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This is actually pretty big. If I'm interpreting this correctly, Google arbitrarily stack ranked employees then dropped the lowest ranked one. Courts thought th
by 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 agoIt 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 agoI honestly have not seen a company larger than ~25 people where that was true. Can you give an example?
- azth 12y agoValve? :)
- DerpDerpDerp 12y agoI'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 agoIt'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 agoThings 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 agoSure, but you're leaving "competence" unspecified. Political connections are based upon competence at what? Therein lies the rub.
- scott_s 12y agoThere'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 agoSomeone 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 agoSolo! Solo! Too Nakma Noya Solo!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]