> I have done mostly contract work since then, but I am wondering if it is common to put your actual job content into your hiring documents to make sure people don't do performance reviews about unrelated tasks?
Honestly for contract work (and usually also full-time employees), the best thing you can do is focus on all the people who are responsible for your performance review and make them happy, make their initiatives look good, and get along with them so that they like you. Sometimes this means doing completely different work than you thought you were hired to do. Or doing all that in addition to what you were hired for.
The absolute worst case for a contractor is that you're "hired to fail" where there's a project with a 90% chance of failing so they bring in a contractor/team who either miraculously save it, or you're blamed for the expected failure. However, even here, if you show competence and make friends with the people who will stab you in the back in the short term, you may also find that some of them call for your services again in the future -- because you did "the job you were hired to do" and made it easy for them, made them look good, and were enjoyable to be around.
The written "rules" of the performance review don't matter, at least in the USA (maybe different in other countries). Performance reviews basically boil down to "how much do I like working with this person?" which definitely includes competence (people mildly dislike working with incompetent people), but also includes things like "makes my day happier" or "great conversation over beers / at the sports game".
I'm mid 30's and have worked a few contracting gigs but never really made it work out (usually it coincided with life being a little too chaotic at the time for me to fully focus on my client). So hopefully some others with more experience will chime in. But there's a lot written on this topic on HN, you can find a lot of experienced views from all sides of the table with a bit of searching!
Honestly for contract work (and usually also full-time employees), the best thing you can do is focus on all the people who are responsible for your performance review and make them happy, make their initiatives look good, and get along with them so that they like you. Sometimes this means doing completely different work than you thought you were hired to do. Or doing all that in addition to what you were hired for.
The absolute worst case for a contractor is that you're "hired to fail" where there's a project with a 90% chance of failing so they bring in a contractor/team who either miraculously save it, or you're blamed for the expected failure. However, even here, if you show competence and make friends with the people who will stab you in the back in the short term, you may also find that some of them call for your services again in the future -- because you did "the job you were hired to do" and made it easy for them, made them look good, and were enjoyable to be around.
The written "rules" of the performance review don't matter, at least in the USA (maybe different in other countries). Performance reviews basically boil down to "how much do I like working with this person?" which definitely includes competence (people mildly dislike working with incompetent people), but also includes things like "makes my day happier" or "great conversation over beers / at the sports game".
I'm mid 30's and have worked a few contracting gigs but never really made it work out (usually it coincided with life being a little too chaotic at the time for me to fully focus on my client). So hopefully some others with more experience will chime in. But there's a lot written on this topic on HN, you can find a lot of experienced views from all sides of the table with a bit of searching!