6 ms·

Ex Microsoftie here. There are a few things I'd fix with MS, but I would definitely start with the forced curve system. It's basically evil. Sort of balled-up

by kabdib 13y ago

Ex Microsoftie here. There are a few things I'd fix with MS, but I would definitely start with the forced curve system. It's basically evil. Sort of balled-up in this is the sense of fear that forces people to make bad decisions just to get promoted (my favorite example of this: The "Metroization" of the Visual Studio 2012 interface, with nearly unusable color schemes and all-caps menus. I have to assume that somebody got promoted because making VS 2012 look like the flavor of the day looked good on a review). I was in Xbox, which had a /lot/ of very, very good people in the same review band that I was in. It's hard to shine when you're sitting next to those folks; it's also hard to imagine not working with them, because one of the reasons I go to work is to study at the feet of masters. So I was looking at an "okay" review, maybe even "sub-okay", while doing work that would probably have brought the company a few hundred million dollars over the next ten years. And I couldn't stand it. And that's one of the reasons I left. Seriously, fuck the Microsoft review system. It's broken. Most everyone with a brain /knows/ that it costs MS really good people. But Ballmer and Brummel (the head of HR) seem to love it; maybe it makes it easy for them to remove threats? I honestly don't know why they think it's good.

jblow 13y ago
I think it just plugs into the Ayn Randian / objectivist mindset. "Some people are hard workers, and others are parasites, let's identify the parasites and axe them and we will have a utopia." Yes, nobody thinks of it in such an outright simplistic way, but I do think this is the basic appeal.
- kabdib 13y ago
  It's a nice theory. But it doesn't work.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    Looks like the objectivists downvoted you. Such is the nature of Hacker News!
  - narrator 13y ago
    I think the stack ranking thing comes from quotas for sales people. The thing about salesman is that you can more or less rate their performance objectively by how much they sell. Trying to bring this over to knowledge workers is a recipe for disaster though.
- javert 13y ago
  Ayn Rand considered collectivist intellectuals and politicians to be the parasites. She particularly lamented big businesses that harness government to gain advantages over the "regular guy," who she actually stood up for. Regarding people who work productively, all she did was heap praise on them---whether they were at the top of the company, or the bottom. For Rand, being moral was never about how much you actually accomplish compared to other people. So, the parent comment is an uninformed and (possibly unintentional) smear. There was a very strong backlash against Rand from the intellectual left the second she was published (in the 40s), and the reverberations from that are still very prevalent in the culture, but they are secondhanded and mistaken.
  - mtdewcmu 13y ago
    I read the Fountainhead, and it was hard to square the views expressed in that book with her extreme enthusiasm for capitalism and business that she expressed in other writings (I didn't read the other books). In the Fountainhead, capitalism comes off as looking rather corrupt and dishonest, a system that was exploited by Peter Keatings at the expense of Howard Roarks. I couldn't really discern a clear and consistent philosophy from that book, so I interpret it as basically a romance, set in an ideal fantasy world, between a heroic uber-mensch, Howard Roark, and a beautiful woman whose high standards admit only uber-mensches, Dominique Francon. The Dominique character I interpret as an idealized Ayn Rand.
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      Romance? Doesn't Roark rape Francon at one point?
      - mtdewcmu 13y ago
        Yes. And she still likes him. It's not an unknown fantasy.
        javert 13y ago
        If I remember correctly, Dominique intentionally hit Roark in the face with a huge stick while she was riding a horse through the woods. That was before the rape scene. I think she had to "bring him down" because she loved him, and she always destroyed that which she loved (e.g. a statue), because she didn't believe that such things belong in a corrupt world. The point of all this was not to condone such a sequence of actions, but to tell a psychological story about two people.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  There is nothing inherently poisonous about doing company-wide ranking (though it is infeasible to do precisely since objective measures of "goodness" are non-existent and you can't do subjective ranking of everyone in all but the smallest environments; whether or not good-enough approximations exist is debatable). However, doing it on a per-team basis is stupid. It guarantees that some teams will have bottom-performers, since a team without bottom-performers will fire or scare away the lowest in the team. Furthermore you incentivize sabotaging your teammates and--even if nobody does it--that makes everyone suspicious of their teammates. If there were a magical wand I could wave to nearly perfectly rank all the employees at a company I were running, I would do it and base compensation off of it. Doing so on a per-team basis is stupid.
  - keithnoizu 13y ago
    You still run into problems if you do an org wise stack rank and manager popularity and pull is going to impact which groups are magically determined to have only top performers. A better approach really I think is to just do 360s and if there are clear problems with key employees that are holding back other employees let them go. If you have everyone working on complex code and are pushing for excellence over time it will become clear who is making the grade and who isn't. Even if some of the employees that work well on the team could be replaced by other slightly more efficient or intelligent employees the benefit of doing so is greatly offset by ramp up and recruiting time that takes away from team productivity.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      But to do that you need to be able to trust managers to make competent hiring and firing decisions. I have watched firing decisions happen at Microsoft, as well as been hired. I can tell you that managers are definitely not trusted to make these decisions or at least weren't when I was there. So once you establish that you don't trust managers, you pick managers who excel at politics rather than anything else and the problem continues.
      - keithnoizu 13y ago
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  People at the tip top of success like Ballmer tend to be ardent defenders of competition and pure meritocracy, because viewing the world this way frames their own success as heroic. Perhaps a zero-sum mentality also helps to provide the motivation to claw your way relentlessly to the top of the pile in the first place.
  - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
    It's especially amusing considering that actual "merit" is usually the last thing I think of when I see people at the "tip top of success" like Ballmer. Very few of these people did much more to merit their success than anybody else in the industry they're in, in terms of actually doing quality work. Most of the "above and beyond" effort they put in is related either to simply being part of the relevant 'old boys club'/coming from wealth already or else engaging in the kind of backstabbing and negative competition that MSFT's stack ranking encourages.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    [Citation needed.]
- einhverfr 13y ago
  Well, formerly from the ground level of Product Support Services, I will point out one key thing. The review system is one of the surest ways to ensure that the hard workers stay on the work floor and are never promoted. The people who find the problems, and fight to get them fixed, are the people who make their bosses eventually look bad just a little, and they get barely ok reviews. Those who work to rule get good reviews and advance. What this effectively means is that middle management ends up killing the organization.
keithnoizu 13y ago
The review system is really insane. I remember working in the SBT division on the AAPT group as an SDET and constantly being taken back by how archaic most of the practices were there. Which I can only imagine were in place because everyone was afraid to rock the boat too much or take a chance on something and come up short for their annual performance review. On a similar vein there is just a mountain of half ass'd internal tools that only exist because someone had to mark off a checklist item on their review commitments but never bothered to maintain. Which would be fine except whenever you have to tackle a project if there's an internal solution it will always be favored over the open source or license-able alternatives. I'd constantly get flak for asking questions of senior management like why don't we have unit test coverage, why doesn't our system allow for any sort of dependency injection, why don't we have continuous integration, why are we using this shitty internal browser test bed instead of selenium and selenium grid, etc. I spent a lot of time working on pushing modern standards around testing test code, designing reusable testing frameworks, leveraging continuous delivery etc. and to be honest it hurt my career trajectory quite a bit over what just following marching orders and writing crap code and commitment items would have done. You should consider yourself lucky for being in the entertainment division however. That group seems a lot more progressive than most of the other divisions. The developer quality seems to be better as well. I was really horrified at the low level of competency of about 60% of my coworkers.
grumps 13y ago
I also worked with a Big 4 accounting firm and they used this method exclusively. It was nothing but politics...I managed for a year but left when I felt mentally unchallenged...so I left.

by kabdib 13y ago

jblow 13y ago

I think it just plugs into the Ayn Randian / objectivist mindset. "Some people are hard workers, and others are parasites, let's identify the parasites and axe them and we will have a utopia." Yes, nobody thinks of it in such an outright simplistic way, but I do think this is the basic appeal.

kabdib 13y ago
It's a nice theory. But it doesn't work.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  Looks like the objectivists downvoted you. Such is the nature of Hacker News!
- narrator 13y ago
  I think the stack ranking thing comes from quotas for sales people. The thing about salesman is that you can more or less rate their performance objectively by how much they sell. Trying to bring this over to knowledge workers is a recipe for disaster though.
javert 13y ago
Ayn Rand considered collectivist intellectuals and politicians to be the parasites. She particularly lamented big businesses that harness government to gain advantages over the "regular guy," who she actually stood up for. Regarding people who work productively, all she did was heap praise on them---whether they were at the top of the company, or the bottom. For Rand, being moral was never about how much you actually accomplish compared to other people. So, the parent comment is an uninformed and (possibly unintentional) smear. There was a very strong backlash against Rand from the intellectual left the second she was published (in the 40s), and the reverberations from that are still very prevalent in the culture, but they are secondhanded and mistaken.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  I read the Fountainhead, and it was hard to square the views expressed in that book with her extreme enthusiasm for capitalism and business that she expressed in other writings (I didn't read the other books). In the Fountainhead, capitalism comes off as looking rather corrupt and dishonest, a system that was exploited by Peter Keatings at the expense of Howard Roarks. I couldn't really discern a clear and consistent philosophy from that book, so I interpret it as basically a romance, set in an ideal fantasy world, between a heroic uber-mensch, Howard Roark, and a beautiful woman whose high standards admit only uber-mensches, Dominique Francon. The Dominique character I interpret as an idealized Ayn Rand.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    Romance? Doesn't Roark rape Francon at one point?
    - mtdewcmu 13y ago
      Yes. And she still likes him. It's not an unknown fantasy.
      - javert 13y ago
        If I remember correctly, Dominique intentionally hit Roark in the face with a huge stick while she was riding a horse through the woods. That was before the rape scene. I think she had to "bring him down" because she loved him, and she always destroyed that which she loved (e.g. a statue), because she didn't believe that such things belong in a corrupt world. The point of all this was not to condone such a sequence of actions, but to tell a psychological story about two people.
aidenn0 13y ago
There is nothing inherently poisonous about doing company-wide ranking (though it is infeasible to do precisely since objective measures of "goodness" are non-existent and you can't do subjective ranking of everyone in all but the smallest environments; whether or not good-enough approximations exist is debatable). However, doing it on a per-team basis is stupid. It guarantees that some teams will have bottom-performers, since a team without bottom-performers will fire or scare away the lowest in the team. Furthermore you incentivize sabotaging your teammates and--even if nobody does it--that makes everyone suspicious of their teammates. If there were a magical wand I could wave to nearly perfectly rank all the employees at a company I were running, I would do it and base compensation off of it. Doing so on a per-team basis is stupid.
- keithnoizu 13y ago
  You still run into problems if you do an org wise stack rank and manager popularity and pull is going to impact which groups are magically determined to have only top performers. A better approach really I think is to just do 360s and if there are clear problems with key employees that are holding back other employees let them go. If you have everyone working on complex code and are pushing for excellence over time it will become clear who is making the grade and who isn't. Even if some of the employees that work well on the team could be replaced by other slightly more efficient or intelligent employees the benefit of doing so is greatly offset by ramp up and recruiting time that takes away from team productivity.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    But to do that you need to be able to trust managers to make competent hiring and firing decisions. I have watched firing decisions happen at Microsoft, as well as been hired. I can tell you that managers are definitely not trusted to make these decisions or at least weren't when I was there. So once you establish that you don't trust managers, you pick managers who excel at politics rather than anything else and the problem continues.
    - keithnoizu 13y ago
mtdewcmu 13y ago
People at the tip top of success like Ballmer tend to be ardent defenders of competition and pure meritocracy, because viewing the world this way frames their own success as heroic. Perhaps a zero-sum mentality also helps to provide the motivation to claw your way relentlessly to the top of the pile in the first place.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  It's especially amusing considering that actual "merit" is usually the last thing I think of when I see people at the "tip top of success" like Ballmer. Very few of these people did much more to merit their success than anybody else in the industry they're in, in terms of actually doing quality work. Most of the "above and beyond" effort they put in is related either to simply being part of the relevant 'old boys club'/coming from wealth already or else engaging in the kind of backstabbing and negative competition that MSFT's stack ranking encourages.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  [Citation needed.]
einhverfr 13y ago
Well, formerly from the ground level of Product Support Services, I will point out one key thing. The review system is one of the surest ways to ensure that the hard workers stay on the work floor and are never promoted. The people who find the problems, and fight to get them fixed, are the people who make their bosses eventually look bad just a little, and they get barely ok reviews. Those who work to rule get good reviews and advance. What this effectively means is that middle management ends up killing the organization.

keithnoizu 13y ago

The review system is really insane. I remember working in the SBT division on the AAPT group as an SDET and constantly being taken back by how archaic most of the practices were there. Which I can only imagine were in place because everyone was afraid to rock the boat too much or take a chance on something and come up short for their annual performance review. On a similar vein there is just a mountain of half ass'd internal tools that only exist because someone had to mark off a checklist item on their review commitments but never bothered to maintain. Which would be fine except whenever you have to tackle a project if there's an internal solution it will always be favored over the open source or license-able alternatives. I'd constantly get flak for asking questions of senior management like why don't we have unit test coverage, why doesn't our system allow for any sort of dependency injection, why don't we have continuous integration, why are we using this shitty internal browser test bed instead of selenium and selenium grid, etc. I spent a lot of time working on pushing modern standards around testing test code, designing reusable testing frameworks, leveraging continuous delivery etc. and to be honest it hurt my career trajectory quite a bit over what just following marching orders and writing crap code and commitment items would have done. You should consider yourself lucky for being in the entertainment division however. That group seems a lot more progressive than most of the other divisions. The developer quality seems to be better as well. I was really horrified at the low level of competency of about 60% of my coworkers.

grumps 13y ago

I also worked with a Big 4 accounting firm and they used this method exclusively. It was nothing but politics...I managed for a year but left when I felt mentally unchallenged...so I left.