I spent a lot of my working life as a contract programmer. I was a hired hand brought in to develop specific pieces of code. I was paid a fee agreed at the beginning of the contract. At other times in my career I worked as an employee. One of the biggest disadvantages of being an employee, as far as I was concerned, was having to submit myself to appraisals. It also was fairly galling that my pay could not reflect the shortage of my specific technical skills.
I found the whole appraisal project slightly surreal. I had, essentially, done the same job as a contractor as I was doing as a 'permi' but now some box ticking exercise would, in theory, determine how much I was paid. Even worse, when I briefly became a manager rather than a developer, I had to give appraisals. The whole process seemed as fake to me as a manager as it had seemed to be to be fake as one who was managed.
The good thing about being part of a pay-setting discussion was the final incontrovertible proof that the appraisal numbers played no part in setting pay increases but was, at best, a fig leaf for denying a decent increase to someone who was not highly regarded by me, or more importantly, my own boss.
Well, now I have put all that behind me, and will probably never have to suffer it again. There are some compensations to getting old and past it.
