Yeah I&#x27;m not sure objective performance ratings ever really existed, mostly because there just isn&#x27;t really a good way to measure performance on a personal level for programming&#x2F;software engineering&#x2F;most mind-driven tasks. Even still, in larger companies, when you have two employees that have gone above and beyond, but only have &quot;funding&quot; to move one of them up a &quot;grade level&quot; , it becomes a political decision very quickly, as usually the manager with the most power gets to promote their empmloyee of choice.<p>I put quotes on those words because I find they&#x27;re usually just corporate excuses to not pay someone what they could be worth elsewhere. That&#x27;s totally the company&#x27;s right by the way, not complaining about that, it is in their best interest to pay you as little as is necessary just as it is in your best interest to be paid as much as necessary.<p>But what it did do was enable you to at least have something as a sticking point when it came to review time -- &quot;My performance this year has definitely been not-bad, as demonstrated by my contributions to x, y, and z projects, when is my raise coming&quot; is something I feel like you can at least say if there is a formal performance review process in place. Once there is no performance review process, it&#x27;s not clear when you would even say that?<p>Worst case I can only imagine a world where the yearly review (and with it the yearly expectation for higher pay) was no longer a thing, and the mentality that talking about pay&#x2F;asking for more of it became&#x2F;stayed somewhat taboo.