20 ms·

Yahoos Bristle at Mayer’s New QPR Ranking System and “Silent Layoffs”

139 points by johnjlocke 13y ago

absherwin 13y ago
This suggests there's a major problem in the mid-level management that's communicating the message. Telling a front-line manager to put someone in a bucket to meet the quota results in bad feelings, poor decisions that lead to loss of talent and bad publicity. The alternative doesn't have to be abolishing stack ranking. The manager's manager should instead ask for justification and help the manager raise standards if they are too low. If not, he should repeat the same process with his manager. The +-3% variance indicates that the executive team expected this to happen. Since the feedback indicates that it's not happening in some (many) cases, hopefully this has triggered top-down conversations on the right way to implement.
yapcguy 13y ago
Can't believe that employees would actually complain about their work by posting "on an internal message board for anonymous feedback". If it's anonymous, I have a bridge to sell you!
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  it is natural selection similar to Darwin prize - if you're stupid enough to seriously b!tch on internal _anonymous_ board ... Reminds me about anonymous surveys in some previous BigCo where emailed links to the surveys contained unique ID.
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    Both of those situations seem like they would set up massive lawsuits down the line.
    - hackula1 13y ago
      Only if you told them why, in a "right to work" state.
  - gesman 13y ago
    Yes :) You can post absolutely anonymous comment. But only after you log in :)
    - RyJones 13y ago
      this was exactly how the "anonymous" board at Microsoft worked.
- thrillgore 13y ago
  The last place i'd be bitching about my work, performance, or someone else's performance is somewhere that's persistent. It hits home when its face to face.
- grecy 13y ago
  We have an internal blog at my company, which is an admittedly small telco. People often post honest thoughts, which are often complaining about the company. You would think of all companies that could trace a DHCP IP to a logged in user it would be a telco. Not so. Things are so dysfunctional around here it would take a week to attempt to do such a thing, and it wouldn't be accurate. There are so many other things going on it would never be a priority anyway.
  - gesman 13y ago
    I used to work at ALU and they had this type of board (most active section was buy/sell though). Anonymous area felt like a road rage where employees were bitching at: - each other - government - taxes - lousy hockey team plays
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
tptacek 13y ago
If you're a manager in a stack-ranking organization like this, in this market, why not take a stand? Refuse to classify team members who are not actually "occasionally misses" as such. If it's straight-up stack ranking, give everyone a tie for 3rd place or something. What's the worst thing that happens? You get let go? What a great way to get let go from a dysfunctional company.
- Zimahl 13y ago
  I believe it's a 'miss' for the manager if they can't do the performance reviews the right way. I worked with two folks that had previously worked at Intel. The same procedure was implemented there. There was a top 10%, a middle 80%, and a bottom 10%. This isn't a problem when working on a team of 10 to 20, but you certainly don't want to be on a team of 3 to 4. In that case, someone has to be the top and someone has to be the bottom. Once you are on the bottom once it's pretty much a 'start looking' situation. These types of systems have their obvious drawbacks. You don't want to work with good people because the better they are the bigger chance that you'll end up on the lower end.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Yeah, it's clear to me what the disincentive is. On the other hand, maybe call their bluff. If you're the manager willing to go to bat for your team and take a stand against insane performance measurement systems, there's a decent chance they don't want to lose you anyways.
    - wooster 13y ago
      My read is that with the situation Yahoo is in now, that's exactly the type of manager they want to let go. From their perspective, those are the managers who don't listen to the directions they're getting from executive management. It's hard to turn around a company if you tell people to do something and nobody does it.
    - allochthon 13y ago
      You would be surprised. Some big companies are so broken that these processes are like a steamroller. If you're in management at one of these places, do not assume that because you are valuable and in a profit center you will be able to buck the trend. Better to just start looking for other opportunities now. Large companies that use forced ranking: you will reap the fruits of your broken process after a few years.
OWaz 13y ago
Whoa what? “Mayer, in fact, tried to address the issue yesterday morning in a Q&A, which she began by quoting her favorite children’s book about the value of experience.” How do you start addressing concerns of working professionals by quoting a children's book?
- agilebyte 13y ago
  I have had 2 adults, on separate occasions, quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry they read as children. If the shoe fits, I have no problem with it.
  - retr0rocket 13y ago
    2 adults, such valuable insight.
  - cpeterso 13y ago
    Did Mayer quote from the The Little Prince, too? That article didn't say.
- sp332 13y ago
  Children's books are often written to convey a general pattern of human behavior. Teamwork, sharing, empathy, etc. It's not a bad starting point for a conversation, because it helps everyone see the pattern you're talking about quickly. Just make sure to follow up with actual details to fill in the generic outline!
- Flimm 13y ago
  Often I find stories for children are the most insightful and concise.
mathattack 13y ago
These types of forced ranking systems are very tough. Microsoft has had a lot of complaints about there's. GE, on the other hand, has had success with theirs. I've seen them work successfully at large firms where they were ingrained, and the companies had other cultural norms to increase teamwork. I've seen it flop at a few software firms. What they're good for: - Forcing managers to make hard decisions and give real feedback. (You can't just tell everyone "You're doing fine.") - Highlighting who at the bottom should be let go, and who a level below should replace them. (In most firms, the top 10% at a given level outperforms the bottom 10% at the level above them) - Providing internal guidance for larger layoffs. - Encouraging constant trimming to avoid those larger layoffs. The problems of these systems are numerous though: - It can discourage teams of superstars from working together on large projects. "What if only 1 or 2 out of us can be ranked high?" - It can encourage selfish behavior and infighting if there aren't other counterbalancing forces. - There is frequently disagreement for anyone not in the chosen group. - Much of the differentiation is based on managers ability to fight for their employees, rather than employees actual ability. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In Marissa's defense, she wasn't hired to continue "Business as usual".
- pmarca 13y ago
  "In most firms, the top 10% at a given level outperforms the bottom 10% at the level above them." This is a really key point. This dovetails with another fact of corporate life: over time, the median performance of any level degrades to the worst performer at that level. "I deserve to be promoted to VP. Look at Joe the VP, I'm obviously better than he is." Any company that isn't regularly clearing out the bottom 10% is fooling itself about both its hiring competence and its management skills. Any employee who can't get judged to be in the upper 90% of any organization isn't nearly as good as he/she thinks.
- allochthon 13y ago
  Providing internal guidance for larger layoffs. Just a reminder that if corporations are people, they're sociopaths.
  - 13y ago
tonetheman 13y ago
Meh stack ranking sucks. Bad move. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/stack_ranking_steve_ballmer_s_employee_evaluation_system_and_microsoft_s.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/stack_ran...
hacker789 13y ago
> I feel so uncomfortable because in order to meet the bell curve, I have to tell the employee that they missed when I truly don’t believe it to be the case. [...] More often than I’d like I’m told we are executing a certain way ‘because Marissa said so.’ If you have an underproductive department with overprotective management, layoffs (and negative performance reviews) won't happen as frequently as they should. Maybe members of management just want to protect their respective fiefdoms. Maybe they have their empathy makes it difficult to lay people off. Maybe they genuinely believe their teams are doing well. Maybe their teams actually are doing well, and exceptionally few layoffs (if any) need to happen. Regardless, "because Marissa said so" is a perfectly valid answer. There will be collateral damage, but it's likely that she's dealing with some extremely protective, entrenched management who won't negatively review anyone on their teams unless they're forced to.
- bcoates 13y ago
  If you've got an underproductive department with overprotective management, I've got a suggestion for where you could trim some fat. I have difficulty comprehending the logic that trusts someone to monitor, assess, and organize a team's work, but doesn't trust them to take responsibility for the performance of the whole team and micromanages their staffing from above.
  - hacker789 13y ago
    > I have difficulty comprehending the logic that trusts someone to monitor, assess, and organize a team's work, but doesn't trust them to take responsibility for the performance of the whole team and micromanages their staffing from above. I hear you. I imagine Mayer would like to fire those overprotective members of management, but I can't imagine how she could know exactly who they are at this point. This review processes should hopefully help shine a light on some of them.
steven2012 13y ago
If you read "Straight From the Gut" by Jack Welch, you would know that this is standard practice that is supposed to weed out the bottom 10% every year. The "GE Way" was to keep pruning from the bottom, and yes, it would mean that sometimes decent performers would get cut. In the book, there's an anecdote about how at some point, groups would take on crappy workers, just so that they could fire them for the yearly purge.
- pcwalton 13y ago
  > The "GE Way" was to keep pruning from the bottom, and yes, it would mean that sometimes decent performers would get cut. In the book, there's an anecdote about how at some point, groups would take on crappy workers, just so that they could fire them for the yearly purge. How is that something that should be emulated? Seems like a tremendous waste of resources to me.
  - gesman 13y ago
    Stupidity of top management justifies the response
SurfScore 13y ago
If you want to make an omelette, you've gotta break some eggs.
001sky 13y ago
Kara Swisher: She's clearly in the monkey quadrant. On the topic of the chart: why would you ever work for a place why 85% are structually constrained to underperform or be average? If 100% of the empolyees start out the 15% "Target Hires", in a single generatino they have 6/7 failure rate of performing to their potential? Makes no sense if you're actually any good.
- 001sky 13y ago
  “Because Marissa Said So” Glad to see HN dropped the pejoritive title
danmaz74 13y ago
In theory, a system like this could work much better if those "bell" rankings were only forced on teams which aren't performing well (as a team). This would both encourage teamwork and lower the risk to let very good people go only because they're in an exceptional team.
hvass 13y ago
Can anyone explain how this differs from Microsoft's ranking system? I doubt Marissa is not aware of that practice.
jimbokun 13y ago
This is the "sequester" approach to layoffs. Instead of deciding which projects are not paying off and cutting them, cut employees across all projects, regardless of how well they perform. Similar to the budgetary sequester backed into by the US government.
- saalweachter 13y ago
  And the sequester by the US gov't was designed to be so disastrously bad that the different parties would be forced to come up with a better solution. Whoops.
- lclarkmichalek 13y ago
  Except apparently Yahoo has grown since she joined, so it would seem this has not been implemented in order to reduce staff size.
  - camus2 13y ago
    Dont worry, Yahoo will fire a lot of people soon. Yahoo "bought a lot of buzz" to drive its stock up so big investors can cash in, they will trim their workforce soon,
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      Yep. I know this sounds harsh, and this is pure conjecture on my part, but the way I see it is that Marissa Mayer is on a 5 year contract and after that she is out of there, regardless of what state Yahoo is in. If the company is a mess in 5 years time she can blame it on the culture which was resistant to change. She will simply jump onto the next gravy train via her big investor and board-room friends. The WSJ and NYT say her total compensation over this period will be at least $100m+. All she has to do is sit tight, look as though she's busy, and hopefully keep the share price up to maximize her share options.
      - tesseractive 13y ago
        Considering that the company has burned through multiple CEOs already anyway, I think the case that the company was doomed if she didn't try some major moves is both obvious and compelling. The thing I like is that she's trying both the carrot and the stick at the same time: trying to make Yahoo a better place to work with Google-style amenities, while also making staff more accountable and slashing poor performers. She's also focusing the company much more heavily on mobile which is both obvious and necessary, but which wasn't taken nearly as seriously by previous execs. I don't know whether it will work or not, but this doesn't seem like a "marking time" strategy at all.
steven2012 13y ago
I worked at Yahoo, and quite frankly, Yahoo needs to go through a few years of culling the bottom 10% like this. After several iterations of this, it could be a great company again. What Mayer is saying is that she is willing to sacrifice those employees that are at the lower boundaries of acceptable, in order to make more room for the top 85% And quite frankly, the managers that are complaining about having to put people at the lower boundaries are highly likely to be underperforming as well. When I was there, it was mostly filled with bloated and lazy employees.
- masklinn 13y ago
  There are two problems here: 1. if the company moves to stack ranking rather than just does a cull, it's a bad move 2. stack ranking works at the team level, not at the company level. If a team is full of morons and the next one is full of awesome developers, stack ranking will keep 90% of the morons and cull 10% of the good devs.
  - ianbicking 13y ago
    "stack ranking works at the team level, not at the company level. If a team is full of morons and the next one is full of awesome developers, stack ranking will keep 90% of the morons and cull 10% of the good devs." That may be a risk they are willing to take. They are probably firing some good people. If a team is doing great and they fire someone from that team because SOMEONE has to get fired, then that's poisonous. But if someone isn't right for the job, but because the job is badly defined, or poorly managed, or the goals are unreasonable, or whatever... it does definitely suck for the person being fired, but losing that employee is a reasonable cost for Yahoo.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      That may be a risk they are willing to take Yup. They are in kind of a "bet-the-company" stage right now. They've got a problem, they've got no perfect solutions, and if they sit about just twiddling their thumbs they will go under.
- 13y ago
brimanning 13y ago
Not that it's quite the same, but I can't help thinking of decimation in the Roman sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  the main difference :) " The leadership was usually executed independently of the one in ten deaths of the rank and file"
- 001sky 13y ago
  Now don't start giving them any more ideas !
727374 13y ago
For now, all the yahoo services I use stink as much as they always have. It will take years for these sweeping cultural changes to pay off, if the do. Definitely a heroic effort on Mayer's part, considering the shelf life of Yahoo CEOs is so low.
smegel 13y ago
What difference does it make? If your committed to reducing an organisation by X%, then a certain number of people are going to be fired. And it makes sense they are the lowest performing percentile. So maybe some people were rated as "misses" when they weren't, but they were still the lowest ranked employee in their unit. Would this argument be mute if they were ranked "least effective" instead?
- ye 13y ago
  I also thing firing the bottom X% is absolutely normal for a business. It's a free market. If you're ranking in the bottom X%, then it's likely your own fault.
  - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
    Those are some...interesting...views. 1) There is no "absolutely normal" anything about firing or laying off employees. Some of layoffs/firings will be to get rid of bottom X%-ers, but some will be good or even very well qualified and capable employees (e.g. for salary or budgetary reasons). 2) There is no such thing as a "free market." Or, put another way, "it's a free market" in the same way that China is a pure communist state. 3) You're assuming the person granting the grade--the manager--is being objective and assigning grades fairly. If you think managers do that, you're either a manager, inexperienced, or woefully oblivious (or possibly all three). There are many, many reasons a person could be placed in the bottom X% that have literally nothing to do with his performance or abilities.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    Except as others have pointed out, you're not ranked according to the company, but your group. And in companies that like to keep groups small, that means even in groups where everyone is performing well, someone has to be called the bottom. Your manager was forced to blame someone for something so you get fired for being part of a project that had better staffing so it would be less impacted by loss. This setup requires someone to be called deadweight whether that group actually has any or not. Firing a static percentage of the company every year is horrible for morale. Managers who are doing their jobs and managing their people should find out when they need to work with them or let them go. People who should be let go shouldn't be held on to until the next review cycle.
tieTYT 13y ago
> In 1981, Ford's sales were falling. Between 1979 and 1982, Ford had incurred $3 billion in losses. Ford's newly appointed Division Quality Manager, John A. Manoogian, was charged with recruiting Deming to help jump-start a quality movement at Ford.[19] Deming questioned the company's culture and the way its managers operated. To Ford's surprise, Deming talked not about quality but about management. He told Ford that management actions were responsible for 85% of all problems in developing better cars. In 1986, Ford came out with a profitable line of cars, the Taurus-Sable line. In a letter to Autoweek Magazine, Donald Petersen, then Ford chairman, said, "We are moving toward building a quality culture at Ford and the many changes that have been taking place here have their roots directly in Deming's teachings."[20] By 1986, Ford had become the most profitable American auto company. For the first time since the 1920s, its earnings had exceeded those of arch rival General Motors (GM). Ford had come to lead the American automobile industry in improvements. Ford's following years' earnings confirmed that its success was not a fluke, for its earnings continued to exceed GM and Chrysler's. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
- mathattack 13y ago
  I'm trying to tie this to the original article. Is the idea that performance reviews are inconsistent to systemic management improvements ala Deming? My understanding is he was against the annual review.
  - tieTYT 13y ago
    I think it's relevant for many reasons. But I was reminded of the information when I noticed that Yahoo seems to be blaming the 15%.
    - bmm6o 13y ago
      ... which is why you italicized the 85% bit? But one is a percentage of people, and the other a percentage of problems. If I'm misunderstanding, it would be helpful if you explained further.
pico303 13y ago
Isn't this the system Microsoft is using that has created such huge problems for the company? There was that Vanity Fair article recently that talked about what a mess the product teams are at Microsoft. It blamed the stack rankings in part for creating a hostile environment where nothing could get done. Nobody collaborates because they want to come out on top of those rankings, and some even go so far as to sabotage their co-workers to stay atop the rankings. I seem to recall the article suggesting that the only place stack ranking ever worked was GE. Sounds to me like a recipe for disaster.
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
I mean at this point Yahoo is an anachronism, they might as well go all the way with it. Perhaps this will accelerate the inevitable and we can all just be done with it.
r00fus 13y ago
So stacked ranking - why do companies not understand that the granularity level can't be too low (i.e., teams of 5 or so)? Or is it just the case that stacked ranking works in theory but doesn't scale to real organizations (kind of like communism)?
EGreg 13y ago
This is silly in my opinion. If she wanted to prune the comoany to make room for more (acqui-)hires do it in stages. First let the managers feel like they can more easily fire the most underperforming people. Donmt force them to do so.
qdog 13y ago
This is a pretty popular thing at many large companies. Everyone somehow wants to hire the cream of the crop, yet there are only so many cream of the crop candidates. My own experience is that after a couple of rounds of these layoffs, most of the fat is cut from a lot of teams. After that you start knocking off productive people. I'd be more impressed by someone who invigorated their workforce and then selectively cut people after they figured out who wasn't working out. Choosing a random manager assigned number that wasn't specifically requested to be a ritual offering of headcount isn't very smart. It'll bite you in the ass eventually when productive people actually end up leaving because of the work environment.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Give me any prp stack ranking system and I can twist your apr's to get you in the bottom slot if your really good it might take a year or 18 months.
- a3n 13y ago
  > This is a pretty popular thing at many large companies. Everyone somehow wants to hire the cream of the crop, yet there are only so many cream of the crop candidates. I think in some places it's not so much the desire to hire the cream of the crop, but a manager or managers wanting to believe that by hiring only the cream of the crop, they are then the cream of their crop. As a side effect, it helps them maintain an erection.
drgath 13y ago
I was one of those who was laid-off, or fired, or whatever you want to call it. I've been really confused over the last week because the reasons for my termination were pretty vague. But wow, after reading that, so many things make sense now. One of the areas this type of a bell-curve system falls apart is for highly specialized and well-qualified teams, such as the one I was working on. Who knows, maybe I was a poor employee, but after all the raises, accolades, and the promotion I received (by my firing manager), I'd like to think that wasn't the case and it was just a manager put in a tough spot. Regardless, it was a nice run and the job market is great. I'm taking a bit of time off, but if you are a company in SF and looking for someone with lots of JavaScript, Node.js, and frontend experience at startups and (of course) big companies, links are in my profile.
- eps 13y ago
  What did you do there if you don't mind me asking?
  - drgath 13y ago
    See the link in my profile. :)
    - bretd 13y ago
      I liked your spirit...management is one shit where the board's decision or the management's decision is responsible for a company's failure..what these guys were doing when they were hiring or buying companies...is employees responsible for the failures... In any company's failure, the first one to blame is the management because they failed and that's why a lay off has to be done..I had always felt that layoff is an easy way for a CEO or the management to wash off their hands rather than trying to solve the problem at hand.. A leader is someone who leads his team and makes other perform... In management, I have found most people just licking the bosses above them...and i hate these bunch...in such a management structure, one actually creates a bunch of followers who are unfortunately called managers.. There are exceptions...and they are very few...and these are actual leaders who have the power to turn things around..
at-fates-hands 13y ago
Here's the deal. As an employee with boots on the ground, you're usually the first to see this sort of stuff coming a hundred miles away. Why anybody would put up with this BS is completely beyond me. If you can get a job at Yahoo, I'm pretty sure you shouldn't have any problem getting another well paying job. I was in a pretty large corporation and they started doing this and a ton of their top developers started leaving in droves. I'm talking 10 a week, and not entry level guys. We're talking senior BA's, developers and engineers when it was at its worst. They had a turn over rate in the 90% range. After 6 months of not being able to do anything because they were in a constant training mode, a bunch of directors and middle managers got axed and they took a different approach. It takes a lot to move the needle, but when it does, it will make a difference.
davidrudder 13y ago
Wouldn't this encourage cross-department collaboration? My logic goes like this: Collaborating makes one succeed. But, you don't want your team to succeed, because then you might be laid off. But, people on other teams aren't in competition with you. So, if you collaborate with them, you can really kick the ass of that jerk next to you that you used to be friends with. I'm joking...mostly.
- qdog 13y ago
  The other team will take the accolades for your work, your team will be mad at you for mot pulling your weight.
notacoward 13y ago
When it comes to employee ratings, absolute vs. relative is a red herring. Both lead to adverse outcomes. With the more common absolute ratings, managers have an incentive to rate everyone highly, so people who work for honest managers get screwed. With relative ratings, the weakest members of the strongest teams get screwed. Rating employees just doesn't work unless the departments are also rated. If you know the relative strength of each department then you can adjust the ratings of its members accordingly. There's still a serious question of what you do with that information, but at least then it won't be totally distorted by the differences between teams and managers.
gesman 13y ago
Every "good" girl secretly fantasy to have a dominatrix whip in her hands. "Welcome to the real world!" --Morpheous
platform 13y ago
I work for a company with stack ranking. and was forced to stack-rank my team. The success of this system depends on 3 things a ) qualifications of the managers doing stack ranking b ) perception management of the employees being ranked. c ) quality (impact and sophistication) of the projects people are doing ( a ) is hard to come by in middle-management ranks (because very few talents individuals stay in those ranks -- they either move up, or move out). ( b ) perception management (essentially ability to blame others, to create inflated perception of your contribution) -- is a horrible thing to do for a technology company who benefits from having introverts who just love to program. Those will often fall the victim to the 'smoke and mirror specialists'. ( c ) can simply be traced to poor up stream decisions/conditions. ---- - But how to actually deal with accumulated incompetency (as it happens especially in companies that must grow very fast) ? --- - The answers I heard here would work but in combination a) stack-rank projects b) within project evaluate performance of project's stakeholders/initiators in addition to the project team c) stack-rank all employees by using peer-and-outsider model that takes up 40% of the overall rank (so that if an employee has excellent enteprise impact, but an incompetent manager, as noted earlier, -- he/she will not be totally dependent on that manager's score)... And that also builds up better team work.
paulbjensen 13y ago
In the documentary 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room', it mentioned that the company had a "rank-and-yank" system, whereby annually everyone would rank everyone else. Those ranked in the top 10% would be promoted, and those in the bottom 10% would be let go. One guy commented "I don't know a successful company that fires 10% of its employees every year".
gesman 13y ago
I worked at IBM Research for 6 years and they have absolutely the best way to achieve the best possible productivity from all employees: The secret? "Trust Your People". I was a contractor, working offsite, from another country. I used to come to IBM Research facility once a month and we had quick discussion: "Should we add this? Ok. Let this guy (me) do that". After that I disappear for a month or two, charge IBM hourly and then present a report of what was done. Result: we had the best enterprise security product on the market that actually generated plenty of revenues for the company. Hats off to IBM and to SRW, JM, JK, BA, and of course DC! Granted we were smaller team - 20 people in total or so. Lots of new people were coming in and doing their best to deliver their best. There was something spiritual about this, but it worked like a charm.
pmarca 13y ago
This discussions are always so outstanding. Has anyone ever actually seen a large organization where more than 85% of the people are high achieving?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
sakopov 13y ago
Am I the only one wondering why Yahoo! is still around? I struggle to even comprehend what the hell they even do today after jumping out of the search engine race.
nickbauman 13y ago
C'mon. Right or wrong, everyone knows the "no working from home" policy was a way for Y! to do a mass layoff without having it look like one to the street. This is merely an extension of the same policy. Mayer can afford to make a lot of mistakes. It's not her dime after all. So she will make them.
analog31 13y ago
It would be interesting to look at companies with stack ranking and see if any objective performance measure is a significantly better predictor of a layoff than: 1) A random number generator; 2) the personality of your boss.
joshuaheard 13y ago
It seems to me there are two problems with this system. One is that you are grading on the curve so a "less good" but still good employee is getting fired. The other is that the only person doing the evaluating is the employee's manager. I would propose a system where there is an absolute, not relative, scoring method. Pick 10 criteria and score them with 1 - 10 points. Set a minimum score for continued employment, say 70 points. I would also crowd-source the reviews. Not just the manager, but peers and people that report to the employee would all give a review. Then take the average review score.
bretd 13y ago
I had put down this comment in reply to one of the thread's below...however its better that i put it as a separate comment too..for a larger audience...and in appreciation of true leaders.. management is one shit where the board's decision or the management's decision is responsible for a company's failure..what these guys were doing when they were hiring or buying companies...is employees responsible for the failures... In any company's failure, the first one to blame is the management because they failed and that's why a lay off has to be done..I had always felt that layoff is an easy way for a CEO or the management to wash off their hands rather than trying to solve the problem at hand.. A leader is someone who leads his team and makes other perform... In management, I have found most people just licking the bosses above them...and i hate these bunch...in such a management structure, one actually creates a bunch of followers who are unfortunately called managers.. There are exceptions...and they are very few...and these are actual leaders who have the power to turn things around..

139 points by johnjlocke 13y ago

This suggests there's a major problem in the mid-level management that's communicating the message. Telling a front-line manager to put someone in a bucket to meet the quota results in bad feelings, poor decisions that lead to loss of talent and bad publicity. The alternative doesn't have to be abolishing stack ranking. The manager's manager should instead ask for justification and help the manager raise standards if they are too low. If not, he should repeat the same process with his manager. The +-3% variance indicates that the executive team expected this to happen. Since the feedback indicates that it's not happening in some (many) cases, hopefully this has triggered top-down conversations on the right way to implement.

yapcguy 13y ago

Can't believe that employees would actually complain about their work by posting "on an internal message board for anonymous feedback". If it's anonymous, I have a bridge to sell you!

VladRussian2 13y ago
it is natural selection similar to Darwin prize - if you're stupid enough to seriously b!tch on internal _anonymous_ board ... Reminds me about anonymous surveys in some previous BigCo where emailed links to the surveys contained unique ID.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Both of those situations seem like they would set up massive lawsuits down the line.
  - hackula1 13y ago
    Only if you told them why, in a "right to work" state.
- gesman 13y ago
  Yes :) You can post absolutely anonymous comment. But only after you log in :)
  - RyJones 13y ago
    this was exactly how the "anonymous" board at Microsoft worked.
thrillgore 13y ago
The last place i'd be bitching about my work, performance, or someone else's performance is somewhere that's persistent. It hits home when its face to face.
grecy 13y ago
We have an internal blog at my company, which is an admittedly small telco. People often post honest thoughts, which are often complaining about the company. You would think of all companies that could trace a DHCP IP to a logged in user it would be a telco. Not so. Things are so dysfunctional around here it would take a week to attempt to do such a thing, and it wouldn't be accurate. There are so many other things going on it would never be a priority anyway.
- gesman 13y ago
  I used to work at ALU and they had this type of board (most active section was buy/sell though). Anonymous area felt like a road rage where employees were bitching at: - each other - government - taxes - lousy hockey team plays
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

tptacek 13y ago

If you're a manager in a stack-ranking organization like this, in this market, why not take a stand? Refuse to classify team members who are not actually "occasionally misses" as such. If it's straight-up stack ranking, give everyone a tie for 3rd place or something. What's the worst thing that happens? You get let go? What a great way to get let go from a dysfunctional company.

Zimahl 13y ago
I believe it's a 'miss' for the manager if they can't do the performance reviews the right way. I worked with two folks that had previously worked at Intel. The same procedure was implemented there. There was a top 10%, a middle 80%, and a bottom 10%. This isn't a problem when working on a team of 10 to 20, but you certainly don't want to be on a team of 3 to 4. In that case, someone has to be the top and someone has to be the bottom. Once you are on the bottom once it's pretty much a 'start looking' situation. These types of systems have their obvious drawbacks. You don't want to work with good people because the better they are the bigger chance that you'll end up on the lower end.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Yeah, it's clear to me what the disincentive is. On the other hand, maybe call their bluff. If you're the manager willing to go to bat for your team and take a stand against insane performance measurement systems, there's a decent chance they don't want to lose you anyways.
  - wooster 13y ago
    My read is that with the situation Yahoo is in now, that's exactly the type of manager they want to let go. From their perspective, those are the managers who don't listen to the directions they're getting from executive management. It's hard to turn around a company if you tell people to do something and nobody does it.
  - allochthon 13y ago
    You would be surprised. Some big companies are so broken that these processes are like a steamroller. If you're in management at one of these places, do not assume that because you are valuable and in a profit center you will be able to buck the trend. Better to just start looking for other opportunities now. Large companies that use forced ranking: you will reap the fruits of your broken process after a few years.

OWaz 13y ago

Whoa what? “Mayer, in fact, tried to address the issue yesterday morning in a Q&A, which she began by quoting her favorite children’s book about the value of experience.” How do you start addressing concerns of working professionals by quoting a children's book?

agilebyte 13y ago
I have had 2 adults, on separate occasions, quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry they read as children. If the shoe fits, I have no problem with it.
- retr0rocket 13y ago
  2 adults, such valuable insight.
- cpeterso 13y ago
  Did Mayer quote from the The Little Prince, too? That article didn't say.
sp332 13y ago
Children's books are often written to convey a general pattern of human behavior. Teamwork, sharing, empathy, etc. It's not a bad starting point for a conversation, because it helps everyone see the pattern you're talking about quickly. Just make sure to follow up with actual details to fill in the generic outline!
Flimm 13y ago
Often I find stories for children are the most insightful and concise.

mathattack 13y ago

These types of forced ranking systems are very tough. Microsoft has had a lot of complaints about there's. GE, on the other hand, has had success with theirs. I've seen them work successfully at large firms where they were ingrained, and the companies had other cultural norms to increase teamwork. I've seen it flop at a few software firms. What they're good for: - Forcing managers to make hard decisions and give real feedback. (You can't just tell everyone "You're doing fine.") - Highlighting who at the bottom should be let go, and who a level below should replace them. (In most firms, the top 10% at a given level outperforms the bottom 10% at the level above them) - Providing internal guidance for larger layoffs. - Encouraging constant trimming to avoid those larger layoffs. The problems of these systems are numerous though: - It can discourage teams of superstars from working together on large projects. "What if only 1 or 2 out of us can be ranked high?" - It can encourage selfish behavior and infighting if there aren't other counterbalancing forces. - There is frequently disagreement for anyone not in the chosen group. - Much of the differentiation is based on managers ability to fight for their employees, rather than employees actual ability. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In Marissa's defense, she wasn't hired to continue "Business as usual".

pmarca 13y ago
"In most firms, the top 10% at a given level outperforms the bottom 10% at the level above them." This is a really key point. This dovetails with another fact of corporate life: over time, the median performance of any level degrades to the worst performer at that level. "I deserve to be promoted to VP. Look at Joe the VP, I'm obviously better than he is." Any company that isn't regularly clearing out the bottom 10% is fooling itself about both its hiring competence and its management skills. Any employee who can't get judged to be in the upper 90% of any organization isn't nearly as good as he/she thinks.
allochthon 13y ago
Providing internal guidance for larger layoffs. Just a reminder that if corporations are people, they're sociopaths.
- 13y ago

tonetheman 13y ago

Meh stack ranking sucks. Bad move. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/stack_ranking_steve_ballmer_s_employee_evaluation_system_and_microsoft_s.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/stack_ran...

hacker789 13y ago

> I feel so uncomfortable because in order to meet the bell curve, I have to tell the employee that they missed when I truly don’t believe it to be the case. [...] More often than I’d like I’m told we are executing a certain way ‘because Marissa said so.’ If you have an underproductive department with overprotective management, layoffs (and negative performance reviews) won't happen as frequently as they should. Maybe members of management just want to protect their respective fiefdoms. Maybe they have their empathy makes it difficult to lay people off. Maybe they genuinely believe their teams are doing well. Maybe their teams actually are doing well, and exceptionally few layoffs (if any) need to happen. Regardless, "because Marissa said so" is a perfectly valid answer. There will be collateral damage, but it's likely that she's dealing with some extremely protective, entrenched management who won't negatively review anyone on their teams unless they're forced to.

bcoates 13y ago
If you've got an underproductive department with overprotective management, I've got a suggestion for where you could trim some fat. I have difficulty comprehending the logic that trusts someone to monitor, assess, and organize a team's work, but doesn't trust them to take responsibility for the performance of the whole team and micromanages their staffing from above.
- hacker789 13y ago
  > I have difficulty comprehending the logic that trusts someone to monitor, assess, and organize a team's work, but doesn't trust them to take responsibility for the performance of the whole team and micromanages their staffing from above. I hear you. I imagine Mayer would like to fire those overprotective members of management, but I can't imagine how she could know exactly who they are at this point. This review processes should hopefully help shine a light on some of them.

steven2012 13y ago

If you read "Straight From the Gut" by Jack Welch, you would know that this is standard practice that is supposed to weed out the bottom 10% every year. The "GE Way" was to keep pruning from the bottom, and yes, it would mean that sometimes decent performers would get cut. In the book, there's an anecdote about how at some point, groups would take on crappy workers, just so that they could fire them for the yearly purge.

pcwalton 13y ago
> The "GE Way" was to keep pruning from the bottom, and yes, it would mean that sometimes decent performers would get cut. In the book, there's an anecdote about how at some point, groups would take on crappy workers, just so that they could fire them for the yearly purge. How is that something that should be emulated? Seems like a tremendous waste of resources to me.
- gesman 13y ago
  Stupidity of top management justifies the response

SurfScore 13y ago

If you want to make an omelette, you've gotta break some eggs.

001sky 13y ago

Kara Swisher: She's clearly in the monkey quadrant. On the topic of the chart: why would you ever work for a place why 85% are structually constrained to underperform or be average? If 100% of the empolyees start out the 15% "Target Hires", in a single generatino they have 6/7 failure rate of performing to their potential? Makes no sense if you're actually any good.

001sky 13y ago
“Because Marissa Said So” Glad to see HN dropped the pejoritive title

danmaz74 13y ago

In theory, a system like this could work much better if those "bell" rankings were only forced on teams which aren't performing well (as a team). This would both encourage teamwork and lower the risk to let very good people go only because they're in an exceptional team.

hvass 13y ago

Can anyone explain how this differs from Microsoft's ranking system? I doubt Marissa is not aware of that practice.

jimbokun 13y ago

This is the "sequester" approach to layoffs. Instead of deciding which projects are not paying off and cutting them, cut employees across all projects, regardless of how well they perform. Similar to the budgetary sequester backed into by the US government.

saalweachter 13y ago
And the sequester by the US gov't was designed to be so disastrously bad that the different parties would be forced to come up with a better solution. Whoops.
lclarkmichalek 13y ago
Except apparently Yahoo has grown since she joined, so it would seem this has not been implemented in order to reduce staff size.
- camus2 13y ago
  Dont worry, Yahoo will fire a lot of people soon. Yahoo "bought a lot of buzz" to drive its stock up so big investors can cash in, they will trim their workforce soon,
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    Yep. I know this sounds harsh, and this is pure conjecture on my part, but the way I see it is that Marissa Mayer is on a 5 year contract and after that she is out of there, regardless of what state Yahoo is in. If the company is a mess in 5 years time she can blame it on the culture which was resistant to change. She will simply jump onto the next gravy train via her big investor and board-room friends. The WSJ and NYT say her total compensation over this period will be at least $100m+. All she has to do is sit tight, look as though she's busy, and hopefully keep the share price up to maximize her share options.
    - tesseractive 13y ago
      Considering that the company has burned through multiple CEOs already anyway, I think the case that the company was doomed if she didn't try some major moves is both obvious and compelling. The thing I like is that she's trying both the carrot and the stick at the same time: trying to make Yahoo a better place to work with Google-style amenities, while also making staff more accountable and slashing poor performers. She's also focusing the company much more heavily on mobile which is both obvious and necessary, but which wasn't taken nearly as seriously by previous execs. I don't know whether it will work or not, but this doesn't seem like a "marking time" strategy at all.

steven2012 13y ago

I worked at Yahoo, and quite frankly, Yahoo needs to go through a few years of culling the bottom 10% like this. After several iterations of this, it could be a great company again. What Mayer is saying is that she is willing to sacrifice those employees that are at the lower boundaries of acceptable, in order to make more room for the top 85% And quite frankly, the managers that are complaining about having to put people at the lower boundaries are highly likely to be underperforming as well. When I was there, it was mostly filled with bloated and lazy employees.

masklinn 13y ago
There are two problems here: 1. if the company moves to stack ranking rather than just does a cull, it's a bad move 2. stack ranking works at the team level, not at the company level. If a team is full of morons and the next one is full of awesome developers, stack ranking will keep 90% of the morons and cull 10% of the good devs.
- ianbicking 13y ago
  "stack ranking works at the team level, not at the company level. If a team is full of morons and the next one is full of awesome developers, stack ranking will keep 90% of the morons and cull 10% of the good devs." That may be a risk they are willing to take. They are probably firing some good people. If a team is doing great and they fire someone from that team because SOMEONE has to get fired, then that's poisonous. But if someone isn't right for the job, but because the job is badly defined, or poorly managed, or the goals are unreasonable, or whatever... it does definitely suck for the person being fired, but losing that employee is a reasonable cost for Yahoo.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    That may be a risk they are willing to take Yup. They are in kind of a "bet-the-company" stage right now. They've got a problem, they've got no perfect solutions, and if they sit about just twiddling their thumbs they will go under.
13y ago

brimanning 13y ago

Not that it's quite the same, but I can't help thinking of decimation in the Roman sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)

VladRussian2 13y ago
the main difference :) " The leadership was usually executed independently of the one in ten deaths of the rank and file"
001sky 13y ago
Now don't start giving them any more ideas !

727374 13y ago

For now, all the yahoo services I use stink as much as they always have. It will take years for these sweeping cultural changes to pay off, if the do. Definitely a heroic effort on Mayer's part, considering the shelf life of Yahoo CEOs is so low.

smegel 13y ago

What difference does it make? If your committed to reducing an organisation by X%, then a certain number of people are going to be fired. And it makes sense they are the lowest performing percentile. So maybe some people were rated as "misses" when they weren't, but they were still the lowest ranked employee in their unit. Would this argument be mute if they were ranked "least effective" instead?

ye 13y ago
I also thing firing the bottom X% is absolutely normal for a business. It's a free market. If you're ranking in the bottom X%, then it's likely your own fault.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  Those are some...interesting...views. 1) There is no "absolutely normal" anything about firing or laying off employees. Some of layoffs/firings will be to get rid of bottom X%-ers, but some will be good or even very well qualified and capable employees (e.g. for salary or budgetary reasons). 2) There is no such thing as a "free market." Or, put another way, "it's a free market" in the same way that China is a pure communist state. 3) You're assuming the person granting the grade--the manager--is being objective and assigning grades fairly. If you think managers do that, you're either a manager, inexperienced, or woefully oblivious (or possibly all three). There are many, many reasons a person could be placed in the bottom X% that have literally nothing to do with his performance or abilities.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Except as others have pointed out, you're not ranked according to the company, but your group. And in companies that like to keep groups small, that means even in groups where everyone is performing well, someone has to be called the bottom. Your manager was forced to blame someone for something so you get fired for being part of a project that had better staffing so it would be less impacted by loss. This setup requires someone to be called deadweight whether that group actually has any or not. Firing a static percentage of the company every year is horrible for morale. Managers who are doing their jobs and managing their people should find out when they need to work with them or let them go. People who should be let go shouldn't be held on to until the next review cycle.

tieTYT 13y ago

> In 1981, Ford's sales were falling. Between 1979 and 1982, Ford had incurred $3 billion in losses. Ford's newly appointed Division Quality Manager, John A. Manoogian, was charged with recruiting Deming to help jump-start a quality movement at Ford.[19] Deming questioned the company's culture and the way its managers operated. To Ford's surprise, Deming talked not about quality but about management. He told Ford that management actions were responsible for 85% of all problems in developing better cars. In 1986, Ford came out with a profitable line of cars, the Taurus-Sable line. In a letter to Autoweek Magazine, Donald Petersen, then Ford chairman, said, "We are moving toward building a quality culture at Ford and the many changes that have been taking place here have their roots directly in Deming's teachings."[20] By 1986, Ford had become the most profitable American auto company. For the first time since the 1920s, its earnings had exceeded those of arch rival General Motors (GM). Ford had come to lead the American automobile industry in improvements. Ford's following years' earnings confirmed that its success was not a fluke, for its earnings continued to exceed GM and Chrysler's. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

mathattack 13y ago
I'm trying to tie this to the original article. Is the idea that performance reviews are inconsistent to systemic management improvements ala Deming? My understanding is he was against the annual review.
- tieTYT 13y ago
  I think it's relevant for many reasons. But I was reminded of the information when I noticed that Yahoo seems to be blaming the 15%.
  - bmm6o 13y ago
    ... which is why you italicized the 85% bit? But one is a percentage of people, and the other a percentage of problems. If I'm misunderstanding, it would be helpful if you explained further.

pico303 13y ago

Isn't this the system Microsoft is using that has created such huge problems for the company? There was that Vanity Fair article recently that talked about what a mess the product teams are at Microsoft. It blamed the stack rankings in part for creating a hostile environment where nothing could get done. Nobody collaborates because they want to come out on top of those rankings, and some even go so far as to sabotage their co-workers to stay atop the rankings. I seem to recall the article suggesting that the only place stack ranking ever worked was GE. Sounds to me like a recipe for disaster.

dinkumthinkum 13y ago

I mean at this point Yahoo is an anachronism, they might as well go all the way with it. Perhaps this will accelerate the inevitable and we can all just be done with it.

r00fus 13y ago

So stacked ranking - why do companies not understand that the granularity level can't be too low (i.e., teams of 5 or so)? Or is it just the case that stacked ranking works in theory but doesn't scale to real organizations (kind of like communism)?

EGreg 13y ago

This is silly in my opinion. If she wanted to prune the comoany to make room for more (acqui-)hires do it in stages. First let the managers feel like they can more easily fire the most underperforming people. Donmt force them to do so.

qdog 13y ago

This is a pretty popular thing at many large companies. Everyone somehow wants to hire the cream of the crop, yet there are only so many cream of the crop candidates. My own experience is that after a couple of rounds of these layoffs, most of the fat is cut from a lot of teams. After that you start knocking off productive people. I'd be more impressed by someone who invigorated their workforce and then selectively cut people after they figured out who wasn't working out. Choosing a random manager assigned number that wasn't specifically requested to be a ritual offering of headcount isn't very smart. It'll bite you in the ass eventually when productive people actually end up leaving because of the work environment.

walshemj 13y ago
Give me any prp stack ranking system and I can twist your apr's to get you in the bottom slot if your really good it might take a year or 18 months.
a3n 13y ago
> This is a pretty popular thing at many large companies. Everyone somehow wants to hire the cream of the crop, yet there are only so many cream of the crop candidates. I think in some places it's not so much the desire to hire the cream of the crop, but a manager or managers wanting to believe that by hiring only the cream of the crop, they are then the cream of their crop. As a side effect, it helps them maintain an erection.

drgath 13y ago

I was one of those who was laid-off, or fired, or whatever you want to call it. I've been really confused over the last week because the reasons for my termination were pretty vague. But wow, after reading that, so many things make sense now. One of the areas this type of a bell-curve system falls apart is for highly specialized and well-qualified teams, such as the one I was working on. Who knows, maybe I was a poor employee, but after all the raises, accolades, and the promotion I received (by my firing manager), I'd like to think that wasn't the case and it was just a manager put in a tough spot. Regardless, it was a nice run and the job market is great. I'm taking a bit of time off, but if you are a company in SF and looking for someone with lots of JavaScript, Node.js, and frontend experience at startups and (of course) big companies, links are in my profile.

eps 13y ago
What did you do there if you don't mind me asking?
- drgath 13y ago
  See the link in my profile. :)
  - bretd 13y ago
    I liked your spirit...management is one shit where the board's decision or the management's decision is responsible for a company's failure..what these guys were doing when they were hiring or buying companies...is employees responsible for the failures... In any company's failure, the first one to blame is the management because they failed and that's why a lay off has to be done..I had always felt that layoff is an easy way for a CEO or the management to wash off their hands rather than trying to solve the problem at hand.. A leader is someone who leads his team and makes other perform... In management, I have found most people just licking the bosses above them...and i hate these bunch...in such a management structure, one actually creates a bunch of followers who are unfortunately called managers.. There are exceptions...and they are very few...and these are actual leaders who have the power to turn things around..

at-fates-hands 13y ago

Here's the deal. As an employee with boots on the ground, you're usually the first to see this sort of stuff coming a hundred miles away. Why anybody would put up with this BS is completely beyond me. If you can get a job at Yahoo, I'm pretty sure you shouldn't have any problem getting another well paying job. I was in a pretty large corporation and they started doing this and a ton of their top developers started leaving in droves. I'm talking 10 a week, and not entry level guys. We're talking senior BA's, developers and engineers when it was at its worst. They had a turn over rate in the 90% range. After 6 months of not being able to do anything because they were in a constant training mode, a bunch of directors and middle managers got axed and they took a different approach. It takes a lot to move the needle, but when it does, it will make a difference.

davidrudder 13y ago

Wouldn't this encourage cross-department collaboration? My logic goes like this: Collaborating makes one succeed. But, you don't want your team to succeed, because then you might be laid off. But, people on other teams aren't in competition with you. So, if you collaborate with them, you can really kick the ass of that jerk next to you that you used to be friends with. I'm joking...mostly.

qdog 13y ago
The other team will take the accolades for your work, your team will be mad at you for mot pulling your weight.

notacoward 13y ago

When it comes to employee ratings, absolute vs. relative is a red herring. Both lead to adverse outcomes. With the more common absolute ratings, managers have an incentive to rate everyone highly, so people who work for honest managers get screwed. With relative ratings, the weakest members of the strongest teams get screwed. Rating employees just doesn't work unless the departments are also rated. If you know the relative strength of each department then you can adjust the ratings of its members accordingly. There's still a serious question of what you do with that information, but at least then it won't be totally distorted by the differences between teams and managers.

gesman 13y ago

Every "good" girl secretly fantasy to have a dominatrix whip in her hands. "Welcome to the real world!" --Morpheous

platform 13y ago

I work for a company with stack ranking. and was forced to stack-rank my team. The success of this system depends on 3 things a ) qualifications of the managers doing stack ranking b ) perception management of the employees being ranked. c ) quality (impact and sophistication) of the projects people are doing ( a ) is hard to come by in middle-management ranks (because very few talents individuals stay in those ranks -- they either move up, or move out). ( b ) perception management (essentially ability to blame others, to create inflated perception of your contribution) -- is a horrible thing to do for a technology company who benefits from having introverts who just love to program. Those will often fall the victim to the 'smoke and mirror specialists'. ( c ) can simply be traced to poor up stream decisions/conditions. ---- - But how to actually deal with accumulated incompetency (as it happens especially in companies that must grow very fast) ? --- - The answers I heard here would work but in combination a) stack-rank projects b) within project evaluate performance of project's stakeholders/initiators in addition to the project team c) stack-rank all employees by using peer-and-outsider model that takes up 40% of the overall rank (so that if an employee has excellent enteprise impact, but an incompetent manager, as noted earlier, -- he/she will not be totally dependent on that manager's score)... And that also builds up better team work.

paulbjensen 13y ago

In the documentary 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room', it mentioned that the company had a "rank-and-yank" system, whereby annually everyone would rank everyone else. Those ranked in the top 10% would be promoted, and those in the bottom 10% would be let go. One guy commented "I don't know a successful company that fires 10% of its employees every year".

gesman 13y ago

I worked at IBM Research for 6 years and they have absolutely the best way to achieve the best possible productivity from all employees: The secret? "Trust Your People". I was a contractor, working offsite, from another country. I used to come to IBM Research facility once a month and we had quick discussion: "Should we add this? Ok. Let this guy (me) do that". After that I disappear for a month or two, charge IBM hourly and then present a report of what was done. Result: we had the best enterprise security product on the market that actually generated plenty of revenues for the company. Hats off to IBM and to SRW, JM, JK, BA, and of course DC! Granted we were smaller team - 20 people in total or so. Lots of new people were coming in and doing their best to deliver their best. There was something spiritual about this, but it worked like a charm.

pmarca 13y ago

This discussions are always so outstanding. Has anyone ever actually seen a large organization where more than 85% of the people are high achieving?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

sakopov 13y ago

Am I the only one wondering why Yahoo! is still around? I struggle to even comprehend what the hell they even do today after jumping out of the search engine race.

nickbauman 13y ago

C'mon. Right or wrong, everyone knows the "no working from home" policy was a way for Y! to do a mass layoff without having it look like one to the street. This is merely an extension of the same policy. Mayer can afford to make a lot of mistakes. It's not her dime after all. So she will make them.

analog31 13y ago

It would be interesting to look at companies with stack ranking and see if any objective performance measure is a significantly better predictor of a layoff than: 1) A random number generator; 2) the personality of your boss.

joshuaheard 13y ago

It seems to me there are two problems with this system. One is that you are grading on the curve so a "less good" but still good employee is getting fired. The other is that the only person doing the evaluating is the employee's manager. I would propose a system where there is an absolute, not relative, scoring method. Pick 10 criteria and score them with 1 - 10 points. Set a minimum score for continued employment, say 70 points. I would also crowd-source the reviews. Not just the manager, but peers and people that report to the employee would all give a review. Then take the average review score.

bretd 13y ago

I had put down this comment in reply to one of the thread's below...however its better that i put it as a separate comment too..for a larger audience...and in appreciation of true leaders.. management is one shit where the board's decision or the management's decision is responsible for a company's failure..what these guys were doing when they were hiring or buying companies...is employees responsible for the failures... In any company's failure, the first one to blame is the management because they failed and that's why a lay off has to be done..I had always felt that layoff is an easy way for a CEO or the management to wash off their hands rather than trying to solve the problem at hand.. A leader is someone who leads his team and makes other perform... In management, I have found most people just licking the bosses above them...and i hate these bunch...in such a management structure, one actually creates a bunch of followers who are unfortunately called managers.. There are exceptions...and they are very few...and these are actual leaders who have the power to turn things around..