I think luxury goods, and the privilege of living within your means, is to be able to buy goods and instantly depreciate them.
I buy electronics equipment, computers, furniture, clothes, and cars with the mindset I will be the last owner of them, and they will have no resale value.
“I bought this, and I will assume it’s instantly worthless”
It keeps me from buying the same thing twice and causes me to save up for the thing I really want, and keep it for as long as possible. It also lets me be picky about my preferences and really scope out exactly what I want on a relaxed timeframe.
Perhaps it’s a side effect of growing up with hand me downs, and knowing anything our family owned was one step to junk, but it does keep spending in check now that I am doing okay in my career.
It's worth clarifying that by "Meeting or Exceeding" or "better than Exceeding", I wasn't referring to the actual rating names, but indicating what buckets of ratings. i.e. Better than Exceeding means a rating that was > "Exceeding Expectations"
“Meeting or exceeding” is the American construction. If I’m exceeding I expect a big raise, or at least talk of a promotion (maybe next year). Starting a phrase with “meeting” puts a iscount on it.
Of course we are talking about companies that are paying too much in the first place, so maybe they’ll be forgiven for trying to bring the slope down a bit.
It is probably a way to give workers fake kudos without actually giving them anything.
A lot of north american modern management theory seems to think that praising your employees is the best way to get them to perform. By telling someone who's good but not great a "You got exceed expectations!!" they'll feel like they are valued.
> It is probably a way to give workers fake kudos without actually giving them anything.
It's actually the opposite. The ratings themselves are associated with multipliers for your annual bonus and stock grants. IIRC, the full spectrum of ratings and multipliers was:
Meets None (0.0) -> Meets Some (0.5) -> Meets Most (0.85) -> Meets (1.0) -> Exceeds (1.25) -> Greatly Exceeds (2.0) -> and Redefines (3.0)
Ignoring the company multiplier, which was always a value slightly greater than 1.0 when I was there (that may not be true now), for a Senior Engineer (L5) with a $175k salary, 15% bonus target, and annual stock grant of $110k vesting over 4 years , the value of the rating to them at each exceeds level would be:
Exceeds: ~$12k / year
Greatly Exceeds: ~$53k / year
Redefines: ~$107k / year
The top 2 buckets only account for about 8% or so of employees, but the number for Exceeds was around 20% of employees during my time.
It's a way to correct under-leveling rapidly. Google at least aimed to hire at the level of fully demonstrated and sustainable competency; if there was any doubt you'd be hired at the lower level. That can be corrected in a ~year with greatly exceeds or redefines ratings. There was a bit of step function in yearly raises depending on the rating as well but promotion was a substantial raise.
Quite the opposite: getting into the top brackets is directly tied to large pay increases, larger bonuses and stock grants, and puts you in line for promotion.
it's a bit logarithmic. the upper end needs to be 1% 0.1% 0.01%, for the same kind of reasons we went from "MTS" to staff, sr staff, principal, distinguised, fellow.
“What works for you only works for you, so you might not have discovered that it works for anything else, but only if you were really paying attention.”
There’s a risk with a user base and having a support organization, much like the risk calculation the insurance industry takes.