Performance Summary: Self

PERFORMANCE SUMMARY: SELF

Rating requested. N/A. Rating received, every cycle, six years running. Exceeds Expectations. Promotion cycles cleared in that time. Zero. I have kept both numbers in the same spreadsheet tab since year two, which was either an early warning sign or a decent piece of foresight, depending on which version of me is doing the rating.

Manager comments, verbatim, from three separate cycles, three separate managers. "Strong technical contributor." "Reliable, doesn't need hand holding." "Would benefit from being more visible to leadership." Nobody has ever specified the mechanism by which visibility to leadership is supposed to occur. The one time I asked directly, the answer was "just keep doing what you're doing and it'll happen," which is the corporate equivalent of a doctor telling you to wait and see.

BACKGROUND, FOR CONTEXT

I'm from a village outside Nalgonda, about ninety minutes from Hyderabad if the highway's behaving. First person in my family to finish an engineering degree, JNTU Hyderabad, reservation seat, class of a year I won't bother naming because the year matters less than the fact that I was the only one from my school's entire graduating batch to make it into any engineering college that year, reserved seat or not. My father sells fertilizer and pesticide out of a small shop. He has never once, in nine years, asked me what "mainframe migration" means, and I have never once tried to explain it to him, because I don't think the explanation would land anywhere useful for either of us.

I live in Kukatpally now, share a two bedroom flat with my wife and, since last year, my mother, who moved in after my father's shop started needing less of her time than it used to. Forty minutes to Gachibowli on a good day, closer to ninety when the outer ring road backs up, which it does most days, so I've stopped calling it a good day and started calling the ninety minute version the actual day, with the forty minute version as the exception.

CURRENT ROLE

Senior systems engineer, insurance sector account, migrating a client's claims-processing system off a mainframe that's older than I am and onto something cloud-based that the client's board approved four years ago and has been slow-walking ever since, the way large insurance boards slow-walk anything that isn't immediately visible to a shareholder. I know this codebase better than almost anyone else on the floor. I say this not as a boast but as a data point, because the data point matters for what comes next.

SPONSORSHIP, DEFINITION

Not in the employee handbook. I looked. There's a section on mentorship, which is the formal, assignable, HR tracked version of a relationship, and then there's sponsorship, which is the actual mechanism by which anything moves in this building, and which exists nowhere on paper because writing it down would require admitting it's unevenly distributed.

A sponsor puts your name in rooms you're not in. A sponsor tells a client, before you've even met them, that you're the person they want on this. A sponsor absorbs a small amount of risk on your behalf, spends a sliver of their own credibility, because they've decided you're worth it.

I have never had one. I want to say that as a fact, not a complaint, though I recognize those two categories blur once you've been the fact for six years running.

INCIDENT LOG, ENTRY 1

Date. Roughly two years ago. Context. Staffing of the account team for the same insurance client, eight seats, kickoff with two VPs flying in from their Bay Area headquarters. I had more direct experience on that mainframe than six of the eight people selected. I checked. I have the commit history and the change tickets to back it up, which is a strange thing to keep as evidence, but here we are.

Reason given, when I asked my team lead, calmly, in the tone I use for exactly this kind of question. The client wanted people who'd "gel well culturally" with the visiting leadership. I have heard this phrase deployed as justification more times than I can count, across three managers and two reorganizations. I have never once heard it used to explain an inclusion. Only an absence.

Resolution. None logged. Ticket closed, status, won't fix.

INCIDENT LOG, ENTRY 2

Date. Eight months ago. Context. A team offsite at a resort outside Shamshabad, meant for bonding before a big renewal pitch. Over dinner, one of the VPs, making conversation, asked me what my gotra was, the way you'd ask someone their star sign at a party where everyone assumes the answer is harmless small talk. I gave a one word answer, invented on the spot, something generic enough to pass, and changed the subject to the renewal numbers, which is the one subject I can always redirect a room toward without anyone noticing the redirect.

Resolution. None logged. I don't log this kind of thing anywhere except here, apparently, tonight, for the first time.

TRAINING MODULE FEEDBACK, UNSUBMITTED

Company ran a D&I training last year. Gender, disability, LGBTQ+ inclusion, each with its own module, quiz, completion certificate. Caste got one slide. Definitional only. Here's what caste is, here's why it's relevant in the Indian context, moving on now to unconscious bias in performance reviews.

There is no field on the internal grievance portal for caste. I checked that too. The categories map onto protected classes as defined by employment law in jurisdictions that never needed a caste category, because the people who built the portal template were solving a problem they'd personally never had.

Feedback field left blank. Reason. See Risk Assessment, below.

DRAFT EMAIL, UNSENT, RECOVERED FROM TRASH

Subject line. Feedback on D&I Training, Caste Coverage. Body, first line only, before I deleted the rest. "I wanted to flag a gap in last quarter's training that I don't think was intentional, but that has a real impact on"

It has a real impact on. I stopped there both times I tried to finish that sentence, a year apart, which tells you something about how long a half written email can sit in a person before either the courage or the email itself expires. The email expired first, both times.

RISK ASSESSMENT

Probability that raising this formally improves my standing. Low. Probability that it makes me, permanently, in every future room on this floor, "the guy who brought up caste." High. Probability that being that guy costs more, over a ten year horizon, than staying invisible costs. I've run this calculation more times than any of the others in this document, and it hasn't changed once, not after the dinner in Shamshabad, not after the eighth time I watched a staffing list go up without my name on it.

I don't call this cowardice, mostly because I don't think the word buys me anything useful. It's closer to underwriting. I looked at the exposure and declined the policy.

STAKEHOLDER FEEDBACK, INFORMAL, NEVER RECORDED

My wife, more than once. Why not just switch companies, if the pattern's this consistent. My answer, also more than once. The pattern would probably follow me, and testing that costs three years and someone else's onboarding budget before I'd even have data on whether it's actually different anywhere else. She isn't wrong that this is a convenient answer. I'm not sure that makes it an incorrect one.

My mother, once, not knowing any of this history, asked why I never bring friends home from work. I told her the commute makes it hard for anyone to justify the trip out to Kukatpally. She accepted this the way she accepts most things I tell her about my job, politely, without follow up questions, because she's decided, I think, that my work is a country she doesn't speak the language of, and it's easier for both of us if she doesn't try to visit.

ACTION ITEMS

None assigned this cycle. Carried forward to next cycle. Also the cycle after that, most likely, going by trend.

CLOSING STATUS

Standup's at ten fifteen tomorrow, same floor, same building off the outer ring road, same ninety minute drive most days. I'll be there, on time, prepared, exceeding expectations in every measurable category except the one nobody will put a metric on. Ticket stays open. I've stopped expecting it to close, which isn't the same as closing it myself. It's just what an open ticket looks like after enough sprints that nobody remembers who filed it, or, if they remember, has decided it isn't theirs to fix.