12 ms·

This blurs the real issue. You can still have different compensation and PIPs and everything else without stack rankings. The real issue is that stack ranking

This blurs the real issue. You can still have different compensation and PIPs and everything else without stack rankings. The real issue is that stack rankings compel managers to meet a quota for low performers. Even if the team is full of top tier engineers, one or more get dealt the short straw every review period.

at-fates-hands 4y ago
I work at a company that has stack ranking. While I'm just a developer, my wife is a director at the same company. I multiple years, she's turned in her evaluations and had the director and VP above her tell her to lower several employees ranking. One example was an engineer who didn't get along with the people on his team for a pretty high profile project. They know the guy's brilliant and don't want to fire him, so they move him to a lower profile project to decommission several server farms they had been struggling to get done. Dude goes in and absolutely kills it. They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars by the tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned and renegotiated several large contracts the company was on the hook for. My wife ranked him in the upper tier. He wrinkled a few feathers, but once they reallocated him, he absolutely thrived and saved the company literally a ton of money. Nope. He pissed too many people off, her boss and bosses boss mandated she give him a low ranking with a miniscule pay increase and minimum bonus in order to punish him for his behavior early in the year. Nothing he did after that mattered to them. Nothing. When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.
- ngc248 4y ago
  At the beginning of my career, I had faced the same issue. This was at a casino gaming company. During the first year I was the top performer, but due to the GFC (2008) i got peanuts. The next year, the director got his old report as a manager for us. This manager created interference between me and the director, i got multiple people coming and telling me to listen to the manager and submit to him. I was entirely sidelined, given miniscule raises and bonuses. other people who deferred to the manager and followed his words were promoted. Fortunately for me a director from another group who knew my work, took me under his wing and I was finally able to thrive. Does not matter the exceptional work you do, its always about listening to your "superiors". Ofc this depends on the organization. Not every place will be like this
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  Doesn’t sound good. There has to be balance. Focusing on individual performance, culture be dammed is toxic as well.
- balls187 4y ago
  What did he do to piss people off? It seems as though you are burying the lede here.
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  > When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix. Your ability to get on well with others, and work effectively as a part of a team is a component of your _actual performance_. It’s probably the most important component. The only real mistake here seems like this guy should have been fired instead.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    I think that’s a massive assumption on your part. How do you feel that you have enough information to conclude that he ought to have been fired?
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      The person described in the parent post was so difficult to get on with that they had to be moved to another project, and they are described has having pissed off a large number of people, including more than one level of management. The two possible explanations are, the majority of the company is highly toxic, this particular IC is highly toxic. So unless the posters wife is a remarkably toxic manager, the most likely explanation is that the IC is. Definitely sounds like the company would benefit from sacking them.
  - sshine 4y ago
    > Your ability to get on well with others [... is] probably the most important Not all work is being performed by cooperating teams. A lot of high-value work is carried out by individuals. Some of those are not cooperative. You don't need to be cooperative to be of high value. It just helps in a lot of cases, and it's nice for others either way.
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      This isn’t true at all. Unless you are the only person who consumes the work you produce, and you produce it without the input of anybody else, then you work on a team, and how you get along with the other people in that team is the most important factor in your success.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  >> They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars... tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned Sounds a little far-fetched. Slack, Airbnb and Netflix spend about 6M, 17M and 28M on AWS monthly; to SAVE "hundreds of millions" the company would need to be ridiculously large and inefficient.
  - Foobar8568 4y ago
    Or used a mix of oracle/sun/IBM hardwares and the like. I can imagine easily 9 digits yearly budget including licenses.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    GP didn't provide a denominator. Assuming a year, which is typical for such calculations, your example figures become: Slack: 72M, 204M, 336M. Two out of the three are already in "hundreds of millions of dollars", per year. GP could also be talking about savings over expected life time of the servers if they were not decommissioned, which could easily be 5+ years.
- RobRivera 4y ago
  this paints me an accurate picture of things
- gamblor956 4y ago
  This story is nonsensical. Engineers don't negotiate contracts at large companies. The legal department does. Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate. I can see this guy exaggerating the work he actually did, and taking credit for the work of others, which would explain the low rating and why everyone else dislikes him.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    The legal department doesn't do discovery and evaluation. Its job is to ensure the contract is good for all relevant parties and stakeholders - not to pick the brand of the turbo encabulator you need for your IoT Web3 crane welder controller dashboard project. I imagine you need to cross a certain combination of company size and project profile/visibility before legal & procurement aren't just sanity-checking and rubber-stamping whatever purchase orders the engineering teams send their way. It's entirely normal to see engineers negotiating contracts at large companies. Large companies are, after all, mostly a collection of smaller teams that self-manage to a large degree. > Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate. That's what the sales people want you to believe - to ensure they don't have to deal with anyone who understands the problem space of the product/service they're selling.
    - gamblor956 4y ago
      Engineers will participate in selecting contract features; it's the equivalent of telling a car dealer you want a car with Android Auto and a sunroof. Engineers absolutely do not negotiate contracts. It's pretty clear from the replies to my comment that you guys don't actually know what is involved in negotiating a B2B contract. The stuff the engineers are allowed to participate in is the layer of snow covering the tip of the iceberg.
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        I suppose we have a different perspective (and experience) about what is the snow, and what is the iceberg. Last time I dealt with this as an engineer, I picked a vendor, procured a quote, discussed how license applies to our usage (which was somewhat of a corner case for the license), and forwarded it to procurement - few days later, we got the exact thing I asked for, on the conditions and for the price I agreed to with the vendor. Were there extra negotiations I'm not aware of done to close that deal? I don't know. If they were, they didn't have any impact I could observe from where I was sitting.
wilg 4y ago
I wonder if it could work if you (somehow) ranked the company as a whole, not by team?
- riffraff 4y ago
  It would be less obviously bad, but the same issue applies: say the company has three teams of ten people and they are all good: one gets fired/lower salary anyway each round. And now you have the additional issue that evaluations need to be objective, which is hard, while a manager never wants to lose member of their team, so they're naturally pushed to overrate their people to protect them from ending up at the bottom.
  - wombatpm 4y ago
    I’m sure their are management consultants who watched the first season of Andor and thoughts “Now that’s what I’m talking about”
- doktorhladnjak 4y ago
  All companies with stack ranking do some sort of merge sort to achieve this, typically called “calibration”. You have to rate employees at the team level because as you go up the chain, managers stop knowing how individuals more than one level of management below them perform. The only viable exception to this I’ve seen is in organizations like sales where there’s some reasonable, objective criteria to evaluate an entire workforce on. Nothing good exists like this for software engineers though.
  - kqr 4y ago
    Common misunderstanding. Good sales is far more than closing big contracts. Good sales is about finding low cost customers, good fits, and prospects that challenge the expertise in the company in the right ways. If you measure just total contract size and think this is all there is to evaluate sales on, you incentivise bad sales.
    - 4y ago
TeMPOraL 4y ago
I wonder if people pushing for stack ranking are justifying this in terms of natural selection. That is, even if the company is all top performers, periodically cutting bottom 1% or 5% or whatever is going to improve average performance even further over time. This would make some sense if employees were like cells or fruit flies. But in most companies, employees are like organs. You can't improve a body by cutting out 5% of its organs and waiting for them to reappear. At best, you'll degrade the body's performance. At worst, the body will die.

at-fates-hands 4y ago

I work at a company that has stack ranking. While I'm just a developer, my wife is a director at the same company. I multiple years, she's turned in her evaluations and had the director and VP above her tell her to lower several employees ranking. One example was an engineer who didn't get along with the people on his team for a pretty high profile project. They know the guy's brilliant and don't want to fire him, so they move him to a lower profile project to decommission several server farms they had been struggling to get done. Dude goes in and absolutely kills it. They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars by the tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned and renegotiated several large contracts the company was on the hook for. My wife ranked him in the upper tier. He wrinkled a few feathers, but once they reallocated him, he absolutely thrived and saved the company literally a ton of money. Nope. He pissed too many people off, her boss and bosses boss mandated she give him a low ranking with a miniscule pay increase and minimum bonus in order to punish him for his behavior early in the year. Nothing he did after that mattered to them. Nothing. When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.

ngc248 4y ago
At the beginning of my career, I had faced the same issue. This was at a casino gaming company. During the first year I was the top performer, but due to the GFC (2008) i got peanuts. The next year, the director got his old report as a manager for us. This manager created interference between me and the director, i got multiple people coming and telling me to listen to the manager and submit to him. I was entirely sidelined, given miniscule raises and bonuses. other people who deferred to the manager and followed his words were promoted. Fortunately for me a director from another group who knew my work, took me under his wing and I was finally able to thrive. Does not matter the exceptional work you do, its always about listening to your "superiors". Ofc this depends on the organization. Not every place will be like this
alphabettsy 4y ago
Doesn’t sound good. There has to be balance. Focusing on individual performance, culture be dammed is toxic as well.
balls187 4y ago
What did he do to piss people off? It seems as though you are burying the lede here.
AmericanChopper 4y ago
> When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix. Your ability to get on well with others, and work effectively as a part of a team is a component of your _actual performance_. It’s probably the most important component. The only real mistake here seems like this guy should have been fired instead.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  I think that’s a massive assumption on your part. How do you feel that you have enough information to conclude that he ought to have been fired?
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    The person described in the parent post was so difficult to get on with that they had to be moved to another project, and they are described has having pissed off a large number of people, including more than one level of management. The two possible explanations are, the majority of the company is highly toxic, this particular IC is highly toxic. So unless the posters wife is a remarkably toxic manager, the most likely explanation is that the IC is. Definitely sounds like the company would benefit from sacking them.
- sshine 4y ago
  > Your ability to get on well with others [... is] probably the most important Not all work is being performed by cooperating teams. A lot of high-value work is carried out by individuals. Some of those are not cooperative. You don't need to be cooperative to be of high value. It just helps in a lot of cases, and it's nice for others either way.
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    This isn’t true at all. Unless you are the only person who consumes the work you produce, and you produce it without the input of anybody else, then you work on a team, and how you get along with the other people in that team is the most important factor in your success.
skeeter2020 4y ago
>> They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars... tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned Sounds a little far-fetched. Slack, Airbnb and Netflix spend about 6M, 17M and 28M on AWS monthly; to SAVE "hundreds of millions" the company would need to be ridiculously large and inefficient.
- Foobar8568 4y ago
  Or used a mix of oracle/sun/IBM hardwares and the like. I can imagine easily 9 digits yearly budget including licenses.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  GP didn't provide a denominator. Assuming a year, which is typical for such calculations, your example figures become: Slack: 72M, 204M, 336M. Two out of the three are already in "hundreds of millions of dollars", per year. GP could also be talking about savings over expected life time of the servers if they were not decommissioned, which could easily be 5+ years.
RobRivera 4y ago
this paints me an accurate picture of things
gamblor956 4y ago
This story is nonsensical. Engineers don't negotiate contracts at large companies. The legal department does. Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate. I can see this guy exaggerating the work he actually did, and taking credit for the work of others, which would explain the low rating and why everyone else dislikes him.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  The legal department doesn't do discovery and evaluation. Its job is to ensure the contract is good for all relevant parties and stakeholders - not to pick the brand of the turbo encabulator you need for your IoT Web3 crane welder controller dashboard project. I imagine you need to cross a certain combination of company size and project profile/visibility before legal & procurement aren't just sanity-checking and rubber-stamping whatever purchase orders the engineering teams send their way. It's entirely normal to see engineers negotiating contracts at large companies. Large companies are, after all, mostly a collection of smaller teams that self-manage to a large degree. > Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate. That's what the sales people want you to believe - to ensure they don't have to deal with anyone who understands the problem space of the product/service they're selling.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    Engineers will participate in selecting contract features; it's the equivalent of telling a car dealer you want a car with Android Auto and a sunroof. Engineers absolutely do not negotiate contracts. It's pretty clear from the replies to my comment that you guys don't actually know what is involved in negotiating a B2B contract. The stuff the engineers are allowed to participate in is the layer of snow covering the tip of the iceberg.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      I suppose we have a different perspective (and experience) about what is the snow, and what is the iceberg. Last time I dealt with this as an engineer, I picked a vendor, procured a quote, discussed how license applies to our usage (which was somewhat of a corner case for the license), and forwarded it to procurement - few days later, we got the exact thing I asked for, on the conditions and for the price I agreed to with the vendor. Were there extra negotiations I'm not aware of done to close that deal? I don't know. If they were, they didn't have any impact I could observe from where I was sitting.

wilg 4y ago

I wonder if it could work if you (somehow) ranked the company as a whole, not by team?

riffraff 4y ago
It would be less obviously bad, but the same issue applies: say the company has three teams of ten people and they are all good: one gets fired/lower salary anyway each round. And now you have the additional issue that evaluations need to be objective, which is hard, while a manager never wants to lose member of their team, so they're naturally pushed to overrate their people to protect them from ending up at the bottom.
- wombatpm 4y ago
  I’m sure their are management consultants who watched the first season of Andor and thoughts “Now that’s what I’m talking about”
doktorhladnjak 4y ago
All companies with stack ranking do some sort of merge sort to achieve this, typically called “calibration”. You have to rate employees at the team level because as you go up the chain, managers stop knowing how individuals more than one level of management below them perform. The only viable exception to this I’ve seen is in organizations like sales where there’s some reasonable, objective criteria to evaluate an entire workforce on. Nothing good exists like this for software engineers though.
- kqr 4y ago
  Common misunderstanding. Good sales is far more than closing big contracts. Good sales is about finding low cost customers, good fits, and prospects that challenge the expertise in the company in the right ways. If you measure just total contract size and think this is all there is to evaluate sales on, you incentivise bad sales.
  - 4y ago

TeMPOraL 4y ago

I wonder if people pushing for stack ranking are justifying this in terms of natural selection. That is, even if the company is all top performers, periodically cutting bottom 1% or 5% or whatever is going to improve average performance even further over time. This would make some sense if employees were like cells or fruit flies. But in most companies, employees are like organs. You can't improve a body by cutting out 5% of its organs and waiting for them to reappear. At best, you'll degrade the body's performance. At worst, the body will die.