6 ms·

Sacked Google worker awarded €110,000 for unfair dismissal

87 points by rmchugh 12y ago

noobface 12y ago
This is actually pretty big. If I'm interpreting this correctly, Google arbitrarily stack ranked employees then dropped the lowest ranked one. Courts thought that process was unfair, opening up the door for every single ex-Googler in Ireland. I'd love to have a protections like this in the US. I've had the same thing happen to me at a large company. Political ranking rather than performance leads to some incredibly insular work places.
- bsbechtel 12y ago
  It never feels like it at the time, but you're better off winding up at a workplace that values your contributions over your political connections.
  - TrainedMonkey 12y ago
    I honestly have not seen a company larger than ~25 people where that was true. Can you give an example?
    - azth 12y ago
      Valve? :)
      - DerpDerpDerp 12y ago
        I've heard tale that because of the lack of formal structure at Valve, you need political connections to actually get anything done. Perhaps even more so than places with a formal structure.
        mercer 12y ago
        It's quite likely that some kind of hidden structure emerged. However, could you explain what you mean with 'political' in this context? Because 'political connections', in my mind, also includes reputation and knowledge of competence. And that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
        DerpDerpDerp 12y ago
        Things that would normally qualify as "soft power", eg, being friends with the right people, trading favors, reputation management, etc. Even the example you give requires reputation management, as opposed to merely raising a good technical argument at the time (as a new person on the staff).
        rhizome 12y ago
        Sure, but you're leaving "competence" unspecified. Political connections are based upon competence at what? Therein lies the rub.
        scott_s 12y ago
        There's a famous essay about exactly that called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". We discussed it about two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611
        kyllo 12y ago
        Someone already made a variation of Greenspun's Tenth Rule about this--in the absence of formal management, your company will contain an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of management.
      - sneak 12y ago
        Solo! Solo! Too Nakma Noya Solo!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 12y ago
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anigbrowl 12y ago
Because of this, she said staff were ranked from one to five and someone at Google always had to get a low score “of 2.9”, so the unit could match the bell curve. She said senior staff “calibrated” the ratings supplied by line managers to ensure conformity with the template and these calibrations could reduce a line manager’s assessment of an employee, in effect giving them the poisoned score of less than three. Being from Ireland myself, it amazes me that Americans tolerate stack ranking, grading on a curve, and t-scores - tools whose statistical utility has been obviated by the abandonment of all other contexts.
- tsaoutourpants 12y ago
  Most of us don't. The practice is largely confined to Silicon Valley, and there are plenty of other places for any variety of technologist to work. Why anyone wants to work for Google is beyond me.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    I don't know about "largely", but it certainly is also highly dependent on the management in place. One place I worked one of the managers basically implemented an unofficial "stack ranking" within his group of 4-6 employees so that he could always have a scapegoat.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    It's not at all largely confined to Silicon Valley - GE and Microsoft were the places that really popularized stack ranking, back in the 80s, and it's all over Wall Street and consulting. It may be largely confined to the United States - I don't have enough international work experience to know whether other countries do it, but just judging by cultural differences, it seems somewhat unlikely. As for why anyone works for Google - as a recently ex-Googler, I can answer that. Most of us don't think about it at all. The calibration scores are hidden from us, and they only have observable effects once a year when bonuses and raises come out. And most Googlers are paid ridiculously well anyway (don't we have an article on HN about Bay Area gentrification every few days?), and typically would be working in finance if they cared about maximizing financial payout. So people work for Google because they want the other things Google can provide - challenging technical problems, smart coworkers, the chance to impact millions of users even in a tiny way - and it doesn't particularly matter what management thinks of us. Compensation was a small part of my decision to leave. I left because I felt that I had learned everything I could learn at Google, and the stuff that I did want to explore and learn about could only be done outside of the company.
Splendor 12y ago
Interesting. I was unaware that Google used stacked rankings.
- DannyBee 12y ago
  They really don't (at least for performance). The article gets several things wrong. For example, the purpose of calibration is not to stack rank, but to ensure consistency (IE 3.5 means the same thing across different orgs), etc. Managers don't sit in a room and try to force fit a curve.
UweSchmidt 12y ago
Basically with stack ranking, if I see a colleague doing well, that's bad for me? Sounds horrible.
- rmchugh 12y ago
  There was an interesting article about Microsoft's use of a similar mechanism written by one of their developers. He wrote that it encouraged people to seek out incompetent teams to work with as within these teams they were guaranteed to shine. Thus, clever people did not want to work with clever people, as it would reflect poorly on their evaluations, regardless of the team's actual performance. As I understand it, Microsoft have dropped the use of these mechanisms, for this and other reasons.
  - UweSchmidt 12y ago
    More fundamentally, what led to such a system in the first place? "People are fundamentally lazy and we need to do X to make them work" vs. "People are fundamentally awesome and will work hard if we can remove obstacles and demotivators."
    - xcntktn 12y ago
      You just described this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
      - UweSchmidt 12y ago
        Exactly, thanks!
    - georgemcbay 12y ago
      Of course many middle-management types assume everyone is fundamentally intellectually lazy, just like a thief assumes everyone wants to steal his stuff.
  - rhizome 12y ago
brudgers 12y ago
Another article on stack ranking system? We get it. Stack ranking is evil. What more could we expect from a horrible company when the best thing that could happen is that they fail. We hateses nasty lying Mic... Nevermind sorry gollum gollum.
- hga 12y ago
  An article that makes a potentially credible claim---testimony under oath, I presume, that a judge found credible---that Google's acknowledged stack ranking system is now being used to fire people is a very big thing.
century19 12y ago
When I worked for a consultancy in about my second year I got a great review. A few days later my manager called me into a meeting and apologised and said the grading had to be reviewed as the country manager wanted it to be lowered. This person didn't know me and didn't know what I was doing. And so it was lowered. This did affect my pay rise I believe, that was all. It did annoy the hell out of me at the time though. I think my manager made a mistake in letting me know the rating before someone who didn't know me approved it. This probably happens a lot, ratings getting downgraded, and people don't know.
tsycho 12y ago
The article is very vague on the actual specifics of this termination, and I don't claim to know any more details. However, to at least play devil's advocate to this one sided story, what incentive does Google have to fire someone "arbitrarily" if they have been performing satisfactorily, especially considering that Google has been on a continuous hiring spree for a while? Doesn't it seem plausible that the said employee wasn't doing a great job in the first place? If Google fired the lowest stack ranked member in each team every year, we would have heard about 100s of stories or lawsuits by now. I don't know if Google is clean in this particular case, but something smells fishy from the story as it is currently portrayed in this article.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > Doesn't it seem plausible that the said employee wasn't doing a great job in the first place? Playing ong with your devil's advocacy: there are ways to fire someone who is not performing well. Europe makes it harder, but not impossible, to fire under-performing employees. Certainly in England it's pretty easy to fire people, especially in their first two years of employment. (Just avoid any hint of discrimination against the protected statuses). Also: I'm curious. Don't you trust the Irish courts?
- steven2012 12y ago
  Jack Welch popularized this decades ago, where every year he would force departments to cull 5-10% of their employees. He stated that this was well-received for the first few years, but after that it got harder, because managers were starting to let go people who were actually decent. But Welch insisted on this because it kept things from stagnating, as well as keeping open reqs when you found very good people. He also said that managers would start to try to game the system where they would hire poorly performing people just so that they could be culled. I think there is some value to occasionally culling your worst performers, but having it as a practice every year the way Welch did, and presumably Google does, makes it tough on everyone because it could lead to situations where good but not outstanding employees are let go for no apparently reason.
- jacalata 12y ago
  What lawsuits would you have seen? I don't see how it would be illegal to do that in the US in any way.
vfxGer 12y ago
More details in an earlier article http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/sacked-google-manager-got-30pc-pay-rise-previous-year-tribunal-told-29394243.html http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/sacked-google-ma...

87 points by rmchugh 12y ago

This is actually pretty big. If I'm interpreting this correctly, Google arbitrarily stack ranked employees then dropped the lowest ranked one. Courts thought that process was unfair, opening up the door for every single ex-Googler in Ireland. I'd love to have a protections like this in the US. I've had the same thing happen to me at a large company. Political ranking rather than performance leads to some incredibly insular work places.

bsbechtel 12y ago
It never feels like it at the time, but you're better off winding up at a workplace that values your contributions over your political connections.
- TrainedMonkey 12y ago
  I honestly have not seen a company larger than ~25 people where that was true. Can you give an example?
  - azth 12y ago
    Valve? :)
    - DerpDerpDerp 12y ago
      I've heard tale that because of the lack of formal structure at Valve, you need political connections to actually get anything done. Perhaps even more so than places with a formal structure.
      - mercer 12y ago
        It's quite likely that some kind of hidden structure emerged. However, could you explain what you mean with 'political' in this context? Because 'political connections', in my mind, also includes reputation and knowledge of competence. And that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
        DerpDerpDerp 12y ago
        Things that would normally qualify as "soft power", eg, being friends with the right people, trading favors, reputation management, etc. Even the example you give requires reputation management, as opposed to merely raising a good technical argument at the time (as a new person on the staff).
        rhizome 12y ago
        Sure, but you're leaving "competence" unspecified. Political connections are based upon competence at what? Therein lies the rub.
      - scott_s 12y ago
        There's a famous essay about exactly that called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". We discussed it about two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611
      - kyllo 12y ago
        Someone already made a variation of Greenspun's Tenth Rule about this--in the absence of formal management, your company will contain an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of management.
    - sneak 12y ago
      Solo! Solo! Too Nakma Noya Solo!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 12y ago

Because of this, she said staff were ranked from one to five and someone at Google always had to get a low score “of 2.9”, so the unit could match the bell curve. She said senior staff “calibrated” the ratings supplied by line managers to ensure conformity with the template and these calibrations could reduce a line manager’s assessment of an employee, in effect giving them the poisoned score of less than three. Being from Ireland myself, it amazes me that Americans tolerate stack ranking, grading on a curve, and t-scores - tools whose statistical utility has been obviated by the abandonment of all other contexts.

tsaoutourpants 12y ago
Most of us don't. The practice is largely confined to Silicon Valley, and there are plenty of other places for any variety of technologist to work. Why anyone wants to work for Google is beyond me.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  I don't know about "largely", but it certainly is also highly dependent on the management in place. One place I worked one of the managers basically implemented an unofficial "stack ranking" within his group of 4-6 employees so that he could always have a scapegoat.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  It's not at all largely confined to Silicon Valley - GE and Microsoft were the places that really popularized stack ranking, back in the 80s, and it's all over Wall Street and consulting. It may be largely confined to the United States - I don't have enough international work experience to know whether other countries do it, but just judging by cultural differences, it seems somewhat unlikely. As for why anyone works for Google - as a recently ex-Googler, I can answer that. Most of us don't think about it at all. The calibration scores are hidden from us, and they only have observable effects once a year when bonuses and raises come out. And most Googlers are paid ridiculously well anyway (don't we have an article on HN about Bay Area gentrification every few days?), and typically would be working in finance if they cared about maximizing financial payout. So people work for Google because they want the other things Google can provide - challenging technical problems, smart coworkers, the chance to impact millions of users even in a tiny way - and it doesn't particularly matter what management thinks of us. Compensation was a small part of my decision to leave. I left because I felt that I had learned everything I could learn at Google, and the stuff that I did want to explore and learn about could only be done outside of the company.

Splendor 12y ago

Interesting. I was unaware that Google used stacked rankings.

DannyBee 12y ago
They really don't (at least for performance). The article gets several things wrong. For example, the purpose of calibration is not to stack rank, but to ensure consistency (IE 3.5 means the same thing across different orgs), etc. Managers don't sit in a room and try to force fit a curve.

UweSchmidt 12y ago

Basically with stack ranking, if I see a colleague doing well, that's bad for me? Sounds horrible.

rmchugh 12y ago
There was an interesting article about Microsoft's use of a similar mechanism written by one of their developers. He wrote that it encouraged people to seek out incompetent teams to work with as within these teams they were guaranteed to shine. Thus, clever people did not want to work with clever people, as it would reflect poorly on their evaluations, regardless of the team's actual performance. As I understand it, Microsoft have dropped the use of these mechanisms, for this and other reasons.
- UweSchmidt 12y ago
  More fundamentally, what led to such a system in the first place? "People are fundamentally lazy and we need to do X to make them work" vs. "People are fundamentally awesome and will work hard if we can remove obstacles and demotivators."
  - xcntktn 12y ago
    You just described this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y
    - UweSchmidt 12y ago
      Exactly, thanks!
  - georgemcbay 12y ago
    Of course many middle-management types assume everyone is fundamentally intellectually lazy, just like a thief assumes everyone wants to steal his stuff.
- rhizome 12y ago

brudgers 12y ago

Another article on stack ranking system? We get it. Stack ranking is evil. What more could we expect from a horrible company when the best thing that could happen is that they fail. We hateses nasty lying Mic... Nevermind sorry gollum gollum.

hga 12y ago
An article that makes a potentially credible claim---testimony under oath, I presume, that a judge found credible---that Google's acknowledged stack ranking system is now being used to fire people is a very big thing.

century19 12y ago

When I worked for a consultancy in about my second year I got a great review. A few days later my manager called me into a meeting and apologised and said the grading had to be reviewed as the country manager wanted it to be lowered. This person didn't know me and didn't know what I was doing. And so it was lowered. This did affect my pay rise I believe, that was all. It did annoy the hell out of me at the time though. I think my manager made a mistake in letting me know the rating before someone who didn't know me approved it. This probably happens a lot, ratings getting downgraded, and people don't know.

tsycho 12y ago

The article is very vague on the actual specifics of this termination, and I don't claim to know any more details. However, to at least play devil's advocate to this one sided story, what incentive does Google have to fire someone "arbitrarily" if they have been performing satisfactorily, especially considering that Google has been on a continuous hiring spree for a while? Doesn't it seem plausible that the said employee wasn't doing a great job in the first place? If Google fired the lowest stack ranked member in each team every year, we would have heard about 100s of stories or lawsuits by now. I don't know if Google is clean in this particular case, but something smells fishy from the story as it is currently portrayed in this article.

DanBC 12y ago
> Doesn't it seem plausible that the said employee wasn't doing a great job in the first place? Playing ong with your devil's advocacy: there are ways to fire someone who is not performing well. Europe makes it harder, but not impossible, to fire under-performing employees. Certainly in England it's pretty easy to fire people, especially in their first two years of employment. (Just avoid any hint of discrimination against the protected statuses). Also: I'm curious. Don't you trust the Irish courts?
steven2012 12y ago
Jack Welch popularized this decades ago, where every year he would force departments to cull 5-10% of their employees. He stated that this was well-received for the first few years, but after that it got harder, because managers were starting to let go people who were actually decent. But Welch insisted on this because it kept things from stagnating, as well as keeping open reqs when you found very good people. He also said that managers would start to try to game the system where they would hire poorly performing people just so that they could be culled. I think there is some value to occasionally culling your worst performers, but having it as a practice every year the way Welch did, and presumably Google does, makes it tough on everyone because it could lead to situations where good but not outstanding employees are let go for no apparently reason.
jacalata 12y ago
What lawsuits would you have seen? I don't see how it would be illegal to do that in the US in any way.

vfxGer 12y ago

More details in an earlier article http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/sacked-google-manager-got-30pc-pay-rise-previous-year-tribunal-told-29394243.html http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/sacked-google-ma...