How engineering managers actually get rated

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Key takeaways:

• Your team’s achievements don’t automatically show your contribution. Be specific about the decisions you made that made those achievements happen.
• Engineering manager ratings are less consistent than individual contributor ratings. Different evaluators can reach different conclusions about the same manager.
• Impact beyond your team makes your contribution easier to see as it gives other leaders direct evidence of your work.

You have just spent two weeks on calibration. You wrote a packet for each of your engineers, gathered the evidence, and sat with your peer engineering managers discussing their performance.

A few weeks later, your manager shares your rating with you.

That was decided in a similar calibration session. Your manager, alongside their peers, compared your performance with engineering managers whose teams you may have never worked with. You do not know what was said, the evidence that was presented, or many of the managers you were measured against.

It is easy to think of your performance review as a more senior version of the one you just ran for your team, but it isn’t.

The process applied to you differs in three important ways, and understanding them can change the evidence you offer to your manager to take into the next cycle.

Your evidence is other people’s output

An engineer can easily point to code they wrote, systems they designed, and incidents they resolved.

You have an attribution problem. Your team completed that difficult migration, kept its senior engineers through a reorganization, and reduced the number of incidents. Your contribution to those outcomes is something someone has to infer.

Your manager might not see most of this work directly. Instead, they rely on things like team sentiment, 360 feedback, engagement scores, and skip-level conversations. Those signals can be misleading too.

A manager might be well-liked because they avoid difficult conversations. Another might not be very well-liked that period because they’ve had a few difficult conversations. From a distance, it can be difficult to tell the difference.

Your manager then has to represent your work to people who may have never seen you do it.

This is where specific decisions become useful evidence. “Her team delivered the platform migration” tells people what your team did. “She cut the migration scope in half in January, which is why it was delivered at all” tells them what you did.

The difference is attribution. The more clearly someone can connect an important outcome to a decision you made, the easier your contribution is to evaluate.

Engineering managers are harder to evaluate

You might expect performance evaluations to become more accurate as you move into management. The research suggests otherwise.

A large study of performance ratings found that two supervisors were more likely to disagree when evaluating a manager (r=.57) than when evaluating an individual contributor (r=.68).

It makes sense when you think about it. One engineering manager might inherit a stable team working on a visible product. Another might inherit a struggling team, a legacy system, or a project that gets cancelled halfway through the year. Separating the manager’s contribution from everything happening around them isn’t easy.

Talent Strategy Group’s 2026 survey found that 84.7% of organizations run calibration meetings, and 63.6% provide an expected distribution.

You don’t know how other managers performed

You know how your team performed, but often you don’t know how the other managers in your calibration performed.

You might have delivered everything you committed to, improved reliability, and grown two senior engineers. Another manager might have done all of that while also taking on a second team.

Michael Lopp describes this in The Mario Meeting: managers arrive at calibration convinced their people deserve the highest ratings, but people in the room have to compare those cases against each other.

The same happens when you are the person being discussed. It might be clear that you did a good job. Where that puts you compared with the other engineering managers is much harder to know.

Impact beyond your team is easier to see

Maybe you led an initiative that improved a deployment process used by several teams, fixed how your organization onboards engineers, or resolved a dependency that had been blocking multiple teams. These are problems where your contribution is easier to identify, and other leaders have probably seen the impact themselves.

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That visibility matters because your manager is no longer the only person who can make the case for your work.

This doesn’t mean neglecting your own team to find organization-wide projects. Your team still comes first. However, once it is performing well, solving problems beyond it can give your manager stronger evidence to take into calibration.

You cannot control what happens in a room you are not in, but you can be more deliberate about what evidence reaches it.