Blog for Engineering Managers

Blog for Engineering Managers

Crediting maintenance work in performance reviews

Most engineering rubrics measure what was delivered, not what happened in the background for the systems to keep working.

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Stephane Moreau
May 05, 2026
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Most engineering rubrics measure what was delivered, not what happened in the background for the systems to keep working – here is what to add to yours so the engineers keeping the lights on get the credit they deserve.

You have probably had this conversation. Calibration season, two engineers at the same level. One built a new service that landed in front of customers and got named in the all-hands. The other spent the cycle on a database migration that prevented an outage nobody ever saw, plus the mentoring and documentation that kept a junior team functional while the t…

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