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Vagueness prevents you from moving forward in companies
It's in the company's interest to keep your performance vague. Vague means they can spin it either way.
When it comes to evaluate someone’s performance, it’s in the company’s best interest to keep things as vague as possible. The further away you get from saying “I did X which saved you Y”, the better they are because they can spin that narrative to either demote or promote you.
By being as vague as they can within any HR structure in place (KPIs, structured questions, etc) they have plenty of ammo to use against you because you also have no concrete evidence to if what you are doing is valuable to them.
How do you prove you are valuable if they don’t let you ? I think that’s why most promotion advice out there stem around making things measurable and trackable but again it’s hard to track impact.
And when their business is doing well, they can’t associate that with what you have done since it’s time based and not output based. If you built software for a bank and that bank did well, it’s hard to tell if they did well because of their new saving scheme or the new banking software you helped make.