On annual performance review

I find this annual performance review amusing. It happened in ‘05. Not 2005, but 1905.

In the year of 1905, the person being reviewed was given an overall rating of 3 out of 5, i.e., an average score. His manager commented that the person devoted his time to “publishing a series of outside papers” and “he has done reasonably well”.

As a matter of fact, in 1905, the person published 5 papers. One of them, “On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light”, eventually led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. And this wasn’t even his best result that year – the other being his theory on Relativity.

From his manager’s perspective, this was an average year for Albert Einstein. For Physics and Human Being, however, this was a revolutionary year.