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The way it was done at amzn was to get all managers for the department together in a room and provide information about each of their team members and why they
by mjr00 4y ago
The way it was done at amzn was to get all managers for the department together in a room and provide information about each of their team members and why they were ranked the way they were. If an employee was doing a small number of hard tasks and providing a lot of mentorship it was quite the opposite, they were much more likely to get a "highly valued" ranking than be marked as a low performer. Obviously if you use stupid metrics like lines of code or story points closed you will get stupid results.
- acdha 4y agoHow did they reconcile that with a hard quota? I can see that working with a degree of trust but not a fixed percentage.
- mjr00 4y agoLargely you're still ranking your performers from top to bottom, so it's a matter of placing the line at the bottom in the right place to get the desired percentage. Even then there was still a lot of debate among department managers around people on the borderline least effective category. There were usually very clear outliers who were definitely LE (people clearly coasting, people who didn't show up to work regularly), and sometimes that was enough. Other times managers did have to push each other to be brutally honest about those who were borderline, essentially asking, "If you fired this person and got a replacement, would the replacement be more effective than the current person within 6 months?" Keep in mind it was never a hard quota, though in my case at amzn I did have a few times where the GM (so manager of ~1500 org) pushed back and said not enough people were in LE for our department, in which case a few borderline people did unfortunately have to get put into LE.
- the_af 4y agoSounds hellish. Also seems to ignore these aren't replacement parts, these are your team mates or reports, actual humans with names and families attached. If they weren't coasting or not showing up for work, what you describe sounds like yet another alienating, dehumanizing process at work.
- oblio 4y agoYour company probably does it, too, they just don't tell you and they're small enough nobody cares. Unless it's a super small company or you're the owner of your company.
- the_af 4y agoMy company probably does something like it, true. What's hellish is that the ranking is forced, you must put people on a PIP or rank them "low", which is absurd. Being told to meet a quota for low performers is bizarre.
- wpietri 4y agoI just want to be clear here that what you describe is not anything approaching measurement, let alone measurement of performance.
- mjr00 4y agoI mean I've never seen any performance "measurement" system that isn't just subjective review with another name. Objective metrics can be useful, and certainly could be a part of a manager's evaluation of an employment, but they never tell the whole story. Someone who closes out tons of tickets but is a complete asshole and hated by their teammates should get a worse performance review than someone who codes less but provides mentorship and guidance and is generally pleasant to work with.
- wpietri 4y agoSure. But stack ranking is built on the fantasy of measurable individual performance.
- ilyt 4y agoThat's the problem. The system wants to assign one number to performance and fire based on that yet even getting an approximation of that is hard > Someone who closes out tons of tickets but is a complete asshole and hated by their teammates should get a worse performance review than someone who codes less but provides mentorship and guidance and is generally pleasant to work with. They should get a talk with their manager about the attitude and if they don't fix it they should be fired; not wait for any ranking to cull them.
- NhanH 4y agoHow big is a department at amazon? In other words, how many managers are in that conversation and how big are their team size?
- oblio 4y agoHe said that before already: > But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.