One of the things that did me in was working insane hours (like 80 hour weeks) to get a project …

The ridiculous bell curve… I was also quite surprised early on my career. I was asked to rate my colleagues, when I said they were all top performers, as we had such a tight team (we could really depend on each other) and it was a very homogeneous group skill wise, my manager presented me “the bell curve”. I couldn’t really grasp it, context wise it made no sense. I thought things were changing a bit: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-... My take on work is have fun (yes, I can do some extra hours now and then), never neglecting physical and mental health.

If I’m ever running a company that does annual reviews, I’m also going to have underlings review their managers.

> When I pushed back on my manager, he said sorry, I deserved it, but they were required to give a certain percentage satisfactory and he had had to give the exceptional review to someone else. In some organizations, the manager could've urgently worked up the chain of command, that some performance review plan had, er, unintended consequences. If that was the situation. (The organization might've had a plan for raises that they could quickly reformulate to have the same cost but better morale and retention outcomes. Or this might've been their way to quietly prepare for layoffs, or to implement some awful stack-ranking practice. Or maybe a consultant, golfing buddy, or someone who wanted some change credited to themself... proposed some questionable HR practice. Or, if your manager wasn't being truthful, it could be that there was some reason that they or someone higher up thought/want…

I think I'm headed in the same direction as you only 5 years in. In 2022 I pursued a Tech Lead role heavily and was rewarded with it. Then I got burned out from the immense effort to get there and the subsequent new onslaught of pressures and responsibilities. I quit the company about 6 months into the TL role after being forced to deliver a botched project to meet an arbitrary deadline. I still don't think I've recovered from the experience - my team was pretty great and the tech was healthy, but the management surrounding all this really put me off redoing this for a long time, if ever. I phrase it in this way: I can no longer deliver 100% of my "personal excellence" to my employer. I "selfishly" want a good chunk, ideally most of it, to myself for my own pursuit and life enjoyment.