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Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?
- xal 13y agoSo what's a better way to do it? You need a documented system. If you don't have a documented system then there will be an undocumented system which is the same problem with less documentation.
- yuhong 13y agoI think michaelochurch advocated open allocation.
- kvb 13y agoHow does open allocation address performance evaluation/compensation? Doesn't Valve have both open allocation and stack ranking?
- xal 13y agoValve does stack ranking == compensation and they very much have a hirachy, it's just not documented. It's called the Tyranny of Structurelessness: http://beautifultrouble.org/principle/beware-the-tyranny-of-structurelessness/ http://beautifultrouble.org/principle/beware-the-tyranny-of-...
- michaelochurch 13y agoValve "stack ranking" is for bonuses only. In other words, an error that puts you toward the bottom of the stack reduces your payout from a pool of money you were never promised and to which you are not entitled. You get another chance next year to excel and come out on top. Over time, the errors should smooth out. Microsoft-style stack ranking, on the other hand, completely fucks up your career in the company, even if you were just unlucky. You don't get another chance. This can happen when a company falters (layoffs) but it shouldn't be by-design.
- seiji 13y agoYou get another chance next year to excel and come out on top. A year is a long time to be passed by for additional compensation. Our technostartup environment makes a year feel even longer since the rate of change and adoption of new products is accelerating. How do companies justify holding paltry bonus parties when teenagers are selling companies for $30 million or raising valuations at $4 billion for things that didn't exist 12 to 24 months ago? Yearly bonuses feel like an entire lifetime passes between them. Sure, great, here's your bonus amount, but out in the real world there are still people going from zero-to-millions in the same timeframe. Does this just go back to people are weak/scared/risk-averse and companies can exploit that sociopathically by paying someone $X while their work generates 10$X to 100$X value to the company?
- michaelochurch 13y agoI don't know anything internal about Valve, and I'm sure their system isn't working perfectly, but I'd imagine that the people generating 10-100x salary are getting bonuses that they're happy with, at least in most cases. That would be the more rare case of an employee getting screwed (delivering massive value, underpaid). Much more common is an employee who's screwed by being given inappropriate work, few or no opportunities to advance, but then compensated accurately (this might mean getting laid off) for the value delivered (with no allowance made for the error being in that person's work allocation). No evaluation process is perfect, but a system where being unlucky means you live on your salary for a year is better than one where being unlucky fucks up your career, possibly beyond that job if you get fired abruptly with no severance. Microsoft-style stack-ranking is the latter.
- endianswap 13y agoIt's not structureless just because it's flat. Specifically, the article mentions "accountability is what gives democracy its bite", and Valve has definite accountability in its peer review and ranking processes, which as jstelly notes has no forced/expected distribution of results. From the same article is a very appropriate quote: "Structurelessness is often mistakenly conflated with absence of hierarchy, when in fact, effective non-hierarchical forms of organizing actually require a great deal of structure. Anyone who has participated in an effectively facilitated general assembly or spokescouncil meeting will well understand this distinction."
- jstelly 13y agoValve's review system bears little resemblance to the stack ranking being discussed here. It has no forced or expected distribution of results, for example.
- gradys 13y agoStack ranking as decided by peer review, no less.
- michaelochurch 13y agoReview (and compensate based on) impact rather than "performance", the latter carrying connotations of personal assessment rather than objective contribution. Low impact doesn't mean you're a "low performer" or bad person, just that you didn't have any major successes that year. You'd fire over low impact if someone clearly didn't care, but not if they were just unlucky/ill-mentored/mistaken in choosing what efforts to focus on. The problem with stack-ranking is that it lets people get "killed by the dice", to use an RPG metaphor.
- endianswap 13y agoValve does this in its ranking process, specifically the ranking process is about determining a composite value relative to his/her peers that each individual has on the company that allows for varied impacts to be comparable. For example in a system like this, someone who is an amazing programmer who spends more time making everyone around him smart than writing features doesn't have to rank lower than someone who quietly sits by himself writing a ton of feature code. That, plus no expectation/forcing of a certain distribution (e.g. the 10% lowest scoring people aren't necessarily shit, they could all be adequate in terms of value and deserving of a solid bonus, it's just that they're not as high as the folks above them) are what makes the process truly work and keeps confidence/trust in the system high (as well as the fact that all employees participate in the process.)
- bguthrie 13y agoLess documentation isn't always a bad thing. If you can't appeal to a written authority, you have to rely on your own judgment in the face of ambiguity.
- tehwebguy 13y agoI think that documentation is desired to limit legal exposure.
- vkou 13y agoA peer review-driven process. Productivity lost to that can't possibly be worse then the culture of backstabbing that stackrank promotes. For another point, the article seems to be making a heavy statistical error in assuming that Google's average developer lifespan is 1 year. Taking the average lifespan biases the result heavily towards new hires (Of which there are a lot of). A more relevant metric would be average time between an engineer joining, and leaving.
- kumarm 13y ago[A peer review-driven process. Productivity lost to that can't possibly be worse then the culture of backstabbing that stackrank promotes.] Every methodology has draw backs. Peer Review-driven system result in patting each others back always rather than providing honest feedbacks. I have seen places where no one questions a decision to not hurt a peer (Because thats gonna hurt them in review).
- jacalata 13y agoDoesn't seem like an important error to me. His point is that most Google employees haven't spent long enough there to be affected by multiple rounds of stack ranking/attempts to get promoted, and there being a hell of a lot of new hires is exactly why that's true.
- CamperBob2 13y agoYou need a documented system. If you don't have a documented system then there will be an undocumented system which is the same problem with less documentation. So don't complain when your kid gets expelled from the second grade for pointing his finger like a gun and saying "Bang."
- thwarted 13y agoThat's not a problem with documentation, that's a problem with what is documented.
- CamperBob2 13y agoBut documentation never shrinks, any more than production code does. It becomes a substitute for thinking. Zero-tolerance policies and stack ranking both seem like good examples.
- oceanplexian 13y agoA hierarchal system of good management. Hiring processes that don't suck. Instead of a complex recruiting maze where you need to have 13 people review new hires (and strive for the lowest common denominator between the group), they need more freedom to hire good people. People will and do game the system anyway. To counter that, managers need authority to terminate bad apples on a whim. If these large corporations managed themselves like a collection of startups, we might see more innovation and less turnover.
- mtrimpe 13y agoEach employee receives a single unit of value. Let's call it a 'credit.' Each employee then has to distribute all of his 'credit' to other employees. Each employee then gives away any credit received according to the same original distribution. Each employee continues doing so until the credit received and distributed reaches an equilibrium. Each employee is then ranked by the total amount of 'credit' they've accumulated. Maybe we should call it 'PeopleRank' ;)
- Angostura 13y agoPresumably this leads to people passes their credit to the worst candidate, in an effort to stop the good candidates from surpassing their own score.
- mtrimpe 13y agoDo you have any reason to believe this happens in an iterative model as well? In this model there's no reason to believe the worst candidate isn't passing his credit to employees just about to surpass you, which would defeat the purpose.
- nilkn 13y agoIf everybody did this, they'd still be helping someone else surpass their own score. It also puts a lot of power into the hands of that one guy, who gets to redistribute all those credits.
- xal 13y agoSo the funny thing is that this system is called Unicorn and has been in effect for many years at Shopify: http://www.fastcompany.com/1770955/using-social-media-improve-employee-communication-collaboration-and-even-compensation http://www.fastcompany.com/1770955/using-social-media-improv... It's useful, but no replacement for performance reviews.
- mtrimpe 13y agoI was going to ask how you knew that since I couldn't get that from the FastCompany article. Good thing I checked your profile first. Loved seeing you at MicroConf and keep up the good work ;) I'm not surprised that performance reviews are still needed since just a ranking wouldn't give employees a direction or focus to improve. I am curious what you did find the ranking information to be useful for though?
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoHow about approaching managers in the same way we always like companies to approach developers, i.e., hire good ones and empower them do their job in the best way they know how? Using a system that is enforced from the top down is a perfect way to guarantee you'll only get the kind of below mediocre managers we love to bitch about. All of these systems are based on the assumption that companies can't trust the people they hire to delegate responsibility to. They're basically methods of maintaining a toxic environment instead of dealing with the root causes. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it attracts the wrong people. What good manager you ever worked for would want to function in that kind of a system?
- Metrop0218 13y agoYou need something more quantifiable than that when you're running a giant organization... Your approach would absolutely work in a startup of 20 people or less, but try that in the 10,000+ man Operating Systems Division at Microsoft and you'll run into some crazy logistics problems.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agohiring/firing/raises can be done in small groups by their managers. What's crazy about that?
- hyperpape 13y agoManagers squabble over the best developers. They fight to transfer their worst developers to each other, and don't let talented developers go work on other projects that interest them. Every group gets the same number of raises, regardless of their performance, or effective developers in poor groups get nothing. Stack ranking sounds like a shitty system, without a doubt. But I don't think you can have a well grounded opinion until you think about the issues it's trying to address.
- humanrebar 13y agoLet managers release under-performing developers to "the bench", where they can be picked up by teams that need some new blood. People on the bench are cheaper to "hire" than people from outside, so managers have an incentive to prefer picking them up. Managers don't "let" developers do anything. They have to actually have leadership skills (or enough budget) to keep their good engineers around by choice. Effective developers on poor teams find more attractive offers. Sometimes this will involve bonuses or raises. Sometimes this will involve more influence over product direction. Obviously some sort of ground rules are needed (significant others on different teams, no kickbacks).
- jacques_chester 13y agoDocumentation isn't magic. Documented systems beget undocumented systems.
- brown9-2 13y agoThe evil, destructive, part of stack ranking is when you need to apply the 20%/70%/10% breakdowns to all teams equally, meaning that even a team of 5 people needs to have one and only one "exceeds expectation" person and one person who "needs improvement", regardless of overall team level. It's not clear from this writeup that Amazon and Facebook are applying curves at such a micro level.
- fizx 13y agoI've wondered if recursively propagating down "bonus points" would be a fair way of solving this. For example, Acme, Inc ranks on a 1-5 scale, and all things being equal, a manager will get (direct reports)x3 points to allocate for his performance reviews. But Acme has a good quarter due to a strong engineering effort, so the CEO decides that Bob, VP of Eng, gets a 4, and he gets to allocate (direct reports)x4 points among his directors, who each get to allocate (their score)x(their direct reports), and so on. I think there needs to be some adjustment to the equations, because it doesn't make sense that everyone under a superstar also should be rated a 5. But I like the general idea of having groups be accountable as a group, and having that propagate downwards into the organization.
- kybernetikos 13y agoI always wanted to experiment with a system where all employees have a currency that they can pay other developers who help them or that they think are doing really well. As well as the credits that all employees have, there are also large numbers of credits distributed to the product owners of products in proportion to how much money they make. Come bonus time, the bonuses are paid in proportion to how many credits you have received from others.
- bmohlenhoff 13y agoBecause it's easy and everyone else is doing it. Next question?
- gum_ina_package 13y agoThe title of this post assumes MS's stack ranking system is bad. Based off of personal experience, MS has dramatically improved how they do stack ranking. All companies stack rank, even startups. The only difference is that when that is formalized, everyone is on the same page and culture is more transparent.
- r00fus 13y agoSince you seem to have more knowledge of this than the general public here, can you provide info on how it's been improved of late? As I understand stacked ranking, there doesn't seem to be many improvements that help when the underlying premise (forced attrition of "poorly performing" employees - where "poorly performing" is a judgement handed down by management) has major downsides.
- grandalf 13y agoInevitably some percentage of hiring decisions were flawed, either that they underestimated or overestimated the candidate's potential. These kinds of ranking systems are a mechanism to correct for that error once there is a lot more information known about the employee.
- vladimirralev 13y agoThat's not how stack ranking works. The only thing that is inevitable is that you will have many teams where almost everybody is either top-performer or low-performer, but they will get ranked on the global scale as if they are equally productive.
- lifeformed 13y agoMy impression that these types of systems are more for culling than accurate performance review. Perhaps they need to drop a certain percentage of employees by some target date, and this is the most blame-free way to do it on a large scale.
- ripvanwinkle 13y agoIsn't there a fundamental difference between the FB rule of restricting the top rating to just 2% of employees and the Microsoft rule of decreeing that there must be a bottom 10% of "poor quality , less talented, undesirable elements" in the workforce. The FB system doesn't make the non 2% feel rejected and unhappy - it just makes it very hard to be crowned the superstar which I think most people find perfectly acceptable. To address the relatively longer period of MS employee retention, Microsoft employees (esp the technical ones) in general work on a set of technologies (C#, NT Kernel, SharePoint,...) for which MS is the place to be. They build up expertise and then if they have to leave to join a comparable company, they need to rebuild in a different set of technologies most likely open source stuff of which there is very little in Microsoft. Now if you are a Linux kernel hacker / Python guru/... at Google/Amazon the world is your oyster - everything you are good at transfers readily to companies/roles of similar stature outside. Its almost like Microsoft technologies are a moat around its castle that keeps talent from leaving. full disclosure I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years before leaving.
- pnathan 13y ago> Its almost like Microsoft technologies are a moat around its castle that keeps talent from leaving. This is not unique to MS and MS tech, sadly.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoThere are lots of companies that love hiring former Microsoft employees because they use the same stacks. Its only when moving to a new tech like google or some startups that there would be a problem, but then again google and facebook opened offices in Kirkland/Bellevue for some reason....the moat ain't that deep.
- SteveJS 13y ago"one person cannot be evaluated and paid in isolation of budgets" - SteveSi is just wrong on this. This is only true if you have a policy of highly differentiated pay for short term performance and/or have an "up or out policy". ... both of which are in effect at MS. You can argue it's a bad idea not to have one or both of those policies, but it is certainly possible to have a review system based on what one did, rather than based on the necessary political fight over cutting up the budget pie.
- mseebach 13y agoSo, the obvious pathologies of the Microsoft stack ranking model aside, what are the reasons that a company will want to do this? The main reasons I can think of has to do with the dangers of getting comfortable in a large company. It's very easy for a lazy manager to just hand out "A"s to everyone on the team and just cruise along. Slackers are poisonous, but painful to deal with for a conflict-shy, comfortable manager. Actually being forced to think critically about which of your employees are the top performance, and which aren't (and it's a mathematical fact that they're not going to be the same) is a useful tool to keep such a manager on his toes. Another effect is simply to encourage a certain rate of churn in all teams, to get some fresh blood flowing through the system. Stack-ranking directly forces the manager to use his human capacity for critical thinking to evaluate his employees, and in such is a useful distraction from that even more disastrous evaluation method: Objective metrics (hours worked, lines of code committed, bugs closed, sales numbers etc).
- etler 13y agoI think managers are inherently in a bad place to review the performance of individuals in the team below them. They're primarily affected by the mean performance of the team, so if one guy is slacking off and the rest of the team needs to pick up the slack, the manager might not notice. I think peer reviews will be more honest. If a peer is doing next to nothing, or providing little to the team while everyone else is working like crazy, you're in a much better position to see that.
- boomzilla 13y agoI think it is a lot more complicated that just that. The root cause here is there is no easy way to quantify one's contribution to the company (or even a team) in software development. Some other professions are easier to evaluate, e.g. stock traders have their own P/L, lawyers/doctors have their own customer billings, etc. Note that I said "easier", but not necessarily bullet proof, because it still encourages people to optimize for short term goals.
- etler 13y ago
- anonymous 13y agoI'm more interested in why employees don't band together to game the system and ensure a given outcome, then split the winnings. Like a sort of a pyramid scheme - you and a buddy agree that this quarter it will be you who gets promoted and split the bonus/raise with your buddy. Then you get a third buddy and get him in on it if he agrees to let the second buddy be promoted this quarter. Now you're splitting 3 raises among 2 people. Then you get a fourth buddy in and promote the third one and so on. The system ends once the group has too many people at a high position. At that point any new employee joining the company at a low position is screwed, probably. Also at this point infighting will probably break out from people who don't want to split their raises with the ones with less money, given that they don't have a way of advancing any further. Obviously the only way to win at this is to be the very first person who, after everybody leaves, gets left with the highest position and highest salary. Which is why I called it a pyramid scheme.
- gknoy 13y agoHow visible and gameable are the metrics, though? You'd have to ensure your metrics were better than some, worse than others, but NOT so much worse as to be dangerous. Also, that sounds like a horrible amount of concerns for a developer. I'd like to build and ship code, not worry about measuring performance.
- walshemj 13y agoIt has worked that way at one company I worked at some mangers gave people a good evaluation one year and slightly under next year.
- cnahr 13y agoIt seems to me that stack ranking can only work for companies that are so attractive for new talent that any new hires are likely to be more valuable than the lowest-ranked current employees. Once a company is no longer so attractive, as seems to be the case with Microsoft today, you're actually pushing out better talent in exchange for worse.
- rm445 13y agoEh? Do you really think their pool of applicants is worsening quickly enough that a bottom-10% performer is better than the median new applicant? They still have bags of money to pay people, you know.
- grumps 13y agoStandard Big 4 Consulting implementation. It provides value for a few years until employee realize that it's a lot easier to: 1. Get a job elsewhere 2. Hide in mediocrity because the effort to achieve a high ranking is greater than the reward by a lot. In my personal experience with force ranking systems, is that it also drives politics within the organization. As an example: I once was skipped a promotion because when we went to demo a unit the shipping department did a poor job packing the prototype equipment that I had just spent an entire summer building. Due to the packing job, a single RS-232 pin because slightly unseated causing intermittent behaviors for one of many features. It was still the most successful demo the company had ever given. So success we received a request for pricing the Military 24 hours later, which is unheard of. Despite this the Chief Engineer blasted me for the failure, and our inability to find the issue on site (mind you he was there too). When I brought this up at my review I was indirectly told by my boss that he didn't agree with my rating/rank but it was over his head. After that, I practiced both Items 1 & 2 but discovered that my new company also followed this practice. So it was a rinse and repeat to make sure force ranking is not within my new companies.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mbesto 13y agoSAP is too!
- andrewkreid 13y agoThe main takeaway here is that large companies have large-company pathologies. If you don't like that, work at smaller companies.
- progn 13y agoEh. I'm in Facebook bootcamp now. Between this article about the ranking system, a truly uninspiring (to me --- YMMV) choice of teams to work on, and the press Facebook has been getting lately, I'm seriously considering parting ways and going somewhere else. Nobody can beat Facebook's pay or food, but what good is it if I feel like I lack direction and purpose? How much would it damage my career to say I tried FB bootcamp and didn't feel it was a match?
- kybernetikos 13y agoI can't speak for anyone else, but it depends a bit on what you do next. One or two solid jobs down the road, I doubt anyone will really care, but if you do it enough that it looks like you have made a habit of joining up and then not giving it a fair chance based on gossip from outside the company, then yes, that will count against you.
- daveman692 13y agoHey, since I can't find your name or contact info on your account I figured I'd comment saying that I run Bootcamp and it sounds like we should chat (dr@fb.com) :)
- nbm 13y agoAs a complement to dr's offer above, if you want to talk to someone who has been at FB for a while and worked with a bunch of infrastructure (traffic, core systems, &c.) and product (graph search, site integrity, &c.) teams, hit me up. My unixname is neil (and my non-work contact details are in the HN profile). I'd like to help you and dr find you a good match - FB has been a great opportunity for me, but I stumbled a bit so I know how important finding the right thing to work on is. I can also offer you my frank impression of the performance review system here, which I've been through a few times as an IC and as a manager.
- benmax 13y agoWhy would you say you quit right off the bat? So you can brag about being accepted but not staying? I don't really understand
- michaelochurch 13y agoWhy do these companies have Microsoft-style stack-ranking systems? Because many engineers are pussies who don't fight for themselves. Imagine if that stack-ranking nonsense were done to a law firm. (Law firms have a very civilized way of managing people out into external promotions if they, after ~6 years, obviously aren't going to make partner. Google "Cravath model".) There'd be lawsuits galore. Attorneys would start legal process just to get embarrassing details (about said stack ranking, perhaps) into the public in discovery. Why? Because they (including the female ones) have balls. Doctors and lawyers would never put up with MSFT-style stack-ranking. Bankers find clever ways to subvert and abuse it when it is imposed upon them. But there are a lot of engineers who are just cowards, unwilling to stick up for themselves. Example: in many companies, negative performance reviews are part of the transfer packet and impede mobility. Being (again) pussies who don't fight for themselves, many engineers just assume that's how things work. No, it's not. You can actually build a legal case on that alone. It's harassment (interference with job duties, here interpreted as using internal mobility opportunities) and already the start of a legal case-- if you get your shit together and start documenting. Use the right words and the bad review will go away. Stack ranking isn't technically illegal, but if it renders immobile people who perform in good faith (i.e. don't flagrantly blow off job requirements) it does leave the company civilly liable for harassment charges-- interference with job duties. If software engineers collectively grew a pair, it would fall down within minutes.
- jacques_chester 13y agoYour remarks assume that software developers aren't subverting stack ranking. Anecdotally, they are, either individually or in cooperation with their managers.
- yesiamyourdad 13y agoA lot is self-imposed: engineers tend to believe in the idea of a meritocracy and the 20% overachievers. It's the lone hacker ethic. The downside is that if you stick to that, 80% of us get the shaft. Lots of comparisons to attorneys, on significant difference is that attorneys have a way to advance their career while remaining an attorney. I've got nearly 20 years in this biz and constantly get told that if I want to increase my salary, I need to move into management. I notice a lot of the discussion is around how to get "promoted". Attorneys get promoted to partner, at which point they have equity in the company, and that's not "here's some stock options", you actually have your cash invested in the partnership.
- calinet6 13y agoHere's a question to which most people experience revulsion, but must be thought of and answered honestly: Why not give everyone the same bonus based on company performance? Make it collective good. You'll probably think of reasons, like "good people should be rewarded," or "people who do things wrong need to have consequences," but you must realize the alternative is this vile demotivational anti-pattern with even worse consequences. The right way is to align the company goal with the individual goal, and do it simply and clearly. American companies need to understand and follow Deming's principles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle...), or we'll continue falling into the soul-sucking black hole we're already halfway into. He already knew all of this, every bit of what we're experiencing, and our objection to his ideas is nothing more than an ideological almost religious belief that the most effective way to motivate individuals is to rank, rate, measure, and reward them accordingly. In fact, those archaic methods of management only serve to demotivate and systemically destroy culture and productivity alike, and reduces the quality of whatever you produce, be it innovation or physical products. We know this. Deming's ideas work. They are truth in writing, and knowledge in practice. He pulled Japan out of a post-war recession and made them legends of quality production for pete's sake. Why can't we learn?
- forkandwait 13y agoI am currently reading a bunch of the Toyota Way books, Deming, etc. and sometimes I wonder if one of the most basic assumptions in the West is that the individual is the root and the system is a derived thing. This assumption starts, maybe, with Christianity which tells us that we stand alone before God judged on our individual character, not on our wealth or social position. Buddhism, on the other hand, tells us that even our perception of selfhood and autonomy is an illusion to be rooted out and discounted. To toss out an assumption as fundamental as these would require a huge realignment of all sorts of things -- how we punish and reward, our sense of self worth, who is good and who is bad, etc. So we don't really want to go there. I think the West could benefit from a swing to the Systems/ Wholeness side of the dichotomy, but I wouldn't want to discount how powerful and what a creative force our individualism has been throughout the last 2000 years. (EDIT, PS: Deming is the real deal, and the Toyota Way/ Lean books and movement tries to take some of his surface ideas and implement them without challenging their readers in the way Deming wanted to.) (EDIT, PPS: Toyota / Buddha says "You see a problem? Change the system." Microsoft/ Jesus says "You see a problem? Roast the culpable individuals, reward the virtuous individuals.") (EDIT, PPPS: Hegel and his philosophical descendants have the best take on the dynamic movement between individual and collective, without discounting either of the two viewpoints.)
- winslow 13y agoI recall Valve having a stack ranking system as well? I haven't heard anything bad about their ranking system though. Maybe it is different considering the lack of managers with the flat culture that makes it better. EDIT: Article I found on MS vs Valve stack ranking. http://www.jpuddy.net/2012/stack-ranking-to-gain-team-insight/ http://www.jpuddy.net/2012/stack-ranking-to-gain-team-insigh...
- brosco45 13y agoBecause they hired Microsoft managers.
- unsupak 13y agoIt depends on whether there are any checks so that such ranking systems are not abused. I know first hand that such systems are ripe for abuse by those who are connected. I know of an incident when a well connected long term employee performed very poorly and was put in the weeding out category. However because of his connections with Vice Presidents was able to engineer so that someone else was given his place in the ranking and fired. In a way a person was specifically hired to that team, reviews were engineered to give him a bad review in order to remove the well-connected but badly performing manager from the bottom list. This was not uncommon and would happen invariably in order to save the well connected but poorly performing person.
- joe_the_user 13y agoFacebook is the company that surprised me here. Stackrank seems like umpteen other methods whose ultimate aim is to vacuuming people dry and discarding them. This "works" in the sense that if you can't motivate someone with the challenge, excitement and etc of working for you, there's always money, fear and the-other-etceteras. Yahoo and Microsoft have lost all cachet to their workplace, and Amazon has always been innovative in the "our engineers have calculated exactly the profit made from turning off the air-conditioning in warehousing and legal has drafted the matching don't-ask, don't-tell contract" sense. But Facebook using this seems like an indication they've reconciled themselves to being on the way down. That was quick.
- WalterBright 13y ago> Why not give everyone the same bonus based on company performance? Make it collective good. That pretty much happens when companies routinely provide stock to the employees.
- amaks 13y agoOf course there is a curve in all companies. The question is of interpretation how review scores get assigned (stab in my back and lunches with manager's peers like in Microsoft and perhaps in Amazon), or based on a peer reviews like in Google. Besides, to the best of my knowledge there is no fixed bottom 10% (or any number of percents) in Google/Facebook which ought to let go after each review period, compared to Microsoft.
- amaks 13y ago"Although there isn’t forced ranking in place, it does looks like Google one-upped Amazon in making it difficult to climb up their corporate ladder by having a promotion process based on pleasing everyone." This is not true. First, I think it's great that promotion-readiness is decided by an employee and not her manager(s). Second, when promotion packet is written, it gets reviewed by a promotion committee, most likely in another campus, and there is a very high likelihood that promotions are granted more objectively compared to the manager's peers (and up the chain, depending on a target level like it's done in Microsoft, long before peer feedback is written). Promotion committee decisions get reviewed and iterated to satisfy the promotion budget, and those lucky ones who meet the bar, get promoted. Sounds like a pretty fair system to me.