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How Adobe keeps key employees from quitting

74 points by cpeterso 11y ago

SapphireSun 11y ago
So, essentially they changed the names of various meetings and then gave a budget to managers because stack ranking with mandatory firing causes political infighting. Now let's see how they deal with deadwood in a few years... I imagine there will be a pendulum.
- jewel 11y ago
  Hopefully yearly goal setting and then regular checkups will help reduce the amount of deadwood they accumulate. I believe that most people have great potential if properly motivated. A few years of growth associated with being thoughtfully mentored might not be enough to bring deadwood back to life, but it could save a lot of employees from heading down that path. Also, having regular checkins makes it a lot more obvious when someone isn't performing, which means the deadwood is more likely to be let go. I realize this is overly optimistic, due to faults in the managers themselves. For example, kingdom builders will keep deadwood since it increases their headcount. The yearly performance reviews at a previous job were a waste of time. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has had good experiences with them either as a manager or as an employee.
- walshemj 11y ago
  Someone who is really bad is fairly easy to spot and deal with you don't need to stack rank everyone to do that.
- lucian1900 11y ago
  "Dead wood" is a myth. Few employees are useless and it's always obvious if it is the case.
  - dagw 11y ago
    In what way is it a myth? I've definitely worked with people who where without a doubt dead wood, but I agree that it's absolutely obvious to everyone who they are.
    - lordnacho 11y ago
      I don't agree that it's obvious. Smart people who aren't motivated can be pretty good at pretending to be productive. I've worked with a guy who hand waves everything even slightly technical, doesn't know what version control is, and generally has no real insights. But it seems I'm in minority. He has a phd and is presented as the brains of the company. Due to historical chance he's also held important sounding titles. He acts friendly, too.
- toyg 11y ago
  FTFA: "marked increase in what Morris calls “involuntary, non-regrettable attrition, because team leaders are no longer putting off having tough conversations with people who aren’t cutting it"
AdrianRossouw 11y ago
so they invented 1on1s?
- te 11y ago
  ... and renamed the annual review as a "rewards check-in".
  - derefr 11y ago
    I think the actually-interesting thing that changed is that there's no longer a fan-in of review data, followed by some sort of central number-crunching. Instead, it's effectively a feudal system: every "lord" is empowered to give their "vassals" whatever raises/promotions/bonuses they like. This is a system that actually works well, if you've got good and generous "lords" that want to keep their "vassals" happy and productive and generally use "do it yourself" as an opportunity to do away with bureaucracy, rather than make more. Whatever benefit Adobe is seeing from the change is probably because they managed to hire some really good managers (somehow), and are finally letting them loose to do their jobs. Of course, a bad feudal lord is a lot worse than an impersonal rank-and-yank system. At least rank-and-yank is predictable enough to be gamed.
    - willvarfar 11y ago
      Very nicely put between-the-lines interpretation :) One small nitpick: > a bad feudal lord is a lot worse than an impersonal rank-and-yank system. At least rank-and-yank is predictable enough to be gamed. If you have a bad lord (eh, manager) and your company uses a rank-and-yank system, then it'll be your boss gaming it not you. -Reviews- eh 'working' in general - only works well if you have a good well-meaning boss?
      - walshemj 11y ago
        Except when behind closed doors they fiddle the figures
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
comrade1 11y ago
I usually say that one shouldn't feel loyalty to a corporation because the corporation has no loyalty to you, but Adobe is different. It did feel like they looked out for you - the corporate culture is good and the workers are happy (at least the people I worked with). I don't think they've closed a single office of the companies that they've bought over the years even if the product has since disappeared.
- derefr 11y ago
  How does that work? Is e.g. the Fireworks team just an isolated-to-their-own-office subteam of the Photoshop team now?
  - comrade1 11y ago
    I only know what happened in my case. I worked for a Swiss company that was bought by Adobe. They pretty quickly expanded our office and we became an rnd center - the other in Europe being Hamburg. Other examples, macromedia became their san francisco offices, navisware or some other purchase became an office in north carolina.... They must eventually close some down though - they've bought a ton of companies in the last 10 years.
- abalone 11y ago
  Not really. They may not have "closed" their acquired Boston office, for example, but they massively downsized it. (Which is fair. They weren't doing well.) Another poster mentioned Fireworks. That was moved to India and eventually cancelled. Lots of Adobe products that aren't doing well get moved to India, accompanied by U.S. layoffs. I'm not saying it's a "bad" company, but it's definitely not the case that they keep offices alive when products are doing poorly, just because of employee loyalty.
willvarfar 11y ago
I'm a bit skeptical. I've been through different companies with both strategies, and the 'goal setting' is a lesser evil than once-per-year but its hardly a reason for staying. All formal review processes are just time sinks. The only review system I kinda liked was Symbian's. I have no idea if it was a mainstream idea, but they assigned you a level based on how you and your boss perceived a third party would describe your influence. Edit to add: this is an excellent old article I was reminded of and recommend: http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-hr http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-hr
flapjaxx 11y ago
they didn't keep me and a few of my boys from quitting
flapjaxx 11y ago
Actually they have been loosing a lot of their top talent. This is just a PR Fluff piece.
- stfnfhrmnn 11y ago
  I was wondering that. There is more to retaining talent than just fixing the review system. If the company changes their product strategy dramatically and engineers aren't happy with that, money won't help. Surely the whole idea how Adobe implements CC is flawed. It'll discourage product innovation (customers already locked in anyway), dripfeeding features does suffice. Buying other products and companies to increase potential market and customers is the only way left to increase revenue. Which engineer wants that? Just looking at Lightroom (because I'm a customer), there appears to have been a lot of change over the years. Highly visible engineers and managers lost to do their own thing, Spotify and other companies. The about screen lists engineers involved, that has changed dramatically as well. I don't know how engineering is set up at Adobe, but it certainly looks like they have outsourced quite a bit of that product. It will probably take several years for Adobe to realise that their license rental scheme was a shot in the foot...
- frankydp 11y ago
  Curious if you think someone will ever step in and really displace Adobe and Autodesk in any meaningful way? Or is the feature curve too steep.
mturmon 11y ago
The reason I was told about the elimination of a yearly written report card, and replacing by regular conversation, is that employees have no trail of documents saying their performance is good. This gives greater freedom to lay people off, in the sense that there is no documentary basis for a lawsuit of wrongful termination.
- exacube 11y ago
  I would actually think otherwise -- with no formal documentation of poor performance, they'll have a much harder time justifying a layoff/firing if they are sued for discrimination or something.
  - mturmon 11y ago
    I see where you're going, but the constraints don't work out that way. In an at-will state like California, you can be laid off for any business reason, such as "the work in this area is closing up." So, justifying a layoff (to the satisfaction of a court) is not a major constraint. But if there is documentation stating that the employee's work is great, that future opportunities abound, etc., then that justification begins to look suspect. On the other hand, in the absence of documentation, the at-will rules give great freedom to the employer.
- onion2k 11y ago
  Were you told that by someone who was laid off?
  - mturmon 11y ago
    I'd rather not say, but: they were not laid off. They were in a position to know, at my 5K person workplace. I don't want to seem like a conspiracy theorist. There was probably no one over-riding reason for ditching the written report. But I think the above was a big factor.
Yhippa 11y ago
On the underperformer side this is an interesting strategy. By having frequent conversations about underperformance that alone causes people to leave. If what they're doing is true I think this is one of the more innovative talent management strategies out there. I hope this leads to more honest conversations and less politics due to doing whatever it takes to make sure you come out on the top end of a distribution. As a consultant I've had many projects where we came in to fix a process where we were really fighting their performance management and incentives system.
lucb1e 11y ago
> It’s also about boosting Adobe’s (ADBE -0.18%) stock price. I know it's about the larger trend, but I couldn't help grinning.
- sandstrom 11y ago
  These inline quotes in some newspapers feel so out of place and irrelevant. They are only good when they are funny, as in this case.
z3t4 11y ago
To set a salary: Look at what they have done previously. If you hire a coder: Look at the quality of their code and the problems they have solved. Then figure out exactly what they will do in your company. And make an agreement what that might be worth, considering the quality of their previously work. For me it takes less then five minutes of reading someone's code for me to decide if I want to hire them or not. I also already know what I need and what that will be worth. You can repeat this every year or six month because of the constantly changing requirements of what needs to be done. And then it will be even easier, as you have access of everything the employee has done. To keep them: Constantly give them attention when they do something good, like solving a problem, suitable for their skill level and competence. Remember that you can praise different ppl for different things. You will get away praising junior developers for doing things at their level while at the same time praising senior developers for solving serious hard problems. Remember that praising, celebrating and thanking people do not cost any money!! Some people just want to come to work and do exactly what they have done the last ten years, while others get bored if they do not face any challenges. The later category will need management, but they will also be valuable as they will be able to adapt to changes and advance your company. For those that want to, let them go to conferences and learn new stuff. The stuff they learn will add value to your company. Identify every individual's skill and good traits, then take advantage of them! Never, ever fire anyone unless there is a very serious problem, like stealing or fist fighting. Do not allow ass kissing, bullying or politics in general. Encourage a professional attitude, but keep in mind that "everything is personal", so try to be fair. It's only when people feel safe and at ease they can go outside their comfort zones and achieve great things!
- irascible 11y ago
  You sound like a good manager. Right on.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  this... if all those rules were followed, the workplace would be a very stimulating place to be! which is sadly not true for many, or not most of the time for almost all
- holychiz 11y ago
Galanwe 11y ago
Been at Microsoft at the time they made the exact same transition (from "bell curve" to "goal/commitments"). Anyway most of these big companies just follow one another on subjects like compensation and review system. Frankly, both systems are just a stupid loss of time... It always end up the same: you don't want/are not interested to fill in those lengthy and boring papers, so you just write pretty much bullshit in there. Your manager (usually) being a good guy will help you rewrite part of it so that it's "corporate". And that's it. Nobody really cares. For those who did not had to write that kind of papers, it's just always more or less the same. You have to answer 5/10 lines on questions like: "What did you do this last quarter?" "What are your commitments for the upcoming quarter?". 90% of all the "commitments" of the department at MS looked like that kind of BS: 1. Describe your project and mention you're happy with it. 2. Say that you plan to work hard to reducing the technical debt (every single MS project has 20 years of debt) 3. Say that you will try to improve the overall quality of the project and work with QAs 4. Find some trait in your personality or skills that you will improve for next quarter. e.g. "I will try to spend more time studying component X so that I can help on that matter". After some time you don't even pay attention to these reviews. Just copy/paste what was written for the last quarter, change the commitments as accomplishments, and create some new commitments depending on the trending problems in the team.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  It's not just bullshit, it's actively harmful. It encourages people to game the system, often by playing political games. Secondary to that it encourages work on short-term, easily measurable projects, which tends to be the least valuable work. If you spend a year cleaning up garbage code you won't get nearly as many gold stars as if you just built some useless shiny bolt-on feature that nobody will actually use in the future. Now you understand a lot of what's been wrong with software development at places like MS over the last decade and more. Perhaps even worse than that, this sort of bureaucratic BS tends to be extremely off putting to talented engineers who are intrinsically motivated to do good work. So they leave. Because they have the most talent and experience and are thus the most able to find work elsewhere easily. Bad corporate culture has a tendency to cause talent to evaporate out of a company. It's been happening at MS for decades and has seriously damaged them, it's happening at a lot of other places too. The problem is that when the people in charge look at what's wrong they don't see these things because it's practically invisible on a macro scale. Individual people on specific teams could run you a laundry list of former heavy hitters in their part of the company who left for greener pastures because they got fed up. But at the highest levels the only evidence that tends to show up is that for some reason it's become more and more difficult to execute on challenging projects, which is easy to attribute to any one or multiple of the countless other changing variables.
lostcolony 11y ago
This seems like the kind of system you'd have if you just didn't mandate anything, but had a culture of giving a damn, and one time a year to suggest raises. I.e., I'm pretty sure this is the default, and grading according to a bell curve and letting people go who fall below a certain percentage, regardless of actual performance, is the weird exception (in the sense of taking effort to implement, not exception in the sense that few people do it). If I am a manager, and I care about those under me doing a good job (both to reflect well on me, and to continue to perform well), I will, of course, check in periodically. Ask how things are going, suggest areas that could use improving, and commending them for areas they're doing well in. The response to that would color how I recommend people for raises, and if someone didn't seem to respond ~at all~ to that, and was underperforming, would lead me to recommend their transfer to another team or being let go.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Large companies have three somewhat conflicting goals: 1) Find and retain key people 2) Make improvements in the culture and the people that work there over time 3) Have some kind of system that allows you to let people go when sales go downhill. (And sales will go downhill at some point. Bringing a group of managers into your office and telling them to get rid of 20% of the workforce within the next 4 weeks -- without the affected employes having any indication at all that they are at the bottom of the list -- makes a bad situation even worse) I think perhaps it's best to separate these goals instead of trying to do it all at once. You don't necessarily want to find people that look like the ones you have. Improvements in people, culture, and environment is something that should always be done with a focus on how the employees personal goals (which should be part of this conversation) fit into the larger enterprise goals, not the other way around. And as long as employees are getting to work in various teams over the course of the year, having each team force-rank folks according to whether they would keep them on their team if the budget was cut in half seems reasonable, because that's just what might happen. Notice that managers do not appear on the vote-them-off-the-island system. It's a very tough situation and there are no easy answers. I think identifying the various parts and how they might conflict with each other is the first step in moving to the next local optimization.
- eitally 11y ago
  I agree with you. One of the very simplest ways companies could help themselves is through transparent communication of corporate strategy & performance, particularly if line managers map that to individual & team objectives. I have never been at any company that did a good job of this. It seems much more common that strategic obfuscation, keeping employees in the shadows (if not entirely in the dark) is something taught in management school.
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    (My day job is helping organizations change.) Many years ago, I worked with a client once that was very small, like <50 people, but was staffed with people who used to hold very senior positions in large companies. We had some really kick-ass guys, don't get me wrong, but overall the entire thing was a cluster fuck. Why? Because succeeding in a selfless way in a small team and succeeding in an ambitious way in a large organization are diametrically-opposed things. These guys could talk a good game about how things were supposed to be -- they had taken all the leadership courses and been coached and mentored like hell. They were self-starters and highly-motivated overachievers. There's no doubt in my mind that giving them a clear objectives and sufficient resources would result in the objectives being met. But getting a clear idea of organizational strategy communicated from point A to point B in this place was impossible. People hold on to knowledge in a large organization. Knowledge is power. It was not unusual -- and remember this was an extremely small org -- to be part of a meeting with 4 or 5 folks where everybody in the room had a different idea of what the endgame was. The CEO told different people different things. Mid-level managers were encouraged to compete with one another. I told my wife that it was the first place I had worked where each person I met had a secret strategy for "once the board gets rid of all those other yahoos, I'll be the one left standing" Sharing a vision/strategy and living your values is something that cannot be overstated. In fact, executives have to over-communicate and demonstrate it almost as melodrama in order for the rank-and-file to really grok it.
gjm11 11y ago
I cannot imagine any situation in which I would think "Man, I hate my job. I'd quit right now if it weren't for the enlightened way they do performance review and goal-setting." Of course that's a little unfair. Maybe doing this stuff well means that employees are less likely to find themselves with nothing important to do, or something. Still, it seems like it's focusing on the wrong things. If you want to keep good employees, surely you actually want to do things like these: Give them interesting work to do. Give them work that has actual value for the world. Pay them well. Make sure they have good tools. Give them a sense of responsibility for the company's success (which means (1) shares or options and (2) as much clarity as possible about how their work relates to the company's higher-level goals). Make sure there are opportunities for progress. If tinkering with performance-management makes a big difference, I think that can only be because either before or after the tinkering it was catastrophically broken.
- kylebgorman 11y ago
  In the science of management there is the "two-factor" theory which holds that the factors which promote job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are essentially separate, so, that, e.g., increasing job satisfaction does not necessary decrease people's job dissatisfaction. (This jives with my experiences: a raise doesn't make me feel any better about a toxic coworker). Casting what you're saying in the same terms, "no stack ranking" is essential to head off worker dissatisfaction but it doesn't necessarily make Adobe a good place to work.
- redwood 11y ago
  Google's system was intolerable. You put yourself up for competitive promotion. Draining, rewards those who pay the optics game. Worst of all it left the great people who don't know how to play politics behind and left a lot of terrible people promoted who did
- scottmwinters 11y ago
  They pretty much said it was catastrophically broken...so maybe it IS making a big difference?
Dirlewanger 11y ago
Don't see this mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback Instead of 1 on 1s, employees review a handful of their peers + their superiors. What do people think about this?
- sageabilly 11y ago
  In the times that I've worked places that did this, it always completely exacerbated any underlying petty feuds that were going on between co-workers and lambasted managers for doing things like actually managing instead of being totally cool with someone playing WOW all day. Your peers are not the best judges of your overall positive contributions to the company. Peer feedback can be important, as evidenced by some of the posts upstream, and I think it's good for a manager to get an overall feel for the team dynamic and if there's unanimous rumblings about one member that might need to be addressed. But ultimately your manager is the only person who's going to understand what positive contributions to the company that you're making, because your manager sees a bigger picture than your peers. Reviewing a manager can be a good thing or it can be a double edged sword- truly anonymous reviews are pretty much impossible so it's inevitable that you're going to be tied to your review somehow. In a perfect world managers would be adults and you'd be able to have conversations about management styles and communication styles and both parties would come to have mutual respect and understanding, but in my 15 years in the working world this has only happened to me once so I don't hold my breath for it happening again.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Any system will be gamed. In this case, you are encouraging making coworkers happier, which is often not done by being a more productive worker.
taki1 11y ago
They allow them 3-month vacation in India once a year?
johansch 11y ago
Seems like a key piece of this is to give HR less power.
columbo 11y ago
> Adobe’s stock price has increased from about $30 to over $80 since Check In began. I don't want to be overly negative but COME ON. Changing their goals program didn't nearly triple their stock price. I'm surprised Fortune included that at the end. If it truly had that much of an impact that should be the title of the article.
lordnacho 11y ago
Sounds like it can be summarized as "shorter feedback cycles". Doesn't sound too dumb, but IMO you the real issue is that you can't get people to talk candidly unless you have some good man management. Sure, allowing people to talk more often is good, but what happens if they don't feel they can say what they want? It doesn't always seem like a good idea to blurt out your real feelings about work.
cinbun8 11y ago
> Ditching annual performance reviews has paid unexpected dividends. > At an annual “rewards check-in,”... It looks to me like this is old wine in a new bottle. Instead of calling it a bell curve you give it a new name. For a corporation to change a system like this where performance reviews are tied to fixed budgets is next to impossible. Most feedback that I give my employees are during a lunch conversation or a code review. Trickle feedback works quite well. I'm against annual performance reviews too. Adjustments in compensation are not mapped to fixed goals for a year or 8 week reviews. Whoever gets more shit done in the interest of the company gets a pay hike when we can accommodate it. Simple.
logn 11y ago
"involuntary, non-regrettable attrition" What does that even mean?
- o_nate 11y ago
  Firing people.

74 points by cpeterso 11y ago

So, essentially they changed the names of various meetings and then gave a budget to managers because stack ranking with mandatory firing causes political infighting. Now let's see how they deal with deadwood in a few years... I imagine there will be a pendulum.

jewel 11y ago
Hopefully yearly goal setting and then regular checkups will help reduce the amount of deadwood they accumulate. I believe that most people have great potential if properly motivated. A few years of growth associated with being thoughtfully mentored might not be enough to bring deadwood back to life, but it could save a lot of employees from heading down that path. Also, having regular checkins makes it a lot more obvious when someone isn't performing, which means the deadwood is more likely to be let go. I realize this is overly optimistic, due to faults in the managers themselves. For example, kingdom builders will keep deadwood since it increases their headcount. The yearly performance reviews at a previous job were a waste of time. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has had good experiences with them either as a manager or as an employee.
walshemj 11y ago
Someone who is really bad is fairly easy to spot and deal with you don't need to stack rank everyone to do that.
lucian1900 11y ago
"Dead wood" is a myth. Few employees are useless and it's always obvious if it is the case.
- dagw 11y ago
  In what way is it a myth? I've definitely worked with people who where without a doubt dead wood, but I agree that it's absolutely obvious to everyone who they are.
  - lordnacho 11y ago
    I don't agree that it's obvious. Smart people who aren't motivated can be pretty good at pretending to be productive. I've worked with a guy who hand waves everything even slightly technical, doesn't know what version control is, and generally has no real insights. But it seems I'm in minority. He has a phd and is presented as the brains of the company. Due to historical chance he's also held important sounding titles. He acts friendly, too.
toyg 11y ago
FTFA: "marked increase in what Morris calls “involuntary, non-regrettable attrition, because team leaders are no longer putting off having tough conversations with people who aren’t cutting it"

AdrianRossouw 11y ago

so they invented 1on1s?

te 11y ago
... and renamed the annual review as a "rewards check-in".
- derefr 11y ago
  I think the actually-interesting thing that changed is that there's no longer a fan-in of review data, followed by some sort of central number-crunching. Instead, it's effectively a feudal system: every "lord" is empowered to give their "vassals" whatever raises/promotions/bonuses they like. This is a system that actually works well, if you've got good and generous "lords" that want to keep their "vassals" happy and productive and generally use "do it yourself" as an opportunity to do away with bureaucracy, rather than make more. Whatever benefit Adobe is seeing from the change is probably because they managed to hire some really good managers (somehow), and are finally letting them loose to do their jobs. Of course, a bad feudal lord is a lot worse than an impersonal rank-and-yank system. At least rank-and-yank is predictable enough to be gamed.
  - willvarfar 11y ago
    Very nicely put between-the-lines interpretation :) One small nitpick: > a bad feudal lord is a lot worse than an impersonal rank-and-yank system. At least rank-and-yank is predictable enough to be gamed. If you have a bad lord (eh, manager) and your company uses a rank-and-yank system, then it'll be your boss gaming it not you. -Reviews- eh 'working' in general - only works well if you have a good well-meaning boss?
    - walshemj 11y ago
      Except when behind closed doors they fiddle the figures
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

comrade1 11y ago

I usually say that one shouldn't feel loyalty to a corporation because the corporation has no loyalty to you, but Adobe is different. It did feel like they looked out for you - the corporate culture is good and the workers are happy (at least the people I worked with). I don't think they've closed a single office of the companies that they've bought over the years even if the product has since disappeared.

derefr 11y ago
How does that work? Is e.g. the Fireworks team just an isolated-to-their-own-office subteam of the Photoshop team now?
- comrade1 11y ago
  I only know what happened in my case. I worked for a Swiss company that was bought by Adobe. They pretty quickly expanded our office and we became an rnd center - the other in Europe being Hamburg. Other examples, macromedia became their san francisco offices, navisware or some other purchase became an office in north carolina.... They must eventually close some down though - they've bought a ton of companies in the last 10 years.
abalone 11y ago
Not really. They may not have "closed" their acquired Boston office, for example, but they massively downsized it. (Which is fair. They weren't doing well.) Another poster mentioned Fireworks. That was moved to India and eventually cancelled. Lots of Adobe products that aren't doing well get moved to India, accompanied by U.S. layoffs. I'm not saying it's a "bad" company, but it's definitely not the case that they keep offices alive when products are doing poorly, just because of employee loyalty.

willvarfar 11y ago

I'm a bit skeptical. I've been through different companies with both strategies, and the 'goal setting' is a lesser evil than once-per-year but its hardly a reason for staying. All formal review processes are just time sinks. The only review system I kinda liked was Symbian's. I have no idea if it was a mainstream idea, but they assigned you a level based on how you and your boss perceived a third party would describe your influence. Edit to add: this is an excellent old article I was reminded of and recommend: http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-hr http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-hr

flapjaxx 11y ago

they didn't keep me and a few of my boys from quitting

flapjaxx 11y ago

Actually they have been loosing a lot of their top talent. This is just a PR Fluff piece.

stfnfhrmnn 11y ago
I was wondering that. There is more to retaining talent than just fixing the review system. If the company changes their product strategy dramatically and engineers aren't happy with that, money won't help. Surely the whole idea how Adobe implements CC is flawed. It'll discourage product innovation (customers already locked in anyway), dripfeeding features does suffice. Buying other products and companies to increase potential market and customers is the only way left to increase revenue. Which engineer wants that? Just looking at Lightroom (because I'm a customer), there appears to have been a lot of change over the years. Highly visible engineers and managers lost to do their own thing, Spotify and other companies. The about screen lists engineers involved, that has changed dramatically as well. I don't know how engineering is set up at Adobe, but it certainly looks like they have outsourced quite a bit of that product. It will probably take several years for Adobe to realise that their license rental scheme was a shot in the foot...
frankydp 11y ago
Curious if you think someone will ever step in and really displace Adobe and Autodesk in any meaningful way? Or is the feature curve too steep.

mturmon 11y ago

The reason I was told about the elimination of a yearly written report card, and replacing by regular conversation, is that employees have no trail of documents saying their performance is good. This gives greater freedom to lay people off, in the sense that there is no documentary basis for a lawsuit of wrongful termination.

exacube 11y ago
I would actually think otherwise -- with no formal documentation of poor performance, they'll have a much harder time justifying a layoff/firing if they are sued for discrimination or something.
- mturmon 11y ago
  I see where you're going, but the constraints don't work out that way. In an at-will state like California, you can be laid off for any business reason, such as "the work in this area is closing up." So, justifying a layoff (to the satisfaction of a court) is not a major constraint. But if there is documentation stating that the employee's work is great, that future opportunities abound, etc., then that justification begins to look suspect. On the other hand, in the absence of documentation, the at-will rules give great freedom to the employer.
onion2k 11y ago
Were you told that by someone who was laid off?
- mturmon 11y ago
  I'd rather not say, but: they were not laid off. They were in a position to know, at my 5K person workplace. I don't want to seem like a conspiracy theorist. There was probably no one over-riding reason for ditching the written report. But I think the above was a big factor.

Yhippa 11y ago

On the underperformer side this is an interesting strategy. By having frequent conversations about underperformance that alone causes people to leave. If what they're doing is true I think this is one of the more innovative talent management strategies out there. I hope this leads to more honest conversations and less politics due to doing whatever it takes to make sure you come out on the top end of a distribution. As a consultant I've had many projects where we came in to fix a process where we were really fighting their performance management and incentives system.

lucb1e 11y ago

> It’s also about boosting Adobe’s (ADBE -0.18%) stock price. I know it's about the larger trend, but I couldn't help grinning.

sandstrom 11y ago
These inline quotes in some newspapers feel so out of place and irrelevant. They are only good when they are funny, as in this case.

z3t4 11y ago

To set a salary: Look at what they have done previously. If you hire a coder: Look at the quality of their code and the problems they have solved. Then figure out exactly what they will do in your company. And make an agreement what that might be worth, considering the quality of their previously work. For me it takes less then five minutes of reading someone's code for me to decide if I want to hire them or not. I also already know what I need and what that will be worth. You can repeat this every year or six month because of the constantly changing requirements of what needs to be done. And then it will be even easier, as you have access of everything the employee has done. To keep them: Constantly give them attention when they do something good, like solving a problem, suitable for their skill level and competence. Remember that you can praise different ppl for different things. You will get away praising junior developers for doing things at their level while at the same time praising senior developers for solving serious hard problems. Remember that praising, celebrating and thanking people do not cost any money!! Some people just want to come to work and do exactly what they have done the last ten years, while others get bored if they do not face any challenges. The later category will need management, but they will also be valuable as they will be able to adapt to changes and advance your company. For those that want to, let them go to conferences and learn new stuff. The stuff they learn will add value to your company. Identify every individual's skill and good traits, then take advantage of them! Never, ever fire anyone unless there is a very serious problem, like stealing or fist fighting. Do not allow ass kissing, bullying or politics in general. Encourage a professional attitude, but keep in mind that "everything is personal", so try to be fair. It's only when people feel safe and at ease they can go outside their comfort zones and achieve great things!

irascible 11y ago
You sound like a good manager. Right on.
saiya-jin 11y ago
this... if all those rules were followed, the workplace would be a very stimulating place to be! which is sadly not true for many, or not most of the time for almost all
holychiz 11y ago

Galanwe 11y ago

Been at Microsoft at the time they made the exact same transition (from "bell curve" to "goal/commitments"). Anyway most of these big companies just follow one another on subjects like compensation and review system. Frankly, both systems are just a stupid loss of time... It always end up the same: you don't want/are not interested to fill in those lengthy and boring papers, so you just write pretty much bullshit in there. Your manager (usually) being a good guy will help you rewrite part of it so that it's "corporate". And that's it. Nobody really cares. For those who did not had to write that kind of papers, it's just always more or less the same. You have to answer 5/10 lines on questions like: "What did you do this last quarter?" "What are your commitments for the upcoming quarter?". 90% of all the "commitments" of the department at MS looked like that kind of BS: 1. Describe your project and mention you're happy with it. 2. Say that you plan to work hard to reducing the technical debt (every single MS project has 20 years of debt) 3. Say that you will try to improve the overall quality of the project and work with QAs 4. Find some trait in your personality or skills that you will improve for next quarter. e.g. "I will try to spend more time studying component X so that I can help on that matter". After some time you don't even pay attention to these reviews. Just copy/paste what was written for the last quarter, change the commitments as accomplishments, and create some new commitments depending on the trending problems in the team.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
It's not just bullshit, it's actively harmful. It encourages people to game the system, often by playing political games. Secondary to that it encourages work on short-term, easily measurable projects, which tends to be the least valuable work. If you spend a year cleaning up garbage code you won't get nearly as many gold stars as if you just built some useless shiny bolt-on feature that nobody will actually use in the future. Now you understand a lot of what's been wrong with software development at places like MS over the last decade and more. Perhaps even worse than that, this sort of bureaucratic BS tends to be extremely off putting to talented engineers who are intrinsically motivated to do good work. So they leave. Because they have the most talent and experience and are thus the most able to find work elsewhere easily. Bad corporate culture has a tendency to cause talent to evaporate out of a company. It's been happening at MS for decades and has seriously damaged them, it's happening at a lot of other places too. The problem is that when the people in charge look at what's wrong they don't see these things because it's practically invisible on a macro scale. Individual people on specific teams could run you a laundry list of former heavy hitters in their part of the company who left for greener pastures because they got fed up. But at the highest levels the only evidence that tends to show up is that for some reason it's become more and more difficult to execute on challenging projects, which is easy to attribute to any one or multiple of the countless other changing variables.

lostcolony 11y ago

This seems like the kind of system you'd have if you just didn't mandate anything, but had a culture of giving a damn, and one time a year to suggest raises. I.e., I'm pretty sure this is the default, and grading according to a bell curve and letting people go who fall below a certain percentage, regardless of actual performance, is the weird exception (in the sense of taking effort to implement, not exception in the sense that few people do it). If I am a manager, and I care about those under me doing a good job (both to reflect well on me, and to continue to perform well), I will, of course, check in periodically. Ask how things are going, suggest areas that could use improving, and commending them for areas they're doing well in. The response to that would color how I recommend people for raises, and if someone didn't seem to respond ~at all~ to that, and was underperforming, would lead me to recommend their transfer to another team or being let go.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Large companies have three somewhat conflicting goals: 1) Find and retain key people 2) Make improvements in the culture and the people that work there over time 3) Have some kind of system that allows you to let people go when sales go downhill. (And sales will go downhill at some point. Bringing a group of managers into your office and telling them to get rid of 20% of the workforce within the next 4 weeks -- without the affected employes having any indication at all that they are at the bottom of the list -- makes a bad situation even worse) I think perhaps it's best to separate these goals instead of trying to do it all at once. You don't necessarily want to find people that look like the ones you have. Improvements in people, culture, and environment is something that should always be done with a focus on how the employees personal goals (which should be part of this conversation) fit into the larger enterprise goals, not the other way around. And as long as employees are getting to work in various teams over the course of the year, having each team force-rank folks according to whether they would keep them on their team if the budget was cut in half seems reasonable, because that's just what might happen. Notice that managers do not appear on the vote-them-off-the-island system. It's a very tough situation and there are no easy answers. I think identifying the various parts and how they might conflict with each other is the first step in moving to the next local optimization.

eitally 11y ago
I agree with you. One of the very simplest ways companies could help themselves is through transparent communication of corporate strategy & performance, particularly if line managers map that to individual & team objectives. I have never been at any company that did a good job of this. It seems much more common that strategic obfuscation, keeping employees in the shadows (if not entirely in the dark) is something taught in management school.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  (My day job is helping organizations change.) Many years ago, I worked with a client once that was very small, like <50 people, but was staffed with people who used to hold very senior positions in large companies. We had some really kick-ass guys, don't get me wrong, but overall the entire thing was a cluster fuck. Why? Because succeeding in a selfless way in a small team and succeeding in an ambitious way in a large organization are diametrically-opposed things. These guys could talk a good game about how things were supposed to be -- they had taken all the leadership courses and been coached and mentored like hell. They were self-starters and highly-motivated overachievers. There's no doubt in my mind that giving them a clear objectives and sufficient resources would result in the objectives being met. But getting a clear idea of organizational strategy communicated from point A to point B in this place was impossible. People hold on to knowledge in a large organization. Knowledge is power. It was not unusual -- and remember this was an extremely small org -- to be part of a meeting with 4 or 5 folks where everybody in the room had a different idea of what the endgame was. The CEO told different people different things. Mid-level managers were encouraged to compete with one another. I told my wife that it was the first place I had worked where each person I met had a secret strategy for "once the board gets rid of all those other yahoos, I'll be the one left standing" Sharing a vision/strategy and living your values is something that cannot be overstated. In fact, executives have to over-communicate and demonstrate it almost as melodrama in order for the rank-and-file to really grok it.

gjm11 11y ago

I cannot imagine any situation in which I would think "Man, I hate my job. I'd quit right now if it weren't for the enlightened way they do performance review and goal-setting." Of course that's a little unfair. Maybe doing this stuff well means that employees are less likely to find themselves with nothing important to do, or something. Still, it seems like it's focusing on the wrong things. If you want to keep good employees, surely you actually want to do things like these: Give them interesting work to do. Give them work that has actual value for the world. Pay them well. Make sure they have good tools. Give them a sense of responsibility for the company's success (which means (1) shares or options and (2) as much clarity as possible about how their work relates to the company's higher-level goals). Make sure there are opportunities for progress. If tinkering with performance-management makes a big difference, I think that can only be because either before or after the tinkering it was catastrophically broken.

kylebgorman 11y ago
In the science of management there is the "two-factor" theory which holds that the factors which promote job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are essentially separate, so, that, e.g., increasing job satisfaction does not necessary decrease people's job dissatisfaction. (This jives with my experiences: a raise doesn't make me feel any better about a toxic coworker). Casting what you're saying in the same terms, "no stack ranking" is essential to head off worker dissatisfaction but it doesn't necessarily make Adobe a good place to work.
redwood 11y ago
Google's system was intolerable. You put yourself up for competitive promotion. Draining, rewards those who pay the optics game. Worst of all it left the great people who don't know how to play politics behind and left a lot of terrible people promoted who did
scottmwinters 11y ago
They pretty much said it was catastrophically broken...so maybe it IS making a big difference?

Dirlewanger 11y ago

Don't see this mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback Instead of 1 on 1s, employees review a handful of their peers + their superiors. What do people think about this?

sageabilly 11y ago
In the times that I've worked places that did this, it always completely exacerbated any underlying petty feuds that were going on between co-workers and lambasted managers for doing things like actually managing instead of being totally cool with someone playing WOW all day. Your peers are not the best judges of your overall positive contributions to the company. Peer feedback can be important, as evidenced by some of the posts upstream, and I think it's good for a manager to get an overall feel for the team dynamic and if there's unanimous rumblings about one member that might need to be addressed. But ultimately your manager is the only person who's going to understand what positive contributions to the company that you're making, because your manager sees a bigger picture than your peers. Reviewing a manager can be a good thing or it can be a double edged sword- truly anonymous reviews are pretty much impossible so it's inevitable that you're going to be tied to your review somehow. In a perfect world managers would be adults and you'd be able to have conversations about management styles and communication styles and both parties would come to have mutual respect and understanding, but in my 15 years in the working world this has only happened to me once so I don't hold my breath for it happening again.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
Any system will be gamed. In this case, you are encouraging making coworkers happier, which is often not done by being a more productive worker.

taki1 11y ago

They allow them 3-month vacation in India once a year?

johansch 11y ago

Seems like a key piece of this is to give HR less power.

columbo 11y ago

> Adobe’s stock price has increased from about $30 to over $80 since Check In began. I don't want to be overly negative but COME ON. Changing their goals program didn't nearly triple their stock price. I'm surprised Fortune included that at the end. If it truly had that much of an impact that should be the title of the article.

lordnacho 11y ago

Sounds like it can be summarized as "shorter feedback cycles". Doesn't sound too dumb, but IMO you the real issue is that you can't get people to talk candidly unless you have some good man management. Sure, allowing people to talk more often is good, but what happens if they don't feel they can say what they want? It doesn't always seem like a good idea to blurt out your real feelings about work.

cinbun8 11y ago

> Ditching annual performance reviews has paid unexpected dividends. > At an annual “rewards check-in,”... It looks to me like this is old wine in a new bottle. Instead of calling it a bell curve you give it a new name. For a corporation to change a system like this where performance reviews are tied to fixed budgets is next to impossible. Most feedback that I give my employees are during a lunch conversation or a code review. Trickle feedback works quite well. I'm against annual performance reviews too. Adjustments in compensation are not mapped to fixed goals for a year or 8 week reviews. Whoever gets more shit done in the interest of the company gets a pay hike when we can accommodate it. Simple.

logn 11y ago

"involuntary, non-regrettable attrition" What does that even mean?

o_nate 11y ago
Firing people.