A lot of other posters have focused on other aspects of the workplace and opinions are all over the place. As a manager with a few years behind me in that role, I want to focus on one of the last areas you mentioned: HR and corporate.
They're the developers that do the actual work that makes money. Your job is to enable and encourage them to do that efficiently. (This goes for every other kind of productive work too, whether it's developing code or manufacturing widgets.) So there's time management and making sure they're on task but one big thing you can do is INSULATE THEM FROM CORPORATE BULLSHIT. Dealing with the bullshit is YOUR job. As much as possible, you keep it from affecting them and their work. If they are more than vaguely aware of HR policies, that's usually you not doing your job.
Another aspect is to insulate them from each other's bullshit so they don't detrimentally affect one another's. Sometimes that's necessary, especially if you have one or more primadonnas on the team.
To make reviews not suck (as much):
1. Keep a log of the assignments you give each person, the times when they agreed they would be done and when they actually were done and the quality of their work.
2. Most corps will make you or them define "goals" each year. Make sure those goals are in line with what they should be doing anyway. Have frequent meetings with them either as a group for group goals or one on one for individual goals and ask them about progress. Provide a sounding board about them.
3. Come review time, you will have a list of the things they accomplished, an assessment of how well they did them and how timely they were and their goals will either have been accomplished to your satisfaction or you will already know the reasons why.
4. When there are problem behaviors, talk to your devs about them right away. Never leave them to review time.
The review is then mostly just a summary discussion of the stuff in your log, unless they were a problem. You identify the qualities that helped them get their work done and any problem behaviors that came up repeatedly. Compliment them on their good behaviors again as you should have throughout the year. Summarize by saying how they're doing relative to your expectations. (Not relative to other team members -- they can all be doing great or they can all suck.)
At a lot of companies HR will require you to fill out some form that addresses behaviors and goals. You have to do that, and you have to nominally discuss it with your employees. But keep that as terse as possible and then put your real assessment in the overall comments area or on an attached document. Make it clear that what's important to you is not the HR form but what they do every day, that their actual work is valuable to you and the company.