EngineerHer

At a certain point in my career, I made a deliberate decision to take a step back.

I had spent years in roles where I was permanently flat out — stretching myself, problem-solving at full capacity, operating at a pace that was genuinely unsustainable. I was good at it. But I was exhausted, and I knew it. So when an opportunity came up to take a role I knew I could do — a role I had effectively done years before, at a level well within my capability — I took it. Deliberately. Intentionally. As a way of giving myself some breathing room to think, to recover, and to regain some semblance of a life outside of work.

What I had not anticipated was that the system would punish me for it.

I completed my work during normal working hours. I delivered everything that was asked of me. No targets missed. No tasks outstanding. No failures I could point to. And yet when my performance review came, it was the worst I had ever received.

I asked for specifics. What had I failed to deliver? Which targets had I missed? What had gone wrong as a result of my actions? The answer, to each question, was: nothing.

What was actually happening — and it took me a while to name it clearly — was that I was being penalised for not performing busyness. For not being visibly, exhaustingly, demonstrably present in the way that the culture around me had decided was what commitment looked like. I was completing my role in normal working hours, and somehow that felt like an insult. Like I was sitting on potential I was refusing to spend in the service of the organisation’s preferred version of dedication.

It was the most instructive performance review of my career. Not because it was fair — it wasn’t — but because it showed me, in sharp relief, exactly how broken the measurement system was.

What performance reviews are supposed to measure

In theory, a performance review measures impact. What did you deliver? What was the outcome of your work? How did the organisation or team move forward because of what you did?

In practice, many performance reviews measure something else entirely. They measure visibility. Hours. Perceived commitment. The appearance of effort. How much you seemed to care, as assessed by how much of yourself you appeared to sacrifice.

These are not the same thing. Not even close.

An engineer who works 70 hours a week and delivers mediocre outcomes is not performing better than an engineer who works 40 hours and delivers excellent ones. But in a culture that has confused effort with output, the first engineer will often be assessed more favourably. Because she is seen. Because her presence signals commitment in a way that competence and efficiency — quietly, calmly doing the job well — somehow doesn’t.

This is the performance review trap. And it catches women disproportionately — not because women are less visible, but because the cost of performing visibility is higher for women who are carrying more outside of work, and because the definition of commitment in many engineering cultures was written by people for whom 70-hour weeks were genuinely available to them.

Why efficiency gets punished

Here is the paradox at the heart of this trap: the better you are at your job, the more likely you are to fall into it.

When you are genuinely skilled — when you can navigate a role with ease because you have spent years building the expertise that makes it manageable — you are not working less. You are working efficiently. You are applying experience and judgment in a way that means you don’t need to brute-force your way through problems with raw hours.

But organisations that measure input rather than output cannot see this. All they see is that you left at a normal time. That you didn’t seem stressed. That you didn’t look like you were struggling. And in cultures that have romanticised struggle as evidence of seriousness, not struggling reads as not trying.

The cruelty of this is that it penalises exactly the kind of development that organisations claim to want. They say they want experienced, capable people who can handle complexity efficiently. And then they reward people who perform incapability — who make their work look hard, who stay late visibly, who perform the theatre of effort regardless of what it actually produces.

If you have ever felt that being good at your job was somehow working against you — that your competence was invisible in a way your colleagues’ apparent struggle wasn’t — this is probably why.

How to reframe your performance before the review happens

The mistake most people make is trying to change the narrative during the performance review conversation. By then, it is almost always too late. The impression has been formed.

The work happens before. And it is specifically the work of making your impact visible — deliberately, consistently, and in terms that the organisation actually measures.

Document outcomes, not activities. Keep a running record of what you deliver and — crucially — what the impact of that delivery was. Not ‘I completed the design review’ but ‘I completed the design review, identified two critical issues that would have cost significantly more to fix at a later stage, and the project shipped on time.’ The difference between an activity and an outcome is the difference between invisible and visible work.

Quantify wherever you can. Time saved, cost avoided, problems prevented, processes improved. Numbers are harder to dismiss than qualitative descriptions. If your efficiency saved the team ten hours last quarter, say so. If your intervention prevented a failure that would have required a week of remediation, say so. Make the invisible cost of your contribution visible by naming what would have happened without it.

Share your work in progress, not just on completion. In cultures that reward visibility, the people who are seen to be working are the people who talk about their work as it happens. Send the brief update. Mention what you’re working on in the team meeting. Flag the thing you just solved. Not performatively — but consistently enough that your output is part of the ambient awareness of the team, not a surprise that appears at review time.

Frame your efficiency as a strategic asset. If your organisation values experience, then your ability to deliver in less time is evidence of that experience. ‘I was able to resolve this quickly because of my background in X’ is a different sentence than saying nothing and hoping someone notices. Name the expertise behind the efficiency.

The conversation you need to have before your next review

If you are approaching a performance review cycle and you are concerned about how your contribution is being perceived, the time to address that is now — not in the review itself.

Ask your manager, in a direct and low-stakes conversation:

The question to ask:

“I want to make sure I’m being assessed on the things that matter most. Can we align on what success looks like for my role over the next period — specifically in terms of outcomes rather than hours?”

That question does two things. It opens a conversation about how you’re being measured before the measurement happens. And it signals — clearly and professionally — that you are aware of the distinction between effort and impact, and you expect to be assessed on the right one.

If the answer you get back is vague — if the response centres on presence, attitude, or being more visible without any concrete deliverables attached — that is important information about the organisation you are in. It tells you that the measurement system is feeling-based rather than outcome-based, and that no amount of excellent delivery will reliably produce an excellent review in that environment.

That doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It means you know what you’re dealing with — which is the necessary first step toward deciding what to do about it.

When the system is the problem

Some performance review systems are genuinely broken. They measure the wrong things, consistently, because the culture that built them decided long ago that hours and visibility were proxies for value — and nobody has successfully challenged that assumption.

If you are in that kind of organisation, the strategies above will help you navigate the system more effectively. But they won’t fix the system. And at some point, the question worth sitting with is whether you want to keep optimising your performance within a system that was never designed to recognise the kind of contribution you actually make.

The best performance review I ever received was for a role where my manager measured me on what I delivered and the quality of what I delivered. Full stop. Hours never came up. Visibility never came up. The only question on the table was: did you do what you said you would do, and did it achieve what we needed it to achieve?

That is what a fair performance system looks like. And it is worth knowing the difference — because you are allowed to want that, and to make decisions accordingly.

If your most recent performance review left you feeling that the assessment didn’t match the reality of what you delivered, the Leadership Load Diagnostic is worth taking. It takes five minutes and will help you see where the weight in your career is sitting right now.

➡️ Take the Leadership Load Diagnostic here

And if this post resonated — if you recognised yourself in the engineer who was doing everything right and still couldn’t get a fair hearing — I’d love to hear from you. You are not imagining it. And you are not alone.