Career & Self

360-degree feedback is the corporate ritual of allowing bosses, subordinates, and peers to anonymously broadcast their impressions like hidden microphones. Opinions gathered from all directions arrive as a cocktail of contradictions, elation, and dread. The goodwill of evaluators often transforms into unseen spears that leave quiet scars on those being reviewed. Results become metrics touted as merits while also triggering secondary disasters of gossip and anxiety. In the end the system meant to be an equal court becomes a stage for unequal power struggles.

Agile is the development methodology that loves change more than planning and cheerfully welcomes rough estimates and endless meetings. Truth always emerges at the end of each sprint, though nobody ever finds the time to verify it. Progress tracking is said to occur, but often it's merely a ritual of staring blankly at a mountain of backlog. In practice, product owners and scrum masters perform strange religious ceremonies while developers are tossed between fleeting satisfaction and unending revisions.

An application is a bureaucratic ritual in which one entrusts their fate to the judgment of others. Hope and despair are mailed together, betting one’s future on a return envelope. The moment you press submit is a fine line between courage and folly. By the time your forms arrive, your spirit has usually already sunk.

Appraisal is the sacred ritual through which organizations measure the difference between achievement and sloth, dispensing equal parts praise and reproach. At quarter-end, countless feelings soar untethered from numbers, and a stack of paper decrees human worth. The true purpose is not the appraisal itself, but the spectacle it provides for meetings. Everyone claims to want fairness, yet those who believe in it harbor the deepest doubts.

Aptitude refers to the ideal self where one’s talents and personality fit perfectly, yet its measurement is nothing but superstition dressed in science. Various tests proclaim "perfect match" like magic while actually slipping through the cracks of statistics. Each questionnaire that tries to define you ultimately narrows human potential instead. In the end, people are sorted into the binary of "apt" or "not apt", and all complexity vanishes.

An assessment center is a field of trials under the guise of evaluating talent. Participants exhaust themselves with group exercises and presentations, only to be judged by vague interviewers’ whims. It touts fairness and efficiency, yet becomes a device to test stress tolerance and corporate servility. Successful candidates emerge not as proven talents, but as warriors who endured needless ordeals.

Waterfall is an archaic development method that elevates up-front planning to sacred ritual. The moment a detailed plan is set, the project’s future seems predestined. Implementation and testing are left to downstream workers toiling under rigid schedules. Change requests become heresy, and a single line added to the spec is treated like a blasphemous act. The long road to delivery inflicts more drama and suffering than any epic tale.