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Blizzard manager departs in protest of employee ranking system

343 points by minimaxir 4y ago

etempleton 4y ago
I kind of can’t believe anyone still uses stack ranking. Its long-term negative effects to an organization are pretty well documented.
- cr__ 4y ago
  I could see a company stubbornly sticking to it if they’ve been doing it for a couple decades, but to implement it in 2021 is really wild.
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    I would guess that this new implementation is a prelude to a round of layoffs, and when he refused to participate in the (Possibly unknown to him, but if so probably an indication that he didn't have his ear to the ground enough) layoff planning it was easier to put him first on the chopping block.
  - Bud 4y ago
    [dead]
CosmicBagel 4y ago
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZfxV-MdPmS8J:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/blizzard-manager-departs-in-protest-of-employee-ranking-system https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZfxV-M...
qaz_plm 4y ago
https://archive.ph/rTGIB https://archive.ph/rTGIB
HHC-Hunter 4y ago
Scumbag Companies gonna scumbag. Rat race to the bottom.
ilyt 4y ago
> The process, called "stack ranking," requires managers to give about 5% of their employees a low performance evaluation to fit on a bell curve of relative performance. ...companies still use it ? Thought microsoft taught industry a lesson here
- gurchik 4y ago
  Capital One does, and I hear many banks do
- sosodev 4y ago
  Seems like managers are often asked to stack rank before layoffs...
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    That's about the only time I can think of where it makes sense. If you have to lay off some people, then obviously you want to get rid of the lowest performers. But if times are good and everyone is performing well enough and contributing, why get rid of them? If they're not performing well enough, then you shouldn't need stack ranking to figure that out, and you don't need to arbitrarily set a percentage of employees to put on performance improvement plans or fire.
    - dasudasu 4y ago
      The rationale is that there can only be so many employees and if natural attrition is low then they’d prefer to re-roll on mediocre performers in an attempt to capture the top ones.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        That's a bad rationale. Mediocre performers, are, by definition, average. Unless your hiring process has completely changed, you're not likely to get anyone better if you toss out a mediocre performer and hire someone new: the new person could be better, or could be worse. Moreover, the mediocre person is experienced and productive; the replacement will not be, and probably won't be for a long time. (If the mediocre performer isn't productive, then they're not mediocre unless most of your employees are terrible, and should be fired for bad performance.)
nitwit005 4y ago
> He also said that he was asked to keep the policy secret from employees. Yea, that'd last about a day.
monero-xmr 4y ago
I implore the dissatisfied and frustrated people on HN (regarding layoffs and general direction of the industry) to start your own companies. 1 of 3 things will happen: - The world will be populated with enlightened companies structured in pro-worker models that are wonderful for everyone involved - You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful - You will balance option 1 and 2 in some better fashion that moves the needle closer to your idealized vision Isn't that better than just hating your life, punching a card, and waiting for the axe to fall on your head?
- drekipus 4y ago
  Always my approach If something isn't right, go change it. If you can't, break free until you can. Else it's a bigger problem than you might realise
  - grugagag 4y ago
    > Else it's a bigger problem than you might realise Then talking about it or protesting may be the way. When the climate where we all can start our business and make a significant change in this landscape will come that will be the best solution. But right now it’ll barely do a dent, if that. I sense that what we are facing are systemic problems
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  It’s not easy to start and build a business. Not everyone has the ability or luck required. I don’t see an issue with employees protesting or trying to sabotage a system they see as unjust.
  - prottog 4y ago
    > trying to sabotage a system they see as unjust. You should see something wrong with someone actively sabotaging a system. It's fine and maybe encouraged to protest or move on to a better opportunity, but sabotage just means they're making the whole world a little bit worse off.
dudul 4y ago
The bell curve thing is so idiotic. It has very perverse effect such as intentionally hiring low performers to let them go during the next cycle and make sure you can keep your team.
- dvhh 4y ago
  I am guessing that when company reach a certain size, bean counter need to take over to manage the business
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    It’s true. The bean counting is Jira workflows and constant discussion about modifying them. The dedication to process as a startup grows is really astounding. It changes work relationships in my experience and turns people into robots.
fishtoaster 4y ago
> A Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg that the evaluation process is designed to [...] "ensure employees who don't meet performance expectations receive [...] differentiated compensation. Most of the response is the usual PR speak, but "differentiated compensation" seems like a new level of back-bending to avoid saying "less pay."
- scient 4y ago
  If your compensation consists of base pay plus a bonus, that is usually tied to performance, then why should you get the bonus payout if you don't meet expectations?
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    Stack ranking guarantees that the process isn't actually measuring if people are meeting expectations or not.
  - 6177c40f 4y ago
    Because I doubt that the ranking system will be objective or even closely tied to any real measure of skill, performance, merit.
  - the_af 4y ago
    Who says they didn't meet expectations? As long as you define these expectations as "no other employee performs better than you".
  - Lazare 4y ago
    There are employee evaluation tools that try to measure if employees are meeting expectations. The entire point of stack ranking is that it does not do this. The article is about a lead who resigned/got fired because the system wanted to penalise someone who was meetings expectations.
  - fishtoaster 4y ago
    There's nothing wrong with getting paid less if you don't meet performance expectations. I'm just impressed with the term they made up ("differentiated compensation") to try to make that sound nicer.
Blackstrat 4y ago
Companies still use it. The company I retired from three years ago still uses it. If the manager is doing their job, their team’s performance, relative to the rest of the company, is not normally distributed. Stack ranking is a stupid idea, as many of Welch’s ideas are now considered.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Why is it distributed? Maybe if you took people at random but: (sarcasm) shouldn't you have all good people because your leetcode hiring process only produces "the best" (/sarcasm) Add to the fact that "rankings" are often largely political. There's a "minimum talent" aspect and then the last 1-2 points is most often political and representative of machiavellian power levels in the corporate dominance hierarchy. Also, the article headline should explicitly call out Stack Ranking. Stack Ranking basically admits one of two things: 1) your recruiting sucks 2) your work culture sucks Well, and #3: corporate culture doesn't value balance or having any "bad times" in your life.
- petre 4y ago
  Curve fitting "performance" to an "expected" bell curve is clearly idiotic, even from a mathematical perspective. In the described case one won't have a symetric bell curve and the population is going to be too small, even if measuring performance was done right, which it clearly wasn't. Whoever invented this process has done so without understanding normal distributions. It's a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
  - robotresearcher 4y ago
    A quick Google shows estimates of about ~10K Blizzard employees. That's a plenty large enough population for mass-population trends to show up.
    - Blackstrat 4y ago
      It may be, but remember that most companies do stack ranking at some roll up level, not over the entire population. I had 40+ developers in my organization with two peers having comparable sized teams. We were expected to horse trade amongst ourselves to insure the VP got his distribution. However, the VP would always try to browbeat each of us into matching the curve. It was pretty intense and he frankly didn’t give a rat’s rear end who got steamrolled in the process. To say I was thrilled to have outlasted his employment would be an understatement.
qqtt 4y ago
I think there are also two different "flavors" of stack ranking usually at play. There is the one where the company wants to reward top performers. I think this one is most common, and I have never worked at a company that doesn't so some form of bonus budgeting that tries to capture a group of employees who are performing well and give them a bonus. The budget itself dictates how many employees can fit into that group, so ultimately what happens is a natural bell curve of the biggest rewards going to the perceived top performers, as agreed upon by managers usually at the organization level. The other more insidious stack ranking involves a punitive element, whereby a group must necessarily be singled out for performance improvement reasons. This is the type of thing where managers, no matter what the team members actually accomplished, have to put someone on a performance improvement plan or start performance managing them to "get them up the bar" because someone naturally has to fall into the "bottom performer" bucket of stack ranking. I think the former is common and pretty unavoidable unless a company has an unusually large bonus budget pool available. The latter approach is what causes problems with companies, because all of a sudden team mates become competitors and cultures can go downhill rapidly. Think Amazon, Microsoft under Ballmer, and GE under Walsh. It's kind of interesting how many companies who are doing the former bonus budget pooling eventually get seduced into doing the latter and destroying their culture.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  I've seen this play out at my university in two different ways. The more obvious way is very obvious: we had a professor who told us he'll be grading us by first tallying up the answers, and then applying a bell curve to the scores, so that X% of the students get an A, Y% get a B, etc., and some Z% of the students will fail. As you can imagine, everyone was up in arms about how obviously unfair this is. The less obvious case, but close to what you describe, was scolarships. For almost every "track"[0], scolarships were awarded for top X% of students. In the "track" I was in, and another one in our faculty, the scolarships were instead given to anyone who crossed a certain absolute grade threshold, in (IIRC three) tiers. The higher the tier you reached, the more money you got, independent of how other students fared (probably subject to budget constraints, though). Now, I can't prove it, but there was one other notable difference between our "track" and that other one with same scolarship model, and every other "track" at the university I was aware of: ours were famously cooperative, everyone else was fiercely competitive. I don't think it's a coincidence. My university experience was that of everyone helping each other out, because it was always a win-win both socially sometimes financially. Everywhere else, this was unthinkable - helping other students created a risk of them getting ahead of you and taking your scolarship. I'm dismayed to see the same thing repeating in companies too. -- [0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
Good leadership taking a stand against bad management.
mrbgty 4y ago
Honorable guy
blibble 4y ago
Blizzard completely lost their ability to operate in China today after they lost a corporate game of chicken with their Chinese partner NetEase https://www.pcgamer.com/netease-smashes-up-world-of-warcraft-statue-after-its-nasty-breakup-with-blizzard/ https://www.pcgamer.com/netease-smashes-up-world-of-warcraft... it will likely be months (if not years) before they are permitted to operate again, likely killing the habit for a large percentage of their player base I wonder how the droid that initiated that contract re-negotiation was ranked?
- tenpies 4y ago
  Should my gamer heart flutter at the idea that this might be long good-term for Blizzard? NetEase seemed to have an extraordinary influence in making modern Blizzard as financially extractive as possible of its player base. And surely, there are other relations that have made modern Blizzard into what it is, but you can see the NetEase fingerprints on every title released since 2008.
  - blibble 4y ago
    I don't think so I know WoW in china operated under a completely different business model where you pay by the hour instead of a expansion packs and a monthly subscription (no idea about their other games)
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    I'd be more optimistic about the Microsoft deal than anything. There's a potential that they could treat Blizzard's IP as a loss leader into the MS ecosystem, and lighten up on that stuff.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    > Should my gamer heart flutter at the idea that this might be long good-term for Blizzard? No. WOW and it's planetary popularity killed Blizzard not some deal with CCP backed company.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    > Should my gamer heart flutter at the idea that this might be long good-term for Blizzard? Why would you want that? Companies don't make games. People make games. All the people at Blizzard who made the games that you remember fondly have moved on. There's nothing left but an empty shell of a brand running on the fumes of inertia.
deeviant 4y ago
Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, N% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that N% of each team are. The weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team. Further, stack ranking mostly ignores the existence of human psychology. As soon as metric is chosen to be a benchmark for the measurement of performance, it almost immediately because useless as a benchmark for performance, because people are people. People will find out how the game works, and they will play the game. Employees will sabotage other's work to make themselves look relatively better, managers will hire whipping boys for the specific purpose of giving a low rating so they can take the sword. Sure this happens with any performance rating system, but the worse behaviors are accentuated with fundamentally broken rating systems. How should employee evaluation be done then? It's straight forward: * Set clear expectations. * Get peer feedback * Manager decides how the employee performed in comparison to the expectations that were clearly communicated to the employee based on the manager's personal knowledge of their reports work, and from that of peer feedback. No zero sum hunger game bullshit required.
- blibble 4y ago
  > Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, 5% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that 5% of each team are. Further, the weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team. absolutely, it may work (possibly) if you could apply that 5% over an entire large department but each line manager only has visibility over their (hopefully) small number of reports so if you have 3 excellent reports on a high performing team: who do you dump in it? the usual answer is the person with the least leverage/ability to resign, which is grossly unfair
- GVIrish 4y ago
  > Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. This is the fundamental flaw with stack ranking that really irks me. Stack ranking force fits people to a normal distribution but that's backwards. With normal distributions you're supposed to measure the phenomena then use statistical formulas to see if the data fits a normal distribution. Maybe it does. Maybe it's bi-modal, or tri-modal. Maybe the data is evenly distributed. But no, companies butcher the concept of a bell curve and end up doing serious damage to the culture of the company as everyone starts optimizing their behavior to succeed in an utterly irrational system.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
I don't understand, why would they fire someone who stated they intended to resign? I always thought the game was to get employees to volunteer to leave instead of formally terminating them?
- chris_wot 4y ago
  Head on a pike move for the other managers.
- boole1854 4y ago
  It sends a message to the other middle managers who might also be considering protesting or trying to organize a larger protest.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    The cat is out of the bag. Now the managers can quietly collaborate with the team and everyone can take their turn being the dunce until they move on in a couple of years.
- cuttysnark 4y ago
  To send a message, seems like. "Senior engineering lead fired for challenging corporate directive" might deter others who thought of taking a similar stance. "Senior engineering lead resigns in protest of corporate directive", on the other hand, seems like a call to arms for the conscience-driven; a thorn in corporate's side. Better to squash it and deal with the one-off "firing". Especially if it's for "cause"—then they can give nothing as severance, and quote a violation of the "employee agreement" as the reason.
anacrolix 4y ago
Carefully, he's a hero
kristopolous 4y ago
The third rail in any company is failing to observe the hierarchy. It's probably a swifter hammer then even harassment or discrimination.
xutopia 4y ago
How far Blizzard has fallen.
Sebb767 4y ago
Related joke: Any program has a least one bug and can be made shorter by at least one line. So any program can be reduced to a single line that doesn't work. Stack ranking seems to bring in the assumption that any company can be reduced to a single employee on a performance improvement plan ;-)
6177c40f 4y ago
I don't really understand how stack ranking is supposed to work. If 5% of employees must be ranked low, and they improve, they'll either be ranked low again or someone who wasn't ranked low will be ranked low- even if that person's performance hasn't changed. This just seems designed to ensure there's always some group of fall guys and also to create teams that are competitive with themselves to a toxic degree.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  These companies also have a general policy of 5-10% 'natural' attrition a year, i.e. they expect a large percent of people to leave. The bottom 5% of stack ranked folks are almost always targeted for this attrition. They're put on 'performance improvement plans' that demand daily monitoring and check-in, and other onerous rules designed to make them quit. With stack ranking the bottom bucket is basically assumed and designed to be ejected from the company every year.
- fatneckbeard 4y ago
  GE gained a lot of share price but the company long term value was crushed, now it's splitting into three companies. If you want a lot of short term goal people to make money pumping stock, this is a great way to go. If you want to build long term value for shareholders it's absolutely one of the dumbest things you can possibly do.
  - enkid 4y ago
    GE didn't just split into three companies. Before this current split it basically shedded entire industries worth of spin off companies. Short term thinking led to over commitment to financial services like annuities, which paid upfront but then they had to pay back more than they got in the first place. It also led to sales with steep discounts on maintenance contracts, once again gaining significant cash upfront at the cost of a long tail of costs. This was directly related to the competitive culture, where anyone questioning something bringing in cash was seen as risk adverse and unaggressive.
- wpietri 4y ago
lokar 4y ago
Stack ranking != rating to a curve IME stack ranking (esp between several teams) can be very helpful and improve fairness. Just don’t impose a distribution on ratings
stefan_ 4y ago
The Twitter thread of the person in question is probably a better source: https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168 https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168
Krisjohn 4y ago
If you create a system that will always punish 5% of a group of people, you need to admit that you just enjoy punishing people.
Pr0ject217 4y ago
Good for him. That policy is BS.
yazzku 4y ago
I have said it in the past and I will say it once again: fuck Blizzard! They have bastardized every single game franchise and turned it into an unregulated online casino of loot boxes. They defiled Diablo by making a mobile version. They defiled World of Warcraft. There was never a Starcraft 3. They don't give two shits about anyone's opinion. They will keep pushing shitty products and exploiting their workers until they have sucked everybody's soul. If you are a Blizzard North fan, refrain from buying anything from the money-sucking parasite that Activision/Blizzard has become.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  I would say: fuck MBAs MBAs programs are a ritual of cargo cult indoctrination that that reinforces beliefs based on pseudoscience and irrationality. Not only they're completely clueless about how to generate value for a customer, they have taken every revenue generating activity in America, applied some fucked up short-term thinking, and ruined them. For every Steve Jobs (value generating individual) there's a John Sculley (MBA), ready to milk every cash cow dry. The best thing that occurred to Apple was to undo the entire legacy of John Sculley and send him home. Contrary to popular belief: nobody fucking needs MBAs. MBAs are a mistake. The US had a much better economy before MBAs were invented. What's the contribution of US MBAs? making China the #1 country by GDP, and normalizing clown-like botox faces. Truly the most idiotic cargo cult ever created.
  - adra 4y ago
    If you want to consider it as a maximization of shareholder value, then you're dead wrong. They're pumping the value of US shares making CEOs and large shareholders even more filthy rich than they ever worth this lifetime, so pat them on the back for that. Blame them for greasing palms and watering down corporate tax rates. Blame them for maximizing profits by shifting jobs overseas. All that money flowing to the top is making a very few people a lot of money and in that role they're doing great at it, at least as long as I've been old enough to pay attention. It's not MBAs that are the problem you hate, it's capitalism stretched to it's _naturally_ anti-competitive pinnacle.
29athrowaway 4y ago
1st round: - Nobody knows they are being ranked. - Employees are ranked, some % at the bottom is terminated, some % at the top is promoted or rewarded. - The theory behind stacked ranking seems to work. nth round: - A strong candidates comes to an interview. The interviewer thinks: "If we hire this candidate, my ranking will lower and I'll be closer to the bottom. Better pass on this guy!" (sabotage) - A weak candidate comes to an interview. The interviewer thinks: "If we hire this candidate, my ranking will go up and I'll be farther from the bottom. We need to hire this guy!" (sabotage) - Someone asks for help with documentation. The team mate think "Uhm, I should work on my tasks instead of helping others, that will boost my rank" - The employees that choose not to sabotage the company will be punished. - The theory behind stacked ranking is proven wrong. So: 1) a company that implements stacked ranking is performing self-sabotage. 2) MBAs are based on pseudoscience and cargo cult. True business thinking is beyond them. https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/human-resources-hr-terms/15258-forced-distribution-method.html https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/human-resources-h... 3) ~10% layoff = strong signal your company is using stacked ranking.
freitzkriesler 4y ago
The problem with stack ranking is when companies are international. Cultural nepotism ends up making this system completely fall apart. Case in point, I had an Indian engineering manager report that had his staff PiPs entirely down racial lines. Thankfully, jira and our GitHub repo proved otherwise. I gave the Indian dev lead his own PiP. By the next year he wised up but I had a long enough list to can him for other reasons. Meanwhile, a whole year had to go by before we could can this pain in the rear. This type of BS is why companies like Microsoft lost to companies like google or apple. I'm not surprised blizzard is going down the same rabbit hole.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LarsDu88 4y ago
  Ballmer hunger game'd Microsoft to the brink. If Google ever does the same thing at the same scale, the next Google will arise. It's as hard to make a Google nowadays. It's hard to get those people who know how to do it out of Google!
dbg31415 4y ago
My 2 cents. Stack Ranking is designed to give companies a lever to exit poor performing employees, with the thought of making room for more new ones... new ones who won't statistically, be as bad as the ones that were let go. Your manager is tasked with finding people they don't like and putting them on performance plans. And let's be honest, a performance plan is not to help you improve. It's to make your life miserable so you start shopping for a new job. You haven't done anything they can outright fire you over, but they just don't like you. So HR gives them this lever to pull. And it's set up as a cautionary tale to others, "If you aren't good, you'll get cut... just like Joe!" Anyway I'm torn on Stack Ranking. I mean, it does exactly what it'd designed to do. It helps cull a small percentage of the employees every year. But is it fair? Or done in a way that isn't totally subjective? Not in my experience. And have you ever met anyone who was on a performance plan, but got off and went on to be successful? I haven't. 25+ years in tech. But you can't just outright fire people. Everyone would hate you, and I'm sure it's not legal in every state. So you slowly build your case, through Stack Ranking, and after a few months you can just say, "Gosh, Joe didn't work out... not my fault, he didn't follow the improvement plan HR set down for him." There are always those people who just... look, your team will work better without them. Think of the annoying guy who always puts his boss in an awkward position with questions, or think about the guy who cooks fish in the microwave, or the guy who is just a little too into [fill in the subject] and won't shut up about it... Stack Ranking helps get rid of those people from your office. As a manager, I've participated in this. I've benefited from this. But I don't see any value in hiding the fact that you Stack Rank, I think that's the real flaw in Blizzard's plan. They should make it public. Tell all the employees, "Guess what, we're going to get rid of 1 in 20 of you to make room for fresh blood." Is it shitty? Meh, I guess. But also do you really think that there aren't at least 1 in 20 of your peers you wouldn't relish the opportunity to replace? Put another way, do you really think that if rolled a D20, and had a 1 that you wouldn't get a higher number if you re-rolled? I mean, the odds are in your favor. If the 13 was obnoxious enough, or constantly biked to work and left his stinky bike gear to dry in the break room... I'd be tempted to re-roll a 13 too. =P So me personally... years ago, when I was working at a bigger company, I used Stack Ranking to get rid of some people who were overly political in the office. Like... I just put them on a performance plan, and it worked. Give them busy work, give them a bunch of self-evaluations to use, and micromanage them until they quit. I guess it was shady, but the end result was a positive thing for my my team -- at least I felt that at the time. If you trust your manager, Stack Ranking isn't a bad thing. If you don't trust your manager... well let's just say you have bigger issues. And really, if you don't like your boss you should find a new job... before you get Stack Ranked! (=
karmakaze 4y ago
Gives ladder MMR a whole new meaning.
komali2 4y ago
The stack ranking policy mentioned is blatantly unethical, but not surprising. Corporations finding ways to extract the most amount of labor for the least amount of money is one of the defining characteristics of capitalist mode of production. That's the core dynamic when you don't own your means of production (a more nebulous concept in the software world of course): workers want to work less for more money, owners want workers to work more for less money. A lot of other comments are saying, this doesn't make sense, there'll always be someone getting ranked low, this doesn't make sense, it's arbitrarily punishing teams full of high performers, this doesn't make sense, no matter how hard you work, the only thing that matters is whether or not you're in the bottom 5%, applying a bell curve to a small population doesn't work, etc etc. Correct, those are all great reasons why this is silly from an objective standpoint concerned with worker's wellbeing or just sheer rationality, but from a corporate profit standpoint, it doesn't matter (sort of, see below). All that matters is there are mechanisms in place to extract more labor for less money. Where they failed is to account for an uptick in societal concern for worker's wellbeing. Now this guy get fired and there's a story, that's bad PR. There's a binary demographic in the USA right now, those that will care about this guy and worker's rights, and those that will arbitrarily defend the business' right to do whatever it pleases (and be opposed to things like unions on ideological grounds). From my observations it seems the former group has more buying power because companies seem to cater their actions more towards that group in general, although it is hilarious and frustrating how bone-headed corporations continue to be when it comes to worker's rights, fighting tooth and nail and spending millions to crush unionization efforts. I write poorly, to summarize what I mean to say is it was a mistake from all angles, capitalist or otherwise, to treat this guy the way they did. Now they blew up a story and now we have Yet Another Data Point for blizzard being shit to their employees. Now a bunch of people are learning about stack ranking and how stupid it is and that blizzard is still doing it. If they wanted to be effective extractors of labor value they should have found more subtle ways of doing it, like swapping out guaranteed vacation time for "unlimited" policies and then implementing a "dynamic work ethic" culture that made people take less vacation time and continue to work remote while on vacation. Or, you know, they could just be really smart and give their employees shared ownership in the company, making it more profitable in general, more stable, and creating a more positive work environment. That would of course mean less share of profit for the shareholders which is why this will of course never happen. I write authoritatively because I don't know how to hedge well, I'm actually very curious what others here think about how this reflects in general on the overall push in the usa for more unionization, particularly of software engineers and especially for the games industry. What other solution here is there, given that blizzard can't be trusted to do well by its employees? Someone else here wrote "start a competing company!" but I don't think we need to do much to agree that starting a blizzard competitor from your garage is a kind of silly idea (though I do much prefer indie games, what I mean is that an MMO or blizzard-scale games are simply out of scope for these kinds of companies).
kaiby 4y ago
I've heard that at companies that did stack ranking, managers of groups with high performers would actually seek out poor performers who didn't care about their ranking from other groups, to add to their group so that they wouldn't have to give a poor mark to their own people. These poor performers became hot commodities. Talk about gaming the system...
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > These poor performers became hot commodities. Talk about gaming the system... Couple iterations of that and you'll have people who are hired and/or paid extra for the purpose of being a "fuse" that protects the high performers during layoffs by being first to get fired.
  - shriek 4y ago
    That happens already. No big company is running on a skeleton crew. If they are then we have a bigger problem.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      But is the distribution maintained fractally down to most/all of the big company's teams?
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Not sure about the “paid extra” part, but this is called Hire To Fire[1] and is evidently in practice at companies that do stack ranking. 1: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to-fire-practice-reveals-a-brutal-truth-about-management.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
    - urthor 4y ago
      It leads to the metagame. For many junior employees, far more likely to be predesignated as H2F, you onboard as a hire to fire employee. Then immediately begin networking for an adjacent team to join. It's never about what you can do. Always about who you know.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
Hell yeah Brian Birmingham!! Way to stick up for your ethics! https://twitter.com/BrianBirming https://twitter.com/BrianBirming
ElijahLynn 4y ago
"Blizard Manager" (Brian Birmingham) tells more here (2 hrs ago): https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168 https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168
- ElijahLynn 4y ago
  Brian tweets: "And to wrap up I want to again clarify that I was surprised to see the Bloomberg article below. I did NOT provide them the email they're quoting from, but I believe the quotes are accurate. They have neither spoken to me nor reached out to me in any way." source: https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688562148978690 https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688562148978690
jmyeet 4y ago
Stack ranking is beyond awful abs usually incredibly toxic. It’s not performance based. It’s a popularity contest. More specifically it encourages the formation of cliques and rewards manipulation.
smugma 4y ago
I work with a manager who has the inverse problem. He has multiple (2-3 out of 10) low performers but had pressure to only mark one as a low performer. Now that one person has left the team he’s able to mark a new person as the low performer.
tigerlily 4y ago
Good on him. The real question is are Blizzard using Orc ranks or Human ranks?
shmerl 4y ago
Totally messed up system which is stacked against the worker, so name checks out.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
plaguepilled 4y ago
This is very par for the course for Blizzard, sadly. They have not exactly made a name for themselves as collegiate and staff-supporting. Personally I try to support smaller creators wherever I can. Not to say they're always perfect either, but the rate of controversy there is significantly lower, and honestly there are a lot of great games coming from the indie space. I encourage anyone who is similarly saddened by this recent news to consider doing the same.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
If you're a manager and your team has enough direct reports that you can set 5% of your team to "developing," then your teams are too big and your managers are incompetent.
- xbar 4y ago
  Thought experiment: how would you feel about stack ranking all managers but no employees?
SkyMarshal 4y ago
> “When team leads asked why we had to do this, World of Warcraft directors explained that while they did not agree, the reasons given by executive leadership were that it was important to squeeze the bottom-most performers as a way to make sure everybody continues to grow,” Birmingham wrote in the email, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. “This sort of policy encourages competition between employees, sabotage of one another’s work, a desire for people to find low-performing teams that they can be the best-performing worker on, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity.” Indeed, these stack ranking schemes need a Freakonomics or Moneyball style critical analysis applied to them, they’re likely at least as harmful as helpful.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Top grading stack ranks are devised by managers who fundamentally believes people are fungible widgets, and like a widget, have a defect rate that’s statistically analytic. I’ve rarely found an engineer I’ve hired that is worth letting go. Sometimes engineers come in and struggle at what they are assigned, but as a manager if I take the time to understand the person, rather than discarding the widget, I’ll find what they are good at and I can find a way to make them do that. There was always “something there” when we hired them, and it was my fault if I didn’t match them to the right work, style of working, or environment for working. The managers of widgets are sad widgets. To be a person as a manager, you have to manage people.
- kashif 4y ago
  > I’ve rarely found an engineer I’ve hired that is worth letting go. Unfortunately, all of us cannot claim this. There certainly are engineers who need to be let go.
Lapsa 4y ago
just buy that boon of plenty already
bayesian_horse 4y ago
Are there Bronze League Heros among the developers?
flohofwoe 4y ago
> ...to give a low evaluation to an employee that he felt didn’t deserve it in order to fill a quota... So essentially the same method used as in Stalin's Great Purge, rat out your colleagues even though they did nothing wrong just to fulfill a made up quota. That will be really great for morale and the public image of the company /s
tempwhatever212 4y ago
This kind of stack ranking was used at large investment bank (starts with M) about 10 years ago while I was working there as a C++ developer. It resulted in a strategy where some teams have hired puffer people with the only purpose to have poor performance ratings assigned to them and let them go when the demand for such inevitably rose for such from HR. This shielded the core team allowing them to focus solely on actual business requirements. There were people in the office taking decent salary, doing barely anything with kind of no expectations of their performance whatsoever. Some were doing their masters, some hit the gym very hard, some were just chilling out. This was my first lesson on how focus on tactical goals and metrics can fundamentally screw up the long term vision.
- Foomf 4y ago
  Goodhart's law is very similar in concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - cainxinth 4y ago
    Also brings this article to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- int0x2e 4y ago
  Extremely well put. Any time a business decides on a metric / decision criteria, they introduce a strong incentive for their employees and managers to act accordingly. For some reason, leaders rarely seem to think hard enough about the possible outcomes. My anecdote - at a former big tech company, we had a long hiring freeze, and they even decided that when someone leaves or gets fired, their headcount goes back up to senior leadership who decide where that headcount should be (so as a manager, if you fire someone - you might lose the position entirely). So, naturally, even since then there have been zero people fired, even if they are low performers, since managers want to keep their headcount. But talented people obviously still get offers and leave, and when they leave, their headcount disappears. So after a year or so of this great policy, the average level of talent across the company is steadily dropping, which also means it'll be much harder to recruit top talent even after this policy is over - because most talented people want to join a team where they can still learn and evolve, collaborate with other smart folks, etc.
iamyemeth 4y ago
Summary could have been: "Man makes a stand against more Blizzard bullshit, mistakenly assuming that someone in management has a soul, gets fired"
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
Google does this same shit. They even have a graphical tool for it; not kidding. Google, widely mocked for the douchiness of its hiring process (which it admitted to years ago and claimed that it was trying to reduce), forces employees to rank their fellows using a graphical tool that presents their pictures on screen and demands that you move them up or down to rank them in reference to each other. The application makes it impossible to align colleagues on the same horizontal line. I mean... who the fuck expends the engineering time to create such an offensive tool? Google; that's who.
- sakex 4y ago
  I work there, it's definitely not true
  - oblio 4y ago
    Are you a manager?
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    Really? You know company-wide practices at all offices, for the last decade or so? I have this first-hand from a colleague who worked there, and he is definitely not one to make things up. Plus... this would be an oddly specific lie, don't you think? To be fair, I should have used past tense in my comment, since this was a few years ago. But, given interview experiences at Google reported by other immediate colleagues, I would find the story believable even without knowing the credibility of the source. Here's another one: My friend (not the one who saw the "ranking" system) had an interview at Google, where he was given a programming exercise and told he could solve the problem in any language he wanted. The interviewer left the room, and my friend correctly solved the problem in Objective-C. The interviewer came back, looked at it, and said, "Oh, not THAT language." A few years later, Google publicly admitted that its interview process sucked and said it was making it better. I have declined to interview with them, however, not only because of friends' experiences but also the company's behavior on the whole.
- deelly 4y ago
  First time hearing about it. Some src to claims maybe?
freilanzer 4y ago
> In recent years, Blizzard’s corporate overseers at Activision have taken a larger role in operations, pushing the company to cut costs and produce games more quickly. And that's exactly the reason for the downfall of the company. No vision, no passion, no leadership, no quality - just quantity and money.
Herbstluft 4y ago
I experienced firsthand how this system breeds a new kind of system gamers that would not come to fruition otherwise. Honestly stack ranking can only be described as a fetish, it offers no gain and really only exists because certain people really love it in a very creepy way.
afrcnc 4y ago
Back in the early 2010s, EA and Ubisoft were considered the worst gaming studios because they pushed "loot crate" mechanics. Now, Activision-Blizzard has not only developed some of the most expensive stores in any game, but they almost always deliver half-finished games and abuse their employees in the process, while EA and Ubisoft are considered some of the best places to work in the gaming industry. I think this company needs a boycott really bad to put it back on the good path.
- oblio 4y ago
  > EA and Ubisoft are considered some of the best places to work in the gaming industry Oh, really? I haven't followed this kind of stuff in a while. So they're good now? How would they rank for software development, in general? Game studios are notoriously subpar when you start comparing them to FAANG, big enterprise sotware development shops, etc.
  - bartread 4y ago
    > Game studios are notoriously subpar when you start comparing them to FAANG, big enterprise sotware development shops, etc. I don't think this has changed substantially. It's supply and demand: lots of people want to build games for the sake of building games. At least in theory it sounds more exciting than maintaining whatever microservice for a FAANG. So, because there's a lot more supply than demand, they get paid less.
  - wetpaws 4y ago
    Unisoft is an absolute shitfest internally. EA on other hand was always a good place to work, despite being an plague of the gaming industry on itself. Doing good things and being a good place to work are not necessary the same thing.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  No, they just started paying PR firms when their deserved reputation started causing brand new graduates (their core hire) to pass on their job offers. The entire game industry is a massive shit show of employee abuse.
andremedeiros 4y ago
Funny. This is exactly why I left a certain e-commerce company. Good on them.
Exendroinient00 4y ago
It's hard to evaluate performance in the industries adjacent to arts/entertainment which the gaming industry definitely is.Typical software practices won't work in the every industry.
Hakeemmidan 4y ago
This was implemented in a company that I worked for, and it made people flat out lie to keep up with the system
musicale 4y ago
> "This sort of policy encourages competition between employees, sabotage of one another’s work, [and] a desire for people to find low-performing teams that they can be the best-performing worker on, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity." Accurate summary.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 4y ago
I remember stack ranking back in the '70s where managers had to fill the low performer quota.
el_don_almighty 4y ago
You smart people sure are dumb. HR is the real enemy here and their fear-based power derives from risk management action against Federal/State mandates and potential employee legal action, i.e. "Make sure we don't get sued and that we have a strong defense if we do." Without a documented methodology for weeding out 'poor performers' and a history of doing so, the company's risk from an individual dismissal increases. Hence the HR team locked in the basement where nobody accounts for the differential cost from all these schemes and programs. Like vaccinations, thousands of lives are vaccinated in the hopes of preventing one, high-cost event with a damaging outcome. Managers feel safer, executives don't care, and you play the game
hansvm 4y ago
Somebody recently bought my apartment complex and thought it would be fun to add a surcharge even for payment methods like echecks. After a couple months of dealing with a thousand paper checks they're trying to no avail to fix the problem by begging everyone to pay online. Incentives matter.

343 points by minimaxir 4y ago

I kind of can’t believe anyone still uses stack ranking. Its long-term negative effects to an organization are pretty well documented.

cr__ 4y ago
I could see a company stubbornly sticking to it if they’ve been doing it for a couple decades, but to implement it in 2021 is really wild.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  I would guess that this new implementation is a prelude to a round of layoffs, and when he refused to participate in the (Possibly unknown to him, but if so probably an indication that he didn't have his ear to the ground enough) layoff planning it was easier to put him first on the chopping block.
- Bud 4y ago
  [dead]

CosmicBagel 4y ago

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZfxV-MdPmS8J:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/blizzard-manager-departs-in-protest-of-employee-ranking-system https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZfxV-M...

qaz_plm 4y ago

https://archive.ph/rTGIB https://archive.ph/rTGIB

HHC-Hunter 4y ago

Scumbag Companies gonna scumbag. Rat race to the bottom.

ilyt 4y ago

> The process, called "stack ranking," requires managers to give about 5% of their employees a low performance evaluation to fit on a bell curve of relative performance. ...companies still use it ? Thought microsoft taught industry a lesson here

gurchik 4y ago
Capital One does, and I hear many banks do
sosodev 4y ago
Seems like managers are often asked to stack rank before layoffs...
- midoridensha 4y ago
  That's about the only time I can think of where it makes sense. If you have to lay off some people, then obviously you want to get rid of the lowest performers. But if times are good and everyone is performing well enough and contributing, why get rid of them? If they're not performing well enough, then you shouldn't need stack ranking to figure that out, and you don't need to arbitrarily set a percentage of employees to put on performance improvement plans or fire.
  - dasudasu 4y ago
    The rationale is that there can only be so many employees and if natural attrition is low then they’d prefer to re-roll on mediocre performers in an attempt to capture the top ones.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      That's a bad rationale. Mediocre performers, are, by definition, average. Unless your hiring process has completely changed, you're not likely to get anyone better if you toss out a mediocre performer and hire someone new: the new person could be better, or could be worse. Moreover, the mediocre person is experienced and productive; the replacement will not be, and probably won't be for a long time. (If the mediocre performer isn't productive, then they're not mediocre unless most of your employees are terrible, and should be fired for bad performance.)

nitwit005 4y ago

> He also said that he was asked to keep the policy secret from employees. Yea, that'd last about a day.

monero-xmr 4y ago

I implore the dissatisfied and frustrated people on HN (regarding layoffs and general direction of the industry) to start your own companies. 1 of 3 things will happen: - The world will be populated with enlightened companies structured in pro-worker models that are wonderful for everyone involved - You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful - You will balance option 1 and 2 in some better fashion that moves the needle closer to your idealized vision Isn't that better than just hating your life, punching a card, and waiting for the axe to fall on your head?

drekipus 4y ago
Always my approach If something isn't right, go change it. If you can't, break free until you can. Else it's a bigger problem than you might realise
- grugagag 4y ago
  > Else it's a bigger problem than you might realise Then talking about it or protesting may be the way. When the climate where we all can start our business and make a significant change in this landscape will come that will be the best solution. But right now it’ll barely do a dent, if that. I sense that what we are facing are systemic problems
cactusplant7374 4y ago
It’s not easy to start and build a business. Not everyone has the ability or luck required. I don’t see an issue with employees protesting or trying to sabotage a system they see as unjust.
- prottog 4y ago
  > trying to sabotage a system they see as unjust. You should see something wrong with someone actively sabotaging a system. It's fine and maybe encouraged to protest or move on to a better opportunity, but sabotage just means they're making the whole world a little bit worse off.

dudul 4y ago

The bell curve thing is so idiotic. It has very perverse effect such as intentionally hiring low performers to let them go during the next cycle and make sure you can keep your team.

dvhh 4y ago
I am guessing that when company reach a certain size, bean counter need to take over to manage the business
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  It’s true. The bean counting is Jira workflows and constant discussion about modifying them. The dedication to process as a startup grows is really astounding. It changes work relationships in my experience and turns people into robots.

fishtoaster 4y ago

> A Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg that the evaluation process is designed to [...] "ensure employees who don't meet performance expectations receive [...] differentiated compensation. Most of the response is the usual PR speak, but "differentiated compensation" seems like a new level of back-bending to avoid saying "less pay."

scient 4y ago
If your compensation consists of base pay plus a bonus, that is usually tied to performance, then why should you get the bonus payout if you don't meet expectations?
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Stack ranking guarantees that the process isn't actually measuring if people are meeting expectations or not.
- 6177c40f 4y ago
  Because I doubt that the ranking system will be objective or even closely tied to any real measure of skill, performance, merit.
- the_af 4y ago
  Who says they didn't meet expectations? As long as you define these expectations as "no other employee performs better than you".
- Lazare 4y ago
  There are employee evaluation tools that try to measure if employees are meeting expectations. The entire point of stack ranking is that it does not do this. The article is about a lead who resigned/got fired because the system wanted to penalise someone who was meetings expectations.
- fishtoaster 4y ago
  There's nothing wrong with getting paid less if you don't meet performance expectations. I'm just impressed with the term they made up ("differentiated compensation") to try to make that sound nicer.

Blackstrat 4y ago

Companies still use it. The company I retired from three years ago still uses it. If the manager is doing their job, their team’s performance, relative to the rest of the company, is not normally distributed. Stack ranking is a stupid idea, as many of Welch’s ideas are now considered.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Why is it distributed? Maybe if you took people at random but: (sarcasm) shouldn't you have all good people because your leetcode hiring process only produces "the best" (/sarcasm) Add to the fact that "rankings" are often largely political. There's a "minimum talent" aspect and then the last 1-2 points is most often political and representative of machiavellian power levels in the corporate dominance hierarchy. Also, the article headline should explicitly call out Stack Ranking. Stack Ranking basically admits one of two things: 1) your recruiting sucks 2) your work culture sucks Well, and #3: corporate culture doesn't value balance or having any "bad times" in your life.
petre 4y ago
Curve fitting "performance" to an "expected" bell curve is clearly idiotic, even from a mathematical perspective. In the described case one won't have a symetric bell curve and the population is going to be too small, even if measuring performance was done right, which it clearly wasn't. Whoever invented this process has done so without understanding normal distributions. It's a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  A quick Google shows estimates of about ~10K Blizzard employees. That's a plenty large enough population for mass-population trends to show up.
  - Blackstrat 4y ago
    It may be, but remember that most companies do stack ranking at some roll up level, not over the entire population. I had 40+ developers in my organization with two peers having comparable sized teams. We were expected to horse trade amongst ourselves to insure the VP got his distribution. However, the VP would always try to browbeat each of us into matching the curve. It was pretty intense and he frankly didn’t give a rat’s rear end who got steamrolled in the process. To say I was thrilled to have outlasted his employment would be an understatement.

qqtt 4y ago

I think there are also two different "flavors" of stack ranking usually at play. There is the one where the company wants to reward top performers. I think this one is most common, and I have never worked at a company that doesn't so some form of bonus budgeting that tries to capture a group of employees who are performing well and give them a bonus. The budget itself dictates how many employees can fit into that group, so ultimately what happens is a natural bell curve of the biggest rewards going to the perceived top performers, as agreed upon by managers usually at the organization level. The other more insidious stack ranking involves a punitive element, whereby a group must necessarily be singled out for performance improvement reasons. This is the type of thing where managers, no matter what the team members actually accomplished, have to put someone on a performance improvement plan or start performance managing them to "get them up the bar" because someone naturally has to fall into the "bottom performer" bucket of stack ranking. I think the former is common and pretty unavoidable unless a company has an unusually large bonus budget pool available. The latter approach is what causes problems with companies, because all of a sudden team mates become competitors and cultures can go downhill rapidly. Think Amazon, Microsoft under Ballmer, and GE under Walsh. It's kind of interesting how many companies who are doing the former bonus budget pooling eventually get seduced into doing the latter and destroying their culture.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
I've seen this play out at my university in two different ways. The more obvious way is very obvious: we had a professor who told us he'll be grading us by first tallying up the answers, and then applying a bell curve to the scores, so that X% of the students get an A, Y% get a B, etc., and some Z% of the students will fail. As you can imagine, everyone was up in arms about how obviously unfair this is. The less obvious case, but close to what you describe, was scolarships. For almost every "track"[0], scolarships were awarded for top X% of students. In the "track" I was in, and another one in our faculty, the scolarships were instead given to anyone who crossed a certain absolute grade threshold, in (IIRC three) tiers. The higher the tier you reached, the more money you got, independent of how other students fared (probably subject to budget constraints, though). Now, I can't prove it, but there was one other notable difference between our "track" and that other one with same scolarship model, and every other "track" at the university I was aware of: ours were famously cooperative, everyone else was fiercely competitive. I don't think it's a coincidence. My university experience was that of everyone helping each other out, because it was always a win-win both socially sometimes financially. Everywhere else, this was unthinkable - helping other students created a risk of them getting ahead of you and taking your scolarship. I'm dismayed to see the same thing repeating in companies too. -- [0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

Good leadership taking a stand against bad management.

mrbgty 4y ago

Honorable guy

blibble 4y ago

Blizzard completely lost their ability to operate in China today after they lost a corporate game of chicken with their Chinese partner NetEase https://www.pcgamer.com/netease-smashes-up-world-of-warcraft-statue-after-its-nasty-breakup-with-blizzard/ https://www.pcgamer.com/netease-smashes-up-world-of-warcraft... it will likely be months (if not years) before they are permitted to operate again, likely killing the habit for a large percentage of their player base I wonder how the droid that initiated that contract re-negotiation was ranked?

tenpies 4y ago
Should my gamer heart flutter at the idea that this might be long good-term for Blizzard? NetEase seemed to have an extraordinary influence in making modern Blizzard as financially extractive as possible of its player base. And surely, there are other relations that have made modern Blizzard into what it is, but you can see the NetEase fingerprints on every title released since 2008.
- blibble 4y ago
  I don't think so I know WoW in china operated under a completely different business model where you pay by the hour instead of a expansion packs and a monthly subscription (no idea about their other games)
- ramesh31 4y ago
  I'd be more optimistic about the Microsoft deal than anything. There's a potential that they could treat Blizzard's IP as a loss leader into the MS ecosystem, and lighten up on that stuff.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  > Should my gamer heart flutter at the idea that this might be long good-term for Blizzard? No. WOW and it's planetary popularity killed Blizzard not some deal with CCP backed company.
- kibwen 4y ago
  > Should my gamer heart flutter at the idea that this might be long good-term for Blizzard? Why would you want that? Companies don't make games. People make games. All the people at Blizzard who made the games that you remember fondly have moved on. There's nothing left but an empty shell of a brand running on the fumes of inertia.

deeviant 4y ago

Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, N% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that N% of each team are. The weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team. Further, stack ranking mostly ignores the existence of human psychology. As soon as metric is chosen to be a benchmark for the measurement of performance, it almost immediately because useless as a benchmark for performance, because people are people. People will find out how the game works, and they will play the game. Employees will sabotage other's work to make themselves look relatively better, managers will hire whipping boys for the specific purpose of giving a low rating so they can take the sword. Sure this happens with any performance rating system, but the worse behaviors are accentuated with fundamentally broken rating systems. How should employee evaluation be done then? It's straight forward: * Set clear expectations. * Get peer feedback * Manager decides how the employee performed in comparison to the expectations that were clearly communicated to the employee based on the manager's personal knowledge of their reports work, and from that of peer feedback. No zero sum hunger game bullshit required.

blibble 4y ago
> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, 5% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that 5% of each team are. Further, the weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team. absolutely, it may work (possibly) if you could apply that 5% over an entire large department but each line manager only has visibility over their (hopefully) small number of reports so if you have 3 excellent reports on a high performing team: who do you dump in it? the usual answer is the person with the least leverage/ability to resign, which is grossly unfair
GVIrish 4y ago
> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. This is the fundamental flaw with stack ranking that really irks me. Stack ranking force fits people to a normal distribution but that's backwards. With normal distributions you're supposed to measure the phenomena then use statistical formulas to see if the data fits a normal distribution. Maybe it does. Maybe it's bi-modal, or tri-modal. Maybe the data is evenly distributed. But no, companies butcher the concept of a bell curve and end up doing serious damage to the culture of the company as everyone starts optimizing their behavior to succeed in an utterly irrational system.

r3trohack3r 4y ago

I don't understand, why would they fire someone who stated they intended to resign? I always thought the game was to get employees to volunteer to leave instead of formally terminating them?

chris_wot 4y ago
Head on a pike move for the other managers.
boole1854 4y ago
It sends a message to the other middle managers who might also be considering protesting or trying to organize a larger protest.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  The cat is out of the bag. Now the managers can quietly collaborate with the team and everyone can take their turn being the dunce until they move on in a couple of years.
cuttysnark 4y ago
To send a message, seems like. "Senior engineering lead fired for challenging corporate directive" might deter others who thought of taking a similar stance. "Senior engineering lead resigns in protest of corporate directive", on the other hand, seems like a call to arms for the conscience-driven; a thorn in corporate's side. Better to squash it and deal with the one-off "firing". Especially if it's for "cause"—then they can give nothing as severance, and quote a violation of the "employee agreement" as the reason.

anacrolix 4y ago

Carefully, he's a hero

kristopolous 4y ago

The third rail in any company is failing to observe the hierarchy. It's probably a swifter hammer then even harassment or discrimination.

xutopia 4y ago

How far Blizzard has fallen.

Sebb767 4y ago

Related joke: Any program has a least one bug and can be made shorter by at least one line. So any program can be reduced to a single line that doesn't work. Stack ranking seems to bring in the assumption that any company can be reduced to a single employee on a performance improvement plan ;-)

6177c40f 4y ago

I don't really understand how stack ranking is supposed to work. If 5% of employees must be ranked low, and they improve, they'll either be ranked low again or someone who wasn't ranked low will be ranked low- even if that person's performance hasn't changed. This just seems designed to ensure there's always some group of fall guys and also to create teams that are competitive with themselves to a toxic degree.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
These companies also have a general policy of 5-10% 'natural' attrition a year, i.e. they expect a large percent of people to leave. The bottom 5% of stack ranked folks are almost always targeted for this attrition. They're put on 'performance improvement plans' that demand daily monitoring and check-in, and other onerous rules designed to make them quit. With stack ranking the bottom bucket is basically assumed and designed to be ejected from the company every year.
fatneckbeard 4y ago
GE gained a lot of share price but the company long term value was crushed, now it's splitting into three companies. If you want a lot of short term goal people to make money pumping stock, this is a great way to go. If you want to build long term value for shareholders it's absolutely one of the dumbest things you can possibly do.
- enkid 4y ago
  GE didn't just split into three companies. Before this current split it basically shedded entire industries worth of spin off companies. Short term thinking led to over commitment to financial services like annuities, which paid upfront but then they had to pay back more than they got in the first place. It also led to sales with steep discounts on maintenance contracts, once again gaining significant cash upfront at the cost of a long tail of costs. This was directly related to the competitive culture, where anyone questioning something bringing in cash was seen as risk adverse and unaggressive.
wpietri 4y ago

lokar 4y ago

Stack ranking != rating to a curve IME stack ranking (esp between several teams) can be very helpful and improve fairness. Just don’t impose a distribution on ratings

stefan_ 4y ago

The Twitter thread of the person in question is probably a better source: https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168 https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168

Krisjohn 4y ago

If you create a system that will always punish 5% of a group of people, you need to admit that you just enjoy punishing people.

Pr0ject217 4y ago

Good for him. That policy is BS.

yazzku 4y ago

I have said it in the past and I will say it once again: fuck Blizzard! They have bastardized every single game franchise and turned it into an unregulated online casino of loot boxes. They defiled Diablo by making a mobile version. They defiled World of Warcraft. There was never a Starcraft 3. They don't give two shits about anyone's opinion. They will keep pushing shitty products and exploiting their workers until they have sucked everybody's soul. If you are a Blizzard North fan, refrain from buying anything from the money-sucking parasite that Activision/Blizzard has become.

29athrowaway 4y ago
I would say: fuck MBAs MBAs programs are a ritual of cargo cult indoctrination that that reinforces beliefs based on pseudoscience and irrationality. Not only they're completely clueless about how to generate value for a customer, they have taken every revenue generating activity in America, applied some fucked up short-term thinking, and ruined them. For every Steve Jobs (value generating individual) there's a John Sculley (MBA), ready to milk every cash cow dry. The best thing that occurred to Apple was to undo the entire legacy of John Sculley and send him home. Contrary to popular belief: nobody fucking needs MBAs. MBAs are a mistake. The US had a much better economy before MBAs were invented. What's the contribution of US MBAs? making China the #1 country by GDP, and normalizing clown-like botox faces. Truly the most idiotic cargo cult ever created.
- adra 4y ago
  If you want to consider it as a maximization of shareholder value, then you're dead wrong. They're pumping the value of US shares making CEOs and large shareholders even more filthy rich than they ever worth this lifetime, so pat them on the back for that. Blame them for greasing palms and watering down corporate tax rates. Blame them for maximizing profits by shifting jobs overseas. All that money flowing to the top is making a very few people a lot of money and in that role they're doing great at it, at least as long as I've been old enough to pay attention. It's not MBAs that are the problem you hate, it's capitalism stretched to it's _naturally_ anti-competitive pinnacle.

29athrowaway 4y ago

1st round: - Nobody knows they are being ranked. - Employees are ranked, some % at the bottom is terminated, some % at the top is promoted or rewarded. - The theory behind stacked ranking seems to work. nth round: - A strong candidates comes to an interview. The interviewer thinks: "If we hire this candidate, my ranking will lower and I'll be closer to the bottom. Better pass on this guy!" (sabotage) - A weak candidate comes to an interview. The interviewer thinks: "If we hire this candidate, my ranking will go up and I'll be farther from the bottom. We need to hire this guy!" (sabotage) - Someone asks for help with documentation. The team mate think "Uhm, I should work on my tasks instead of helping others, that will boost my rank" - The employees that choose not to sabotage the company will be punished. - The theory behind stacked ranking is proven wrong. So: 1) a company that implements stacked ranking is performing self-sabotage. 2) MBAs are based on pseudoscience and cargo cult. True business thinking is beyond them. https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/human-resources-hr-terms/15258-forced-distribution-method.html https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/human-resources-h... 3) ~10% layoff = strong signal your company is using stacked ranking.

freitzkriesler 4y ago

The problem with stack ranking is when companies are international. Cultural nepotism ends up making this system completely fall apart. Case in point, I had an Indian engineering manager report that had his staff PiPs entirely down racial lines. Thankfully, jira and our GitHub repo proved otherwise. I gave the Indian dev lead his own PiP. By the next year he wised up but I had a long enough list to can him for other reasons. Meanwhile, a whole year had to go by before we could can this pain in the rear. This type of BS is why companies like Microsoft lost to companies like google or apple. I'm not surprised blizzard is going down the same rabbit hole.

deleted 4y ago
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LarsDu88 4y ago
Ballmer hunger game'd Microsoft to the brink. If Google ever does the same thing at the same scale, the next Google will arise. It's as hard to make a Google nowadays. It's hard to get those people who know how to do it out of Google!

dbg31415 4y ago

My 2 cents. Stack Ranking is designed to give companies a lever to exit poor performing employees, with the thought of making room for more new ones... new ones who won't statistically, be as bad as the ones that were let go. Your manager is tasked with finding people they don't like and putting them on performance plans. And let's be honest, a performance plan is not to help you improve. It's to make your life miserable so you start shopping for a new job. You haven't done anything they can outright fire you over, but they just don't like you. So HR gives them this lever to pull. And it's set up as a cautionary tale to others, "If you aren't good, you'll get cut... just like Joe!" Anyway I'm torn on Stack Ranking. I mean, it does exactly what it'd designed to do. It helps cull a small percentage of the employees every year. But is it fair? Or done in a way that isn't totally subjective? Not in my experience. And have you ever met anyone who was on a performance plan, but got off and went on to be successful? I haven't. 25+ years in tech. But you can't just outright fire people. Everyone would hate you, and I'm sure it's not legal in every state. So you slowly build your case, through Stack Ranking, and after a few months you can just say, "Gosh, Joe didn't work out... not my fault, he didn't follow the improvement plan HR set down for him." There are always those people who just... look, your team will work better without them. Think of the annoying guy who always puts his boss in an awkward position with questions, or think about the guy who cooks fish in the microwave, or the guy who is just a little too into [fill in the subject] and won't shut up about it... Stack Ranking helps get rid of those people from your office. As a manager, I've participated in this. I've benefited from this. But I don't see any value in hiding the fact that you Stack Rank, I think that's the real flaw in Blizzard's plan. They should make it public. Tell all the employees, "Guess what, we're going to get rid of 1 in 20 of you to make room for fresh blood." Is it shitty? Meh, I guess. But also do you really think that there aren't at least 1 in 20 of your peers you wouldn't relish the opportunity to replace? Put another way, do you really think that if rolled a D20, and had a 1 that you wouldn't get a higher number if you re-rolled? I mean, the odds are in your favor. If the 13 was obnoxious enough, or constantly biked to work and left his stinky bike gear to dry in the break room... I'd be tempted to re-roll a 13 too. =P So me personally... years ago, when I was working at a bigger company, I used Stack Ranking to get rid of some people who were overly political in the office. Like... I just put them on a performance plan, and it worked. Give them busy work, give them a bunch of self-evaluations to use, and micromanage them until they quit. I guess it was shady, but the end result was a positive thing for my my team -- at least I felt that at the time. If you trust your manager, Stack Ranking isn't a bad thing. If you don't trust your manager... well let's just say you have bigger issues. And really, if you don't like your boss you should find a new job... before you get Stack Ranked! (=

karmakaze 4y ago

Gives ladder MMR a whole new meaning.

komali2 4y ago

The stack ranking policy mentioned is blatantly unethical, but not surprising. Corporations finding ways to extract the most amount of labor for the least amount of money is one of the defining characteristics of capitalist mode of production. That's the core dynamic when you don't own your means of production (a more nebulous concept in the software world of course): workers want to work less for more money, owners want workers to work more for less money. A lot of other comments are saying, this doesn't make sense, there'll always be someone getting ranked low, this doesn't make sense, it's arbitrarily punishing teams full of high performers, this doesn't make sense, no matter how hard you work, the only thing that matters is whether or not you're in the bottom 5%, applying a bell curve to a small population doesn't work, etc etc. Correct, those are all great reasons why this is silly from an objective standpoint concerned with worker's wellbeing or just sheer rationality, but from a corporate profit standpoint, it doesn't matter (sort of, see below). All that matters is there are mechanisms in place to extract more labor for less money. Where they failed is to account for an uptick in societal concern for worker's wellbeing. Now this guy get fired and there's a story, that's bad PR. There's a binary demographic in the USA right now, those that will care about this guy and worker's rights, and those that will arbitrarily defend the business' right to do whatever it pleases (and be opposed to things like unions on ideological grounds). From my observations it seems the former group has more buying power because companies seem to cater their actions more towards that group in general, although it is hilarious and frustrating how bone-headed corporations continue to be when it comes to worker's rights, fighting tooth and nail and spending millions to crush unionization efforts. I write poorly, to summarize what I mean to say is it was a mistake from all angles, capitalist or otherwise, to treat this guy the way they did. Now they blew up a story and now we have Yet Another Data Point for blizzard being shit to their employees. Now a bunch of people are learning about stack ranking and how stupid it is and that blizzard is still doing it. If they wanted to be effective extractors of labor value they should have found more subtle ways of doing it, like swapping out guaranteed vacation time for "unlimited" policies and then implementing a "dynamic work ethic" culture that made people take less vacation time and continue to work remote while on vacation. Or, you know, they could just be really smart and give their employees shared ownership in the company, making it more profitable in general, more stable, and creating a more positive work environment. That would of course mean less share of profit for the shareholders which is why this will of course never happen. I write authoritatively because I don't know how to hedge well, I'm actually very curious what others here think about how this reflects in general on the overall push in the usa for more unionization, particularly of software engineers and especially for the games industry. What other solution here is there, given that blizzard can't be trusted to do well by its employees? Someone else here wrote "start a competing company!" but I don't think we need to do much to agree that starting a blizzard competitor from your garage is a kind of silly idea (though I do much prefer indie games, what I mean is that an MMO or blizzard-scale games are simply out of scope for these kinds of companies).

kaiby 4y ago

I've heard that at companies that did stack ranking, managers of groups with high performers would actually seek out poor performers who didn't care about their ranking from other groups, to add to their group so that they wouldn't have to give a poor mark to their own people. These poor performers became hot commodities. Talk about gaming the system...

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> These poor performers became hot commodities. Talk about gaming the system... Couple iterations of that and you'll have people who are hired and/or paid extra for the purpose of being a "fuse" that protects the high performers during layoffs by being first to get fired.
- shriek 4y ago
  That happens already. No big company is running on a skeleton crew. If they are then we have a bigger problem.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    But is the distribution maintained fractally down to most/all of the big company's teams?
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Not sure about the “paid extra” part, but this is called Hire To Fire[1] and is evidently in practice at companies that do stack ranking. 1: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to-fire-practice-reveals-a-brutal-truth-about-management.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
  - urthor 4y ago
    It leads to the metagame. For many junior employees, far more likely to be predesignated as H2F, you onboard as a hire to fire employee. Then immediately begin networking for an adjacent team to join. It's never about what you can do. Always about who you know.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

Hell yeah Brian Birmingham!! Way to stick up for your ethics! https://twitter.com/BrianBirming https://twitter.com/BrianBirming

ElijahLynn 4y ago

"Blizard Manager" (Brian Birmingham) tells more here (2 hrs ago): https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168 https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168

ElijahLynn 4y ago
Brian tweets: "And to wrap up I want to again clarify that I was surprised to see the Bloomberg article below. I did NOT provide them the email they're quoting from, but I believe the quotes are accurate. They have neither spoken to me nor reached out to me in any way." source: https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688562148978690 https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688562148978690

jmyeet 4y ago

Stack ranking is beyond awful abs usually incredibly toxic. It’s not performance based. It’s a popularity contest. More specifically it encourages the formation of cliques and rewards manipulation.

smugma 4y ago

I work with a manager who has the inverse problem. He has multiple (2-3 out of 10) low performers but had pressure to only mark one as a low performer. Now that one person has left the team he’s able to mark a new person as the low performer.

tigerlily 4y ago

Good on him. The real question is are Blizzard using Orc ranks or Human ranks?

shmerl 4y ago

Totally messed up system which is stacked against the worker, so name checks out.

deleted 4y ago

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plaguepilled 4y ago

This is very par for the course for Blizzard, sadly. They have not exactly made a name for themselves as collegiate and staff-supporting. Personally I try to support smaller creators wherever I can. Not to say they're always perfect either, but the rate of controversy there is significantly lower, and honestly there are a lot of great games coming from the indie space. I encourage anyone who is similarly saddened by this recent news to consider doing the same.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

If you're a manager and your team has enough direct reports that you can set 5% of your team to "developing," then your teams are too big and your managers are incompetent.

xbar 4y ago
Thought experiment: how would you feel about stack ranking all managers but no employees?

SkyMarshal 4y ago

> “When team leads asked why we had to do this, World of Warcraft directors explained that while they did not agree, the reasons given by executive leadership were that it was important to squeeze the bottom-most performers as a way to make sure everybody continues to grow,” Birmingham wrote in the email, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. “This sort of policy encourages competition between employees, sabotage of one another’s work, a desire for people to find low-performing teams that they can be the best-performing worker on, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity.” Indeed, these stack ranking schemes need a Freakonomics or Moneyball style critical analysis applied to them, they’re likely at least as harmful as helpful.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Top grading stack ranks are devised by managers who fundamentally believes people are fungible widgets, and like a widget, have a defect rate that’s statistically analytic. I’ve rarely found an engineer I’ve hired that is worth letting go. Sometimes engineers come in and struggle at what they are assigned, but as a manager if I take the time to understand the person, rather than discarding the widget, I’ll find what they are good at and I can find a way to make them do that. There was always “something there” when we hired them, and it was my fault if I didn’t match them to the right work, style of working, or environment for working. The managers of widgets are sad widgets. To be a person as a manager, you have to manage people.

kashif 4y ago
> I’ve rarely found an engineer I’ve hired that is worth letting go. Unfortunately, all of us cannot claim this. There certainly are engineers who need to be let go.

Lapsa 4y ago

just buy that boon of plenty already

bayesian_horse 4y ago

Are there Bronze League Heros among the developers?

flohofwoe 4y ago

> ...to give a low evaluation to an employee that he felt didn’t deserve it in order to fill a quota... So essentially the same method used as in Stalin's Great Purge, rat out your colleagues even though they did nothing wrong just to fulfill a made up quota. That will be really great for morale and the public image of the company /s

tempwhatever212 4y ago

This kind of stack ranking was used at large investment bank (starts with M) about 10 years ago while I was working there as a C++ developer. It resulted in a strategy where some teams have hired puffer people with the only purpose to have poor performance ratings assigned to them and let them go when the demand for such inevitably rose for such from HR. This shielded the core team allowing them to focus solely on actual business requirements. There were people in the office taking decent salary, doing barely anything with kind of no expectations of their performance whatsoever. Some were doing their masters, some hit the gym very hard, some were just chilling out. This was my first lesson on how focus on tactical goals and metrics can fundamentally screw up the long term vision.

Foomf 4y ago
Goodhart's law is very similar in concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- cainxinth 4y ago
  Also brings this article to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
int0x2e 4y ago
Extremely well put. Any time a business decides on a metric / decision criteria, they introduce a strong incentive for their employees and managers to act accordingly. For some reason, leaders rarely seem to think hard enough about the possible outcomes. My anecdote - at a former big tech company, we had a long hiring freeze, and they even decided that when someone leaves or gets fired, their headcount goes back up to senior leadership who decide where that headcount should be (so as a manager, if you fire someone - you might lose the position entirely). So, naturally, even since then there have been zero people fired, even if they are low performers, since managers want to keep their headcount. But talented people obviously still get offers and leave, and when they leave, their headcount disappears. So after a year or so of this great policy, the average level of talent across the company is steadily dropping, which also means it'll be much harder to recruit top talent even after this policy is over - because most talented people want to join a team where they can still learn and evolve, collaborate with other smart folks, etc.

iamyemeth 4y ago

Summary could have been: "Man makes a stand against more Blizzard bullshit, mistakenly assuming that someone in management has a soul, gets fired"

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

Google does this same shit. They even have a graphical tool for it; not kidding. Google, widely mocked for the douchiness of its hiring process (which it admitted to years ago and claimed that it was trying to reduce), forces employees to rank their fellows using a graphical tool that presents their pictures on screen and demands that you move them up or down to rank them in reference to each other. The application makes it impossible to align colleagues on the same horizontal line. I mean... who the fuck expends the engineering time to create such an offensive tool? Google; that's who.

sakex 4y ago
I work there, it's definitely not true
- oblio 4y ago
  Are you a manager?
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  Really? You know company-wide practices at all offices, for the last decade or so? I have this first-hand from a colleague who worked there, and he is definitely not one to make things up. Plus... this would be an oddly specific lie, don't you think? To be fair, I should have used past tense in my comment, since this was a few years ago. But, given interview experiences at Google reported by other immediate colleagues, I would find the story believable even without knowing the credibility of the source. Here's another one: My friend (not the one who saw the "ranking" system) had an interview at Google, where he was given a programming exercise and told he could solve the problem in any language he wanted. The interviewer left the room, and my friend correctly solved the problem in Objective-C. The interviewer came back, looked at it, and said, "Oh, not THAT language." A few years later, Google publicly admitted that its interview process sucked and said it was making it better. I have declined to interview with them, however, not only because of friends' experiences but also the company's behavior on the whole.
deelly 4y ago
First time hearing about it. Some src to claims maybe?

freilanzer 4y ago

> In recent years, Blizzard’s corporate overseers at Activision have taken a larger role in operations, pushing the company to cut costs and produce games more quickly. And that's exactly the reason for the downfall of the company. No vision, no passion, no leadership, no quality - just quantity and money.

Herbstluft 4y ago

I experienced firsthand how this system breeds a new kind of system gamers that would not come to fruition otherwise. Honestly stack ranking can only be described as a fetish, it offers no gain and really only exists because certain people really love it in a very creepy way.

afrcnc 4y ago

Back in the early 2010s, EA and Ubisoft were considered the worst gaming studios because they pushed "loot crate" mechanics. Now, Activision-Blizzard has not only developed some of the most expensive stores in any game, but they almost always deliver half-finished games and abuse their employees in the process, while EA and Ubisoft are considered some of the best places to work in the gaming industry. I think this company needs a boycott really bad to put it back on the good path.

oblio 4y ago
> EA and Ubisoft are considered some of the best places to work in the gaming industry Oh, really? I haven't followed this kind of stuff in a while. So they're good now? How would they rank for software development, in general? Game studios are notoriously subpar when you start comparing them to FAANG, big enterprise sotware development shops, etc.
- bartread 4y ago
  > Game studios are notoriously subpar when you start comparing them to FAANG, big enterprise sotware development shops, etc. I don't think this has changed substantially. It's supply and demand: lots of people want to build games for the sake of building games. At least in theory it sounds more exciting than maintaining whatever microservice for a FAANG. So, because there's a lot more supply than demand, they get paid less.
- wetpaws 4y ago
  Unisoft is an absolute shitfest internally. EA on other hand was always a good place to work, despite being an plague of the gaming industry on itself. Doing good things and being a good place to work are not necessary the same thing.
bsenftner 4y ago
No, they just started paying PR firms when their deserved reputation started causing brand new graduates (their core hire) to pass on their job offers. The entire game industry is a massive shit show of employee abuse.

andremedeiros 4y ago

Funny. This is exactly why I left a certain e-commerce company. Good on them.

Exendroinient00 4y ago

It's hard to evaluate performance in the industries adjacent to arts/entertainment which the gaming industry definitely is.Typical software practices won't work in the every industry.

Hakeemmidan 4y ago

This was implemented in a company that I worked for, and it made people flat out lie to keep up with the system

musicale 4y ago

> "This sort of policy encourages competition between employees, sabotage of one another’s work, [and] a desire for people to find low-performing teams that they can be the best-performing worker on, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity." Accurate summary.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 4y ago

I remember stack ranking back in the '70s where managers had to fill the low performer quota.

el_don_almighty 4y ago

You smart people sure are dumb. HR is the real enemy here and their fear-based power derives from risk management action against Federal/State mandates and potential employee legal action, i.e. "Make sure we don't get sued and that we have a strong defense if we do." Without a documented methodology for weeding out 'poor performers' and a history of doing so, the company's risk from an individual dismissal increases. Hence the HR team locked in the basement where nobody accounts for the differential cost from all these schemes and programs. Like vaccinations, thousands of lives are vaccinated in the hopes of preventing one, high-cost event with a damaging outcome. Managers feel safer, executives don't care, and you play the game

hansvm 4y ago

Somebody recently bought my apartment complex and thought it would be fun to add a surcharge even for payment methods like echecks. After a couple months of dealing with a thousand paper checks they're trying to no avail to fix the problem by begging everyone to pay online. Incentives matter.