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It is at the surface. I don't think it's commonly implemented that purely though. There will be projects that are failing and they will have, if they already

It is at the surface. I don't think it's commonly implemented that purely though. There will be projects that are failing and they will have, if they already haven't had, tougher cuts. There will be projects that are succeeding and they will get more people. Then there will be projects that are just coasting.. Mayer is way too smart to just sequester the staff like that. On paper you can't really say it's being done any differently though. Every time this comes up, it's treated like kryptonite. What's better? I can agree if this is the ONLY thing they've got going, then yeah it's terrible and the whole company probably is in a lot of trouble. Thing is it'll be a policy of sorts but great managers of great teams will go to the mat and not have guys in the bottom 10%, that stuff happens in big corporations. To that, when you've got an elite team doing elite work, pretty much everyone knows it and usually they are scared to mess with it. Sometimes the hard choice is made and whole teams are shut down because they aren't performing or their project isn't, some times it's their fault and sometimes it was someone else' bad idea. Should they have peers rank peers? What's better? I'm seriously asking, companies have better and lesser performers, companies of a certain size almost always have people that simply aren't good. How do you get rid of them and make the whole company stronger? Some sort of measurable business objective combined with manager ranking and peer ranking?

allochthon 13y ago
There will be projects that are succeeding and they will get more people. Not necessarily. I've seen projects that were profit centers deprioritized for other projects that were moonshots. Due to forced ranking, this resulted in the important but less sexy project getting fewer of the nice evaluations to distribute across the group and the loss of important people. It was ultimately an own-goal on the company's part, but the whole process was too big for any one person to prevent it. It was like watching a slow train wreck. How do you get rid of them and make the whole company stronger? This is a good question. I don't have any clear answers, myself. I'm inclined to think a good place to start is a hiring freeze in the groups that are not contributing and then letting them shrink by attrition followed by a reorg once the project is too understaffed to be competitive.

allochthon 13y ago

There will be projects that are succeeding and they will get more people. Not necessarily. I've seen projects that were profit centers deprioritized for other projects that were moonshots. Due to forced ranking, this resulted in the important but less sexy project getting fewer of the nice evaluations to distribute across the group and the loss of important people. It was ultimately an own-goal on the company's part, but the whole process was too big for any one person to prevent it. It was like watching a slow train wreck. How do you get rid of them and make the whole company stronger? This is a good question. I don't have any clear answers, myself. I'm inclined to think a good place to start is a hiring freeze in the groups that are not contributing and then letting them shrink by attrition followed by a reorg once the project is too understaffed to be competitive.