6 ms·
So 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 sam
by xal 13y ago
So 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.