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I'm constantly amazed at how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization made up of humans. Stack ranking and rela

I'm constantly amazed at how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization made up of humans. Stack ranking and related schemes are so obviously going to be gamed, will definitely measure something other than the nominal thing, and will gum up the works. It's one thing to have a Hunger-Games-style hiring process. Bad as that is, there's an expectation that once you've passed those trials—once you're hired—that you can then devote your time to building things or leading a team that builds things. But when it extends into quarterly or annual reviews, where there must be a loser, then of course it will serve as a distraction from accomplishing actual goals and doing useful work. Now you have to spend time managing your image, making sure you don't piss off the wrong peer, and choosing assignments that are trendy. Companies try to avoid all of that by adding even more complexity to the review process. More layers to prevent favoritism, more concrete metrics to sidestep subjectivity, a longer list of metrics to mitigate any one of them being over-weighted. This just means more time and attention is stolen from productive work, and directed instead toward image management and politics.

tmpz22 4y ago
> how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization At the end of the day even upper management doesn't matter. This is about Owners and Workers and everything in between is just fluff. The $300k - $400k these engineers are making is a rounding error. Turning middle management into cannibals so that one day they might reach slightly higher management is exactly what is supposed to happen, because it means they are willing to kill for the owners.
- 650 4y ago
  Exactly. So many people lose sight of the bigger picture, workers are always cogs in the machine. Luxurious, comfortable cogs, sure. But its crabs in a bucket.
kibwen 4y ago
> I'm constantly amazed at how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization made up of humans. Intelligence isn't a spectrum, it's an infinite-dimensional space. Someone can be smart on one axis and a dunce on infinity-minus-one other axes. Every genius ever born was almost certainly mediocre at nearly everything outside their expertise.
- est31 4y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure about your claim, there were plenty of universal geniuses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath And even today such people exist. Encountering them is often quite an experience. Seeing them being better than you at almost everything is on one hand really nice, on the other hand it makes you wonder what you did wrong. Such folks are usually quite rare though, 1 in a thousand types of people. But I'd imagine Google should be full of them. Or maybe it isn't, idk, given GP.
  - Tronno 4y ago
    I find your statements hard to accept at face value. Does a "polymath" have infinite time to develop excellence in every conceivable discipline? How good was Benjamin Franklin at, say, composing sonatas?
    - acalmon 4y ago
      I’m not sure if you are being ironic, but Benjamin Franklin was a pretty good composer: https://iml.esm.rochester.edu/polyphonic-archive/article/benjamin-franklin-the-composer/ https://iml.esm.rochester.edu/polyphonic-archive/article/ben...
      - Tronno 4y ago
        I'm not being ironic. Your article says he composed two pieces and his instrument skills were "modest". I suspect most people are modest at the hobbies they dabble in. That doesn't make a "universal genius".
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Does it matter? We assume that the people implementing stack ranking have good incentives. At one of my jobs, my manager blurted out what we have all suspected about Scrum. It is valuable to generate a neat numerical progress report for the guy above. It has no other value. My manager doesn't give a shit about achieving anything either. He is doing the same gaming we are.
michaelwww 4y ago
> where there must be a loser, then of course it will serve as a distraction from accomplishing actual goals I didn't realize it was this bad. This is awful.
ouid 4y ago
In what fucking universe has any business major ever passed as smart?
- swores 4y ago
  The current one, in which some jobs still require (foolishly imo) certain qualifications which some smart people are willing to jump through the hoops of to get, in the hope of getting the job they want, even if they might have been able to do the job they wanted without studying for an MBA. Not to mention that decisions on whether or not to stay in education are often taken when fairly young, and even very clever people can arrive in their 20s with incorrect views about the world based on what their parents/teachers/etc believed - if you've spent your childhood being told that a degree is the only way to have a secure future, you have to not only be smarter than needing a degree you also have to be bold enough to think you already know better than everyone around you (which sure, some people are that confident as 12 year olds, some never get that confident even as adults). TLDR, I get why business degrees get a bad rep, and agree that many idiots do do them; but also, a couple of the cleverest people I've ever known have done them, mid-career, because the job they were aiming for (and in both cases I'm thinking of, then went on to achieve) had hard requirements attached and they considered it worth wasting time on an MBA to progress.
lazide 4y ago
What alternative do you propose?
nostrademons 4y ago
When supposedly smart people consistently act stupid, it's usually a good indication that you don't understand the actual game that is being played. The goal of corporate employees usually is not maximizing profit. If it were, things like private equity, LBOs, and shareholder lawsuits would not be necessary. Rather, the goal of organization-man is maintenance of the hierarchy. Why? Because people who aren't interested in this goal either quit and take jobs outside of the corporate world (like consultant, therapist, small business owner, etc.) or they circulate freely throughout many different companies and rely on up-leveling at the interview stage to get raises and promotions. With this goal, all the stack ranking, annual reviews, politics and image maintenance makes sense. For there to be a hierarchy, there must be people at the bottom of the hierarchy. There must also be a pathway to the top of the hierarchy, lest people tire of the game and quit. Therefore, people seeking to preserve the hierarchy will create processes to ensure some people are defined as needing improvement, and others are defined as being worthy of promotion and upward mobility. The folks who are purely interested in maximizing profit usually enter finance and become hedge fund managers, where they have a small staff (largely dispensable, other than themselves) but outsize influence on markets, and can keep 20% of their profits (100% if trading their own capital) for themselves.
jiggawatts 4y ago
Stack ranking kinda-sorta makes sense in a sales team, because fundamentally it isn't a team at all. Sales tends to be made up of a bunch of individuals chasing a finite set of opportunities. Firing low-performing sales people won't remove some essential technical knowledge, and won't affect other sales. In fact, poor performing sales people may "fumble" lucrative opportunities that would have been landed if they had been fired and replaced by someone better. Replacing sales staff is also not a big problem. In fact, some new hires will bring customers with them. None of this is true for creative workers in actual teams with deep technical or site knowledge. Someone with a decade of experience that is a bit burnt out and underperforming may still have amazing contributions albeit less frequently or predictably. Someone that doesn't commit code often but "holds the team together" by lending a helping hand and giving sage advice to juniors can be invaluable. Fire them and the juniors will flounder. New developers not only don't bring customers with them, but likely won't be productive for months. And so on, and so forth. Stack ranking originates in organisations where sales are in charge at the upper levels. They think that what applies to them applies to everybody else at the organisation. This is a mistake, of course, but it's fantastically difficult to overcome "cultural" biases like this. Even otherwise very smart people have a blind spot to this kind of thing. After all, the fish is the last to know it swims in water.
- lupire 4y ago
  Meta and Google have "sales" but it's not really the backbone of the business. Sales is largely via automated systems, not personal deals.

tmpz22 4y ago

> how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization At the end of the day even upper management doesn't matter. This is about Owners and Workers and everything in between is just fluff. The $300k - $400k these engineers are making is a rounding error. Turning middle management into cannibals so that one day they might reach slightly higher management is exactly what is supposed to happen, because it means they are willing to kill for the owners.

650 4y ago
Exactly. So many people lose sight of the bigger picture, workers are always cogs in the machine. Luxurious, comfortable cogs, sure. But its crabs in a bucket.

kibwen 4y ago

> I'm constantly amazed at how stupid supposed smart people can be when it comes to applying metrics to an organization made up of humans. Intelligence isn't a spectrum, it's an infinite-dimensional space. Someone can be smart on one axis and a dunce on infinity-minus-one other axes. Every genius ever born was almost certainly mediocre at nearly everything outside their expertise.

est31 4y ago
I wouldn't be so sure about your claim, there were plenty of universal geniuses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath And even today such people exist. Encountering them is often quite an experience. Seeing them being better than you at almost everything is on one hand really nice, on the other hand it makes you wonder what you did wrong. Such folks are usually quite rare though, 1 in a thousand types of people. But I'd imagine Google should be full of them. Or maybe it isn't, idk, given GP.
- Tronno 4y ago
  I find your statements hard to accept at face value. Does a "polymath" have infinite time to develop excellence in every conceivable discipline? How good was Benjamin Franklin at, say, composing sonatas?
  - acalmon 4y ago
    I’m not sure if you are being ironic, but Benjamin Franklin was a pretty good composer: https://iml.esm.rochester.edu/polyphonic-archive/article/benjamin-franklin-the-composer/ https://iml.esm.rochester.edu/polyphonic-archive/article/ben...
    - Tronno 4y ago
      I'm not being ironic. Your article says he composed two pieces and his instrument skills were "modest". I suspect most people are modest at the hobbies they dabble in. That doesn't make a "universal genius".

throwawaysleep 4y ago

Does it matter? We assume that the people implementing stack ranking have good incentives. At one of my jobs, my manager blurted out what we have all suspected about Scrum. It is valuable to generate a neat numerical progress report for the guy above. It has no other value. My manager doesn't give a shit about achieving anything either. He is doing the same gaming we are.

michaelwww 4y ago

> where there must be a loser, then of course it will serve as a distraction from accomplishing actual goals I didn't realize it was this bad. This is awful.

ouid 4y ago

In what fucking universe has any business major ever passed as smart?

swores 4y ago
The current one, in which some jobs still require (foolishly imo) certain qualifications which some smart people are willing to jump through the hoops of to get, in the hope of getting the job they want, even if they might have been able to do the job they wanted without studying for an MBA. Not to mention that decisions on whether or not to stay in education are often taken when fairly young, and even very clever people can arrive in their 20s with incorrect views about the world based on what their parents/teachers/etc believed - if you've spent your childhood being told that a degree is the only way to have a secure future, you have to not only be smarter than needing a degree you also have to be bold enough to think you already know better than everyone around you (which sure, some people are that confident as 12 year olds, some never get that confident even as adults). TLDR, I get why business degrees get a bad rep, and agree that many idiots do do them; but also, a couple of the cleverest people I've ever known have done them, mid-career, because the job they were aiming for (and in both cases I'm thinking of, then went on to achieve) had hard requirements attached and they considered it worth wasting time on an MBA to progress.

lazide 4y ago

What alternative do you propose?

nostrademons 4y ago

When supposedly smart people consistently act stupid, it's usually a good indication that you don't understand the actual game that is being played. The goal of corporate employees usually is not maximizing profit. If it were, things like private equity, LBOs, and shareholder lawsuits would not be necessary. Rather, the goal of organization-man is maintenance of the hierarchy. Why? Because people who aren't interested in this goal either quit and take jobs outside of the corporate world (like consultant, therapist, small business owner, etc.) or they circulate freely throughout many different companies and rely on up-leveling at the interview stage to get raises and promotions. With this goal, all the stack ranking, annual reviews, politics and image maintenance makes sense. For there to be a hierarchy, there must be people at the bottom of the hierarchy. There must also be a pathway to the top of the hierarchy, lest people tire of the game and quit. Therefore, people seeking to preserve the hierarchy will create processes to ensure some people are defined as needing improvement, and others are defined as being worthy of promotion and upward mobility. The folks who are purely interested in maximizing profit usually enter finance and become hedge fund managers, where they have a small staff (largely dispensable, other than themselves) but outsize influence on markets, and can keep 20% of their profits (100% if trading their own capital) for themselves.

jiggawatts 4y ago

Stack ranking kinda-sorta makes sense in a sales team, because fundamentally it isn't a team at all. Sales tends to be made up of a bunch of individuals chasing a finite set of opportunities. Firing low-performing sales people won't remove some essential technical knowledge, and won't affect other sales. In fact, poor performing sales people may "fumble" lucrative opportunities that would have been landed if they had been fired and replaced by someone better. Replacing sales staff is also not a big problem. In fact, some new hires will bring customers with them. None of this is true for creative workers in actual teams with deep technical or site knowledge. Someone with a decade of experience that is a bit burnt out and underperforming may still have amazing contributions albeit less frequently or predictably. Someone that doesn't commit code often but "holds the team together" by lending a helping hand and giving sage advice to juniors can be invaluable. Fire them and the juniors will flounder. New developers not only don't bring customers with them, but likely won't be productive for months. And so on, and so forth. Stack ranking originates in organisations where sales are in charge at the upper levels. They think that what applies to them applies to everybody else at the organisation. This is a mistake, of course, but it's fantastically difficult to overcome "cultural" biases like this. Even otherwise very smart people have a blind spot to this kind of thing. After all, the fish is the last to know it swims in water.

lupire 4y ago
Meta and Google have "sales" but it's not really the backbone of the business. Sales is largely via automated systems, not personal deals.