21 ms·

My Microsoft Experience (2013)

134 points by luu 11y ago

sudioStudio64 11y ago
Wasn't stack ranking one of the first things that went after Ballmer announced he was leaving?
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Yes, this blog post is from 2013.
- devsquid 11y ago
  I imagine the culture still lingers however, stuff like that tends to stick even decades later.
  - melted 11y ago
    From what I heard, there really IS no stack rank or numeric ratings this time. Managers do get discretion wrt pay and equity, but not much of it. The only score you can give to someone consists of a checkbox that basically says "this person sucks and we need to let him/her go". TBH, I have to say I like this system. Google, for instance, has both the curve and the stack rank, as well as promotion by committee who have no first hand knowledge of your work.
jbapple 11y ago
This is part one of a three part series. Part 2 is here: http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2013/12/23/challenges-with-a-stack-rank-23/ http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2013/12/23/challenges-with-a-stac... Part 3 is here: http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/01/21/effective-performance-reviews-33/ http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/01/21/effective-performance-...
antics 11y ago
One important thing to remember about MSFT is that more than half of the company is "the field" -- sales, evangelism, operations, and so on. The stack ranking system is and was hugely popular with this org. It is popular nowhere else. MSFT still likes to think of itself as an engineering company, but it is hard to have a tail that big and not sometimes accidentally wag the dog. Stack ranking is probably the best example of how true this is. EDIT: To add some color to this tale, a Technical Fellow once told me that during the "rank and yank" period (when everyone was ranked and the bottom 10% were effectively fired) he was continually on the verge of quitting. If you are doing something like inventing the CLR, and you hired 5 of your favorite engineers, how are you supposed to react when someone tells you that it is imperative to fire one of them per year? What could the point of that possibly be? This is more or less a common sentiment among extremely senior engineers who ran important orgs at that time.
- jmspring 11y ago
  Sales and the field also had (not sure if they still do) a different compensation structure than day to day engineering. That can also play into things.
- kabdib 11y ago
  Yeah, we saw a ton of bad attrition. Really good people leaving. I myself often thought I would quit; eventually, I did, though not because of the review model. Ask HR about bad attrition and they would totally deny it. "Sure, people leave. They leave all the time." But if your really, really good systems programmers are bailing, you have a problem; those people do not grow on trees.
- shawnb576 11y ago
  Yeah, I ran a team like this. I was able to attract the best of the best and built a solid team, but the incentive was to hire some people that weren't as good so they could give you somewhere to throw the 10%'s. It's awful because a lot of those people still work hard and are reasonably good at their job, no one wins. I was fortunate that a partner team had a lot of low-performers and I got a little break when we combined curves. That said, I'm skeptical that the stack rank system is gone, based on what I hear from those that are still there (I've been out for many years now). It sounds like a lot of the same curve-fitting is just renamed.
  - steven777400 11y ago
    When I was offered a position at Microsoft, I declined in part because, after the interview, I was concerned they were precisely looking to hire someone to be the "fall guy" for the team (this was while stack ranking was still in effect). Now I'm by no means a great developer (as one of my Microsoft-employed friends brutally said about my declining, "No loss for Microsoft"), but I imagine this concern could scare away genuinely good developers too worried that the politics of "keeping the team together" would outweigh any actual individual contribution they'd make.
    - darkengine 11y ago
jmspring 11y ago
The first full fiscal review cycle where stack ranking took effect was in June of 2014. The announcement was in late 2013, but well, Microsoft fiscal cycle runs July -> end of June. I really don't see how the announcement of doing away with stack ranking (an abomination) dove tails in with something in 2013. Note that the news articles of it's demise were in late 2013, and at large companies announcement -> implementation take time. I doubt the half cycle reviews (late fall/winter) of 2013 fell under the non-stack rank rules, hell, year end is when most of the formal stuff takes place. Another edit -- stack rank elimination was announced end of 2013, realistically the next review cycle (may/june 2014) it took effect. If I look at the poster of the blog's LinkedIn profile, she lists her leaving in Sept of 2012. So this is a valid comment on the stack rank system -- it was certainly a cancer. That said, the timing and lack of detail makes it a bit confusing as to the fact that stack ranking went away basically in mid 2014. (edit some more detail)
douche 11y ago
I'd be interested to hear more stories out of Microsoft about the actual engineers that are doing the real technical work. A lot of these grief pieces seem to come from people that are in the PM/lower-middle management space. When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author did that actually provided significant value, particularly in that final stretch.
- undertow 11y ago
  > When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author did that actually provided significant value, particularly in that final stretch. Yeah, and that's kind of the point. Human value is not intrinsically quantifiable. You can try and apply objective numbers to human behavior, but usually only with brutal results. She nails that point in the second paragraph with the five step break-down. Reviews often boil down to a game of "yeah, but what have you done for me lately?" You generally get railroaded by systems like stack ranking, unless you totally depersonalize your relationship with your peers and directors, and play the numbers game, tallying up petty minutia which may or may not be completely disregarded by the ones who make the rules anyway. This sort of relationship is biased in favor of firing, rather than maintaining and building loyalty. It's all about negative reinforcement, and keeping your subordinates at arms length, so you can easily replace the ones that burn out, once they've proven useless. If that's the sort of atmosphere you crave, have fun. It's not the only way.
  - douche 11y ago
    I wouldn't advocate stack ranking. I would advocate cleaning out or re-purposing deadwood that is not doing anything productive or dragging the rest of the team down. If you can find something else productive for them to do, then that is great, but sometimes people just need to go elsewhere. If things are going well, then firing the least best of your crack staff is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
    - bbcbasic 11y ago
      Stack ranking is analogous to amputating the worst performing 10% of your body, every year. Or 'breaking up' with the worst 10% of your friends. Or knocking down the worst 10% of your house. Etc.
wpietri 11y ago
> There’s a metric in the career-tracking website called “promotion velocity” I can believe that one person was dumb enough to put a metric like that somewhere. But how could an organization be filled with people unable to recognize the systemic effect of highlighting that, the perverse incentives it gives?
- judk 11y ago
  It's horrible but it plays into the myth of the elite rock star. Marisa Mayer at Google famously had a gaggle of special junior PMs that she shepherded into high ranking roles.
  - Rainymood 11y ago
    >Marisa Mayer at Google famously had a gaggle of special junior PMs that she shepherded into high ranking roles. Got some source on that? I'm curious now ...
    - jpatokal 11y ago
      judk is presumably referring to the APM program: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Googles-APM-program http://www.quora.com/What-is-Googles-APM-program
- gumby 11y ago
  Microsoft isn't the first to look at "promotion velocity." The US military does same with with commissioned officers (called "up or out"). If you're passed over twice for promotion you leave. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out Hmm, after looking at that page I see this is quite a common practice. I hope my competitors use it!
smegel 11y ago
I either here really good stories about working at MSFT, or really bad ones. And the really bad ones almost always seem to raise the performance evaluation system there.
fsk 11y ago
tl;dr paraphrasing The OP started out with a good manager and a good team. Then the OP was moved to a bad manager on a bad team. Stack ranking and "promotion velocity". Therefore, time to leave Microsoft. It's almost impossible to survive in any job when your direct boss decides he doesn't want you around.
- qt7 11y ago
  Out of that post I got the feeling of an unhealthy obsession with being promoted, being promoted quickly, being recognised as excellent, nothing less-than-excellent on his review, complaining burn-out (really?). I probably would have had a hard time dealing with what seems to be a youth with a big ego, with a needing behaviour, no idea of how to behave himself and how to balance life and work. I get it, he was young, still, not the type of person I'd ever want to hire.
  - geofft 11y ago
    I don't know a lot of "he"s named Ellen.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    unhealthy obsession with being promoted, being promoted quickly, being recognised as excellent, nothing less-than-excellent on his review That is the mentality the Microsoft metrics-driven management is supposed to encourage. You have to get promoted to be recognised. You have to be seen as better than those around you to avoid being cut in the stack ranking.
    - fsk 11y ago
      "Up or out" makes sense for the military or a law firm or accounting firm. When a software company does it, then it's just needlessly churning employees. Of course, Microsoft always has plenty of recent college graduates eagerly applying every year, so there always are replacements.
    - hamburglar 11y ago
      Yes, absolutely. Once you stop getting promoted at Microsoft, management is conditioned to look at you as dead wood. I was there for nearly 10 years and had good coaching through 5 promotions. One of the things that was kind of nice about the system is that my managers were always really good at spelling out exactly what was going to be expected of me in order to reach the next level. Unfortunately, the requirements just keep ratcheting up, and I got to the point where what my manager laid out as the next set of requirements was simply never going to happen. I wasn't interested in putting in ever-increasing effort and taking on ever-increasing responsibilities. This is when he explained to me that if you just decide to be happy where you are, Microsoft basically starts to lose interest in you and you get the shaft in the stack-ranking. So I left.
hyperliner 11y ago
There are a few other things people almost don't talk about because these blogs seem to always be from people in level 60 (junior people). - There is really no 20% rule that applies to teams. The calibration process is across bands / levels across a given product area. So it is not that you are supposed to give a score of 5 (deadwood) to a member in your 5-people team. It means all people across the division who are at level X are looked at and "sorted" to do that assignment. People level 64-65 and above typically have these "cards" that they use to sort people. That is the meeting where your manager or his manager is supposed to support you. But the other managers don't really know who you are for real. In the best case, they may know of you. So it is really hard to have a conversation because only one or two people have context about every person. So just to summarize, there are these cards that people drop on a table where they do the classification, and people don't really know who they are ranking. - the second point is that moving into new teams is in many cases a really bad idea because the new manager now inherits a new person that cannot be defended as well as the existing team for the simple reason that the new person is not known as well. Many people have been in the same division for 15 years or more. You know they are not going to be an unknown and they coast on the legacy reviews. The new guy / gal is an easy victim unless she is some sort of Bill Gates right off the bat. - one thing that was crazy in that review is that they not only let go of people with bad scores. They also let go of people with good scores but who are deemed to have reached their plateau level. So you may still be a great director or GPM but if the system decides the director is not going to make GM or the GPM is not going to make director, then they also see you as a candidate to get rid of. - the most important problem for the industry I believe is that the system perpetuates the need to create NEW stuff. So for example, why would somebody create Powershell instead of using a perfectly fine alternative from the Linux / Unix world? Well, because that way you are the person who created a NEW thing and not who simply PORTED a solution! Can you imagine the world today if we could use the same commands or patterns of commands in Windows as we do in Linux? Clearly the OS are too different for that to be practical but we cannot argue that the syntax and paradigm could have been more similar.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Powershell's object pipeline far outshines the Unix style "pass around strings and dick with parsing everywhere". It also handles quoting in a much more sane manner, eliminating security holes or just plain bugs you get in, say, bash. The included editor and command line completion for arguments is really slick. Painting PS as just NIH is simply incorrect. MS bringing back Services for Unix for real is a somewhat orthogonal issue than coming up with a superior shell.
melted 11y ago
To give you some perspective from an ex-softie (been on the outside for 7 years now, so my experience is not recent). PMs are the hated super-political, credit grabbing ruling class of Microsoft. She was a junior PM. It's not clear what most of them actually do. When I was there, they pretended to "design" features, where in reality the specs were written by devs, they just took credit for them. Then they sat around in meetings and "managed the schedule" and "reported status" to one another. Since there are (or at least were) so many of them at Microsoft, the whole "reporting status" thing can self-perpetuate, because at some point the communication overhead begins to dominate. As a result, most PMs just interfere with work and slow things down, sometimes dramatically so. This was the result of someone deciding, some 20-25 years ago, that developers couldn't handle talking to one another, and they couldn't test software themselves. I sort of agree with the latter point, but only when it comes to manual and end-to-end testing. Developers have an overriding priority: to get stuff out the door, whether it's ready or not. That's what they get promoted for. Any kind of deep testing beyond unit tests is considered, by and large, a waste of time, especially by junior devs who haven't been through support hell yet. PMs though? You could easily have one or two of them per team of 20 devs if they do their work well, not 1:1 as it sometimes is at Microsoft. Shit, for the past 7 years I haven't worked with any PMs at all, and my productivity is at all time high. So when I found out recently that Microsoft is getting rid of the formal test discipline (a mistake, IMO, for reasons outlined above, should have merely reduced their scope to high value work), I thought about PMs as well. Bite the pillow, my PM brethren, Satya is going in dry. I imagine once the second shoe falls, Microsoft will once again be a pretty decent place to work.
- judk 11y ago
  That last paragraph is disgusting and inappropriate.
  - melted 11y ago
    Good. That means it came across the way I meant it.
- judk 11y ago
  IIRC, Charles Simonyi invented the PM role and organization.
randomfool 11y ago
Primary issue here seems more like a manager who was not trying to help her grow. I see this end horribly much too often in large companies- focus of the project shifts and manager assigns task which is a bad fit. Employee struggles for 6 months or more (probably within the 1yr 'no transfer' period many companies have). Manager doesn't try to find a better project, reviews slip, employee is warned that perf must improve but by then the manager has it in for them and because of low perf they cannot transfer.
0987612345 11y ago
Another ex-softie, from UX background, senior level. I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing (user flow, interactions) features. They are never trained for that in their academics, at the time of hiring they are never quizzed on that (if they are then its on the whims of individual interviewer). And absolute worst is some of them are not even very passionate about it but they end up doing because their manager expects them to. Most of the time they come in the way of designers - that is the good part. The bad part is when they take ownership of UX design and the design team has to constantly struggle to get their inputs in. Universally at Microsoft PMs are seen as the ‘owner’ for the UX design, since they write the ‘specs’. The ‘Spec’ (specification document) is compilation of screenshots from design team in a word documents with a narration of the flow. In places like Office there are so many PMs that many a times there will be a spec documents for dialog boxes. A notorious team in Office (where E. Chisa worked) is the OneNote, that team used to take pride till couple of years back that they don’t have any designers, all UX design is done by PMs. No wonder EverNote came out of no where and steamrolled them (I’m personally a big fan of OneNote for its feature set, but hate the User Experience). To me Microsoft’s biggest bane is the PM discipline, they are holding back MS on taking up Apple, Google to new startups (whenever MS engg team was design driven - Ex. Windows Phone - it came out with great products). The PM discipline used to make sense 20 years back, but not now to the extent that one would have 10-12 PMs for a dev team of 40-50.
- edgyswingset 11y ago
  As someone who's about to start as a PM at MSFT soon... > I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing This is my biggest concern going forward. My background is developing backend services, not building good UIs. I'm confident in my ability to build something somewhat sensible (I have some Android and other UI experience), but fundamentally my strengths have always been in designing and piecing together abstractions with code. I feel like the largest roles of a PM should be in resolving ambiguity and enabling people who have good ideas. My current boss, while he could certainly code circles around me, doesn't actually write much code aside from a few unit tests. Instead, any time I wonder why something should be done a certain way, he can give me a reason and convince me it makes sense. When I have a good idea about how something should be done, he gets out of my way, checks up every few days, and removes any non-technical barriers so that it's as painless as possible for me. I believe that the system we work on would be in a horrible state very fast if he were to suddenly up and leave.
frik 11y ago
The article mentions different teams. What's their roles in the development of Microsoft products? Redmond (MS headquarter), Finland (Nokia headquarter), Cambridge (research ?) and India (outsourcing ?)
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  The author of the article worked in windows phone, so those sites make sense. Note thst Cambridge and India have both dev and research, the latter being kind of big.
- Manishearth 11y ago
  (MS India intern here, but speaking for myself) I know of three offices in India -- Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Delhi. These are proper Microsoft divisions, with a hierarchy and all that. Not managed by some other company (At least, Hyderabad/Bangalore aren't; I don't know anything about Delhi) Some things being worked on here are VS, Office (specific portions), Bing, and Azure.
- 0987612345 11y ago
  Finland is not 'Nokia headquarter', Cambridge is not 'research', and India is not 'outsourcing'. All have product building teams (with all the disciplines involved - Dev, PM, Design). Some places are small (lesser people) Ex. Cambridge, some places are large (India - with complete end to end ownership of product building). And there are Japan, China & Israel R&D divisions too and same applies to those places as well (all disciplines are involved in making of whatever products they are creating).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
dareobasanjo 11y ago
It's interesting that the author of the article primarily blames stack ranking for her challenges. From her post she came in with extremely high expectations of how well she'd do at Microsoft (promoted within 6 months), she got a new manager and immediately assumed they'd play favorites with their existing employees then once given a project she couldn't handle instead of asking for help waited too long so "she wouldn't seem clueless". Then she gets a performance review that says she didn't do well and blames the system & her manager. This seems to expose a significant lack of introspection and self awareness. Is there a company in the world that gives a good performance review when someone spends months on a project, doesn't make progress and doesn't ask for help until it's too late? That said there are two places where Microsoft's former performance review methodology hurts here 1. Microsoft used to give people a score in the misguided belief that knowing "you suck" or "you're awesome" relative to your peers is motivational. In some cases, it does but in many cases it has the opposite effect where it causes someone to be so discouraged that they quit. Which is what the blog author did. 2. The requirement to have people who are flagged as "underperforming" in stack rank based models discourages managers from helping people who are struggling. As a manager it is actually somewhat of a relief to have someone who you can clearly award the "sucks" label without the strain of having to decide which of your team of good performers needs to draw the short straw(s). This to me was one of the biggest problems with the model as a manager at Microsoft since your reward for turning around a poor performer is to find someone else to mark as a poor performer.
gumby 11y ago
The disturbing thing about her mention of "promotion velocity" is that it dovetails painfully with what my kid is exposed to with high school/college. There's a (seemingly) clearly defined road to drive down: do tons of AP classes, extracurriculars etc. Someone set some rules, so people follow them (and game them) with a cargo-cult belief that they will "succeed" (definition unspecified). So now we have kids starting college prep in the sixth grade and taking AP tests in the eighth. We end up with the kid I gave a First Aid test to a couple of weeks ago. He had memorized the entire first aid field manual. But I described a situation and some symptoms (me having a heart attack) and frankly, if that kid had been around I would have died. I asked him why he didn't look for symptoms of the "hurry cases" and he said, "well you start with the first ones in the book." I asked them why they are called "Hurry cases" and it hadn't occurred to him that they word "hurry" was more than a label. Sadly, probably a third of the kids I test are like this, but now our rules say I have to pass them because they can answer any question in the book. But the kids who learned to weld at the age of 10 or who take things apart and can't get them back together again or who are argumentative and have deep knowledge on weird topics -- there's no "road" for them. At least some of them can get to go start companies!

134 points by luu 11y ago

sudioStudio64 11y ago

Wasn't stack ranking one of the first things that went after Ballmer announced he was leaving?

jpatokal 11y ago
Yes, this blog post is from 2013.
devsquid 11y ago
I imagine the culture still lingers however, stuff like that tends to stick even decades later.
- melted 11y ago
  From what I heard, there really IS no stack rank or numeric ratings this time. Managers do get discretion wrt pay and equity, but not much of it. The only score you can give to someone consists of a checkbox that basically says "this person sucks and we need to let him/her go". TBH, I have to say I like this system. Google, for instance, has both the curve and the stack rank, as well as promotion by committee who have no first hand knowledge of your work.

jbapple 11y ago

This is part one of a three part series. Part 2 is here: http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2013/12/23/challenges-with-a-stack-rank-23/ http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2013/12/23/challenges-with-a-stac... Part 3 is here: http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/01/21/effective-performance-reviews-33/ http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/01/21/effective-performance-...

antics 11y ago

One important thing to remember about MSFT is that more than half of the company is "the field" -- sales, evangelism, operations, and so on. The stack ranking system is and was hugely popular with this org. It is popular nowhere else. MSFT still likes to think of itself as an engineering company, but it is hard to have a tail that big and not sometimes accidentally wag the dog. Stack ranking is probably the best example of how true this is. EDIT: To add some color to this tale, a Technical Fellow once told me that during the "rank and yank" period (when everyone was ranked and the bottom 10% were effectively fired) he was continually on the verge of quitting. If you are doing something like inventing the CLR, and you hired 5 of your favorite engineers, how are you supposed to react when someone tells you that it is imperative to fire one of them per year? What could the point of that possibly be? This is more or less a common sentiment among extremely senior engineers who ran important orgs at that time.

jmspring 11y ago
Sales and the field also had (not sure if they still do) a different compensation structure than day to day engineering. That can also play into things.
kabdib 11y ago
Yeah, we saw a ton of bad attrition. Really good people leaving. I myself often thought I would quit; eventually, I did, though not because of the review model. Ask HR about bad attrition and they would totally deny it. "Sure, people leave. They leave all the time." But if your really, really good systems programmers are bailing, you have a problem; those people do not grow on trees.
shawnb576 11y ago
Yeah, I ran a team like this. I was able to attract the best of the best and built a solid team, but the incentive was to hire some people that weren't as good so they could give you somewhere to throw the 10%'s. It's awful because a lot of those people still work hard and are reasonably good at their job, no one wins. I was fortunate that a partner team had a lot of low-performers and I got a little break when we combined curves. That said, I'm skeptical that the stack rank system is gone, based on what I hear from those that are still there (I've been out for many years now). It sounds like a lot of the same curve-fitting is just renamed.
- steven777400 11y ago
  When I was offered a position at Microsoft, I declined in part because, after the interview, I was concerned they were precisely looking to hire someone to be the "fall guy" for the team (this was while stack ranking was still in effect). Now I'm by no means a great developer (as one of my Microsoft-employed friends brutally said about my declining, "No loss for Microsoft"), but I imagine this concern could scare away genuinely good developers too worried that the politics of "keeping the team together" would outweigh any actual individual contribution they'd make.
  - darkengine 11y ago

jmspring 11y ago

The first full fiscal review cycle where stack ranking took effect was in June of 2014. The announcement was in late 2013, but well, Microsoft fiscal cycle runs July -> end of June. I really don't see how the announcement of doing away with stack ranking (an abomination) dove tails in with something in 2013. Note that the news articles of it's demise were in late 2013, and at large companies announcement -> implementation take time. I doubt the half cycle reviews (late fall/winter) of 2013 fell under the non-stack rank rules, hell, year end is when most of the formal stuff takes place. Another edit -- stack rank elimination was announced end of 2013, realistically the next review cycle (may/june 2014) it took effect. If I look at the poster of the blog's LinkedIn profile, she lists her leaving in Sept of 2012. So this is a valid comment on the stack rank system -- it was certainly a cancer. That said, the timing and lack of detail makes it a bit confusing as to the fact that stack ranking went away basically in mid 2014. (edit some more detail)

douche 11y ago

I'd be interested to hear more stories out of Microsoft about the actual engineers that are doing the real technical work. A lot of these grief pieces seem to come from people that are in the PM/lower-middle management space. When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author did that actually provided significant value, particularly in that final stretch.

undertow 11y ago
> When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author did that actually provided significant value, particularly in that final stretch. Yeah, and that's kind of the point. Human value is not intrinsically quantifiable. You can try and apply objective numbers to human behavior, but usually only with brutal results. She nails that point in the second paragraph with the five step break-down. Reviews often boil down to a game of "yeah, but what have you done for me lately?" You generally get railroaded by systems like stack ranking, unless you totally depersonalize your relationship with your peers and directors, and play the numbers game, tallying up petty minutia which may or may not be completely disregarded by the ones who make the rules anyway. This sort of relationship is biased in favor of firing, rather than maintaining and building loyalty. It's all about negative reinforcement, and keeping your subordinates at arms length, so you can easily replace the ones that burn out, once they've proven useless. If that's the sort of atmosphere you crave, have fun. It's not the only way.
- douche 11y ago
  I wouldn't advocate stack ranking. I would advocate cleaning out or re-purposing deadwood that is not doing anything productive or dragging the rest of the team down. If you can find something else productive for them to do, then that is great, but sometimes people just need to go elsewhere. If things are going well, then firing the least best of your crack staff is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
  - bbcbasic 11y ago
    Stack ranking is analogous to amputating the worst performing 10% of your body, every year. Or 'breaking up' with the worst 10% of your friends. Or knocking down the worst 10% of your house. Etc.

wpietri 11y ago

> There’s a metric in the career-tracking website called “promotion velocity” I can believe that one person was dumb enough to put a metric like that somewhere. But how could an organization be filled with people unable to recognize the systemic effect of highlighting that, the perverse incentives it gives?

judk 11y ago
It's horrible but it plays into the myth of the elite rock star. Marisa Mayer at Google famously had a gaggle of special junior PMs that she shepherded into high ranking roles.
- Rainymood 11y ago
  >Marisa Mayer at Google famously had a gaggle of special junior PMs that she shepherded into high ranking roles. Got some source on that? I'm curious now ...
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    judk is presumably referring to the APM program: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Googles-APM-program http://www.quora.com/What-is-Googles-APM-program
gumby 11y ago
Microsoft isn't the first to look at "promotion velocity." The US military does same with with commissioned officers (called "up or out"). If you're passed over twice for promotion you leave. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out Hmm, after looking at that page I see this is quite a common practice. I hope my competitors use it!

smegel 11y ago

I either here really good stories about working at MSFT, or really bad ones. And the really bad ones almost always seem to raise the performance evaluation system there.

fsk 11y ago

tl;dr paraphrasing The OP started out with a good manager and a good team. Then the OP was moved to a bad manager on a bad team. Stack ranking and "promotion velocity". Therefore, time to leave Microsoft. It's almost impossible to survive in any job when your direct boss decides he doesn't want you around.

qt7 11y ago
Out of that post I got the feeling of an unhealthy obsession with being promoted, being promoted quickly, being recognised as excellent, nothing less-than-excellent on his review, complaining burn-out (really?). I probably would have had a hard time dealing with what seems to be a youth with a big ego, with a needing behaviour, no idea of how to behave himself and how to balance life and work. I get it, he was young, still, not the type of person I'd ever want to hire.
- geofft 11y ago
  I don't know a lot of "he"s named Ellen.
- pjc50 11y ago
  unhealthy obsession with being promoted, being promoted quickly, being recognised as excellent, nothing less-than-excellent on his review That is the mentality the Microsoft metrics-driven management is supposed to encourage. You have to get promoted to be recognised. You have to be seen as better than those around you to avoid being cut in the stack ranking.
  - fsk 11y ago
    "Up or out" makes sense for the military or a law firm or accounting firm. When a software company does it, then it's just needlessly churning employees. Of course, Microsoft always has plenty of recent college graduates eagerly applying every year, so there always are replacements.
  - hamburglar 11y ago
    Yes, absolutely. Once you stop getting promoted at Microsoft, management is conditioned to look at you as dead wood. I was there for nearly 10 years and had good coaching through 5 promotions. One of the things that was kind of nice about the system is that my managers were always really good at spelling out exactly what was going to be expected of me in order to reach the next level. Unfortunately, the requirements just keep ratcheting up, and I got to the point where what my manager laid out as the next set of requirements was simply never going to happen. I wasn't interested in putting in ever-increasing effort and taking on ever-increasing responsibilities. This is when he explained to me that if you just decide to be happy where you are, Microsoft basically starts to lose interest in you and you get the shaft in the stack-ranking. So I left.

hyperliner 11y ago

There are a few other things people almost don't talk about because these blogs seem to always be from people in level 60 (junior people). - There is really no 20% rule that applies to teams. The calibration process is across bands / levels across a given product area. So it is not that you are supposed to give a score of 5 (deadwood) to a member in your 5-people team. It means all people across the division who are at level X are looked at and "sorted" to do that assignment. People level 64-65 and above typically have these "cards" that they use to sort people. That is the meeting where your manager or his manager is supposed to support you. But the other managers don't really know who you are for real. In the best case, they may know of you. So it is really hard to have a conversation because only one or two people have context about every person. So just to summarize, there are these cards that people drop on a table where they do the classification, and people don't really know who they are ranking. - the second point is that moving into new teams is in many cases a really bad idea because the new manager now inherits a new person that cannot be defended as well as the existing team for the simple reason that the new person is not known as well. Many people have been in the same division for 15 years or more. You know they are not going to be an unknown and they coast on the legacy reviews. The new guy / gal is an easy victim unless she is some sort of Bill Gates right off the bat. - one thing that was crazy in that review is that they not only let go of people with bad scores. They also let go of people with good scores but who are deemed to have reached their plateau level. So you may still be a great director or GPM but if the system decides the director is not going to make GM or the GPM is not going to make director, then they also see you as a candidate to get rid of. - the most important problem for the industry I believe is that the system perpetuates the need to create NEW stuff. So for example, why would somebody create Powershell instead of using a perfectly fine alternative from the Linux / Unix world? Well, because that way you are the person who created a NEW thing and not who simply PORTED a solution! Can you imagine the world today if we could use the same commands or patterns of commands in Windows as we do in Linux? Clearly the OS are too different for that to be practical but we cannot argue that the syntax and paradigm could have been more similar.

MichaelGG 11y ago
Powershell's object pipeline far outshines the Unix style "pass around strings and dick with parsing everywhere". It also handles quoting in a much more sane manner, eliminating security holes or just plain bugs you get in, say, bash. The included editor and command line completion for arguments is really slick. Painting PS as just NIH is simply incorrect. MS bringing back Services for Unix for real is a somewhat orthogonal issue than coming up with a superior shell.

melted 11y ago

To give you some perspective from an ex-softie (been on the outside for 7 years now, so my experience is not recent). PMs are the hated super-political, credit grabbing ruling class of Microsoft. She was a junior PM. It's not clear what most of them actually do. When I was there, they pretended to "design" features, where in reality the specs were written by devs, they just took credit for them. Then they sat around in meetings and "managed the schedule" and "reported status" to one another. Since there are (or at least were) so many of them at Microsoft, the whole "reporting status" thing can self-perpetuate, because at some point the communication overhead begins to dominate. As a result, most PMs just interfere with work and slow things down, sometimes dramatically so. This was the result of someone deciding, some 20-25 years ago, that developers couldn't handle talking to one another, and they couldn't test software themselves. I sort of agree with the latter point, but only when it comes to manual and end-to-end testing. Developers have an overriding priority: to get stuff out the door, whether it's ready or not. That's what they get promoted for. Any kind of deep testing beyond unit tests is considered, by and large, a waste of time, especially by junior devs who haven't been through support hell yet. PMs though? You could easily have one or two of them per team of 20 devs if they do their work well, not 1:1 as it sometimes is at Microsoft. Shit, for the past 7 years I haven't worked with any PMs at all, and my productivity is at all time high. So when I found out recently that Microsoft is getting rid of the formal test discipline (a mistake, IMO, for reasons outlined above, should have merely reduced their scope to high value work), I thought about PMs as well. Bite the pillow, my PM brethren, Satya is going in dry. I imagine once the second shoe falls, Microsoft will once again be a pretty decent place to work.

judk 11y ago
That last paragraph is disgusting and inappropriate.
- melted 11y ago
  Good. That means it came across the way I meant it.
judk 11y ago
IIRC, Charles Simonyi invented the PM role and organization.

randomfool 11y ago

Primary issue here seems more like a manager who was not trying to help her grow. I see this end horribly much too often in large companies- focus of the project shifts and manager assigns task which is a bad fit. Employee struggles for 6 months or more (probably within the 1yr 'no transfer' period many companies have). Manager doesn't try to find a better project, reviews slip, employee is warned that perf must improve but by then the manager has it in for them and because of low perf they cannot transfer.

0987612345 11y ago

Another ex-softie, from UX background, senior level. I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing (user flow, interactions) features. They are never trained for that in their academics, at the time of hiring they are never quizzed on that (if they are then its on the whims of individual interviewer). And absolute worst is some of them are not even very passionate about it but they end up doing because their manager expects them to. Most of the time they come in the way of designers - that is the good part. The bad part is when they take ownership of UX design and the design team has to constantly struggle to get their inputs in. Universally at Microsoft PMs are seen as the ‘owner’ for the UX design, since they write the ‘specs’. The ‘Spec’ (specification document) is compilation of screenshots from design team in a word documents with a narration of the flow. In places like Office there are so many PMs that many a times there will be a spec documents for dialog boxes. A notorious team in Office (where E. Chisa worked) is the OneNote, that team used to take pride till couple of years back that they don’t have any designers, all UX design is done by PMs. No wonder EverNote came out of no where and steamrolled them (I’m personally a big fan of OneNote for its feature set, but hate the User Experience). To me Microsoft’s biggest bane is the PM discipline, they are holding back MS on taking up Apple, Google to new startups (whenever MS engg team was design driven - Ex. Windows Phone - it came out with great products). The PM discipline used to make sense 20 years back, but not now to the extent that one would have 10-12 PMs for a dev team of 40-50.

edgyswingset 11y ago
As someone who's about to start as a PM at MSFT soon... > I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing This is my biggest concern going forward. My background is developing backend services, not building good UIs. I'm confident in my ability to build something somewhat sensible (I have some Android and other UI experience), but fundamentally my strengths have always been in designing and piecing together abstractions with code. I feel like the largest roles of a PM should be in resolving ambiguity and enabling people who have good ideas. My current boss, while he could certainly code circles around me, doesn't actually write much code aside from a few unit tests. Instead, any time I wonder why something should be done a certain way, he can give me a reason and convince me it makes sense. When I have a good idea about how something should be done, he gets out of my way, checks up every few days, and removes any non-technical barriers so that it's as painless as possible for me. I believe that the system we work on would be in a horrible state very fast if he were to suddenly up and leave.

frik 11y ago

The article mentions different teams. What's their roles in the development of Microsoft products? Redmond (MS headquarter), Finland (Nokia headquarter), Cambridge (research ?) and India (outsourcing ?)

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
The author of the article worked in windows phone, so those sites make sense. Note thst Cambridge and India have both dev and research, the latter being kind of big.
Manishearth 11y ago
(MS India intern here, but speaking for myself) I know of three offices in India -- Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Delhi. These are proper Microsoft divisions, with a hierarchy and all that. Not managed by some other company (At least, Hyderabad/Bangalore aren't; I don't know anything about Delhi) Some things being worked on here are VS, Office (specific portions), Bing, and Azure.
0987612345 11y ago
Finland is not 'Nokia headquarter', Cambridge is not 'research', and India is not 'outsourcing'. All have product building teams (with all the disciplines involved - Dev, PM, Design). Some places are small (lesser people) Ex. Cambridge, some places are large (India - with complete end to end ownership of product building). And there are Japan, China & Israel R&D divisions too and same applies to those places as well (all disciplines are involved in making of whatever products they are creating).
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dareobasanjo 11y ago

It's interesting that the author of the article primarily blames stack ranking for her challenges. From her post she came in with extremely high expectations of how well she'd do at Microsoft (promoted within 6 months), she got a new manager and immediately assumed they'd play favorites with their existing employees then once given a project she couldn't handle instead of asking for help waited too long so "she wouldn't seem clueless". Then she gets a performance review that says she didn't do well and blames the system & her manager. This seems to expose a significant lack of introspection and self awareness. Is there a company in the world that gives a good performance review when someone spends months on a project, doesn't make progress and doesn't ask for help until it's too late? That said there are two places where Microsoft's former performance review methodology hurts here 1. Microsoft used to give people a score in the misguided belief that knowing "you suck" or "you're awesome" relative to your peers is motivational. In some cases, it does but in many cases it has the opposite effect where it causes someone to be so discouraged that they quit. Which is what the blog author did. 2. The requirement to have people who are flagged as "underperforming" in stack rank based models discourages managers from helping people who are struggling. As a manager it is actually somewhat of a relief to have someone who you can clearly award the "sucks" label without the strain of having to decide which of your team of good performers needs to draw the short straw(s). This to me was one of the biggest problems with the model as a manager at Microsoft since your reward for turning around a poor performer is to find someone else to mark as a poor performer.

gumby 11y ago

The disturbing thing about her mention of "promotion velocity" is that it dovetails painfully with what my kid is exposed to with high school/college. There's a (seemingly) clearly defined road to drive down: do tons of AP classes, extracurriculars etc. Someone set some rules, so people follow them (and game them) with a cargo-cult belief that they will "succeed" (definition unspecified). So now we have kids starting college prep in the sixth grade and taking AP tests in the eighth. We end up with the kid I gave a First Aid test to a couple of weeks ago. He had memorized the entire first aid field manual. But I described a situation and some symptoms (me having a heart attack) and frankly, if that kid had been around I would have died. I asked him why he didn't look for symptoms of the "hurry cases" and he said, "well you start with the first ones in the book." I asked them why they are called "Hurry cases" and it hadn't occurred to him that they word "hurry" was more than a label. Sadly, probably a third of the kids I test are like this, but now our rules say I have to pass them because they can answer any question in the book. But the kids who learned to weld at the age of 10 or who take things apart and can't get them back together again or who are argumentative and have deep knowledge on weird topics -- there's no "road" for them. At least some of them can get to go start companies!