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What precisely do you think is obviously insane? Stack ranking as a total doctrine, or "aggressively fire low performers" as a general guideline? Do you think

What precisely do you think is obviously insane? Stack ranking as a total doctrine, or "aggressively fire low performers" as a general guideline? Do you think that Netflix's culture deck is crazy, for example?

gnaritas 10y ago
There's no difference between the two in regards to morale; you'll encourage gaming of metrics in either case. You shouldn't fire people simply for being lowest performer on the team because there will always be a lowest and thus someone is always in fear of being fired even though their work may be just fine. Any place that does this shit will have shit for morale. It's plain stupid.
- 1001101 10y ago
  Keeping low performers around isn't great for morale either. Watching parts of your product go down in flames because someone had no idea what they were doing, and then having to do 10x the work to clean it up and do damage control with customers.
  - gnaritas 10y ago
    A team of excellent people will still have someone at the bottom of productivity on that team; that doesn't make them a low performer. I think you're confusing poor performance with ranking. If you have 10 awesome developers, are you going to fire the 10th best just because he's the 10th? That's what's being discussed, firing the bottom guy without regard to whether he's actually good or bad, merely because he's the bottom guy.
- aetherson 10y ago
  There is clearly a minimum size beyond which it becomes highly dubious to assume that, in this group, the worst 10% are bad performers. Like, if it's a 10 person group, it's not particularly hard to select a 10 person group where the worst person is pretty good. And this is where "dogmatic use of a rule instead of a guideline" comes in. Stack ranking down to the level of every team has bad results. But it is equally true that in a large organization (and the only places that would even consider stack ranking have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of employees, not 10), you just don't have nobody but high performers. It's not possible. I've discussed stack ranking before on HN, and I feel like there are a lot of people here who want to believe that you never need to terminate anyone. That's not true. There also seem to be a lot of people here who believe that the fundamental failure mode of most organizations is being overly quick to fire. That's also not true -- though there are exceptions. You have to understand that firing an employee is extremely stressful for most managers. So much so that lots of managers will very willingly live with a terrible performer who's a huge drag on their team rather than terminate that employee. And so we get management doctrines that are aimed at forcing managers to actually terminate their problem employees. I'm not a fan of stack ranking, though I've also never worked at an extremely large organization. But it's not a fiendish plan created by mustache-twirling villains in order to cause people pain for sheer sadism. It's a deeply imperfect practice that should be looked at with a clear understanding of what motivates it. Dismissing it as sociopathy speaks a lot more to the commenter than the practice.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > But it is equally true that in a large organization (and the only places that would even consider stack ranking have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of employees, not 10), you just don't have nobody but high performers. But even in those organizations, the "stack" doesn't consist of thousands of employees, as the unit on which stack ranking is done is lower-level units (often very low-level), not the whole organization.
    - aetherson 10y ago
      You read the several times in which I said, "Don't apply stack ranking to small teams"? Do you think you're arguing with me?
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        I'm pointing out that your defense of stack ranking in large organizations ignores the manner in which stack ranking is actually applied, even in lagrrge organizations (and there is a reason it's not done across broader groups, too; because large organizations that have good enough objective performance metrics to apply consistently organization-wide have better methods of applying them to make decisions than using them as inputs into stack ranking.)
        aetherson 10y ago
        So, what, you're opposed to people talking about how they think large organizations should work instead of how they actually work? There are about two dozen people in this thread that you should be directing your comments to. But also: If we're talking about an organization where it is impossible for a manager of, say, a 100-200 person department to figure out who the 10-20 worst people are across his entire department -- where he's helpless and just has to say, "Well, I don't know, I'll punt down to my lower-level managers," that's prima facia evidence of a dysfunctional org. What is the doctrine that you feel is going to lead to better termination decisions in that org?
- wavegeek 10y ago
  Yes - the big killer is the "bell curve". Once people realize that making other people look bad is in their interests the organization is doomed. You need to get rid of poor performers but that should be based, as far as you can possibly manage it, on an objective standard.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    I think you mean "a non-objective standard." The great virtue -- and great flaw -- of stack ranking is that it's very, very, very objective. And, as people have pointed out, that means that it can be gamed, and can be applied very inflexibly an inappropriately. But the virtue is that it gives people relatively little opportunity to get out of engaging with it at all.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > I think you mean "a non-objective standard." The great virtue -- and great flaw -- of stack ranking is that it's very, very, very objective. Stack ranking usually takes as it's key input management subjective evaluations of staff performance, which is why the subject units are usually small suborganizations. It's mechanistic in what it does with that input, but it absolutely is not usually based on purely or predominantly objective measures. Organizations which spend the effort to develop meaningful objective performance measures usually also spend the effort to find better uses of them than inputs to rank-and-yank systems.
bitcrusher 10y ago
Yes, it is insane. It's a pressure cooker, which induces personality traits in folks that are undesirable at best. People figure out how to game the system, squash the less assertive/aggressive/self selling types and keep fighting for another day. Amazon has this same problem.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Smaller teams may have all good people. Yet they must fire someone to meet an arbitrary metric. Its corrosive. You can try to consider cross-team measurements, so as to fire the 'bottom 10%' across the company, perhaps preserving good teams. But how do you compare the value of an IT performer with an embedded firmware designer with an OS driver supporter with a backend schema architect? Their criticality to the company can differ wildly. Further, after a cycle or two, teams should be stable and have suitable members. But the scythe keeps reaping, destroying what it was trying to build.
- aetherson 10y ago
  ...you understand that the idea is that you hire to replace the people you fired, and that you suffer turnover as well, right? Yes, applying a strict stack ranking mechanism to an arbitrarily small team does not have good results. Agreed. That's what I mean by saying, it has bad results as a dogmatic rule. But the goal is not to reduce your workforce by 10% every year, either.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > the idea is that you hire to replace the people you fired And if you can't hire because of budget constraints? Or you had a 5 person team that was gelling well, but now you've tossed one to the curb and replaced them with someone new (and burdened the remaining team with the interview process in the interim). Any "fire x percentage" mandate is going to suck when you're looking at a team of high performers. Or, the manager is just going to hire a dud for the express purpose of having someone to fire the next go around. I've seen that happen more times than I want to think about.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Of course, I didn't even mention hiring as I assume we all know its a terrible solution. Hiring is a spotty, error-prone process. Its arguably better to train who you have, than take another roll of the dice. Hiring is how you got into the situation you're in.
    - 10y ago

gnaritas 10y ago

There's no difference between the two in regards to morale; you'll encourage gaming of metrics in either case. You shouldn't fire people simply for being lowest performer on the team because there will always be a lowest and thus someone is always in fear of being fired even though their work may be just fine. Any place that does this shit will have shit for morale. It's plain stupid.

1001101 10y ago
Keeping low performers around isn't great for morale either. Watching parts of your product go down in flames because someone had no idea what they were doing, and then having to do 10x the work to clean it up and do damage control with customers.
- gnaritas 10y ago
  A team of excellent people will still have someone at the bottom of productivity on that team; that doesn't make them a low performer. I think you're confusing poor performance with ranking. If you have 10 awesome developers, are you going to fire the 10th best just because he's the 10th? That's what's being discussed, firing the bottom guy without regard to whether he's actually good or bad, merely because he's the bottom guy.
aetherson 10y ago
There is clearly a minimum size beyond which it becomes highly dubious to assume that, in this group, the worst 10% are bad performers. Like, if it's a 10 person group, it's not particularly hard to select a 10 person group where the worst person is pretty good. And this is where "dogmatic use of a rule instead of a guideline" comes in. Stack ranking down to the level of every team has bad results. But it is equally true that in a large organization (and the only places that would even consider stack ranking have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of employees, not 10), you just don't have nobody but high performers. It's not possible. I've discussed stack ranking before on HN, and I feel like there are a lot of people here who want to believe that you never need to terminate anyone. That's not true. There also seem to be a lot of people here who believe that the fundamental failure mode of most organizations is being overly quick to fire. That's also not true -- though there are exceptions. You have to understand that firing an employee is extremely stressful for most managers. So much so that lots of managers will very willingly live with a terrible performer who's a huge drag on their team rather than terminate that employee. And so we get management doctrines that are aimed at forcing managers to actually terminate their problem employees. I'm not a fan of stack ranking, though I've also never worked at an extremely large organization. But it's not a fiendish plan created by mustache-twirling villains in order to cause people pain for sheer sadism. It's a deeply imperfect practice that should be looked at with a clear understanding of what motivates it. Dismissing it as sociopathy speaks a lot more to the commenter than the practice.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > But it is equally true that in a large organization (and the only places that would even consider stack ranking have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of employees, not 10), you just don't have nobody but high performers. But even in those organizations, the "stack" doesn't consist of thousands of employees, as the unit on which stack ranking is done is lower-level units (often very low-level), not the whole organization.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    You read the several times in which I said, "Don't apply stack ranking to small teams"? Do you think you're arguing with me?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      I'm pointing out that your defense of stack ranking in large organizations ignores the manner in which stack ranking is actually applied, even in lagrrge organizations (and there is a reason it's not done across broader groups, too; because large organizations that have good enough objective performance metrics to apply consistently organization-wide have better methods of applying them to make decisions than using them as inputs into stack ranking.)
      - aetherson 10y ago
        So, what, you're opposed to people talking about how they think large organizations should work instead of how they actually work? There are about two dozen people in this thread that you should be directing your comments to. But also: If we're talking about an organization where it is impossible for a manager of, say, a 100-200 person department to figure out who the 10-20 worst people are across his entire department -- where he's helpless and just has to say, "Well, I don't know, I'll punt down to my lower-level managers," that's prima facia evidence of a dysfunctional org. What is the doctrine that you feel is going to lead to better termination decisions in that org?
wavegeek 10y ago
Yes - the big killer is the "bell curve". Once people realize that making other people look bad is in their interests the organization is doomed. You need to get rid of poor performers but that should be based, as far as you can possibly manage it, on an objective standard.
- aetherson 10y ago
  I think you mean "a non-objective standard." The great virtue -- and great flaw -- of stack ranking is that it's very, very, very objective. And, as people have pointed out, that means that it can be gamed, and can be applied very inflexibly an inappropriately. But the virtue is that it gives people relatively little opportunity to get out of engaging with it at all.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I think you mean "a non-objective standard." The great virtue -- and great flaw -- of stack ranking is that it's very, very, very objective. Stack ranking usually takes as it's key input management subjective evaluations of staff performance, which is why the subject units are usually small suborganizations. It's mechanistic in what it does with that input, but it absolutely is not usually based on purely or predominantly objective measures. Organizations which spend the effort to develop meaningful objective performance measures usually also spend the effort to find better uses of them than inputs to rank-and-yank systems.

bitcrusher 10y ago

Yes, it is insane. It's a pressure cooker, which induces personality traits in folks that are undesirable at best. People figure out how to game the system, squash the less assertive/aggressive/self selling types and keep fighting for another day. Amazon has this same problem.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

Smaller teams may have all good people. Yet they must fire someone to meet an arbitrary metric. Its corrosive. You can try to consider cross-team measurements, so as to fire the 'bottom 10%' across the company, perhaps preserving good teams. But how do you compare the value of an IT performer with an embedded firmware designer with an OS driver supporter with a backend schema architect? Their criticality to the company can differ wildly. Further, after a cycle or two, teams should be stable and have suitable members. But the scythe keeps reaping, destroying what it was trying to build.

aetherson 10y ago
...you understand that the idea is that you hire to replace the people you fired, and that you suffer turnover as well, right? Yes, applying a strict stack ranking mechanism to an arbitrarily small team does not have good results. Agreed. That's what I mean by saying, it has bad results as a dogmatic rule. But the goal is not to reduce your workforce by 10% every year, either.
- falcolas 10y ago
  > the idea is that you hire to replace the people you fired And if you can't hire because of budget constraints? Or you had a 5 person team that was gelling well, but now you've tossed one to the curb and replaced them with someone new (and burdened the remaining team with the interview process in the interim). Any "fire x percentage" mandate is going to suck when you're looking at a team of high performers. Or, the manager is just going to hire a dud for the express purpose of having someone to fire the next go around. I've seen that happen more times than I want to think about.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Of course, I didn't even mention hiring as I assume we all know its a terrible solution. Hiring is a spotty, error-prone process. Its arguably better to train who you have, than take another roll of the dice. Hiring is how you got into the situation you're in.
  - 10y ago