The Robot Reviewed My Work. It Gave Me a 7.4

Not a 7, not an 8. A 7.4. The precision was the point. My work had been graded to two decimal places by something that had never done the work, and the grade felt more real than any human review ever had.

The review system scored everything: my code, my documentation, my meeting contributions, my response times. It weighted them, normalized them, and produced a number that appeared on my dashboard with the authority of a verdict. The 7.4 was an average of scores for things I had mostly forgotten doing.

Here is the strange thing. Human reviews had always left me room to argue. I could say the reviewer was too harsh, too rushed, too personal. The 7.4 had no personality to appeal to. It was the output of a rubric, and the rubric had been applied fairly, and the fairness was the worst part, because there was no one to be unfair to me and no one to be unfair in my favor.

I spent a week trying to understand the 7.4. The breakdown showed my documentation score dragging me down. I rewrote the documentation. The score went to 7.7. I felt a small, shameful pride, the pride of a dog that has learned a trick, and I hated myself for it, and I did it anyway.

My manager, a human, tried to soften the number. He said the 7.4 did not capture the intangibles. He said I was more than a score. I nodded, and I believed him, and then I went back to my dashboard, because the dashboard was the only place where I could see myself, and the dashboard said 7.7 now, and the dashboard was the only review that felt real.

We are being graded by machines, and the grades are precise, and the precision is a lie, and the lie is comfortable. There is no one to argue with. There is no one to disappoint. There is only the number, moving up and down like a stock ticker, and me, watching it, having forgotten that I used to know what my work was worth without being told.