Annual Review Season

It’s a classic tale in the world of IT and operations. All year long, you grind through on-call nights, manage complex migrations, and extinguish fires before anyone even realizes there was smoke. You look at your screens, and everything is beautifully stable. All systems are operational.

Then comes the dreaded annual review meeting.

You sit down in the small meeting room across from your manager, ready to present hard facts. You calmly explain your solid list of technical achievements:

“I improved reliability, reduced incidents, and automated several workflows.”

The manager’s reaction? A perfectly neutral, underwhelming nod:

“Hmm… okay.”

Your hard work is noted, but the invisible nature of uptime means your successes often look like nothing is happening.

Meanwhile, in the very same meeting room, a different colleague is having their review. With dramatic hand gestures and a whiteboard full of random arrows, clouds, and buzzwords, they confidently declare:

“I led a paradigm shift, aligned stakeholders, and unlocked synergies across teams.”

It is pure “Bullshit” but the manager is absolutely impressed.

The outcome is as predictable as a DNS failure. Later in the office hallway, the loud colleague walks by grinning, holding a bonus letter or new company swag. You pull out your phone, check your inbox, and see the dreaded email on your screen:

“Annual raise: 0%”

You can’t help but think: “So… uptime doesn’t count?”

It’s a frustrating but relatable reality in engineering culture. When things run perfectly, it is easy for leadership to overlook the immense effort it takes to keep them that way. In the corporate world, sometimes, volume simply beats value.