Microsoft employee on stack ranking and its 'most universally hated exec'

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81017

by boopsie • 14 years ago

171 123 14 years ago

chamanbuga2• 14 years ago

So... this article simply isn't true.

yajoe• 14 years ago

Which part? While I can't speak to the overall population statistics, there were many people upset about healthcare and the new stack ranking. Think devs and testers with cancer in the family. They attributed -- rightly or wrongly -- both decisions to LisaB, and they were not happy.

The title may be hyperbole, but the content of the blogpost seems spot on.

rlu• 14 years ago

I work for Microsoft so I don't think I can go into too much detail but..

>"If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,"

that is not true.

Stack ranking really isn't as bad as it has been made out to be in the past few weeks.

wingspan• 14 years ago

Personally, the new stack ranking bit doesn't bother me much, as it doesn't seem a whole lot different than before (transposed system of assigning numbers 1-5 and different sized buckets).

The healthcare changes are most upsetting to myself and my wife, especially since we always looked at healthcare as an amazing benefit and competitive advantage to Microsoft. For anyone who doesn't know, there is currently a healthcare plan available that basically covers everything, all the time, with no out-of-pocket costs ever. No copays, no prescription costs, nothing. Of course there are limits, but for many typically cases, like myself, I never pay anything. This plan is going away in 2013 and being replaced by a more typically, less comprehensive option.

chamanbuga2• 14 years ago

A lot of it. The stack ranking system (the one the article mentioned is old), the fact that people are reading the Vanity Fair article secretively, etc... Most of this article is trying to paint an immensely negative picture that simply isn't true.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

Maybe something's changed in the four-and-a-half years since I left, but people were pretty ok with Lisa Brummel when I was at Microsoft. People gently made fun of the fact that she always wears shorts, but there was never anything mean-spirited in that.

She was seen as a huge step up from the guy she replaced, who was rumored to have been having an affair with an underling[1] at the same time that he recorded a video admonishing us to never have inappropriate relations with subordinates. He was also responsible for the infamous towel debacle, which came to define the worst aspects of penny-wise, pound-foolish cost-cutting at the company.

Edit: Thx to, uh, moron for pointing out the new Mini-MSFT post that includes this:

    Is she really the most universally hated executive?
    I don't know about that, but she certainly slipped away from being loved.
    Thousands of employees used to cheer for her. Now?

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2012/07/microsoft-fy12q4-result...

[1] In the (admittedly anonymous) comments: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/06/locked-doors-martin-tay...

[2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/39324385/Towels-Talent

moron2• 14 years ago

Minimsft's post today seems to suggest feelings toward her have changed:

"Is she really the most universally hated executive? I don't know about that, but she certainly slipped away from being loved. Thousands of employees used to cheer for her. Now?"

henrikschroder2• 14 years ago

"Ms Brummel also said Microsoft would scrap asystem that had forced managers to rate a certainnumber of workers as sub-standard each year"

Apparently that didn't happen?

jf• 14 years ago

No. If that wasn't bad enough, that same system requires managers to rate a certain number of worker as sub-standard each year even if they already fired all their sub-standard workers during that same year.

sidcool2• 14 years ago

I don't think Ballmer is hated. People think he is inefficient. And upto some extent, rightly so. But in no way he deserves what's dished out at him in all those grudgingly written blogs by people who couldn't make anything out of themselves.

moron2• 14 years ago

That phrase refers to LisaB, not Ballmer.

sidcool2• 14 years ago

It's Ballmer. I have been downvoted for the comment, but no one ever has given a strong reason as to why Ballmer is a bad CEO. He is not a very good one, that I agree, but he doesn't deserve hatred, does he?

pwny3• 14 years ago

I'm honestly wondering why we value management so much. It might be my lack of corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they're a hindrance most often than not).

Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?

Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?

I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.

henrikschroder2• 14 years ago

> Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing

It's more likely they would be doing things that are personally interesting to them, but not right for the company.

pwny3• 14 years ago

But in the end (shareholders aside, which if you have any I guess you have to please), a company without management would only have engineers to please, making this kind of a circular problem.

skrebbel• 14 years ago

Management isn't the only approach to solving that problem. F.ex Simco or Valve have self-organising teams with high degrees of democracy, which cause roughly the same effect.

jes51992• 14 years ago

Don't confuse human management with project management. In my opinion, you should have two separate people doing those jobs. Your manager should be managing interpersonal issues, team communication, and making sure that tasks don't get dropped, but deciding what direction to go in should be up to someone else - perhaps the team as a whole deciding through consensus, perhaps an outside editor.

digisth• 14 years ago

A good manager will get you what you need (computers, the right chair, a good desk, etc.) An engineer (or admin, etc.) who has everything required is a powerful thing.

A good manager will act as an umbrella and abstraction layer protecting you from metaphorical objects falling from above and give you time and space to work without interruption. It's hard to overstate what this can do for both your work and mental health.

A good manager will be looking out for your interests /as well as/ their own. That means compensation, vacations, work rules, etc. Some companies make this impossible, but where it is possible it is amazingly helpful.

A good manager will make sure you stay focused, provide useful feedback (both positive and negative), and make sure you are staying on target without getting in your way or hurting your morale.

A bad manager, of course, can ruin your day, week, and possibly year.

nahname• 14 years ago

"get you what you need", really means navigate the bureaucratic wasteland

"act as an umbrella", really means protect you from other managers

"look out for your interests". That one is interesting, who looks out for your interests better than yourself?

"stay focused". Same as looking out for your own interests. If you are your own manager, you will know what actually needs to be worked on.

Removing management/bureaucracy isn't simple, but it is pretty depressing how much of it is for it's own sake.

masklinn2• 14 years ago

Yeah. There are numerous quotes on differentials in programmer productivity being an order of magnitude or more between a bad one and a good one, but the reality is — at least in software — it often seems the same holds true for managers, except they can sink or save their whole sub-tree.

A good manager is a powerful thing, especially a good manager who knows his limits, but too often (especially in continental Europe) "management" seems to be a "reward and natural evolution", to the exclusion of other evolutionary paths and hinging as much (if not more) on the ability to brown-nose and play politics as management skills.

Dove• 14 years ago

pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management.

Valve does that:

    How could a 300-person company not have any formal 
    management? My observation is that it takes new hires 
    about six months before they fully accept that no one is 
    going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going 
    to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a 
    promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although 
    there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to 
    the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their 
    responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most 
    valuable resource in the company – their time – by 
    figuring out what it is that they can do that is most 
    valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if 
    they decide that they should be doing something 
    different, there’s no manager to convince to let them 
    go; they just move their desk to the new group (the 
    desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start 
    in on the new thing. (Obviously they should choose a 
    good point at which to do this, and coordinate with both 
    groups, but that’s common sense, not a rule, and isn’t 
    enforced in any way.) That everyone on a project team is 
    an individual contributor, doing coding, artwork, level 
    design, music, and so on, including the leads; there is 
    no such thing as a pure management or architect or 
    designer role. That any part of the company can change 
    direction instantly at any time, because there are no 
    managers to cling to their people and their territory, 
    no reorgs to plan, no budgets to work around. That there 
    are things that Gabe badly wants the company to do that 
    aren’t happening, because no one has signed up to do 
    them.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...

astrodust2• 14 years ago

Valve has an amazing culture, but I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company. Valve seems to operate as a tribe and there's a limit on how huge those can get.

Microsoft seems to be run like a prison camp.

pwny3• 14 years ago

Yep, I knew about Valve and they are an inspiration, truly.

I think Gabe and the other people in charge realized a quite important fact: it's not because they're in charge that their opinions and beliefs are automatically worth more than those of the people who work for them.

seiji• 14 years ago

It's hilarious to see the exact opposite happen: an 80 person company with a multi-page visio org chart, six departments, seven VPs, five pages of expense report rules and regulations, meetings scheduled to plan when to schedule other meetings, and nobody listens to the people who know what to do next because the visionary VC-installed-CEO is Touched By God and can't be questioned even as the company nose dives into obsolescence.

majorlazer• 14 years ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with HL3 taking so long to release. Only partly joking.

jasonwatkinspdx• 14 years ago

Valve does use a form of stack ranking btw. Read their employee handbook. It's on the net.

mheusser• 14 years ago

I think it's important to note that management is a human creation - it is more like a television set - than an element of nature, like a tree. We could live without television sets. Trees, we need to breathe.

cbsmith5• 14 years ago

> I think it's important to note that management is a human creation - it is more like a television set - than an element of nature, like a tree.

Yes, management is much the same as engineers, teachers, masons, textile workers, etc. in this regard... Nature mostly creates consumers, hunters, and possibly prostitutes....

Wait, what is your point?

zwischenzug• 14 years ago

What's your evidence for that? And what do you mean by management? Groups of apes form themselves into hierarchies, and if you read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, you'll find that his romantic notions of a life of poverty free of hierarchy was disabused pretty rapidly.

enqk• 14 years ago

I agree with you, I think engineers should also take care of the trash, watch out for the car park and the accounting, check the budget, talk to customers and handle paper work for taxes.

endymi0n• 14 years ago

Yup, Management IS of utmost importance to a working company. What most managers, companies and universities don't get though is that management isn't really about controlling and reviewing work, but about enabling people and giving them a vision. That's only possible in an atmosphere of humility, gratitude and a total refusal to play the blame game though. It's where companies don't get "managers" from Ivy League but give responsibilities to the best natural leaders and coaches from the team, so they've got their full respect. It's rare to get to this state, but if you've got a company that really gets "management", try to stay. You don't have to work at Trademob (shameless self-plug), there are a lot of meritoctratic startups like this out there - but this spirit usually fades with size. I'm still trying to understand why... All in all, look at these signs: - Bosses have no different equipment or attitude than you do - Your Interview is done by the most senior personnel available and not some clueless HR guy - People don't take themselves too serious but their competitors should ;-) - high freedom, high responsibility atmosphere - You get responsibility for outcomes, not for implementation details.

As for me, I'm still trying to find out how to be a better team leader every day - I'll tell you how when I find out ;-)

vwoolf• 14 years ago

I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.

I'm pretty sure almost every big contemporary tech company tries this when the big company is small and growing, but it almost never works. Joel Spolsky wrote it about the management problem here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper....

Actually, politics happen everywhere that more than two people congregate. It’s just natural. By “no politics” I really mean “no dysfunctional politics.”

Funnily enough, he uses an example from Microsoft—but the Microsoft of the early 1990s.

He also writes about it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/07.html.

No formal management doesn't appear to scale above some number of employees / workers. I can't tell what that number is, but I would guess that it's somewhere around 125 – 150 people—that is, the Dunbar number.[1] Maybe it could be as high as 1,000, but I'm pretty damn skeptical it could be higher than 2,000.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

spaghetti5• 14 years ago

We over-value management because we over-emphasize approval seeking behavior. I find that people who reject the "do your work and get a treat" mentality place a lower value on management and a higher value on cooperation, creativity and so on.

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

It might be my lack of corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they're a hindrance most often than not).

It is your lack of experience. Historically no company has ever gotten to be the size of MSFT, or AAPL or any other multibillion dollar company without management. I don't know for sure the reason, but would guess that someone has to answer to shareholders and they must organize various people with conflicting opinions, ideas and motivations to accomplish a single goal.

Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?

I don’t think so, but I would guess that much of the effort to measure etc. is put in place by HR consultants in at least some part to avoid discrimination lawsuits and to make sure employees are being treated at least somewhat fairly.

Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?

I can confidently say yes to this. Not just engineers, but everyone. If there was no structure, but you had to get a lot done, people would avoid work, work on their own side projects etc. (side projects are not good for the company if they are a new startup that won’t include the company).

[] Someone mentioned valve below, they have a system, it just looks flat. []

I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.

It would probably work for a while, except you would have to answer to shareholders (investors) and you would have to organize your team. Eventually you would either become a full time manager or you would hire professional management so that you could work on coding.

jes51992• 14 years ago

A good manager can make a big difference in productivity. Most software shops, though, don't have good managers - it's too easy to get promoted into it without any experience, or to just flit from company to company without ever learning how to do it well. If I had my own company, I'd work a lot harder to get the best managers possible.

cbsmith5• 14 years ago

Once you have a large enough boat, good management becomes one of the most significant ways you can distinguish yourself from your competitors.

If you think about it, once you get past a certain size, what is remarkable about your company is that you are past that size and it still operates as a single entity. Individual differences matter a lot less than anything you can accomplish across the entire organization.

bane• 14 years ago

Managers are "meta-employees". Their job is not to do any particular work exactly, but to coordinate the work of others and to get the actual employees focused on doing the boring dreck work that nobody really would do by choice.

Think about it this way, there are long standing issues in many leaderless Open Source projects because people more or less just work on what they want and boring crap like writing drivers, or making button graphics or whatever. That's why the ones that tend to be successful tend to be the ones that have strong leadership structures.

Problems crop up in a couple different cases:

1) The size of the group the manager has to coordinate is larger than the manager can actually handle. This results in all kinds of obvious problems I don't think I need to get into.

2) More subtly, and this is where large corporations end up stagnating and dying. It's when the "meta" aspect gets out of control and there are managers of managers of managers.

In this case what happens is that in order to communicate information up the managerial structure, the data necessarily has to become more and more abstract until it often loses so much meaning as to be almost entirely divorced from reality. The side effect of this is that somebody has to produce the abstractions which ends up being the lower levels of the management hierarchy...which of course means that they're no longer functioning in a coordination role as their data reporting role ends up consuming more and more of their time.

3) In large management chains, decision and vision authority tends to move up the hierarchy towards the top, which of course is the part of the hierarchy operating with the least amount (most abstract) of data...and the issues highly abstract "vision statements" that then must be resolved down through the management chain and end up turning in unmotivated "orders" that the lower level coordinators have no real buy in on -- ending up with unmotivated and uncreative solutions to ensure that the "boxes are checked" and satisfy their fraction of the "vision statement". Success in this area is then reported back up the chain as more and more abstract data.

#3 is why large companies usually end up stagnating and ending up uncreative.

msellout4• 14 years ago

Study more anthropology. Small communities have existed without hierarchy, but they have been murdered (literally) by nearby hierarchical societies.

There's something about hierarchy that makes us humans more efficient. Perhaps it has something to do with specialization.

CurtHagenlocher• 14 years ago

"Productivity at Microsoft has skidded to a brief halt thanks to the Vanity Fair article, which employees are reading on tablets and Nooks and Kindles because no one dares bring in the actual magazine."

Seriously? When was the last time you've seen anyone with a physical Vanity Fair magazine? To the extent that this claim is true -- and I have to say that no one in my circle of friends at the company seems to care about this article -- it's because surprise tech people largely consume text through electronic devices.

joe_the_user2• 14 years ago

Vanity Fair is one of six to ten magazines I regularly see at supermarket lines. I don't know how many people actually buy it but it is one of the few publications these days whose headlines can actually intrude on the world of non-subscribers.

Metrop0218• 14 years ago

Yeah I work in phone here and no one I know has given a single fuck about this.

joe_the_user2• 14 years ago

Well, the ole "X% of programmers are rocker stars" position gets a lot of play here (alone with the Steve Jobs quote etc).

I would say that unless a company of some size has the luxury of choosing absolutely who they want from the start, the "rock star" ideology is going to be as corrosive as it sounds like it is at MS.

sriramk• 14 years ago

I've spent six years experiencing all sides of the MSFT review system. I think the articles blaming the curve/stack ranking are wrong - the root problem is that MSFT doesn't have much momentum and the stock isn't doing well.

When everyone isn't getting rich, everyone gets to fight with each other for the limited rewards that are handed down.

I see the same thing happening at Google where the internal systems that worked so well in 2005 are causing political strife with a stagnating stock in 2012.

mckilljoy2• 14 years ago

I'd have to agree, I honestly never saw the stack ranking system screw anyone over the way it is being made out to seem.

It is true that ultimately your manager has to make a case for what bonus/raise/promotion you deserve, and rankings will figure into that. If your manager sucks and/or hates you, he isn't going to fight for you. But if you have a sucky manager, you are in trouble no matter which company you're at.

fghh45sdfhr3• 14 years ago

But if you have a sucky manager, you are in trouble no matter which company you're at.

This is sadly true only most of the time. Occasionally companies are organized so that a bad manager affects his people very little before everyone realizes they are a bad manager and gets rid of them.

Sadly not every company is striving for that kind of organization.

msellout4• 14 years ago

I think someone here quoted Bezos: "If you have a bad manager, then quit." Companies can only detect bad managers when their direct reports leave.

mjwalshe• 14 years ago

Realy I know a team member at a previous employer who where grateful lthat thier team had two peopel with terminal cancer so they ehere given the crap position on the stack rank to hit the teams quota for poor performers

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

Hence, even the best developers on earth work for the money :).

We are all people at the end of the day, nobody is immune except for a select few like Stallman...

ArbitraryLimits• 14 years ago

He gets paid in attention. It's not as different as it seems.

ableal• 14 years ago

> When everyone isn't getting rich, everyone gets to fight with each other

I like proverbs, they often distil penetrating wisdom. Over here, there's this saying: "Casa onde não há pão, todos ralham, ninguém tem razão" - literally translated, that's: in a home without bread, everybody nags/fights, no one is right.

Which is probably, and sadly, only too true.

spuz• 14 years ago

Does that mean that the same will happen in any company whose stock starts to plateau? Because that would be a pretty scary thought. Can you really say that it's hopeless to change the reward system to prevent infighting and boost innovation again?

blackhole• 14 years ago

I am truly amazed that I wanted to work for this company at one point.

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

Microsoft's review system sounds like an even more vicious variety of what Google has, which is more than bad enough to fell a great company.

Google has a bicameral system consisting of (a) manager-assigned "calibration scores" that are the outcome of stack-ranking nonsense and (b) annual peer reviews. It seems like a bicameral review system would be a good thing, by removing career SPOFs. If a bi- or multicameral system is well-designed, that's exactly what you get: multiple paths to success.

Where Google fails it is by making it an AND-gate rather than an OR-gate, even for lateral transfers, much less promotions. (Without good calibration scores, transfer is impossible.) At Google, people need managerial support AND peer support to advance, which means there's endless jockeying for visibility in addition to manager-as-SPOF. It really is the worst of both systems.

In a properly-run company, you have several review signals: peer review, extra-hierarchical work, demonstrated curiosity and will to self-improve, and managerial review. For firing (excluding people who do something outright wrong) the decision should be based an AND-gate. If someone does poorly by his manager AND can't get peer support AND can't find a transfer, then it's time to fire him. Not before. That's how decent companies do it. On the other hand, for title upgrades and pay raises and better projects, decent companies use an OR-gate. If he gets good managerial reviews OR good peer reviews OR has other managers interested in taking him, then treat the employee as successful: give him a decent raise and let him transfer as he wishes.

Now, managerial positions are a bit different. There, you actually want to see strength in several signals before you give someone power over other people. So there's justification for making selection into management be based on an AND-gate. You just really need to be sure that the person can lead. That's different. But title upgrades, pay raises, project allocation, autonomy and transfer opportunities should be based on an OR-gate; if one signal indicates potential for success, move forward. If you can't see this, then you're FAL and you should not be allowed to leave the house without assistance, much less make decisions that affect other people.

Google fucked up its bicameral system by making it an AND-gate for promotions and transfers and an OR-gate for adversity. That's the destruction of what was once a great company. It has cost the software industry billions of dollars worth of value. It sounds like a similar billion-dollar immolation occurred at Microsoft.

Microsoft's system, advanced half a decade or more further in necrosis, seems much the same but worse. It seems like these types of systems get worse over time because more people want to tack on their own shitty ideas as more people develop the system. They're not happy enough with other peoples' pre-existing shitty ideas; they need to make a personal mark on a shitty system by making it noticeably shittier, enough that they hear people complaining about their changes in the cafeteria (which they justify as a good thing because "those people are obviously no good, because good people have nothing to worry about come review time.")

I am glad the Vanity Fair article got published. I have no strong feeling about Microsoft either way, and I have a lot of respect for the great work coming out of Microsoft Research, but it's about time that we see bad HR policies leading to outright exposure and frank humiliation.

rachelbythebay• 14 years ago

There was a joke some years back: what's the difference between Enron and Qwest? Six months.

Now I think it's time for an update. What's the difference between Microsoft and Google? Six years.

Having seen far too much inside the latter (as you did), it seems inevitable. The path has already been blazed, and they are barreling down it just as fast as they can.

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

Google has one advantage, which is that they have a history of being mediocre at the business game but make great products. Microsoft was great in its heyday at the business game but makes mediocre products. This is an era of technology when a lot of the best things really are free (e.g. PostgreSQL, the best relational database, is open source) and Google is way better adapted to that environment.

It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb.

raygeeknyc2• 14 years ago

FYI: He didn't see much at all inside the latter. His tenure was order of single digit months and he appeared to have his mind made up within a matter of weeks.

yuhong• 14 years ago

OT, but about Google, what would you suggest to the Google founders?

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

Real Games was a huge missed opportunity. If they'd engaged indie developers to get quality games instead of mainstream Zynga dreck into Google+, they'd have a real singular (non-copyable) draw instead of competing in the red ocean with Facebook as a "Me, too" product.

cbsmith5• 14 years ago

How bad HR practices can screw a company is a well known fact.

What isn't so well known is how to run a large, knowlege worker driven company well.

That's why it is so hard to cast Microsoft and Google aside as easily as people seem to. Yes, they are doing all kinds of things wrong. What's amazing is how much they are getting right, given the odds. That's the insight the author of this article seems to lack.

kamaal2• 14 years ago

>>How bad HR practices can screw a company is a well known fact.

Welch himself says this. He says the Head of HR is almost as important as the CFO.

The issue is blindly copying his style without understanding the spirit behind it.

andywood• 14 years ago

At every company, and in fact in every village, there is both a formal, extraverted, hierarchical organization, and an informal, social, graph-like organization. Much is made of "networking", but I wonder how many understand that the social network is where the real power is.

The hierarchy gets things done that need doing. The social network transcends, not only moving people between divisions and teams within the company, but also between companies. One might even see this as a principle behind the ascendancy of the likes of Facebook, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

Make no mistake, there are people at Microsoft operating to make things better, and the competition, both internal and external, plays a part. We who like to read, like to practice reading the writing on the wall, as we did while focusing on the chalkboard from our desks, now replaced by the whiteboard from our bouncy balls and standing desks. But we also know that a company lives until the last person turns out the light.

alexclarke• 14 years ago

You'll be glad know to that the arrogant Googlers are still talking about you in their internal mailing lists long after your departure.

raygeeknyc2• 14 years ago

Michael; As a correspondent on your many internal rants at Google, I am not surprised, although sad to see that you have progressed to being a disgruntled ex-employee with an axe to grind.

You were not here long enough to experience the situations you claim to have suffered; you did not fit in, in many aspects, and were unwilling to adapt or in any way change your stance or expectations; and the assertions you make are warped to maintain your own position as being "right" and whatever else needed as being "wrong" to fit.

jkolko• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, this was common practice in tech in 1999. It's called Topgrading; it was started by Welch at GE. You can read all about it at http://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-Leading-Companies-Coaching-...

hubb• 14 years ago

Stack-ranking is all that and worse, according to my mole.

this isn't a conspiracy, it's just a gossip source. that sort of exaggeration makes the article harder to read.

tysont• 14 years ago

As a former Software Development Lead @ Microsoft who went through calibration multiple times and no longer works there or has skin in the game, the article is just plain old factually incorrect.

Yes there is a 20/70/10 curve with both the old/new systems, but managers aren't held to the curve until the org size is around 30-50 people so exceptions can be made in either direction for strong/weak teams. Also the claim that only 1/2's can transfer is bogus, plenty of managers are happy to take 3's and 4's can move in most situations (I know of a person who got multiple U-10/5's and he still found a job). Finally the claim that calibration takes a ton of time is way over hyped, I probably spent less than a week on year end calibration (bit more than that including writing reviews, which is hugely important).

As a Software Development Manager at Amazon I can also attest to the fact that calibration isn't unique to Microsoft, Amazon just calls it OLR's. It's not a perfect system, but I have yet to hear great suggestions on how to improve it. I'm also not advocating the Microsoft system, but the facts in the article are just out of whack.

comex• 14 years ago

Valve has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I'd like to point out that Valve also uses stack ranking, according to their handbook:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

I guess it's the Microsoft influence. But things seem to work out well for them...

msellout4• 14 years ago

Anyone who gets upset at stack ranking has never heard about how management consulting works. They advertise stack ranking in order to RECRUIT.

Life as a management consultant is a perpetual job search, networking internally to get placed on the best projects to get the best performance metrics to get the best bonus. It makes sense, because your job is to give advice to large bureaucracies. If you can't figure out how to navigate corporate politics, you aren't qualified to serve your clients.

marshray2• 14 years ago

And should we expect this system which seems to work so great for management consultants to be the best system for organizing tens of thousands of employees developing software products composed of tens of millions of lines of code shipping to billions of customers?

tmbsundar2• 14 years ago

I am not sure why M$ is singled out for this "Stack Ranking" practice. While in reality every big company has implemented some or other variation of this system.

G# and particularly Jack Welch was the one who first introduced this system en masse. Even he, IIRC, did say that, this Forced Ranking (as it was called), system should be more of a short term thing where in you clean the system of the non-performers (how can someone identify justly and accurately is a question) and do not enforce this once it has run its course (3-5 years). Everyone attributed the success of the G#'s northward share prices during his reign to this "performance culture". If there was any truth in that approach, only it has not sustained after Immelt took over.

Even I>M follows this so called "bell curve" based assessment. Every manager should strictly adhere to the skew in his department, down to the smallest of teams.

With this being essentially a HR question for decades to solve, with so many people graduating with MBA HRs and Ph.Ds, I am surprised at the lack of progress or do not know of any alternative system being implemented in a big company successfully.

The normalization which is done at these companies make a mockery of sound statistical principles. A bell curve is forced on even the smallest of teams rather than letting a pattern emerge with very large populations where the distribution is in a shape of a bell curve.

e.g., In a particularly bad year, in a sales team of 10 people the guy/ girl who sold a 50 mill USD as opposed to a top ranker who has done a 150 million is rated bad and equated with some body who wrote 1000 lines of code and his project got cancelled (Note: Project could have got cancelled for any reason, not necessarily and least likely because of the code he wrote). A person who wrote 1000 loc and showed off (read:built visibility with managers who decide his fate on the rating discussions) could easily get a better rating. The whole system goes around a) building perception b) taking credit for success c) pushing responsibility for failure onto someone else. People become paranoid. Nobody shares information with any one else which would help the other guy get a better rating. The organization suffers as a result.

Despite all this and despite Edward Deming's call decades ago to abolish this rating system as one of his 14 principles, I have not seen a successfully implemented system which replaces this Darwinistic one. Does anybody have any examples of better systems or better implementations in organizations?

kamaal2• 14 years ago

No sorry all those companies don't practice Welch's stack ranking methods.

As per the Welch system, if each manager cuts down 10% of his under performing team. The managers themselves get stack ranked in their managers staff all the way up to the CEO. There fore managers themselves get ranked and cut. But that is not what we see most companies. In many of those companies the axe falls only on people working on grass root levels. And the managerial layers get thicker and thicker and years pass by.

Also for this you need a very good leader at the very top who can drive this. Jack Welch could do it because its his system. Other just do it because they have to.

tmbsundar2• 14 years ago

I worked for G# before and it did not happen that way. Managers did not get stack ranked. Every manager had a mandate to push 10% or 5% of their team as bottom 10 or 5. And, I should add that this was may be because, it was in the IT side and they did not have the luxury of letting go of people. So the bottom 5/ 10% was not moved out. They were handed a rating and the performance improvement plan that goes along with that.

marshray2• 14 years ago

Because the current system benefits the managers, the MBAs, and HR consultants just fine.

The more energy you have to put into such a competition, the more you'll get out of it. Managers spend more time learning and playing the game, by definition. Since it's engineered as a zero-sum game, compounding benefits accrue to those in inverse proportion to the time they actually spend creating externally-meaningful value for the organization.

confluence• 14 years ago

Stack ranking has to be, by far, one of the stupidest management methodologies that I have ever heard of.

It indicates 4 things:

1: Your hiring isn't up to scratch such that this needs to be done (i.e. rank and yank). Raise the hiring bar and reduce firings.

2: You don't trust your employees to do the work you hired them too - this breeds mistrust and increases the level of politics used in the work force. You need to let creative employees freely do what you pay them to do.

3: You don't give projects enough time to mature.

4: You allow randomeness and false causation to determine employee outcomes. For example AIG Finance was completely ripping the other departments during the bubble run up. But come the crash - they almost took the entire firm down.

keeptrying• 14 years ago

Bloomberg does the same thing. Are there big companies that dont do this? In some way or form everyone is ranked at some point.

Microsoft employee on stack ranking and its 'most universally hated exec'

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