Performance management is nonsense
You ever feel like your company's performance management plan is nonsense?
You set goals and your boss or your peers rate you and then your raise and bonus is based on what they say?
Well, your suspicions were correct. It's crap!
In this Harvard Business Review article, the author makes the case that everyone rates everyone inaccuraetly.
--
"Over the last fifteen years a significant body of research has demonstrated that each of us is a disturbingly unreliable rater of other people’s performance. The effect that ruins our ability to rate others has a name: the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect, which tells us that my rating of you on a quality such as “potential” is driven not by who you are, but instead by my own idiosyncrasies—how I define “potential,” how much of it I think I have, how tough a rater I usually am. This effect is resilient — no amount of training seems able to lessen it. And it is large — on average, 61% of my rating of you is a reflection of me.
In other words, when I rate you, on anything, my rating reveals to the world far more about me than it does about you."
--
If you don't play into your raters' idiosyncrasies, you're not going to progress in your career.
When you go 1099, you are still subject to other people's perceptions of you (your client, the prime program manager, your peers, etc.), but at least there is no bureaucratic rating system that determines how far you will progress in your career or how much money you'll make.
So you're not crazy. Not wanting to be subject to an arbitrary performance management and rating system is a perfectly valid reason to go 1099.
Want the full playbook? Check out Going 1099.