The engineer had moved between two teams mid-year. Both managers wrote a review. One rated her as exceeding expectations and ready for the next level. The other rated her as needing improvement. Same person, same twelve months, two ratings three levels apart, and both managers were experienced and acting in good faith. That meeting is the reason I now treat calibration as a process with steps rather than a meeting on a calendar. Here is the method, seven steps, written for engineering teams in Dubai because team composition here makes the problem sharper than the generic advice assumes.
Step 1: Fix the Decision the Round Must Produce
Before anything else, write one sentence: what does this round decide, and who signs it? The useful versions are narrow. “Which engineers are promoted in January, approved by the VP of Engineering.” Or: “Which three people are at risk and will enter a structured improvement plan, approved by the CTO and HR.”
The reason this comes first is that it determines what precision you need. A round that only feeds a modest annual increase does not need three levels of evidence per person. A round that decides promotions and improvement plans does, because those decisions get contested and one of them may be challenged months later. Deciding the stakes up front is also how you stop the round expanding into an exercise that consumes six weeks of management time and produces a spreadsheet nobody acts on.
If you cannot write the sentence, the honest conclusion is that you do not need a calibration round this cycle. You need manager one-to-ones. I have cancelled a round on exactly these grounds and it was the right call.
Our Expert Take
The test for whether a round is real: name the outcome that would change if the calibration meeting produced a different answer. If a promotion, an improvement plan or a budget allocation moves, it is a decision process and deserves the rigour. If nothing moves except the wording in a document, you are running a ceremony, and engineers can tell the difference within one cycle. The credibility you lose on a ceremonial round is spent when you next need the process to carry a hard decision.
Step 2: Freeze the Evidence Window Before Anyone Writes a Rating
Publish the exact period under review, in writing, before managers draft anything. This sounds procedural and it fixes the single largest distortion in performance review, which is recency.
Human memory of a twelve-month period is dominated by the last six to eight weeks, and in engineering that is particularly damaging because the last six weeks frequently contain a release, an incident or a crunch. An engineer who held a difficult migration together in March and had a quiet September will be rated on September unless the window is explicit and the evidence is gathered across it.
There is a second decision to make here, and most teams skip it and then improvise inconsistently: what do you do with incomplete windows? In Dubai, where average tenure in engineering teams is often shorter than in older markets, a meaningful share of any review population will have joined partway through. Decide the rule in advance. Ours is that under four months of observable work means no rating, with a written note and a review at the next cycle. Four to eight months means a rating with the window stated explicitly on the form. Without that rule, one manager rates a five-month joiner generously because “it is early” and another rates the same tenure harshly because “there is not much evidence,” and both think they are being fair.
Step 3: Require Artefacts, Not Adjectives
This is the step that does most of the work, and it is unpopular for the first cycle and then becomes normal.
Every rating must cite specific observable work. Not “strong collaborator” but which three design reviews she changed the outcome of. Not “needs to take more ownership” but which two incidents went unowned and what happened. Not “high impact” but what shipped, to whom, and what it did.
Ratings that arrive supported only by character descriptions get returned before the meeting, not discussed in it. I am deliberate about this because adjectives are where bias lives. “Abrasive,” “not strategic,” “culture fit,” and “natural leader” are all unfalsifiable, they correlate with how similar someone is to the person writing the form, and they survive a calibration meeting because nobody can argue with them. An artefact can be argued with. That is the entire point.
What this produces, when the engineer eventually reads the review, is a document that is specific enough to act on. The most common complaint we hear from engineers in this market about review processes is not harshness, it is vagueness: they cannot tell what would have to be different next year. Artefacts solve that as a side effect.
Step 4: Run the Meeting on Outliers Only
Circulate every rating with its supporting artefacts at least three days before the meeting, and require managers to read them. Then spend the meeting exclusively on two categories: cases where managers disagree, and cases where a rating sits far from the evidence attached to it.
In practice that is fifteen to twenty percent of the population. The other eighty percent are not controversial and discussing them is how rounds run out of time. The classic failure is the alphabetical march: forty minutes on the first four names while everyone is alert, then the genuinely contested cases rushed in the final twenty minutes when the room is tired and wants to leave. The decisions that most need deliberation reliably get the least.
Budget roughly ninety minutes per twenty-five engineers under review, and schedule the second session in advance rather than discovering you need it. If the meeting is running long, the correct response is to stop and reconvene, not to accelerate through the hard cases. A rushed promotion decision costs more than a second meeting.
Launch it: get the levels written before the next cycle
If your calibration is stalling because there is no shared standard to calibrate against, that is a one-week fix. Tell us the levels you actually employ. Engineering managers | Full-stack engineers
Get 3 Free Developer ProposalsStep 5: Normalise Against the Ladder, Not Against Each Other
When two managers disagree, the instinct in the room is to compare: “Is she stronger than Omar?” That question is unanswerable across teams with different work, and it converts calibration into a negotiation that the more senior or more articulate manager wins.
The mechanic that works is narrow and slightly tedious. Read the written level definition aloud. Then ask each manager to state which part of their evidence satisfies which clause. Almost every disagreement I have seen resolves at this point, and it resolves in a specific way: one manager discovers they were rating effort or potential, and the definition describes demonstrated behaviour. That is not a loss of face, it is the process functioning, and it is worth saying so in the room the first few times so managers do not experience correction as defeat.
This is also where the absence of written levels becomes fatal. Without them, the room has no standard and the outcome is decided by status. If you have nothing today, write one paragraph of observable behaviour per level for the levels you actually employ and use it for this round. Our guide to building an engineering career ladder in Dubai covers doing it properly, but an imperfect written standard beats an unwritten one by a wide margin.
One Dubai-specific note that matters more than it sounds. Engineering teams here are commonly assembled from many nationalities and from markets with very different review conventions, and the words on a rating form genuinely do not mean the same thing to every manager. In some traditions the top rating marks an exceptional career event; in others it describes a good year. Neither is wrong until you write down which convention applies in your company. I now spend ten minutes at the start of the first calibration meeting of each cycle doing exactly that, out loud, and it removes a whole class of argument.
Our Expert Take
We are firmly against forced distributions and we get asked about them every year. Requiring a fixed shape assumes performance is normally distributed inside every arbitrary group, which is false for a six-person team and punitive for a strong one. What you want is distribution awareness: look at the spread after calibration, and when one manager has rated everyone near the top while another has rated an equivalent team mid-band, investigate the managers, not the engineers. Imposing a curve fixes the chart and leaves the inconsistency exactly where it was.
Step 6: Separate Rating From Reward, and Sequence Them
Close the rating decision before the compensation conversation opens. If the two run together, the budget silently rewrites the performance judgement, and it does so in a direction nobody will admit to: ratings get trimmed because the increase pool is finite.
That trade may be commercially necessary. It must not be disguised as a performance finding, because the engineer receives a document saying their work was merely adequate when what actually happened is that the budget was constrained. They usually find out, and when they do you have lost the credibility of the whole process and you have given a strong performer a reason to listen to the next recruiter.
Run the two in sequence: ratings closed and signed, then allocation against the pool as a separate decision with its own constraints. Where the pool cannot support what the ratings imply, say so in those terms to the people affected. In my experience senior engineers handle “your rating is strong, the pool this year is thin, here is what we can do and when” considerably better than they handle an unexplained middling rating. The first is a business constraint they can evaluate. The second is a judgement on their work that they know to be wrong. Retention consequences follow accordingly, and we cover the rest of that picture in our note on retaining senior developers in Dubai.
Step 7: Audit the Round for Drift
After the round closes, spend an hour on four cuts of the data: distribution by manager, by tenure band, by team, and by how long each person has been at their current level.
You are not looking for a shape. You are looking for patterns that performance does not explain. One manager consistently at the top of the range. New joiners systematically rated below people with identical evidence and longer tenure. One team where nobody has moved level in three cycles, which usually means a manager who does not put people forward rather than a team that does not grow.
Record one more thing, and this is the entry I have found most valuable over time: for each contested case, whether it was resolved by evidence or by seniority. A round where most disagreements were settled because someone outranked someone else is a round that produced unfair outcomes with good documentation, and it will keep producing them until the mechanic changes.
Keep the audit to a page. If it becomes a deck, it stops happening by the third cycle, which is exactly when the drift it would have caught has compounded into something people have noticed.
Three Mistakes That Cost Us the Most
Letting adjectives into the form. We spent two cycles debating whether an engineer was “strategic” before realising the word had no agreed meaning and was doing nothing but carrying the preferences of whoever used it. Requiring artefacts ended the debate permanently and took one email to introduce.
Discussing everyone. Our first serious round went alphabetically and gave the most deliberation to the least contested cases. The two decisions that were later challenged were both made in the last fifteen minutes.
Running ratings and pay in the same conversation. We did this once, trimmed two ratings to fit the pool without saying that was why, and lost one of the two engineers within five months. The exit conversation was explicit about the reason. A calibration process that quietly absorbs budget pressure is not a performance process, and the people it adjusts are the people most able to leave. If you are also redesigning how you assess people at the front door, our note on building a technical interview scorecard uses the same artefacts-over-adjectives principle.
FAQ: Engineering Performance Review Calibration in Dubai
How long should an engineering calibration meeting take?
Budget roughly ninety minutes for every twenty-five engineers under review, and protect it by refusing to discuss people nobody disagrees about. The failure mode we see constantly is a three-hour meeting that goes name by name in alphabetical order, spends forty minutes on the first four people while everyone is still fresh, and then rushes the genuinely contested cases in the last twenty minutes when attention is gone. If ratings are pre-read and only outliers are discussed, the contested cases are typically fifteen to twenty percent of the population, which is a tractable agenda. For a team of fifty engineers that means around three hours total across two sessions, and the second session should be scheduled in advance rather than created in a panic.
Should we force a rating distribution across the engineering team?
No, and we would push back firmly on any proposal to do so. A forced distribution assumes performance is normally distributed within every arbitrary group, which is false for small teams and actively destructive for strong ones: it requires you to mark somebody down on a six-person team that genuinely performed well, and engineers notice immediately. What you do need is distribution awareness, which is different. Look at the distribution after calibration, and if one manager has rated everyone at the top and another has rated an equivalent team in the middle, investigate the managers rather than adjusting the engineers. The purpose is to find inconsistent application of the ladder, not to impose a shape on reality.
What makes calibration different in Dubai specifically?
Two structural features of the market change how a round behaves. The first is team composition: engineering teams in Dubai are commonly assembled from many nationalities and from markets with very different review conventions, so the words in a rating form do not mean the same thing to every manager. A manager from one background may reserve the top rating for exceptional career events while another uses it for a strong year, and neither is wrong until you write down which convention applies here. The second is turnover and tenure mix. Shorter average tenure means a meaningful share of the population has incomplete evidence windows, and if you do not decide in advance how to rate somebody with five months of observable work you will end up improvising it inconsistently across managers.
Do we need a career ladder before we can calibrate?
You need written level definitions, which is a smaller thing than a full ladder and can be produced in about a week. Calibration works by testing evidence against a shared written standard, so if no standard exists the meeting degenerates into senior people negotiating on behalf of their teams, and the loudest or most senior manager wins. That outcome is worse than no calibration at all because it produces unfair results with a procedural veneer. If you have nothing today, write one paragraph of observable behaviour per level for the levels you actually employ, circulate it, and use it for this round. It will be imperfect and it will still be far better than adjectives.
Launch it: run the next round against a written standard
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Notes on figures: the ninety minutes per twenty-five engineers budget, the fifteen to twenty percent contested-case share, and the four-month and eight-month tenure thresholds are the working rules we use with the engineering teams we recruit for in this market. They are starting points to be measured against your own round, not benchmarks. Observations about review conventions across nationalities and about tenure mix reflect our experience of engineering teams in Dubai and are not drawn from a published study. This article is general information about performance management practice, not legal or HR advice; employment decisions should be reviewed against your own contracts and policies.