from people making mistakes because of overwork, it'd be a good idea to lynch everybody that made mistakes. Three more staff left/were force to leave, bringing our total strength from 16 to thirteen. One of the staff that got removed was my direct head, our section manager.

Not wanting to see some nobody to take the now vacant helm, I was literally forced into taking my boss' position, without so much as an increase in pay, or even a change in title. But I figured it had to be done, so I did it anyway. Our general manager said the promotion will follow eventually. My workload, already double, went triple because I had to do what my section manager used to do, on top of what I'm doing already. Chalk it up to experience. Suck it all in.

We were basically overloaded for the better half of this year. I couldn't even take one vacation leave for the last five months. Not a single fucking one. And we did our job as good as we could. My team basically outperformed the better part of this company in cost/revenue. And HK even sent good words to upper management for our performance.

We're not perfect and god knows we've had our share of mistakes along the way, but we knew we our standing. We were making money and the clients are happy. That's the bottom line.

Then came the appraisals. Our former section manager appraised most of my team, as well as me. And to his credit, I can understand his somewhat modest ratings, as it made sense to make sure that the bell curve to be normal, meaning more people get the middle value compared to the lower and upper extremes. We still got higher than the average so it's more than acceptable. (see graph)


After performing the appraisals, carefully informing the staff of their strengths and points of improvements, we submitted the results to management, who then performed the subsequent calculations for the actual performance adjustment.

Now this is where shit hit the fan. Somewhere along the way, somebody thought it wise to just move the scale up, even though it will pull everybody's scores down inexplicably and produce a motherfucking skewed distribution below.

Because of the adjustment, all of my team members, including me, suddenly appeared subpar. On a scale from A-H, the highest any single member of my team got was E, while some of us did not even get a rank (because they were too low).

Talk about pushing hard and slapping people in the face.

Can you imagine that? Working hard the whole year, being told by everybody including the upper management that your team is doing great, and is one miracle short of being Jesus and then you get a fucking F for all your hassles?

Because of that, and the amazingly stingy policy of management, I got a raise that's not even half of the first raise that I got when I started as a trainee, 5 years ago.

But nevermind the money. On top of that, upper management had the gall to tell my staff individually about complaints coming from HK, which appeared to be random, because even the highest regarded developers somehow got requests of demotion from HK. We verified this and the reports were obviously pulled out of thin air. No substantial evidence could be given. Nothing.

Of course I complained. Oh hell I complained. I asked management if they thought there was something wrong with the team getting real low results despite being good performers. They told me, yes there's something wrong with that. Then I ask them if it can be fixed. I got a big fat NO for an answer. You know what's worse than getting ripped? Being told by whoever ripped you that they really did rip you, but only because they know you can't do anything about it.

Morale in our group has been in an all time low since that day.

I have never been so insulted in my whole career as the day I got my appraisal results, to be honest. It wouldn't have hurt as much if it happened some other time. Any year but this year, because this year, fuck, I knew deep inside my heart that
this was the year I tried hardest.

I argued of course. And in the end, our general manager told me that he will try to make amends through the title adjustments that was supposed to happen after a month. If people got promoted, we figured, salaries are bound to go up and at the very least, people will get their needed reassurance that they didn't work their asses off just to get E's and F's.

Earlier, during a meeting, we were told that the promotions will not happen anytime this year, and even if it did, that I cannot promote everybody - a stark contrast to what I was told, and what I committed to my staff, simply because it's "hard" to do. Funny, because I can't remember an instance we stopped doing something just because it was "hard".

Appraisals are supposed to give people something to look forward to, something that will make them want to work more, because god knows work in itself is just toxic. This year, the appraisal worked opposite, making you just want to work less sterlingly.

And personally, doing management work while retaining my old title is awkward as fuck. Nobody wants to get instructed by somebody who's barely their rank.

What the fuck.

People will think this post is biased on my side, because I'm angry and I just need to vent out. I don't really care. I have numbers to back my side. Substantial numbers that can prove beyond the shadow of the doubt how much BS we got for our efforts.