Comment by hamburglar

I used to work at a large company that had a lousy internal system for doing performance evals and self-reviews. The UI was shitty, it was unreliable, it was hard to use, it had security problems, it would go down on the eve of reviews being due, etc. This all stressed me out until someone in management observed, rather pointedly, that the reason for existence of this system is that we are contractually required to have such a system because the rules for government contracts mandate it, and that there was a possibility (and he emphasized the word possibility knowingly) that the managers actully are considering their personal knowledge of your performance rather than this performative documentation when they consider your promotions and comp adjustments. It was like being hit with a zen lightning bolt: this software meets its requirements exactly, and I can stop worrying about it. From that day on I only did the most cursory self-evals and minimal accomplishents, and my career progressed just fine.

You might not think about this as “quality” but it does have the quality of meeting the perverse functional requirements of the situation.