7 ms·

> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such

by js2 7y ago

> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to the customer. At Yahoo, I designed and built a large project. This took about six months to deliver. At the time, the company was doing quarterly reviews that I think Marissa had imported from Google. Anyway, my manager had rated me as "meets expectations" for a few quarters because this project and the one I had previously worked on weren't visible to "customers" till they were delivered, so he didn't have any evidence to justify a higher rating against other managers' team members. Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated. So I deliver the project and now it's visible and everyone loves it and I get an "exceeds expectations" rating and then a promotion and a raise. From being warned I'd be terminated to a promotion in less than six months, with no change in my work, but simply it becoming visible. Whee big company fun.

gordaco 7y ago
> Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated. This is disturbing and, I think, a twisted form of grade inflation, mixed with the usual suitspeak where words don't necessarily mean what they mean. If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why would you put it at risk of termination? For the record, I also work in a big company with long product cycles, meaning that the product I'm working on started more than one year ago, and the first public release is planned for next December, so I feel your pain. Luckily our process is a bit more sane and our manager follows our work closely, so I'm getting good ratings (but I wonder if the grade inflation will continue in such a way that "exceeds expectations" now means "subpar employee"...).
- MAGZine 7y ago
  This is 100% caused by stack ranking, and the problem you identify is a very real one. Chopping off the bottom 5% of employees works if you have a LOT of dead weight, but realistically you can't really do it continuously or you start removing legitimate talent and, just as worse, fostering a toxic community that values playing politics over delivering value.
  - taftster 7y ago
    Not only that, but chopping off the bottom 5% typically makes room for more hiring; these emptied jobs are likely to be filled with less-than-stellar candidates. It take the new hires a few years before they too are dropped down into that lower 5% rank. Stack ranking ensures that you have churn in your workforce, and not in a good way. You wonder why workers in the tech industry move around so much? Look at stack ranking as a significant contributing factor.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      That’s by design. Keeps the workforce young and insurance cheap.
      - lonelappde 7y ago
        Why would companies prefer cheap insurance over productivity? If they want to pay less, they can just pay less. People would rather get paid less than get fired.
        2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
        Is it about cost? It’s often easier to get that pay raise by hopping companies. You’re then replaced with a new hire who is probably getting more than you did. And needs a few months to get up to speed. Treating your proven employees well to retain them would cost less.
        Spooky23 7y ago
patientplatypus 7y ago
This is a sign of a sick and abusive culture. Once process becomes more important than people then the evil ones will work the system and climb the ladder hurting everyone in their path. Yuck.
- logicchains 7y ago
  Look on the bright side: Yahoo is an example suggesting that at least in tech if a company is managed badly enough this eventually results in its demise.
abdj8 7y ago
I was at Y! at the same time , I witnesssed so many managers gaming the review system . So many funny , and some sad stories from that time.
- lyian 7y ago
  Would love to hear some!
amelius 7y ago
> From being warned I'd be terminated to a promotion in less than six months, with no change in my work, but simply it becoming visible. Whee big company fun. They probably deduced from this that their warning system worked as expected.
- otaviokz 7y ago
  I think the probability of you being right is definitely above 50%.
  - replyguy912 7y ago
    I'd say it's somewhere between bottom 5% and top 10% ;)
- keanzu 7y ago
  Regression to the mean tells you that if you reward success and yell at under performers the successful people will get worse and the under performers will get better. Lesson learned: All yelling, all the time.
TrackerFF 7y ago
The problem, so to speak, is that companies are getting extremely data driven, and constantly need some form of metrics to evaluate their employees. This again can turn into a culture where doing what's expected is devalued to lowest score - because you have that system where there has to be bottom and top performers. And you sadly end up with a situation where workers are (almost) embellishing their projects to get more visibility.
- ckosidows 7y ago
  My company insists each ticket in Jira have a time logged on it now. This is on top of story points. Everyone I know has pushed back on it, but I hope this isn't becoming a standard elsewhere.
  - bravoetch 7y ago
    Product / project / scrum guy here. Logging time won't make sense unless each ticket is one person working on it at a time. The moment it becomes teamwork (like asking someone else for their thoughts on an idea) the value of time is meaningless. People are also useless at estimating time in advance, but pretty great with throwing a story-point number on a given story with the right guidance. Please feel free to schedule me in with your uneducated upper management. They're about to lose value.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Many companies use Jira tickets to track employee time, instead of having a separate time tracking system. This creates a situation where everyone is searching for tickets to make up for their daily 8h.
  - tambre 7y ago
    Same in the company I work at, but only for IT employees. It's fine as long you have over 80% of the monthly hours in you contract tracked. Definitely not used for micromanagement. I myself find it useful for seeing inefficiencies in what I do and ensuring I actually go home. It's handy for charging clients for development work specific to them.
zerr 7y ago
So no peer (fellow engineers) reviews but solely manager?
rolltiide 7y ago
Seems a lot more impersonal but this is a big possibility at small companies too A specialist working on a platform that doesn't need the whole backend team is isolated and easily skipped over for all accolades
vpeters25 7y ago
In agile, or any other project management process, the "customer" is not necessarily just the final user but any stakeholder. As a rule of thumb: anybody who needs regular progress updates on a project is a "customer". The difference in agile vs other development processes is progress reports are partial releases of working code instead of a percentage increase on a gantt chart.
ericmcer 7y ago
The engineers who I have seen game these systems inspire a mix of anger, jealousy and admiration. I can never decide if those of us working hard and trying to make things better are dumb or if the people exploiting company policies are. I watched a new hire recently lynchpin himself into a critical part of the software, make larger then life promises about new “cutting edge” tech in presentations, constantly post articles in Slack, and finally stop showing up or being online much at all other than to do some lip-service and make the occasional PR. I am a little envious of how little he does and how much praise he receives for checking all the boxes with higher ups.
- kbrisso 7y ago
  Where I work this is an "Architect". I'm in the middle of a project designed by these same people to use these "new cutting edge technologies" we are essentially replacing one legacy pile of shit for another new pile of shit that is ever more so complicated to maintain. It blows my mind the money that it being wasted.
oiasdjfoiasd 7y ago
lol. That's when you start looking for a new job. I'll never understand why, in such a hot market, people put up with such B.S. Every single company is looking for software engineers. you're leaving money on the table by not being on the market. I've switched companies every 2-3 years and with a big salary bump each time that I use as leverage to negotiate the next.
smdz 7y ago
And did your manager go on to get another promotion? And may be few more team members had similar jumps in performance? A new manager we had deliberately did this to us. Few of us got marked as "under-performer" levels at random times - risk of being terminated by the bell-curve justification and then within 6 months (not at the same time) we all were "exceeds expectations". The few of us figured out what the manager had done - after 2.5 years. By then she went from being a manager to a senior director with a decent portfolio - and that too pretty quickly. Oh why not! she created "stars" and "performers" out of under-performers. I ended up "deliberately" underperforming for the next 1-1.5 years after they first tagged me. How hard can it be to NOT work? Well it is hard. I invested in learning lot of stuff. But management always figured out I was more than meeting expectations, got me raises and promotions. May be forwarding emails did the trick. But then I got bored, frustrated and quit.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
izacus 7y ago
Huh, as much as I've heard, good luck ever getting a promotion at Google with a track record of MEs and a single EE. People with SEE regularly get their promotions denied.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- inlined 7y ago
  Can confirm. I didn’t get my promotion till 2xEE and 4xSEE.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  That's because it's uncorrelated, not high bar. Until recently, the manager giving you EE and SEE is totally different from and actively distrusted by the promo committees. And on top of that, the criteria are different. Working a little faster than your peers is EE, and is rewarded with raise and extra bonus, but that's different from performing in a higher level role with qualitatively different expectations.
walshemj 7y ago
That sounds interesting a few years ago I worked on a project (the back end system that managed large chunks of the core UK internet infrastructure ). That had an extended 9 month design phase - but a short 12 week agile sprint phase that delivered two intermediate POC versions and then a final working project (we even delivered hardware when at the last minute the customer admitted they hadn't ordered a server) - we even took enough networking gear that we could have installed a net work if that was missing to.
tus88 7y ago
The workplace culture this kind of Lord of the Flies management approach results in must be horrendous.
vecter 7y ago
It sounds like your manager failed to adequately represent your work.
mlinsey 7y ago
Sorry you had to go through such obviously bad management. Just to give some context about how these guidelines are supposed to work at Google: being managed out for staying at Meets Expectations is something that's supposed to be only applicable to entry-level roles. (when I was there, this applied to the new grad T3 rank, as well as T4, I think this may have changed since I left to be just T3). But at an entry-level rank, it is possible to get good ratings and even get promoted if your product hasn't shipped to customers yet (and I would do this with my directs routinely), as long as you are delivering milestones. Part of the definition of T3 is that you cannot yet independently work on a project, ie you need help from senior devs to get things done, and IMO if you stay at this level for more than 1.5 years (3 reviews), and there are no other extenuating circumstances, it's appropriate to consider if the company is a fit. At more senior levels, you have to show business/customer impact to get promoted, but there is also no notion of being managed out for meeting expectations. Of course, these guidelines aren't always implemented or communicated equally across the company, to say nothing of other companies that copy only parts of the process.
rs23296008n1 7y ago
That termination threat is to me a signal that the company hates me and the business relationship is unrecoverable. I'd be polishing my CV and would be gone within a month of finding a better opportunity. Likely with a raise while I was at it. Toxic environments like that are not worth working in. All sorts of other "interesting" corporate cultural aspects are usually also present. Their ethics are compromised so fraud and other criminal activity etc is probably going on as well. Even if not, the company is badly run and long term will fail in various ways for foolish reasons.
lr4444lr 7y ago
Your post is implying a few things that compel me to ask: 1) There is a pure relative ranking firing cut-off at Yahoo regardless of how well the people at the bottom do? 2) Does Yahoo make this clear when they hire you? 3) Your manager was so incompetent that he could not judge your performance outside of customer facing product? 4) A company as big as Yahoo thinks its going to survive alienating the personality that looks for big company culture with that kind of "make the cut" performance review?
- Macha 7y ago
  Stack Ranking at yahoo is no more, at least officially as of a few years ago.
doggydogs94 7y ago
If they had fired you, you could have taken your code and created a startup.
- pmorais 7y ago
  I have never heard of a tech company that doesn’t require that you explicitly give up ownership rights to software written on the job, so good luck with that
JSavageReal 7y ago
How is this even legal? Is there a movement to ban stacking ranking? If we don't voice our concerns as employees, then nobody will. Also the fact that "meets expectations" is concern for firing makes absolutely no sense. A plumber who "meets expectations" in fixing my toilet is a good plumber. I don't expect a plumber to go "above and beyond" and give me a Thai massage too. Absolutely unreal some of the crap we put up with in this industry. Blows my mind that there are actually humans out there in management positions advocating for and implementing this totalitarian dystopian garbage, throwing away their employees for "meeting expectations" as if they're disposable "widgets".
technofiend 7y ago
My project just delivered MVP 1 which automated a certain infrastructure build process that was previously a mix of manual, semi-manual (people running scripts by hand) and automated. In parallel to that green field development I also fixed the issues with the previous solution. Happy path for the old tool is down from 20+ days to 4 and dropping, happy path for the new tool is hours. Now that I've delivered those improvements my boss added reworking the software stack that feeds my current system. He also said to me "Oh, BTW RIFs are coming, take that how you will." So I'm not certain if at this point I'll be RIFd right after delivery of a complete retooling of our infrastructure build process.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  So I'm not certain if at this point I'll be RIFd right after delivery of a complete retooling of our infrastructure build process. Did you write the documentation yet? I think you know what I mean.
hiccuphippo 7y ago
Why would meeting expectations put people at risk of being terminated? Do they expect one to do more work than one was payed to do?
ahupp 7y ago
Ugh. If "meets expectations" puts you in the bottom 5% this says to me that there's wild miscalibration in the review process; e.g not everyone is using the same standard for "meets" and some teams have inflation going on. At my last employer we had lot of cross-review between teams to make sure everyone applies a similar the same standard, just to avoid this problem.

by js2 7y ago

gordaco 7y ago

> Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated. This is disturbing and, I think, a twisted form of grade inflation, mixed with the usual suitspeak where words don't necessarily mean what they mean. If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why would you put it at risk of termination? For the record, I also work in a big company with long product cycles, meaning that the product I'm working on started more than one year ago, and the first public release is planned for next December, so I feel your pain. Luckily our process is a bit more sane and our manager follows our work closely, so I'm getting good ratings (but I wonder if the grade inflation will continue in such a way that "exceeds expectations" now means "subpar employee"...).

MAGZine 7y ago
This is 100% caused by stack ranking, and the problem you identify is a very real one. Chopping off the bottom 5% of employees works if you have a LOT of dead weight, but realistically you can't really do it continuously or you start removing legitimate talent and, just as worse, fostering a toxic community that values playing politics over delivering value.
- taftster 7y ago
  Not only that, but chopping off the bottom 5% typically makes room for more hiring; these emptied jobs are likely to be filled with less-than-stellar candidates. It take the new hires a few years before they too are dropped down into that lower 5% rank. Stack ranking ensures that you have churn in your workforce, and not in a good way. You wonder why workers in the tech industry move around so much? Look at stack ranking as a significant contributing factor.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    That’s by design. Keeps the workforce young and insurance cheap.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Why would companies prefer cheap insurance over productivity? If they want to pay less, they can just pay less. People would rather get paid less than get fired.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
        Is it about cost? It’s often easier to get that pay raise by hopping companies. You’re then replaced with a new hire who is probably getting more than you did. And needs a few months to get up to speed. Treating your proven employees well to retain them would cost less.
      - Spooky23 7y ago

patientplatypus 7y ago

This is a sign of a sick and abusive culture. Once process becomes more important than people then the evil ones will work the system and climb the ladder hurting everyone in their path. Yuck.

logicchains 7y ago
Look on the bright side: Yahoo is an example suggesting that at least in tech if a company is managed badly enough this eventually results in its demise.

abdj8 7y ago

I was at Y! at the same time , I witnesssed so many managers gaming the review system . So many funny , and some sad stories from that time.

lyian 7y ago
Would love to hear some!

amelius 7y ago

> From being warned I'd be terminated to a promotion in less than six months, with no change in my work, but simply it becoming visible. Whee big company fun. They probably deduced from this that their warning system worked as expected.

otaviokz 7y ago
I think the probability of you being right is definitely above 50%.
- replyguy912 7y ago
  I'd say it's somewhere between bottom 5% and top 10% ;)
keanzu 7y ago
Regression to the mean tells you that if you reward success and yell at under performers the successful people will get worse and the under performers will get better. Lesson learned: All yelling, all the time.

TrackerFF 7y ago

The problem, so to speak, is that companies are getting extremely data driven, and constantly need some form of metrics to evaluate their employees. This again can turn into a culture where doing what's expected is devalued to lowest score - because you have that system where there has to be bottom and top performers. And you sadly end up with a situation where workers are (almost) embellishing their projects to get more visibility.

ckosidows 7y ago
My company insists each ticket in Jira have a time logged on it now. This is on top of story points. Everyone I know has pushed back on it, but I hope this isn't becoming a standard elsewhere.
- bravoetch 7y ago
  Product / project / scrum guy here. Logging time won't make sense unless each ticket is one person working on it at a time. The moment it becomes teamwork (like asking someone else for their thoughts on an idea) the value of time is meaningless. People are also useless at estimating time in advance, but pretty great with throwing a story-point number on a given story with the right guidance. Please feel free to schedule me in with your uneducated upper management. They're about to lose value.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Many companies use Jira tickets to track employee time, instead of having a separate time tracking system. This creates a situation where everyone is searching for tickets to make up for their daily 8h.
- tambre 7y ago
  Same in the company I work at, but only for IT employees. It's fine as long you have over 80% of the monthly hours in you contract tracked. Definitely not used for micromanagement. I myself find it useful for seeing inefficiencies in what I do and ensuring I actually go home. It's handy for charging clients for development work specific to them.

zerr 7y ago

So no peer (fellow engineers) reviews but solely manager?

rolltiide 7y ago

Seems a lot more impersonal but this is a big possibility at small companies too A specialist working on a platform that doesn't need the whole backend team is isolated and easily skipped over for all accolades

vpeters25 7y ago

In agile, or any other project management process, the "customer" is not necessarily just the final user but any stakeholder. As a rule of thumb: anybody who needs regular progress updates on a project is a "customer". The difference in agile vs other development processes is progress reports are partial releases of working code instead of a percentage increase on a gantt chart.

ericmcer 7y ago

The engineers who I have seen game these systems inspire a mix of anger, jealousy and admiration. I can never decide if those of us working hard and trying to make things better are dumb or if the people exploiting company policies are. I watched a new hire recently lynchpin himself into a critical part of the software, make larger then life promises about new “cutting edge” tech in presentations, constantly post articles in Slack, and finally stop showing up or being online much at all other than to do some lip-service and make the occasional PR. I am a little envious of how little he does and how much praise he receives for checking all the boxes with higher ups.

kbrisso 7y ago
Where I work this is an "Architect". I'm in the middle of a project designed by these same people to use these "new cutting edge technologies" we are essentially replacing one legacy pile of shit for another new pile of shit that is ever more so complicated to maintain. It blows my mind the money that it being wasted.

oiasdjfoiasd 7y ago

lol. That's when you start looking for a new job. I'll never understand why, in such a hot market, people put up with such B.S. Every single company is looking for software engineers. you're leaving money on the table by not being on the market. I've switched companies every 2-3 years and with a big salary bump each time that I use as leverage to negotiate the next.

smdz 7y ago

And did your manager go on to get another promotion? And may be few more team members had similar jumps in performance? A new manager we had deliberately did this to us. Few of us got marked as "under-performer" levels at random times - risk of being terminated by the bell-curve justification and then within 6 months (not at the same time) we all were "exceeds expectations". The few of us figured out what the manager had done - after 2.5 years. By then she went from being a manager to a senior director with a decent portfolio - and that too pretty quickly. Oh why not! she created "stars" and "performers" out of under-performers. I ended up "deliberately" underperforming for the next 1-1.5 years after they first tagged me. How hard can it be to NOT work? Well it is hard. I invested in learning lot of stuff. But management always figured out I was more than meeting expectations, got me raises and promotions. May be forwarding emails did the trick. But then I got bored, frustrated and quit.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

izacus 7y ago

Huh, as much as I've heard, good luck ever getting a promotion at Google with a track record of MEs and a single EE. People with SEE regularly get their promotions denied.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
inlined 7y ago
Can confirm. I didn’t get my promotion till 2xEE and 4xSEE.
lonelappde 7y ago
That's because it's uncorrelated, not high bar. Until recently, the manager giving you EE and SEE is totally different from and actively distrusted by the promo committees. And on top of that, the criteria are different. Working a little faster than your peers is EE, and is rewarded with raise and extra bonus, but that's different from performing in a higher level role with qualitatively different expectations.

walshemj 7y ago

That sounds interesting a few years ago I worked on a project (the back end system that managed large chunks of the core UK internet infrastructure ). That had an extended 9 month design phase - but a short 12 week agile sprint phase that delivered two intermediate POC versions and then a final working project (we even delivered hardware when at the last minute the customer admitted they hadn't ordered a server) - we even took enough networking gear that we could have installed a net work if that was missing to.

tus88 7y ago

The workplace culture this kind of Lord of the Flies management approach results in must be horrendous.

vecter 7y ago

It sounds like your manager failed to adequately represent your work.

mlinsey 7y ago

Sorry you had to go through such obviously bad management. Just to give some context about how these guidelines are supposed to work at Google: being managed out for staying at Meets Expectations is something that's supposed to be only applicable to entry-level roles. (when I was there, this applied to the new grad T3 rank, as well as T4, I think this may have changed since I left to be just T3). But at an entry-level rank, it is possible to get good ratings and even get promoted if your product hasn't shipped to customers yet (and I would do this with my directs routinely), as long as you are delivering milestones. Part of the definition of T3 is that you cannot yet independently work on a project, ie you need help from senior devs to get things done, and IMO if you stay at this level for more than 1.5 years (3 reviews), and there are no other extenuating circumstances, it's appropriate to consider if the company is a fit. At more senior levels, you have to show business/customer impact to get promoted, but there is also no notion of being managed out for meeting expectations. Of course, these guidelines aren't always implemented or communicated equally across the company, to say nothing of other companies that copy only parts of the process.

rs23296008n1 7y ago

That termination threat is to me a signal that the company hates me and the business relationship is unrecoverable. I'd be polishing my CV and would be gone within a month of finding a better opportunity. Likely with a raise while I was at it. Toxic environments like that are not worth working in. All sorts of other "interesting" corporate cultural aspects are usually also present. Their ethics are compromised so fraud and other criminal activity etc is probably going on as well. Even if not, the company is badly run and long term will fail in various ways for foolish reasons.

lr4444lr 7y ago

Your post is implying a few things that compel me to ask: 1) There is a pure relative ranking firing cut-off at Yahoo regardless of how well the people at the bottom do? 2) Does Yahoo make this clear when they hire you? 3) Your manager was so incompetent that he could not judge your performance outside of customer facing product? 4) A company as big as Yahoo thinks its going to survive alienating the personality that looks for big company culture with that kind of "make the cut" performance review?

Macha 7y ago
Stack Ranking at yahoo is no more, at least officially as of a few years ago.

doggydogs94 7y ago

If they had fired you, you could have taken your code and created a startup.

pmorais 7y ago
I have never heard of a tech company that doesn’t require that you explicitly give up ownership rights to software written on the job, so good luck with that

JSavageReal 7y ago

How is this even legal? Is there a movement to ban stacking ranking? If we don't voice our concerns as employees, then nobody will. Also the fact that "meets expectations" is concern for firing makes absolutely no sense. A plumber who "meets expectations" in fixing my toilet is a good plumber. I don't expect a plumber to go "above and beyond" and give me a Thai massage too. Absolutely unreal some of the crap we put up with in this industry. Blows my mind that there are actually humans out there in management positions advocating for and implementing this totalitarian dystopian garbage, throwing away their employees for "meeting expectations" as if they're disposable "widgets".

technofiend 7y ago

My project just delivered MVP 1 which automated a certain infrastructure build process that was previously a mix of manual, semi-manual (people running scripts by hand) and automated. In parallel to that green field development I also fixed the issues with the previous solution. Happy path for the old tool is down from 20+ days to 4 and dropping, happy path for the new tool is hours. Now that I've delivered those improvements my boss added reworking the software stack that feeds my current system. He also said to me "Oh, BTW RIFs are coming, take that how you will." So I'm not certain if at this point I'll be RIFd right after delivery of a complete retooling of our infrastructure build process.

goatinaboat 7y ago
So I'm not certain if at this point I'll be RIFd right after delivery of a complete retooling of our infrastructure build process. Did you write the documentation yet? I think you know what I mean.

hiccuphippo 7y ago

Why would meeting expectations put people at risk of being terminated? Do they expect one to do more work than one was payed to do?

ahupp 7y ago

Ugh. If "meets expectations" puts you in the bottom 5% this says to me that there's wild miscalibration in the review process; e.g not everyone is using the same standard for "meets" and some teams have inflation going on. At my last employer we had lot of cross-review between teams to make sure everyone applies a similar the same standard, just to avoid this problem.