#performance

annual performance evaluations are out

What is the point in feedback sessions if it is always the same nonsense talking points then why take the time for a meeting.

Are you seeing any AI wins around you? It has been three and a half years since AI started appearing in every presentation deck at CDW. So, what have we actually accomplished? Where did all the energy, effort, focus, and money go? Oh, well.

How come the majority of EMG in Member Protection (aka Fraud/Disputes in the Bank) were promoted in the first half of the year (EDs to AVPs, and AVPs to VPs) but non-EMG employees can’t get basic promotions in place approved? Like seriously, you can’t get an employee promoted from a level 3 to a 2 or a 2 to a 1. They get denied or you hear nothing for months on end. Not even trying to get people into Lead position, just into positions that they should be in based on performance and experience and yet so many EMG have been promoted like nothing. Just because you don’t send out promotion emails doesn’t mean we don’t know or see it. Absolutely ridiculous!

Deals pushed. Numbers missed again.

Will the yearly bonus be better than last year or higher ?
Considering competitors are giving six figures bonus, it's time Seagate management and C suite steps up and gives a fair share to employees

Don't be greedy ba----ds like ASML who are offering 20k bonus vested over 4 years

Seagate management for years has not taken care of employees so this is your one time to show that you really care and actual "HEALING" can begin.

What was your RSU refresh after your Year End Conversations?

Please include your level and performance rating.

I've not looked into the annual reports but do we know how this debt is doing given the company has never done so well on paper?

Senior management protects their turf, you do something to better the company like win a technology challenge and are told that you should have saved it for your own group and not shared it company wide. For that specific reason I have been canceled. No longer an e performer even though no one knows nearly how to do their job and comes running to me. I was told that I should be honored that many take my slides for their own presentations and not giving me credit.

I went to a competitor who now loves my work and also understands their competitive edge over fidelity

Whether a role can be performed effectively from home ultimately depends on the nature of the work itself.
In many cases, remote employees go above and beyond compared to their in-office counterparts. For example, when meetings are scheduled at 6:30 a.m., remote employees are generally expected to be online and fully engaged. This is particularly common for employees based on the West Coast who report to leadership teams on the East Coast. Remote employees also put more hours in work on an average.

Ironically, employees working from the office often benefit from greater visibility and more opportunities for informal interactions with leadership. Remote employees, on the other hand, frequently contend with the classic "out of sight, out of mind" challenge, which can impact recognition and career progression despite strong performance.

We certainly have skill issues, but attributing those issues to remote work misses the mark. The root causes lie elsewhere, and remote work is not the driving factor behind them.
If we're being objective, some of the weakest performers are sitting in Franklin Lakes, which makes it difficult to argue that location is the root cause of the problem.

Bumped from @fv+1kvtn2txr.

Lousy raises and no recognition for anyone, even the top performers. There's literally no reason to put in extra effort anymore.

We have people carrying the team while others do almost nothing. Why don't the layoffs ever target the right people?

I'd be fine with layoffs if they actually targeted the right people. But it's never been about performance. The best workers keep getting let go.

I'm so stressed about layoffs that I can't focus. As a result, I'm worried I'll end up getting cut because my performance is slipping. It's kind of funny in a terrible way.

Heard some senior folks talk about our high performing teams in terms of sports teams. It made me think about genuinely high performing sports teams - the ones who are given time to develop and train, given the best equipment, given support, given trust and empowered to perform and then I thought about XOM, the team on the field is despised by their managers, trying to perform with worse equipment each year, no support and a performance system that pits teammates against each other. I realised the sports team analogy is a pile of bullsh-t.

https://qz.com/google-workers-rally-layoff-protections-headquarters-071726

Among the petition's core demands: a severance guarantee for any worker who is laid off, the option of voluntary departures ahead of any mandatory cuts, the elimination of forced-distribution performance ratings, and the ability for employees to take their severance in the form of extended paid leave.

Too much to do and never enough time now. Once all these changes happen I can’t even imagine this scenario.

And the quarterly bonus… I’m not getting one… So much work done… So disappointing!!!
I’m sure I’m not the only one not getting one..
So disappointing when you’re looking forward to it and it’s not there!!!

GB - took over Nov 2017. Over her tenure, shareholder value has increased by an anemic 2.8%/year, membership by just 1.4%/year, and operating margins have cratered by 52%. Meanwhile, her annual compensation has steadily increased by 7%/year. Sounds like a “2” rating performance but a 4 or 5 compensation. Shareholders should ba----g on the BoD doors demanding her ouster. Wil never happen, since BoD is stacked with her pals.

The most amusing part of the article is the premise itself that IBM can re-achieve any sort of relevance after this decimation.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/ibm-stock-price-fall-sell-87657335

The blue chip’s biggest wipeout on record will force the company to reinvent itself—again.

By Mackenzie Tatananni |
Updated July 17, 2026, 4:27 pm EDT / Original July 17, 2026, 1:00 am EDT

IBM has been forced to reinvent itself many times in the past. After its biggest wipeout on record this past week, it will have to do so again.

Big Blue had been riding high. Yes, there were problems in consulting, as signaled by Accenture’s woes, and in software, tipped off by weakness in ServiceNow and its sector peers. But the stock was trading at an all-time high as recently as June 2 as investors looked at the company’s near-monopoly in mainframe computing, its quantum computing effort, and its prospects as an artificial-intelligence winner.

They were wrong. IBM stock tumbled 25% this past Tuesday, its worst single-day drop on record, following a rare pre-announcement of its quarterly results. Such a move is highly unusual for the company, which is traditionally disciplined when it comes to financial reporting. The last time IBM pre-announced earnings was in October 2008, in an effort to reassure investors it was on track to meet targets during the global financial crisis.

Investors faced a different reality this time around, as IBM posted second-quarter earnings and revenue that missed Wall Street forecasts. While there were plenty of problems—slowing software and consulting sales, a massive reallocation of technology spending by its customers to chips, servers, and other AI needs—the biggest drag on the company’s performance was its infrastructure business. That includes its legacy mainframes—the massive computers enterprises like banks and credit-card networks rely on to process billions of calculations and transactions in real time.

Big Blue is undoubtedly the dominant force in this space. A 2022 study by Celent, commissioned by IBM, found its Z Mainframe Servers line processed more than half of the world’s transactions by value. But that didn’t help the division’s performance during the second quarter. Infrastructure revenue fell, as expected, but the 7% decline was significantly faster and harder than IBM had anticipated. Not only did fewer companies buy the actual mainframe hardware, they also bought less of the high-margin software required for tasks like banking and credit-card payments.

CEO Arvind Krishna attributed the results to poor execution. “We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected, driving the majority of our shortfall,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders.

The 25% drop was massive—and partly justified, even as it erased nearly $70 billion in market capitalization. “The stock had become a crowded AI infrastructure winner and was trading near all-time highs, so any sign of execution issues was going to get punished,” says Dan O’Regan, managing director of equity trading at Mizuho Securities. “That said, a move of this magnitude suggests the market is now pricing in a much more prolonged slowdown than what management has implied.”

It didn’t help that analysts had set high expectations heading into the print. Morgan Stanley, for one, had predicted upside in infrastructure and software that was already priced into the stock. Oppenheimer, which downgraded the stock on Wednesday, had anticipated “no surprises in business trajectory,” making the sudden pre-announcement a true blindside.

Analysts were quick to move to the sidelines following IBM’s earnings miss, asserting that Big Blue would have to lean on major acquisitions or close deals that slipped past the quarter’s deadline to recover lost ground. Now Oppenheimer is questioning the company’s ability to achieve double-digit software revenue growth through 2027. The 5% growth in the latest quarter was sharply below the firm’s 12% estimate.

The bigger issue might be whether IBM’s infrastructure business itself is being disrupted. Even before Tuesday’s plunge, IBM stock had been lagging behind the broader market after stumbling earlier in the year as fears of AI disruption began to take hold. One of the most significant drops occurred in February, when AI start-up Anthropic unveiled a COBOL modernization playbook for its Claude Code tool, claiming it could dramatically streamline updates to the outdated programming language that runs on IBM mainframes. Historically, the immense complexity and cost of migrating off these systems protected IBM’s highly profitable mainframe business—a protective moat AI now threatens to dissolve.

IBM stock closed on Wednesday at 16.54 times 12-month forward earnings, its lowest price/earnings ratio since June 2024. But that says less about where IBM is now than where it was before. As recently as June 2, the stock was trading for more than 25 times, above the S&P 500’s 21.52—a premium valuation that might not have been deserved.

“Lower prices make an asset more attractive,” BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski says. “I just caution investors that, out of all the companies I cover, IBM probably has the lowest organic growth currently and the lowest organic growth outlook. That needs to be reflected in the valuation.”

Shares plunged 26% by Friday’s close, capping off their worst week in history. As tempting as it may be to scoop them up after such a tumble, IBM still has a lot of work to do.

In the worst-case scenario, investors fear that IBM’s enterprise clients—massive businesses with sprawling IT setups—are redirecting their budgets toward AI instead of Big Blue’s traditional offerings. At best, the company was simply caught off guard by a sudden capital expenditure shift, as Krishna asserted, and can reclaim that lost ground in coming quarters.

Slowinski is one of the most bearish voices on the Street, rating the stock at Underperform. “IBM’s strategy is to use its cash flow to acquire higher-growth software assets in order to improve its growth profile,” he says. “But it has a business in consulting, in software, in mainframe, where all of them are low-single-digit organic growers. And the prospects of that improving organically is very slim.”

As Mizuho’s O’Regan sees it, the setup from here depends less on the AI narrative and more on management proving it can consistently execute.

“The market wants proof that this is an execution stumble, not the beginning of a structural slowdown in demand,” O’Regan explains. “As a stock, the days of getting the benefit of the doubt are probably over for now.”

At least until the next metamorphosis begins to take shape.

Remember, the 52 week high and low are $37.42 and $82.62. Those are shocking results.

Any idea?

I don’t want Dan and Alfonso to get on stage next time and complain about the terrible customer experience on the app or mobile site.

They chose to retain the underperforming team while laying off smart people. How did they decide to keep Adam C over other Senior Directors? And Chris P’s underperforming team remains completely intact.

The buck stops with them going forward. They can’t blame the former leadership team anymore.

I find it highly oxymoronic (with the emphasis on mo--nic) that we have these departments that take their work so seriously, use unbelievable amounts of academic rigor to try and solve problems and come from the highest caliber business schools and academic institutions while we see stock prices in free fall and continuous service area exits and RIFs. Maybe things need to be simplified, not iterated with more rigor and wonderfully polished vocabulary in presentations. This place is full of contradictions.

These analysts are hilarious st-----g Bill. There hasn’t been a worse performing bank ceo in decades.

After spending 25 years at Big O across multiple organizations and technologies, I feel I'm in a good position to share my perspective.

One thing many people misunderstand is how compensation works. In my experience, bonuses, salary increases, and RSU's are not automatic rewards for hard work or tenure. They depend heavily on your manager's recommendation, the leadership chain, and the budget allocated to your organization.

Even if your manager believes you deserve a significant raise, there are organizational constraints. Most teams receive a limited compensation budget, so managers often have to make difficult trade-offs. In a team of 10 people, only a small number (Read 1 or almost 2) may receive meaningful increases while everyone else gets little or nothing. That's simply how the budgeting process works.

Because of that, I've learned not to assume that working harder automatically translates into better compensation. Performance really doesn't matter a lot, but manager advocacy, organizational priorities do have their share.

At Big O, timing and organizational placement often matter as much as talent. You could have the abilities of Elon Musk, but if you're buried in an org that's five or six levels below an EVP, don't expect exceptional career growth. Realistically, you may spend years capped at something like IC4, irrespective of your performance.

The same applies to layoffs. From what I've observed over the years, layoffs are not always a pure reflection of talent or performance. Its just big fish eats small fish. One influential manager saving his and sacrificing some one else. Or its a bid. A manager will be asked how many you can get rid off. Sometimes excellent employees are affected while others remain. That's the reality of working in a large corporation.

My advice is simple: don't spend too much emotional energy trying to predict the next raise cycle or the next round of layoffs. Forums like Layoffs.com and Reddit are full of speculation, but nobody outside leadership truly knows what's going to happen.

Instead, invest in yourself. Keep your skills current, interview occasionally, build your professional network, and make sure you always have options.

One lesson that surprised me after leaving Big O was this: spending decades working on internal systems and technologies doesn't automatically translate into equivalent market value outside the company. Many of the tools, processes, and systems are unique to Big O. In many ways, you have to rebuild your external profile and prove yourself again. If you're fortunate enough to find a role using similar technologies, the transition is easier—but that's not always the case.

This is just my experience after 25 years. Others may have had very different experiences, but I hope this perspective helps someone focus on what they can control rather than worrying about what they can't.

1. Continued market share losses across beverages and snacks, last four weeks, last 12 weeks, last 52 weeks, last 5 years
2. GLP-1 adoption accelerating in US, rest of the world is just getting started.
3. A disappointing M&A track record that generates negative shareholder value
4. Executive Leadership that you wouldn’t trust to look after your dog and even worse bench of leaders

You can solve the first three but you can’t solve the fourth one. Investors also have just given up.

The comments are very pukey too.

"TIME's America's best companies list which recognizes organizations that stand out for employee satisfaction, financial performance, and sustainability transparency."

What a joke. Employees are not satisfied. Financial performance is terrible. Must be a pretty low bar to make the list.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jennifer-manchester-5255aa1_proud-to-share-that-fiserv-has-been-named-share-7480998924154073088-VYTt/?highlightedUpdateUrn=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7480998925391552513&highlightedUpdateType=SOCIAL_SHARE&origin=SOCIAL_SHARE&utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAACYMkNIBD-GWPZlWEfpOLTBnZ-SXV-1K9WQ

Charlie sounds upset about being asked why every bank surpassed WF earnings He basically said he was tired of this question. Is he feeling the heat???

Interested in hearing if your performance eval rating/manager comments were as expected or a surprise?
For the first time in over 18 years, I received a “less than expected” rating even though I achieved my stated goals, met deadlines.

Performance gap is widening.

Investors don’t see value in the integrated strategy; reason: there is not an investor base for such a company. You have the majors and then focused companies in refining and midstream. No one buys PSX unless they have to. If you want Refining exposure you buy VLO or even PBF; midstream, you buy EPC or TRGP. We are ruled by index buyers.

We will never outperform the sum of the parts.

I’m hearing Q2 will be the turnaround quarter, word is the numbers coming through look fantastic, maybe that $8 target for the Warrants is in sight

What exactly does this role entail, and what product are we working with? It looks like a glorified Scrum Master position, and most of the people in it are G8s. I'm not sure how sustainable this setup is long-term. What began as a pragmatic shift to stop engineering teams from building things nobody wanted has devolved into a massive, heavily certificated industry of performative bureaucracy.
More than 95% of product managers are not required .We have projects ,We dont have products .In tech there are no products.There are product managers even in data teams .Thats level of insanity this so called "product mindset" BS has reached

Total spam communications that always makes me mad.

The email about record profits, all the while NOT paying for performance angered me.

What is the percentage for merit increase for achieving a performance rating of 2 vs 3 vs 4 vs 5?

Does anyone even get a 5? I heard they don’t give out 5s. Or are they reserved for senior leadership?

LinkedIn posting liking commenting and dressing like they are on a runway at NSM. No wonder nothing of substance ever happens at this company. Lfg Deadtronic

During my time at FIS, I observed instances where individuals with limited technical knowledge were placed in leadership positions over highly skilled resources. It highlighted the importance of having the right expertise and leadership approach in place.

My experience with the MBP QA team was disappointing. Favouritism seemed to outweigh performance, and quality work wasn't properly valued. Despite my commitment and contributions, I was made redundant while others with limited output remained.

It often feels like employees with strong connections or managerial support receive more flexibility, while regular, hardworking employees are the ones most affected during layoffs. Performance should matter more than favoritism.

It’s disappointing to see some employees take weeks off or work from home without concern, while dedicated, high-performing employees face layoffs. Decisions should be based on merit, not relationships.