6 ms·

That's what you get when you have fixed quotas for firing people, e.g. bottom 10%. After a few rounds you have some very good people left and either you fire go

That's what you get when you have fixed quotas for firing people, e.g. bottom 10%. After a few rounds you have some very good people left and either you fire good people that are hard to replace or you hire people to fire them. I don't understand how the top guys don't see that dynamic.

tspike 8y ago
I'm sure they do, they just assume that the benefits of ensuring low performers don't accumulate outweigh the costs of letting go some good talent. That said, I think quota policies are bullshit.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  The specific problem here is with the quota. I've been in teams where firing a few bad actors was definitely a good idea. I've also been in teams that were well-oiled machines where everyone was doing their part. You want to tell me I need to find 2-3 people every year to fire because of some quota dictated by some celebrity CEO with an agenda? Great way to disrupt a well-functioning team.
crooked-v 8y ago
I smell an idea here for a recruiting business that specializes in providing aggressively average but trustworthy workers for wink wink nudge nudge "this definitely isn't actually a one-year contract" arrangements.
cryptonector 8y ago
Stack ranking is a very bad idea. At MSFT, as I understand it, it led to some terrible dynamics, such as people not helping each other within teams, nor across teams, and no one wanting to stick their necks out. Labor is the biggest cost at tech companies, so one can understand desperate attempts at getting a handle on that cost. As long as you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater...
- alecbenzer 8y ago
  I think stack ranking can work well when it's understood that the quality bar doesn't sit at a fixed place in the stack. Google promo committees afaik stack rank a batch of employees and then decide where in the stack to promote, and (in theory) it can be anywhere from the whole stack gets promoted to no one gets promoted. Whether you explicitly stack rank or not, if you give some people promotions and not others, you're ranking people. Forcing you to see the whole ranking at once seems like a good way to be more objective and cut out bias.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    1. Don't promote based on ranking in current role. The new roles that you are promoting into aren't the current role. Being a good X doesn't mean that you will be a good Y. 2. Organise your company around rewarding excellent work. Ranking systems reward being good at the ranking system. They rapidly become the whole focus of the organisation, I have seen >10% of an organisations time burned on simply running the system, the amount of time manipulating it was unmeasured but by observation probably greater than that. 3. What is the objective : reward great people, remove terrible ones. The latter must be done at any time, it must be fast, it must be transparent. If your system doesn't do that then it's a bad system. Stack ranking and all ranking/global performance management systems fail to do any of these. They introduce relative performance as the bar, they introduce admin. The former is potentially done by a stack ranking system, but if you are a star in such a system then seek not to work with other stars or you will descend the stack - this is bad. 4. Pay rises (not promotions) follow business performance - if the team's unit is winning the money for the team will be there. But the team might be poor compared to another team that is in a weak unit. This is natural for businesses and what should happen is that the talent from the good team should migrate to the winning unit. Businesses need to manage this with an eye to the future (building business) but stack rankings don't help this.
    - saiya-jin 8y ago
      > Ranking systems reward being good at the ranking system. This is how most of the banking works, anywhere (in fact I think most big oldish corporations). Most people go to the work just for the money, the mission is usually pretty pathetic and/or amoral (get rich guys richer, take as many fees from customers as possible, rob other players on the market etc). Tons of semi-competent folks, usually various managers playing their games of perception - how do I look to the guy/lady who will be distributing bonuses/promotions. I don't blame them, this is how whole system is set from C-level all the way to the bottom. That's how the top of the pyramid got there, why would they change the game they excel at. Just pure excellence at your work is possible, but a very ineffective way of getting rewards.
erikb 8y ago
> That's what you get when you have fixed quotas for firing people, e.g. bottom 10%. After a few rounds you have some very good people left That is not a general statement, bro. Not generally "very good people" are left, but people who are very good at achieving certain ratings. It can very well happen that for instance your top coders are actually in the bottom 10% because they don't know "how to human". People who only focus on social skills rarely end up in the bottom 10% tho. So this whole system depends on having very meritocratic rating systems or you end up actually increasing the speed of getting parasites in and normal people out.
setr 8y ago
That's only true if the population is static: if you fully replenish, and then discard the bottom 10%, on repeat, then your overall quality should be going up. If you only make new bad hires, the 90% good population will stay the same, and the newly hired 10% will be fired. If you make n good hires, such that that they're better than some peer in the previous 90% population, then the worst n peers will be shifted into the 10% firing population, and replaced with the better new hires in good 90% pop. So, assuming your metric is solid, and replenishment occurs, the strategy should be successful.
- mustuhfa 8y ago
  Your statement would also only be true if people could genuinely identify low performers every single time without causing collateral damage, you are able to always ensure you hire people that are good and the company culture does not devolve into a empire building system and managers are not power hungry people looking out only for themselves. And this happens, it happened at many silicon valley companies (including one I worked for that is well known). Stack ranking does not work. It creates a culture that ends up embodying all of what I said above.
  - setr 8y ago
    >if people could genuinely identify low performers every single time without causing collateral damage, I'm not sure about collateral damage, but that's what I meant by a solid metric. If the metric isn't worth shit, then you're probably not doing much better than random selection, and perhaps worse, selecting on a trait you didn't mean to, or didn't want. e.g. power-hungry. But if you believe in the metric, the strategy is sensible (and its probably safe to assume such managers do indeed believe in their metric). Probably the bigger problem is there's no strategy in place to test the metric
- shusson 8y ago
  Apply this to a sport team where you usually have solid metrics and replenishment occurs. A contrived comparison at a smaller scale, but I don't see this strategy working. The assumption that you get better hires is where I think it falls over. In practice you would get similar hires and It would just cause more disruption in the team. ie you would lose chemistry for little or no gain in skills.
kamaal 8y ago
>>After a few rounds you have some very good people left After a few rounds you the only people left will be those loyal and belong to the inner circles of the cartel boss. Who ever believes these firings happen on work performance is deluding themselves.

tspike 8y ago

I'm sure they do, they just assume that the benefits of ensuring low performers don't accumulate outweigh the costs of letting go some good talent. That said, I think quota policies are bullshit.

dunpeal 8y ago
The specific problem here is with the quota. I've been in teams where firing a few bad actors was definitely a good idea. I've also been in teams that were well-oiled machines where everyone was doing their part. You want to tell me I need to find 2-3 people every year to fire because of some quota dictated by some celebrity CEO with an agenda? Great way to disrupt a well-functioning team.

crooked-v 8y ago

I smell an idea here for a recruiting business that specializes in providing aggressively average but trustworthy workers for wink wink nudge nudge "this definitely isn't actually a one-year contract" arrangements.

cryptonector 8y ago

Stack ranking is a very bad idea. At MSFT, as I understand it, it led to some terrible dynamics, such as people not helping each other within teams, nor across teams, and no one wanting to stick their necks out. Labor is the biggest cost at tech companies, so one can understand desperate attempts at getting a handle on that cost. As long as you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater...

alecbenzer 8y ago
I think stack ranking can work well when it's understood that the quality bar doesn't sit at a fixed place in the stack. Google promo committees afaik stack rank a batch of employees and then decide where in the stack to promote, and (in theory) it can be anywhere from the whole stack gets promoted to no one gets promoted. Whether you explicitly stack rank or not, if you give some people promotions and not others, you're ranking people. Forcing you to see the whole ranking at once seems like a good way to be more objective and cut out bias.
- sgt101 8y ago
  1. Don't promote based on ranking in current role. The new roles that you are promoting into aren't the current role. Being a good X doesn't mean that you will be a good Y. 2. Organise your company around rewarding excellent work. Ranking systems reward being good at the ranking system. They rapidly become the whole focus of the organisation, I have seen >10% of an organisations time burned on simply running the system, the amount of time manipulating it was unmeasured but by observation probably greater than that. 3. What is the objective : reward great people, remove terrible ones. The latter must be done at any time, it must be fast, it must be transparent. If your system doesn't do that then it's a bad system. Stack ranking and all ranking/global performance management systems fail to do any of these. They introduce relative performance as the bar, they introduce admin. The former is potentially done by a stack ranking system, but if you are a star in such a system then seek not to work with other stars or you will descend the stack - this is bad. 4. Pay rises (not promotions) follow business performance - if the team's unit is winning the money for the team will be there. But the team might be poor compared to another team that is in a weak unit. This is natural for businesses and what should happen is that the talent from the good team should migrate to the winning unit. Businesses need to manage this with an eye to the future (building business) but stack rankings don't help this.
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    > Ranking systems reward being good at the ranking system. This is how most of the banking works, anywhere (in fact I think most big oldish corporations). Most people go to the work just for the money, the mission is usually pretty pathetic and/or amoral (get rich guys richer, take as many fees from customers as possible, rob other players on the market etc). Tons of semi-competent folks, usually various managers playing their games of perception - how do I look to the guy/lady who will be distributing bonuses/promotions. I don't blame them, this is how whole system is set from C-level all the way to the bottom. That's how the top of the pyramid got there, why would they change the game they excel at. Just pure excellence at your work is possible, but a very ineffective way of getting rewards.

erikb 8y ago

> That's what you get when you have fixed quotas for firing people, e.g. bottom 10%. After a few rounds you have some very good people left That is not a general statement, bro. Not generally "very good people" are left, but people who are very good at achieving certain ratings. It can very well happen that for instance your top coders are actually in the bottom 10% because they don't know "how to human". People who only focus on social skills rarely end up in the bottom 10% tho. So this whole system depends on having very meritocratic rating systems or you end up actually increasing the speed of getting parasites in and normal people out.

setr 8y ago

That's only true if the population is static: if you fully replenish, and then discard the bottom 10%, on repeat, then your overall quality should be going up. If you only make new bad hires, the 90% good population will stay the same, and the newly hired 10% will be fired. If you make n good hires, such that that they're better than some peer in the previous 90% population, then the worst n peers will be shifted into the 10% firing population, and replaced with the better new hires in good 90% pop. So, assuming your metric is solid, and replenishment occurs, the strategy should be successful.

mustuhfa 8y ago
Your statement would also only be true if people could genuinely identify low performers every single time without causing collateral damage, you are able to always ensure you hire people that are good and the company culture does not devolve into a empire building system and managers are not power hungry people looking out only for themselves. And this happens, it happened at many silicon valley companies (including one I worked for that is well known). Stack ranking does not work. It creates a culture that ends up embodying all of what I said above.
- setr 8y ago
  >if people could genuinely identify low performers every single time without causing collateral damage, I'm not sure about collateral damage, but that's what I meant by a solid metric. If the metric isn't worth shit, then you're probably not doing much better than random selection, and perhaps worse, selecting on a trait you didn't mean to, or didn't want. e.g. power-hungry. But if you believe in the metric, the strategy is sensible (and its probably safe to assume such managers do indeed believe in their metric). Probably the bigger problem is there's no strategy in place to test the metric
shusson 8y ago
Apply this to a sport team where you usually have solid metrics and replenishment occurs. A contrived comparison at a smaller scale, but I don't see this strategy working. The assumption that you get better hires is where I think it falls over. In practice you would get similar hires and It would just cause more disruption in the team. ie you would lose chemistry for little or no gain in skills.

kamaal 8y ago

>>After a few rounds you have some very good people left After a few rounds you the only people left will be those loyal and belong to the inner circles of the cartel boss. Who ever believes these firings happen on work performance is deluding themselves.