6 ms·

Have you ever worked at or with MS? If so, you'd know that stack ranking is the reason MS has flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade

by cgh 14y ago

Have you ever worked at or with MS? If so, you'd know that stack ranking is the reason MS has flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade.

gradys 14y ago
Would you mind expanding on this a bit? How exactly does it contribute to Microsoft's performance in new fields? This is a completely genuine question. I'm not an apologist just trying to defend MS in a roundabout way.
- asveikau 14y ago
  People become obsessed with their scores and their peers' scores. They're wrapped up in internal competition and compete poorly with external players or when assessed honestly with most reality-based metrics.
- cgh 14y ago
  I worked with MS (for a consulting company, first few years of my career) back in "the day", and I got to witness first-hand the craziness of this system. But rather than blab about my own experiences, here's a recent article that sums things up pretty well: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-dow...
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  There are 4 types of workplace cultures. (See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/gervais-rehash-part-iii-markov-and-management-plus-a-4th-culture/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/gervais-rehas... .) Functioning planned culture: guild culture. Master crafts(wo)men and apprentices are clearly defined, but the managerial relationship is advisory and focused on mentorship. The major downside of guild culture (the rarest of the 4) is that it relies on employee loyalty to capture the value it generates. Pathological planned culture: rank culture. (This is the most common corporate culture.) People rise or fall based on subordinacy, rather than the quality of their ideas or their level of effort. You end up with a lot of people who don't work hard because they realize that effort doesn't matter, and a lot of bad ideas getting into implementation. Rank cultures often can't compete on an open market or address new challenges. Functioning market culture: self-executive culture. Here you have a flat hierarchy and employees have a lot of autonomy. However, they're usually expected to take responsibility for their own advancement. This is the Valve-style open allocation culture. Pathological market culture: tough culture. High-stakes performance reviews, low trust of employees but similarly low guidance. This is the sink-or-swim culture. Rank culture tends to turn into tough culture as it generates underperformers, and eventually the higher-ups get upset about the whole thing and have a crackdown. However, tough culture turns back into rank culture as the people who control the performance assessment become the new rank-holders and, in exchange for loyalty, offer safety and advantage in the evaluation process. So tough and rank cultures tend to fall into a degenerate, enervating pattern of oscillation from one extreme to the other. This back-and-forth eventually exhausts the company, leading to constant reorganization and turmoil. When a company institutes permanent tough culture (stack ranking as an inflexible pillar, rather than a temporary measure) the political corrosion associated with rank culture still occurs, but there's a selection dynamic (similar to antibiotic resistance) where the forms of rank culture that survive are the least detectable. So you end up with a culture that's politicized and gamey like a tough culture, but inefficient and extortive like a rank culture, and ultimately you have a workplace where people put in lots of hours and apparent sacrifice, but there's little getting done and there's no vision.
carlisle_ 14y ago
Except the Xbox which has been wildly popular and successful right?
- kevingadd 14y ago
  The team(s)/business unit responsible for XBox had a ton of independence and freedom early on and it contributed to their success. That freedom has slowly been taken away and you can see the effect in the product(s) coming out of that part of the business now.
  - kvb 14y ago
    That's odd; I thought Kinect was widely hailed as a success.
    - kevingadd 14y ago
      Kinect is successful and an interesting product, but they've had a hard time producing genuinely interesting or high quality Kinect games, either first or third party. The ones that are successful tend to actually make rather minimal use of the technology, or use it in odd ways. For a couple examples, IIRC Dance Central isn't able to use the actual skeletal tracking technology, and Double Fine's Kinect games likewise take a different approach that doesn't use the skeletal tracking. Most of the games shipping labelled as 'Better with Kinect' use it as a glorified microphone, which is kind of depressing. At this point there is also a general consensus that the Kinect camera's accuracy is too low for many serious game uses and that the field of view hampers its use in many homes. In their defense, it's rumored that they have addressed this with the next revision of the hardware. My point is more regarding things like the dashboard updates - the XBox 360 dashboard slowly turned into a glorified billboard covered in ads that has incidental features tacked onto it. They've had consistent performance problems with their system software that have never really been addressed (though thankfully they've made slight improvements here and there) - at this point people who have to interact with it on a regular basis, like journalists, are barely able to contain their hatred for the user interface.
    - PeterisP 14y ago
ryanmolden 14y ago
As someone that works at Microsoft I know I can't really respond to this without being accused of being a shill/apoligist (even at a place that prides itself in logical thinking, like HN), but this is such a massive oversimplification, and likely so far off the mark as to possibly be on the wrong planet. Microsoft has a well-known review system that engenders various feelings in various people, not all of them postive. I have posted here before how the stack ranking part is actually low on my list of objectionable things about the whole process, but it is what people know so it is what people cite. I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it, about how people are constantly obsessed with reviews and stabbing their teammates in the back left and right to get a leg up. I have never once witnessed that behavior or even heard of a remotely plausible instance of that happening. That said Microsoft is a big company, so I am sure it has/does happen somewhere. I dispute it is rampant or common. I have heard stories of people that are terrible at working in groups and don't do well. I have heard stories of people that have an opinion of their own skills that seems objectively divorced from reality. I have heard stories of management hubris that ultimately doesn’t pan out. Some of the people that play a starring role in these dramas then invent conspiracies about plotting colleagues causing them to rank poorly, incompetent managers that didn’t recognize their delicate snow-flakism or any other number of explanations that conveniently don’t attribute any share of the blame to themselves. I suspect those tend to be fantasies made to soothe one’s ego. I think anyone with knowledge of internal state at Microsoft could posit a much better explanation of why they have 'flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade' that doesn't involve Machiavellian competition between employees. Hell, reversion to the mean pretty much would cover most bases without any kind of comical soap opera drama needed.
- asveikau 14y ago
  > I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it, You said that the last time I replied to you. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5100751 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5100751
  - kelnos 14y ago
    Doesn't affect the truth/falsehood of what he's saying.

by cgh 14y ago

Have you ever worked at or with MS? If so, you'd know that stack ranking is the reason MS has flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade.

gradys 14y ago

Would you mind expanding on this a bit? How exactly does it contribute to Microsoft's performance in new fields? This is a completely genuine question. I'm not an apologist just trying to defend MS in a roundabout way.

asveikau 14y ago
People become obsessed with their scores and their peers' scores. They're wrapped up in internal competition and compete poorly with external players or when assessed honestly with most reality-based metrics.
cgh 14y ago
I worked with MS (for a consulting company, first few years of my career) back in "the day", and I got to witness first-hand the craziness of this system. But rather than blab about my own experiences, here's a recent article that sums things up pretty well: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-dow...
michaelochurch 14y ago
There are 4 types of workplace cultures. (See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/gervais-rehash-part-iii-markov-and-management-plus-a-4th-culture/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/gervais-rehas... .) Functioning planned culture: guild culture. Master crafts(wo)men and apprentices are clearly defined, but the managerial relationship is advisory and focused on mentorship. The major downside of guild culture (the rarest of the 4) is that it relies on employee loyalty to capture the value it generates. Pathological planned culture: rank culture. (This is the most common corporate culture.) People rise or fall based on subordinacy, rather than the quality of their ideas or their level of effort. You end up with a lot of people who don't work hard because they realize that effort doesn't matter, and a lot of bad ideas getting into implementation. Rank cultures often can't compete on an open market or address new challenges. Functioning market culture: self-executive culture. Here you have a flat hierarchy and employees have a lot of autonomy. However, they're usually expected to take responsibility for their own advancement. This is the Valve-style open allocation culture. Pathological market culture: tough culture. High-stakes performance reviews, low trust of employees but similarly low guidance. This is the sink-or-swim culture. Rank culture tends to turn into tough culture as it generates underperformers, and eventually the higher-ups get upset about the whole thing and have a crackdown. However, tough culture turns back into rank culture as the people who control the performance assessment become the new rank-holders and, in exchange for loyalty, offer safety and advantage in the evaluation process. So tough and rank cultures tend to fall into a degenerate, enervating pattern of oscillation from one extreme to the other. This back-and-forth eventually exhausts the company, leading to constant reorganization and turmoil. When a company institutes permanent tough culture (stack ranking as an inflexible pillar, rather than a temporary measure) the political corrosion associated with rank culture still occurs, but there's a selection dynamic (similar to antibiotic resistance) where the forms of rank culture that survive are the least detectable. So you end up with a culture that's politicized and gamey like a tough culture, but inefficient and extortive like a rank culture, and ultimately you have a workplace where people put in lots of hours and apparent sacrifice, but there's little getting done and there's no vision.

carlisle_ 14y ago

Except the Xbox which has been wildly popular and successful right?

kevingadd 14y ago
The team(s)/business unit responsible for XBox had a ton of independence and freedom early on and it contributed to their success. That freedom has slowly been taken away and you can see the effect in the product(s) coming out of that part of the business now.
- kvb 14y ago
  That's odd; I thought Kinect was widely hailed as a success.
  - kevingadd 14y ago
    Kinect is successful and an interesting product, but they've had a hard time producing genuinely interesting or high quality Kinect games, either first or third party. The ones that are successful tend to actually make rather minimal use of the technology, or use it in odd ways. For a couple examples, IIRC Dance Central isn't able to use the actual skeletal tracking technology, and Double Fine's Kinect games likewise take a different approach that doesn't use the skeletal tracking. Most of the games shipping labelled as 'Better with Kinect' use it as a glorified microphone, which is kind of depressing. At this point there is also a general consensus that the Kinect camera's accuracy is too low for many serious game uses and that the field of view hampers its use in many homes. In their defense, it's rumored that they have addressed this with the next revision of the hardware. My point is more regarding things like the dashboard updates - the XBox 360 dashboard slowly turned into a glorified billboard covered in ads that has incidental features tacked onto it. They've had consistent performance problems with their system software that have never really been addressed (though thankfully they've made slight improvements here and there) - at this point people who have to interact with it on a regular basis, like journalists, are barely able to contain their hatred for the user interface.
  - PeterisP 14y ago

ryanmolden 14y ago

As someone that works at Microsoft I know I can't really respond to this without being accused of being a shill/apoligist (even at a place that prides itself in logical thinking, like HN), but this is such a massive oversimplification, and likely so far off the mark as to possibly be on the wrong planet. Microsoft has a well-known review system that engenders various feelings in various people, not all of them postive. I have posted here before how the stack ranking part is actually low on my list of objectionable things about the whole process, but it is what people know so it is what people cite. I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it, about how people are constantly obsessed with reviews and stabbing their teammates in the back left and right to get a leg up. I have never once witnessed that behavior or even heard of a remotely plausible instance of that happening. That said Microsoft is a big company, so I am sure it has/does happen somewhere. I dispute it is rampant or common. I have heard stories of people that are terrible at working in groups and don't do well. I have heard stories of people that have an opinion of their own skills that seems objectively divorced from reality. I have heard stories of management hubris that ultimately doesn’t pan out. Some of the people that play a starring role in these dramas then invent conspiracies about plotting colleagues causing them to rank poorly, incompetent managers that didn’t recognize their delicate snow-flakism or any other number of explanations that conveniently don’t attribute any share of the blame to themselves. I suspect those tend to be fantasies made to soothe one’s ego. I think anyone with knowledge of internal state at Microsoft could posit a much better explanation of why they have 'flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade' that doesn't involve Machiavellian competition between employees. Hell, reversion to the mean pretty much would cover most bases without any kind of comical soap opera drama needed.

asveikau 14y ago
> I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it, You said that the last time I replied to you. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5100751 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5100751
- kelnos 14y ago
  Doesn't affect the truth/falsehood of what he's saying.