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 4 papers. One of them, “Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt” (or “On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light” in English), eventually led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. And this wasn’t even his best result that year – the other being his special theory of relativity.

From his manager’s perspective, this was an average year for Albert Einstein. For Physics and Human Being, however, this was the “annus mirabilis” (miraculous year).