They feel like Churchill's quip about democracy: self-evals are the worst system, except all the others that have been tried.

Ultimately, employers and employees need a way to ensure pay tracks employee value to company. At hiring time, it's easy: the employee presumably got multiple offers and so there's a quasi-market for that employee.

Later, what do you do, especially if the employee is otherwise happy at the employer? The employee can go out and periodically solicit competitive job offers to hold the employer accountable and ensure their pay keeps up with their skills. But this is super inefficient: even one interview loop costs the employee much more time more than the self-eval process. And this would impose a huge cost on employers, if a huge fraction of their candidates don't intend to ever convert and are just using the job offer as negotiation leverage.

Like, I hate doing performance evals as much as everyone else, but I'm not yet convinced there's a better system for solving the core problem of ensuring people's pay tracks their market value.

Hmm, I am trying to picture how it would be different to pretend to solicit my honest opinion of my work for the last year, versus my managers' doing even the most rudimentary sort of pass/fail appraisal. It all requires a lot of earnestly looking the other way - did I do some good work, sure; some clever things, yes, here and there; did I also slog through mountains of work that seemed obviously dumb/wrongheaded/not-long-for-this-world? Did I ever, but we won't talk about that. Even if I try to think of my best-ever 'save the day' moments, or the biggest screwups I've made, none of that really makes it into the reviews, or if it does, it doesn't seem to change the outcome. It'd be sort of nice to have simple points-based scoring, doing the basics gets you X, doing something excellent/hard/very profitable adds a few points, making a colossal screwup costs you some points, raises and/or bonuses doled out accordingly.

What do you do for the written response part, if anything? Rating yourself at the top of the scale is fine, though often there are several questions. Stuff like, "Please describe how your work exemplified our primary corporate values, including our commitment to innovation, transparency, diversity, and team work." Do you just write "No comment"?

Yes.

I love it. How do your "review" meetings go? Do they just skip them?

They go well because I do a good job.

Yes, such a dumb exercise. People have and do, as their primary purpose, game it and raise the ranks.