8 ms·

Tales of an Ex–Microsoft Manager

64 points by sprague 13y ago

Pretty accurate summary, from a manager's point of view, of how performance ranking happens at Microsoft.

hga 13y ago
Here's a commentator at Mini-Microsoft explaining why it probably became more toxic over time, and it looks like these changes happened before the author arrived: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-to-frickin.html?showComment=1377372530878#c2642513338204621608 http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-... Anonymous said... My memory is really good - [ current head of HR ] is the one who did away with the "life-time performance average" which let people take huge risks and made Microsoft great. THAT, was huge BillG wisdom. You could look at your score over time and do some really simple math to see what kinds of risks you could take. And then suddenly, a 15-year running average of 4.0 turned into "your current manager doesn't like you, and he's required to fire one of his 10 no matter what, so you're fired". She also did away with the standing rule that you could take any written standing offer - NO MATTER WHAT (unless you were actually fired for cause) - which was Bill's way of ensuring that great engineers couldn't be tossed out by one horrible ass-kissing manager ... which is pretty much all of them today. The day that it became possible for a single crappy manager to fire someone for saying "I disagree", or "That's Wrong". Microsoft died. And when's the last time you saw that lovely deck of laminated cards that started with "a passion for technology" ... and a really logical employee development plan? yea, right, somewhere around 1995. [ People who need to leave. ]
- vonmoltke 13y ago
  I think the problems started when they hit their monopoly phase and Windows became a cash cow. It probably looked at that point like they had "won" and all they had to do was keep the upgrade chain going. Don't need to innovate; that would rock the boat and risk the cow.
  - Florin_Andrei 13y ago
    That's an awfully early point in time. Lady Diana was definitely alive back then.
    - hkmurakami 13y ago
      It's taken oldtime winners like Xerox and Kodak decades to wither away and die too.
  - Jare 13y ago
    Strictly speaking, a monopoly / cash cow phase creates a context in which bad practices will not kill your company and are not removed by natural selection. It allows these bad practices to survive and thrive, but it does not create the practices themselves. I think the distinction is important, because removing the cash cow will not fix the problems, but instead let these problems run the company into the ground. RIM is probably a perfect example of this process, and Microsoft is not, which gives credibility to the idea that, for all its failings, Microsoft has in fact been able to embrace a number of innovations and new markets (Xbox, Azure, enterprise...).
    - joe_the_user 13y ago
      Interestingly, some classic monopolies, like the old AT&T and Xerox, innovated tremendously but would fail to capitalize on those innovations (Bell Labs & Unix, Xerox and the Mouse/Menu/etc GUI).
      - nostrademons 13y ago
        I think this is the more common failure mode - a lot of innovative work happens at big companies, but those innovations never make it to market because commercializing a product requires a large investment in, well, finding customers, and the innovators at big companies are not empowered to do this. There is still a ton of innovative research work coming out of Microsoft, Intel, and even IBM, but typically instead of being commercialized and profited from, it languishes until the company shuts down the research lab and the scientists involved get jobs elsewhere.
- maw 13y ago
  She also did away with the standing rule that you could take any written standing offer - NO MATTER WHAT (unless you were actually fired for cause) - which was Bill's way of ensuring that great engineers couldn't be tossed out by one horrible ass-kissing manager ... which is pretty much all of them today. I've read this about ten times and still don't understand it. Do you know what it is supposed to mean?
  - hga 13y ago
    What that means is that if your manager is terminating you with extreme prejudice (but "without cause", e.g. not for stealing from the company), he's not allowed to be a gatekeeper and prevent you from joining another team. E.g. one that knows you are great and your manager is of the "horrible ass-kissing" variety. Let me supply another comment, which shows how terribly bad some very high levels of managers have become: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-to-frickin.html?showComment=1377380382013#c3322100820840904710 http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-... Anonymous said... O.k. here are my 3 favorite Microsoft "principle consultant" experiences: 1. I had this really brilliant L-62 dev who couldn't believe just how STUPID the "chief architects" (L-65 and up, really were). So, one day, one of them walked into our office and took great offense because we'd changed his slides ... Without even blinking, he said "you can change the text all you want, but you can't change my pictures, because that's all people look at." As he was trying to explain to the guy that the "pictures" came from the actual "data" ... I suddenly realized that this moron didn't actually know where charts came from, and I excused myself and waited in the hallway for the really great partner consultant who thought I had a really bad attitude problem, to come flying out, desperately in need of a drink. It took 10 minutes. I took him out for a cup of coffee so no one saw him shaking, throwing things, and revisiting his whole opinion of Microsoft. Seriously, that one wins - but not by much 2). And the same great dev marched off one day to to tell the lead architect that the product he was planning to use, just didn't work that way ... And that one's just plain funny. The "Architect" (who I wouldn't hire to build a computer for a 5-year-old, looked really annoyed, pulled out a glossy marketing folder, pointed and said 'of course it does - IT SAYS SO, RIGHT HERE." Right. Bill Gates would have just shot these people and put their heads on stakes around the castle. [ 3rd example is a bit more intricate but just as bad. ]
vonmoltke 13y ago
That sounds exactly like the hell I went through at Raytheon. In fact, I may have heard that visibility quote verbatim during one review. Raytheon didn't have the problems described by Microsofties, though. The long-term employees (who were a majority at all the facilities I worked in) developed a sort of mass psychosis that was part Stockholm syndrome, part misguided patriotism, and part Dunning-Kruger. If you didn't drink the Kool-Aid yourself the stack ranking system would be the least of your worries, though it was a useful tool for managers to deal with subordinates who wouldn't comply.
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  > The long-term employees (who were a majority at all the facilities I worked in) developed a sort of mass psychosis that was part Stockholm syndrome, part misguided patriotism, and part Dunning-Kruger. Whoa. "Interesting" combination. More details, please?
  - omegaham 13y ago
    I don't work for Raytheon, but I use a lot of their equipment and deal with their engineers fairly often when stuff doesn't work. The government is weird. Especially when it comes to contracts. There's a massive process that goes on come procurement time - years are spent deciding who is going to get the contract, who is going to develop the technology, who is going to do the manufacturing, etc. Thousands of questions get asked and trillions of dollars are on the line. Contractors spend lots of money bribing, er, "promoting" their companies and explaining why they should be the ones to get the contract. Then the contract gets awarded. And, well, the oversight pretty much stops there. Once you have the contract, you've won. You're in the money. And there's very few checks and balances going on to make sure that your product actually works. They're going through this problem right now with Lockheed Martin and the F-35. They've gone through three failed deadlines and massive cost overruns... and nothing has happened. Nothing adverse. Just, "Here's more money, please fix it. Oh, and you're very bad people." Don't worry, though - when the next plane needs to be built, you'll still be on the short-list for who gets the contract. The culture in an organization that exists off of this system is also really, really weird. It's not "Make a good product." It's "Make something that, at a cursory glance, looks like a good product." The two are treated the same, but the latter is rewarded much more because it's easier to put sham features onto something and takes much less effort. An engineer who works his ass off and perfectly fulfills three features in a system gets overshadowed by the engineer who makes a garbage implementation of ten features. Then comes testing time, and the thing is obviously borked to shit. Well, here comes redesign time! There's no punitive measures on it - after all, design is completely different from the field, right? This stuff happens. So here's another 120 billion dollars, let's fix this thing. Wash, rinse, repeat. If you do it right, you can make a product that requires incremental improvement over its entire lifespan instead of making it correctly the first time. The result - everyone makes more money. And the government doesn't really care because it's playing with Monopoly money anyway. It's the end of August in my shop - my captain and master sergeant are sitting there saying, "We need to spend the remaining 20% of our budget on something. No, I don't care what it is. Justify it and figure it out, otherwise our budget will be reduced and we'll be fucked when something big comes up next year." Now - inside this company, no one is actually saying to bork the project and show the 5th consecutive overfulfillment of the Five-Year-Plan. But you'll find that the engineers are not as good as they pretend to be, (their massive achievements are either flawed or completely made up) the managers are competing with each other for these massive made-up achievements, and the people in charge of the company are doublethinking making a good product and borking the shit out of it so that they can say, "We built this thing, so we're obviously the best choice to keep improving it." It's completely batshit insane, and if you value any sense of reality, stay the hell away from any company that deals with the government. The benefits are really, really nice though.
bcbrown 13y ago
I remember one comment at a perf review from my boss when I worked at MS. There were two of us on the team of 35, who were working on a certain tenet. My boss said "next review season, I'm going to go around and ask people who's the [tenet] expert. It should be you, not him." So although we were working together, we were also competing. And yeah, when he asked, I was the expert. I think a large part of that was because whenever the two of us got together to ping people about our tenet, it was in my office, so the emails came from me, and the bug updates were under my name. I did that half-intentionally, and feel a little bad about it.
- asveikau 13y ago
  Thank you for reminding me that "tenet" is one of those words that has a weird MSFT-cult meaning, and an entirely separate meaning to those who are more sane of mind. :-)
  - RyJones 13y ago
    "ask" is my least favorite. "performant" is my most favorite.
throwaway234yu 13y ago
An interesting variant of this system is one where executives give or take points away from organizations based upon team performance. Assume that individual rankings go from -2 to +2. The CEO gives each VP points according to his whim and/or how well their organization did in the quarterly objectives. A favored VP may get +20 points. An underperforming one may get -3. Now he has to assign points to his directors, who get to give points to their managers, who give points to contributors. Now the sum performance review score at each subtree has to match the allocated points. So you have fixed stacks, but they're at least relative to team performance and/or political favor. This system tends to depend on the initial allocations, so you should really get in the favored part of the organization. Throwaway so you don't know which company I'm talking about.
- bitwize 13y ago
  Fifty points for Gryffindor!
bjourne 13y ago
All stories about how bad stack ranking goes like this: "I was a manager at X and all my subordinates were above average/great and the system forced me to give them lower grades." But it stands to reason that since the system measures performance relative to the average exactly half of the managers should have had the opposite problem: "all my subordinates were worse than average but I had to give them higher grades than they deserved." I think the former problem is much more common because people tend to overvalue the people they are directly in contact with. I suspect that if the managers could set the grade freely from 1-5, the an unreasonable amount of 4's and 5's would be given. In a large organisation like Microsoft's the skill of the engineers and the ratings should follow a normal distribution.
- vwinsyee 13y ago
  > In a large organisation like Microsoft's the skill of the engineers and the ratings should follow a normal distribution. My understanding is that stack ranking is effective when first implemented. Subsequent implementations are progressively less effective and eventually become toxic if done too frequently. This is because at the beginning, the distribution of skill in the company's population of engineers does mirror the distribution in the overall, global population of engineers. So the initial stack rank eliminates the bottom, say 10%, performing engineers. The problem is when this happens again the following year, which seems to be what Microsoft has been doing. Barring a horrible incoming recruiting class, the company's distribution has already been shifting to the right. So each yearly cut is cutting out increasingly better engineers.
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    Well, by that rationale, the worst your hiring process, the more you gain by stack ranking once. But, even if you hiring people by tossing coins, if you don't have huge teams the results won't be fair. Yet, just defining a minimum performance and firing the people that don't reach it outperforms that first application of stack ranking. And you can apply that filter as many times you want, with no loss of quality.
  - craigyk 13y ago
jmcphers 13y ago
Just to be fair here, the practice of applying stack ranking to very small populations was not standard across the company. I worked in Office for about 8 years. During those years I found that: - Stack ranking is communicated up front and the process is very transparent. Managers let you know how the process works, what they're doing, how you get bucketed, what they talk about behind the door, and will discuss your "calibration card" with you (the 3-5 high and low points they'll bring into stack ranking meetings). - The curve is not enforced on the level of a development team. It's not enforced in a product group. You don't see the hammer starting to come down until you get to populations of at least hundreds of employees. I disliked the system (despite generally getting strong reviews) but it was not everywhere as demonic as it is depicted here.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Stack rank has not always been acknowledged publicly. Anyways, its fairly well known that the process is necessarily political, at each level.
0jangojones 13y ago
Lived through this as an ex MSFT manager myself. The reality was having to throw direct reports under the bus and explaining to them the outcome was "relative to their peers". Then they'd look at a smaller team and see people with much less impact getting good or great reviews (less competition in those teams). Its an aweful system and firmly believe it factors into MSFTs stagnant innovation. Lifetime average, peer reviewing and open transfers are what's needed.

64 points by sprague 13y ago

Pretty accurate summary, from a manager's point of view, of how performance ranking happens at Microsoft.

hga 13y ago

Here's a commentator at Mini-Microsoft explaining why it probably became more toxic over time, and it looks like these changes happened before the author arrived: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-to-frickin.html?showComment=1377372530878#c2642513338204621608 http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-... Anonymous said... My memory is really good - [ current head of HR ] is the one who did away with the "life-time performance average" which let people take huge risks and made Microsoft great. THAT, was huge BillG wisdom. You could look at your score over time and do some really simple math to see what kinds of risks you could take. And then suddenly, a 15-year running average of 4.0 turned into "your current manager doesn't like you, and he's required to fire one of his 10 no matter what, so you're fired". She also did away with the standing rule that you could take any written standing offer - NO MATTER WHAT (unless you were actually fired for cause) - which was Bill's way of ensuring that great engineers couldn't be tossed out by one horrible ass-kissing manager ... which is pretty much all of them today. The day that it became possible for a single crappy manager to fire someone for saying "I disagree", or "That's Wrong". Microsoft died. And when's the last time you saw that lovely deck of laminated cards that started with "a passion for technology" ... and a really logical employee development plan? yea, right, somewhere around 1995. [ People who need to leave. ]

vonmoltke 13y ago
I think the problems started when they hit their monopoly phase and Windows became a cash cow. It probably looked at that point like they had "won" and all they had to do was keep the upgrade chain going. Don't need to innovate; that would rock the boat and risk the cow.
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  That's an awfully early point in time. Lady Diana was definitely alive back then.
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    It's taken oldtime winners like Xerox and Kodak decades to wither away and die too.
- Jare 13y ago
  Strictly speaking, a monopoly / cash cow phase creates a context in which bad practices will not kill your company and are not removed by natural selection. It allows these bad practices to survive and thrive, but it does not create the practices themselves. I think the distinction is important, because removing the cash cow will not fix the problems, but instead let these problems run the company into the ground. RIM is probably a perfect example of this process, and Microsoft is not, which gives credibility to the idea that, for all its failings, Microsoft has in fact been able to embrace a number of innovations and new markets (Xbox, Azure, enterprise...).
  - joe_the_user 13y ago
    Interestingly, some classic monopolies, like the old AT&T and Xerox, innovated tremendously but would fail to capitalize on those innovations (Bell Labs & Unix, Xerox and the Mouse/Menu/etc GUI).
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      I think this is the more common failure mode - a lot of innovative work happens at big companies, but those innovations never make it to market because commercializing a product requires a large investment in, well, finding customers, and the innovators at big companies are not empowered to do this. There is still a ton of innovative research work coming out of Microsoft, Intel, and even IBM, but typically instead of being commercialized and profited from, it languishes until the company shuts down the research lab and the scientists involved get jobs elsewhere.
maw 13y ago
She also did away with the standing rule that you could take any written standing offer - NO MATTER WHAT (unless you were actually fired for cause) - which was Bill's way of ensuring that great engineers couldn't be tossed out by one horrible ass-kissing manager ... which is pretty much all of them today. I've read this about ten times and still don't understand it. Do you know what it is supposed to mean?
- hga 13y ago
  What that means is that if your manager is terminating you with extreme prejudice (but "without cause", e.g. not for stealing from the company), he's not allowed to be a gatekeeper and prevent you from joining another team. E.g. one that knows you are great and your manager is of the "horrible ass-kissing" variety. Let me supply another comment, which shows how terribly bad some very high levels of managers have become: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-to-frickin.html?showComment=1377380382013#c3322100820840904710 http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-... Anonymous said... O.k. here are my 3 favorite Microsoft "principle consultant" experiences: 1. I had this really brilliant L-62 dev who couldn't believe just how STUPID the "chief architects" (L-65 and up, really were). So, one day, one of them walked into our office and took great offense because we'd changed his slides ... Without even blinking, he said "you can change the text all you want, but you can't change my pictures, because that's all people look at." As he was trying to explain to the guy that the "pictures" came from the actual "data" ... I suddenly realized that this moron didn't actually know where charts came from, and I excused myself and waited in the hallway for the really great partner consultant who thought I had a really bad attitude problem, to come flying out, desperately in need of a drink. It took 10 minutes. I took him out for a cup of coffee so no one saw him shaking, throwing things, and revisiting his whole opinion of Microsoft. Seriously, that one wins - but not by much 2). And the same great dev marched off one day to to tell the lead architect that the product he was planning to use, just didn't work that way ... And that one's just plain funny. The "Architect" (who I wouldn't hire to build a computer for a 5-year-old, looked really annoyed, pulled out a glossy marketing folder, pointed and said 'of course it does - IT SAYS SO, RIGHT HERE." Right. Bill Gates would have just shot these people and put their heads on stakes around the castle. [ 3rd example is a bit more intricate but just as bad. ]

vonmoltke 13y ago

That sounds exactly like the hell I went through at Raytheon. In fact, I may have heard that visibility quote verbatim during one review. Raytheon didn't have the problems described by Microsofties, though. The long-term employees (who were a majority at all the facilities I worked in) developed a sort of mass psychosis that was part Stockholm syndrome, part misguided patriotism, and part Dunning-Kruger. If you didn't drink the Kool-Aid yourself the stack ranking system would be the least of your worries, though it was a useful tool for managers to deal with subordinates who wouldn't comply.

Florin_Andrei 13y ago
> The long-term employees (who were a majority at all the facilities I worked in) developed a sort of mass psychosis that was part Stockholm syndrome, part misguided patriotism, and part Dunning-Kruger. Whoa. "Interesting" combination. More details, please?
- omegaham 13y ago
  I don't work for Raytheon, but I use a lot of their equipment and deal with their engineers fairly often when stuff doesn't work. The government is weird. Especially when it comes to contracts. There's a massive process that goes on come procurement time - years are spent deciding who is going to get the contract, who is going to develop the technology, who is going to do the manufacturing, etc. Thousands of questions get asked and trillions of dollars are on the line. Contractors spend lots of money bribing, er, "promoting" their companies and explaining why they should be the ones to get the contract. Then the contract gets awarded. And, well, the oversight pretty much stops there. Once you have the contract, you've won. You're in the money. And there's very few checks and balances going on to make sure that your product actually works. They're going through this problem right now with Lockheed Martin and the F-35. They've gone through three failed deadlines and massive cost overruns... and nothing has happened. Nothing adverse. Just, "Here's more money, please fix it. Oh, and you're very bad people." Don't worry, though - when the next plane needs to be built, you'll still be on the short-list for who gets the contract. The culture in an organization that exists off of this system is also really, really weird. It's not "Make a good product." It's "Make something that, at a cursory glance, looks like a good product." The two are treated the same, but the latter is rewarded much more because it's easier to put sham features onto something and takes much less effort. An engineer who works his ass off and perfectly fulfills three features in a system gets overshadowed by the engineer who makes a garbage implementation of ten features. Then comes testing time, and the thing is obviously borked to shit. Well, here comes redesign time! There's no punitive measures on it - after all, design is completely different from the field, right? This stuff happens. So here's another 120 billion dollars, let's fix this thing. Wash, rinse, repeat. If you do it right, you can make a product that requires incremental improvement over its entire lifespan instead of making it correctly the first time. The result - everyone makes more money. And the government doesn't really care because it's playing with Monopoly money anyway. It's the end of August in my shop - my captain and master sergeant are sitting there saying, "We need to spend the remaining 20% of our budget on something. No, I don't care what it is. Justify it and figure it out, otherwise our budget will be reduced and we'll be fucked when something big comes up next year." Now - inside this company, no one is actually saying to bork the project and show the 5th consecutive overfulfillment of the Five-Year-Plan. But you'll find that the engineers are not as good as they pretend to be, (their massive achievements are either flawed or completely made up) the managers are competing with each other for these massive made-up achievements, and the people in charge of the company are doublethinking making a good product and borking the shit out of it so that they can say, "We built this thing, so we're obviously the best choice to keep improving it." It's completely batshit insane, and if you value any sense of reality, stay the hell away from any company that deals with the government. The benefits are really, really nice though.

bcbrown 13y ago

I remember one comment at a perf review from my boss when I worked at MS. There were two of us on the team of 35, who were working on a certain tenet. My boss said "next review season, I'm going to go around and ask people who's the [tenet] expert. It should be you, not him." So although we were working together, we were also competing. And yeah, when he asked, I was the expert. I think a large part of that was because whenever the two of us got together to ping people about our tenet, it was in my office, so the emails came from me, and the bug updates were under my name. I did that half-intentionally, and feel a little bad about it.

asveikau 13y ago
Thank you for reminding me that "tenet" is one of those words that has a weird MSFT-cult meaning, and an entirely separate meaning to those who are more sane of mind. :-)
- RyJones 13y ago
  "ask" is my least favorite. "performant" is my most favorite.

throwaway234yu 13y ago

An interesting variant of this system is one where executives give or take points away from organizations based upon team performance. Assume that individual rankings go from -2 to +2. The CEO gives each VP points according to his whim and/or how well their organization did in the quarterly objectives. A favored VP may get +20 points. An underperforming one may get -3. Now he has to assign points to his directors, who get to give points to their managers, who give points to contributors. Now the sum performance review score at each subtree has to match the allocated points. So you have fixed stacks, but they're at least relative to team performance and/or political favor. This system tends to depend on the initial allocations, so you should really get in the favored part of the organization. Throwaway so you don't know which company I'm talking about.

bitwize 13y ago
Fifty points for Gryffindor!

bjourne 13y ago

All stories about how bad stack ranking goes like this: "I was a manager at X and all my subordinates were above average/great and the system forced me to give them lower grades." But it stands to reason that since the system measures performance relative to the average exactly half of the managers should have had the opposite problem: "all my subordinates were worse than average but I had to give them higher grades than they deserved." I think the former problem is much more common because people tend to overvalue the people they are directly in contact with. I suspect that if the managers could set the grade freely from 1-5, the an unreasonable amount of 4's and 5's would be given. In a large organisation like Microsoft's the skill of the engineers and the ratings should follow a normal distribution.

vwinsyee 13y ago
> In a large organisation like Microsoft's the skill of the engineers and the ratings should follow a normal distribution. My understanding is that stack ranking is effective when first implemented. Subsequent implementations are progressively less effective and eventually become toxic if done too frequently. This is because at the beginning, the distribution of skill in the company's population of engineers does mirror the distribution in the overall, global population of engineers. So the initial stack rank eliminates the bottom, say 10%, performing engineers. The problem is when this happens again the following year, which seems to be what Microsoft has been doing. Barring a horrible incoming recruiting class, the company's distribution has already been shifting to the right. So each yearly cut is cutting out increasingly better engineers.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Well, by that rationale, the worst your hiring process, the more you gain by stack ranking once. But, even if you hiring people by tossing coins, if you don't have huge teams the results won't be fair. Yet, just defining a minimum performance and firing the people that don't reach it outperforms that first application of stack ranking. And you can apply that filter as many times you want, with no loss of quality.
- craigyk 13y ago

jmcphers 13y ago

Just to be fair here, the practice of applying stack ranking to very small populations was not standard across the company. I worked in Office for about 8 years. During those years I found that: - Stack ranking is communicated up front and the process is very transparent. Managers let you know how the process works, what they're doing, how you get bucketed, what they talk about behind the door, and will discuss your "calibration card" with you (the 3-5 high and low points they'll bring into stack ranking meetings). - The curve is not enforced on the level of a development team. It's not enforced in a product group. You don't see the hammer starting to come down until you get to populations of at least hundreds of employees. I disliked the system (despite generally getting strong reviews) but it was not everywhere as demonic as it is depicted here.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Stack rank has not always been acknowledged publicly. Anyways, its fairly well known that the process is necessarily political, at each level.

0jangojones 13y ago

Lived through this as an ex MSFT manager myself. The reality was having to throw direct reports under the bus and explaining to them the outcome was "relative to their peers". Then they'd look at a smaller team and see people with much less impact getting good or great reviews (less competition in those teams). Its an aweful system and firmly believe it factors into MSFTs stagnant innovation. Lifetime average, peer reviewing and open transfers are what's needed.