4 ms·
The crucial difference is that teachers don't work in groups i.e. you would rank them against all other teachers in a given school. People say stack ranking i
by kkowalczyk 13y ago
The crucial difference is that teachers don't work in groups i.e. you would rank them against all other teachers in a given school.
People say stack ranking is bad within Microsoft because you're not ranked against all 50k+ employees but against 10+ people that report to the same manager.
If 2 out of 10 people are guaranteed low ranking, then it's better to be a mediocre programmer in a team of poor programmers than to be a very good programmer in a team of even better programmers.
It also means that it makes sense to sabotage the performance of your 9 colleagues because you only care about looking better than them, not about doing best possible job for the company or your team.
A global stack ranking, if it was actually possible, would be great. You do want to get rid of low performers (and hire better replacements) and in a large enough pool the bottom 20% will really be worth replacing with better people.
- devcpp 13y agoI agree, I guess that I would do my best to get the easiest tasks so my performance would be up, and the hardest tasks would either never get done or in a really dirty way. But how do you implement a global stack ranking in such a diverse company like Microsoft? There is no good criteria for comparing the kernel developers to the frontend programmers, for example. I doubt you could even find 100 employees working on the same kind of task.
- yuhong 13y agoI think michaelochurch has talked about "concave" vs "convex" work a lot.
- dusklight 13y agoCan you explain in greater detail please? Are you using the terms "concave" and "convex" in the same way that NNT does in his recent book Antifragile?
- yuhong 13y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177851 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177851 http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macleod-9-convexity/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle...
- RougeFemme 13y agoAn earlier poster, who works at Microsoft, said that the ranking is done in large groups. So I imagine it would be grouped something like developers reporting to a particular PC. . .so it wouldn't be as granular as you describe. . .and the criteria wouldn't be granular either. . .Or I guess the criteria/objectives could be fairly high-level, but any benchmarks used could be more granular and specific.
- kvb 13y agoPeople may say that, but as I understand it that's a misrepresentation of the situation at Microsoft: the curve is only enforced in much larger units. Disclosure: I recently started in a full time position at Microsoft.
- bnegreve 13y ago> A global stack ranking, if it was actually possible, would be great. You do want to get rid of low performers (and hire better replacements) This is really wrong, to get rid of the 20% low performers, you install a system that destroy everyone's confidence and promote short term decision making. In the end, you get rid of 20% of people that just don't play the game AND you decrease the overall performance the group of people. I remember reading a good article showing how rewards affect people performance by changing their goal, but I can't find it. Anyone?