Got a 4? You just got fired from Microsoft

http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/08/27/got-a-4-you-were-just-fired-from-microsoft/

by cek • 14 years ago

39 62 14 years ago

ceklog.kindel.com

Level 64?

doktrin• 14 years ago

Presumably an internal pay-scale ranking system. Government jobs, for instance, are ranked in a G(1?) - G12+ scale. Sounds a little goofy, but large enterprises need some method to standardize and track compensation.

brg• 14 years ago

That's the second level for a "Senior" developer. The senior level band starts at 63. Below that are 59 (college graduate) to 62, which are the bands of Software Engineer and Software Engineer II. Above it are Principle (65-67) and Partner levels.

danielweber2• 14 years ago

I was expecting the levels to be factors of 2. :(

jobowoo• 14 years ago

Most college hires enter at level 59 (SDE/PM/SDET I)

Once you hit level 61, you're an II Once you hit level 63 (maybe 64?), you're Senior After Senior, it goes Principal then Partner.

joshAg3• 14 years ago

why start at 59?

tptacek• 14 years ago

The friends I have who have gotten offers from Microsoft were all informed that Microsoft, as a matter of policy, pays 60% of the top market salary. Has that policy changed?

joshAg3• 14 years ago

Is an offer for just above 100k for someone who just got their undergrad degree (i didn't get an offer like this, but more than one of my friends has) just 60% of the top market salary now? Man, I need to renegotiate my salary.

adgar• 14 years ago

Yes, just over 100k is about right. My fresh out of undergrad offer to one of Microsoft's major competitors was almost identical to my colleagues' MS offers. Mine was to a competitor who is also known for offering below-market salaries along with generous benefits.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

Every company I've ever worked at - has claimed they pay Radford 50 [1] . (50% of the average).

Unless every company pays their employees pretty much exactly the same, somebody out there has to be in the Radford 75, 90, and presumably 100. You'd think that they would brag about that so the best employees would apply there.

It should be clear why companies won't admit to being in the radford 40, 20, 10, and presumably 0. :-)

[1] http://www.radford.com

danielweber2• 14 years ago

I'm really confused by "50% of the average." Wouldn't the average be 100% of the average? I read "50% of the average" as paying someone half of what they are worth.

anamax• 14 years ago

> Every company I've ever worked at - has claimed they pay Radford 50 [1] .

Did they also claim that they only hired average people? Or did they claim that they only hired above average people?

As Scott Adams pointed out, there are very few above average engineers who can't identify the larger of two numbers.

tonetheman3• 14 years ago

Wow hard to figure out if the post is sarcastic or mad or just a matter fact this is how it is. It seems like a sad place. :(

majormajor3• 14 years ago

Doesn't sound bad to me. Seems like a good place to be if you're performing well.

jinushaun• 14 years ago

The problem is the system imposes a bottom 10% even if everyone performs equally well.

homosaur2• 14 years ago

You have to be down for any company's culture to have much success there. I agree that this seems stupid, but Microsoft also is far larger than any company I'd probably work for. There's a lot of other companies that I wouldn't work for either that are that large and they don't use stack ranking. At some point when you become this big, you look at HR as being literally HUMAN RESOURCES, in the sense of the junk you mine in StarCraft. It's chaff to deliver products. Seems as reasonable a system as any to manage that many folks. It's the resources attitude I wouldn't want to be around, not specifically the stack ranking. Seems like a consequence rather than a cause.

butterfi• 14 years ago

Dear Microsoft

You may have received a payment from me, likely for something X-Box related my kids have requested. On my payment, you will notice a number, from one to five. The breakdown for the numbers are as follows:

5: Wow, I really love your products! Each one is a groundbreaking example of "the road ahead." The design and execution are an example to the rest of us of what success looks like. Sadly MCSFT, you just didn't make the cut this year, but don't worry, only a few of your competitors ever get this number, i.e. Google and Apple.

4: Rock star! I couldn't make it through the day without one of your products. To be honest, you didn't really perform as a "4" this year, but work hard! I'm sure you can do it!

3: Thank you! My 2008 copy of Word still works great, and on the rare occasion I boot into Windows 7 I think, "Hey, this OS isn't so bad. I've used worse."

2: By "worse," I mean Vista. Yeah, it works, but honestly, I'm still a little put out by the whole experience. If you really put your heart and mind into it, I'm sure Win 8 will be the run-away success I know you've been working hard to achieve. But, don't screw this up, okay? People are watching.

1: Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Failure to actually deliver innovation, years of being a bully, and products known for their bugginess is no way to run a company. I might care more, but I don't. I'm too busy watching netflix on my iPhone.

I hope this helps. PS - I'm sorry, but thats not what I meant by "you're number one."

JulianWasTaken• 14 years ago

That's odd.

They get a 5 from me. Where 5 is the number of times I have RMAed that XBox there you've mentioned.

(Actually the sad part is that that's a lie, I think the last time was number 6 for this same console, which I play rarely).

batiudrami• 14 years ago

Snarky, not even close to relevant to the article and adds nothing to the conversation. I sure am glad this is the top post.

trimbo• 14 years ago

Microsoft, I think, will be looked back upon as a great example of stack ranking's failure or success. At GE, it is looked upon as a success. But GE's workforce is (mostly) not in the world of knowledge-workers. They're not expected to come up with great products that sell to the masses, for the most part.

I often wonder if Microsoft's inability to get great products to market in a timely fashion is due to stack ranking. They clearly have great people who work there, who can make great products. Even the Zune was a great product. They arrive on the market about 3 years too late, and then require iteration on top of it. Is this because people there optimize their careers for "their number", rather than what's truly best for the company? Only time will tell.

majormajor3• 14 years ago

I think it would be very lazy to reduce Microsoft's ultimate success or failure in this decade to a single policy. There are lots of factors that can make large companies fail to move well with the times.

Likewise, I wouldn't give it much credit if MS (or Google, or whoever) does well. With a few notable counterexamples, most very large companies end up adopting processes to manage the size of the company, but how large is the impact of the particular process chosen? Is it really controlling success or failure?

Bad management/vision can happen in any system.

homosaur2• 14 years ago

What would Ballmer rate in CEO stack ranking with the rest of corporate America?

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

Stack ranking and vicious careerism can demolish a company independent of anything else. Look at what is happening to Google, with its calibration score nonsense and the draconian transfer policy. Same story, 7 years back in time.

"Vision" is one thing but a lot of people have vision (or think they do). Very few people have that rare combination of interpersonal empathy and competency around complexity that enable them to reliably make good decisions as executives of large companies. (Worse yet, over 90 percent of the people given those positions get them as favors and utterly lack both skill sets.)

alttag3• 14 years ago

True, many things, including strategic focus and market selection, can lead to success or failure, but certainly HR policies have some effect in favoring/repressing innovation, collaboration, and truth to power.

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

At GE, it is looked upon as a success.

Um, no. The back-story you're missing is that, up until about 1980, it wasn't uncommon for people to stay at one company for 20+ years, even after they'd essentially ruined their reputations and were regarded as failures, because it was so disastrous and rare for people to actually get fired. So for companies to have 10 or 20% that was obvious deadwood was not rare. By "deadwood" I don't mean people who tried hard but took a long time to onboard or who worked on unlucky projects and could be rehabilitated, but I mean people who showed up at 11, left at 4, and might do no real work other than showing up for a couple meetings per week and making it obvious through inane comments that they didn't understand what was going on.

The first year of rank-and-yank, few objected to most of the firings because the people let go were the obvious nonparticipants, and it was better to get rid of them than lose the whole company. By the second year, it was more tense. By the third and fourth years, it was an outright morale-killer. It turns out that the percentage of people in a company who deserve to be fired isn't a constant.

kamaal5• 14 years ago

This is true, but not the whole part of it.

In his book, Jack Welch says stack ranking put managers in a very difficult position around 3-4 years after it was implemented, simply because now they had choose worst among the very best. Of course not all of it is good, because even if you plan to hire and replace them by somebody else. What is the guarantee that they will be good?

But he later also says, the functions of the HR in GE were very different than in other companies. They were treated on par with the office of the CFO.

Since the HR itself is stack ranked, hiring wrong people means they will be getting ranked low and fired sooner or later. So they will be forced to hire the very best.

Nikker• 14 years ago

With the talent Microsoft hires vs their products the ratio always came out so low I just shook my head. I always pictured a day of work at Microsoft as someone holding a chair over a grad students head making them refactor sol.exe

kamaal5• 14 years ago

>>Is this because people there optimize their careers for "their number", rather than what's truly best for the company?

People work towards the goals you set them to achieve.

Why is this so surprising?

madrona• 14 years ago

Somewhat off topic: what happened to Mini Microsoft? It seems like he/she was intercepted and lobotomized by Microsoft PR. The open threads with wonderful discussion (one of the best venues for talking across silos) habitually wither from neglect from Mini. What's the next best place?

throwaway118• 14 years ago

The system is really ugly in the sense there's a percentage of people that get each score and MUST be met each cycle.

20% people of each group will get a 4/5 regardless of their work done. Then the other 50% of the people that bust their butt off are told: Sorry! We can only tell 10 percent of the people they rock.

jlarocco• 14 years ago

First, despite the headline, nowhere in the actual article does it say 4s and 5s will be fired. In fact, the snarky comment for 5 explicitly says they won't be fired.

Second, I don't really see putting people into these groups is so bad because it's relative to the other employees. Even if everybody is awesome, some people will be more awesome than others. It would be ridiculous to assume everybody in the group is providing the exact same amount of value and should all be ranked 1 or 2.

kabdib• 14 years ago

Yeah, you can be a really, really good dev in a really, really good group, and get screwed. But if you move to another, weaker group you'll start getting great reviews again.

It's nuts. It's probably what's going to force me out. I want to work with very good people, but to get good reviews I'd have to work with knuckledraggers.

cek4• 14 years ago

Author here.

This is the point where I have my biggest beef with the Microsoft system. I was fortunate to have worked in and managed several groups that were CLEARLY exceptional. One team I built was built from the ground up and EVERYONE I hired (about 30 people) had previously had 3.5 or better reviews.

In the end, I did those people a dis-service by hiring them. Some of them got 3.0s the following year. If I had been 'smarter', I would have 'padded' the team with a few poor-performers to ensure that I could meet the curve.

However, earlier in my career, someone I worked with, and whom I thought I respected, confided in me that he did this; he padded this team with "3.0s" intentionally. This felt completely and morally bankrupt to me. So I vowed to never do it myself.

The way this is supposed to be dealt with is that the stack ranking is supposed to balanced up to groups of ~250 people. The VPs or GMs of these larger groups are supposed to 'break ties' and deal with outliers by using their larger population. At a certain scale (and I believe this) it is realistic to believe that there can be a 20%, 20%, 40%, 13%, 7% bucketing. However, this system requires managers to be ready & willing to fight all the way up the chain. And, to a certain extent ALL managers at MS think their groups are better than others (due to the competitive nature induced by the stack ranking we're talking about also applying with even more dire consequences).

There is a related issue that the Microsoft system causes that is directly related to this: Even though groups must put 7% of their people in the "5" bucket, and are expected to "manage those people out" they are not rewarded for doing it, at all. In fact, it is in those managers best interests to keep those "5s" around.

Sad. And Frustrating.

sadga• 14 years ago

That can be intentional, to encourage strong people to become leaders and mentors.

codeonfire2• 14 years ago

Ranking is designed to protect and benefit the people assigning the numbers. The numbers are meaningless and should be called political ranking. Its ok to work at one of these places short term if you need the cash, but have a plan to move on soon.

wcdolphin• 14 years ago

Nothing too new in the post, perhaps a little bit more jaded than how it is often explained.

The part I found most interesting was your opinion on the different roles at Microsoft (quoted below). As someone with some experience in the PM role, I found it especially interesting. I find the opinion you have described spectacularly oversimplified, specifically in that the goal is just to write software (something only developers are needed), instead of writing the /right/ software, and at the right time. It is interesting to examine the different roles and how they interact, i.e. how devs often think of PMs as meetings and overheads, whilst PMs sometimes think of devs simply as resources. Tests, of course, are often left out in their own world, just hacking on whatever, and fixing the builds :-)

--------- Did you notice I said “software developer” above? This advice is really targeted at people who are good at and love actually writing software. It somewhat applies to program managers, product managers, and so forth, but hey, we work in the SOFTWARE industry. The only clear-cut jobs are for those who actually write the shit. Everyone else just helps.

cek4• 14 years ago

Author here.

I was a PM for a great part of my 21 years at Microsoft. I'm quite sure I am "spectacularly" oversimplifying things. That was intentional.

Here's the problem, related to this specific post, which is about mediocre reviews:

A SDE's job can be measured far more objectively than most other roles in a software company. PM's, specifically, have an additional challenge in that what they do is extremely hard to measure.

But don't get me wrong, I was not trying to diminish the importance of the other roles in creating great products.

michaelochurch4• 14 years ago

Stack-ranking is this idea that emerges when a bunch of bored, overpaid and underemployed people of marginal intellect (that's being generous) watch a terrorist attack on TV and decide, "It be funna' do that to, hurr hurr, a comph-uh-ny!". The caretaker who wipes the shit off their mirrors every morning reminds them that they have executive positions and can actually act out their childish fantasies, so they do.

alttag3• 14 years ago

There have been several articles posted here at HN that complain (rightly, IMNSHO) about stack ranking and the inner turmoil it engenders. (For example, why share a shortcut or automation if using it when others do not makes you appear superior?)

I'm curious, does MSFT still enforce the stacks? The OP made it sound like the scale was independent of one's relative rank.

kamaal5• 14 years ago

I don't know why you are being down voted, because there is some truth in what you say.

The point is so called senior managers and executives you see today in the vast majority of the companies are totally undeserving of what they get. They didn't make it to the top on merit. Most of them had it easy, they made it big during gold rush in the IT boom. They were just there in the right place at the right time.

Most of them if were to compete with even a average developer of our time, will not last much longer.

jrockway• 14 years ago

I propose this instead of perf:

http://sportsfixchicago.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Bosto...

alttag3• 14 years ago

How does this affect the "contract employees"? I'm guessing they don't get the bonuses, but do they get rated?

Microsoft still has a high rate of contractors (and I count some friends and relatives among this number), although less since they got in trouble from the federal government for not paying most types of benefits to contractors. [1]

1: http://archive.washtech.org/news/courts/display.php?ID_Conte...

cek4• 14 years ago

Author here.

In my experience what this post discusses is completely irrelevant to contract employees.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

9:00 PM? Is this what hard work is considered nowadays? Going home that late everyday? Geez, I'd rather be called lazy.

kamaal5• 14 years ago

I've stayed at office for days.

Some people I know never went back home for a week.

At the year end appraisal. We were told we deserved nothing extra as we were told that we were just doing our jobs.

That's how badly management can rip you off.

kamaal5• 14 years ago

Stack ranking is nor for everyone. Its a bit like making a awesome but a very difficult dish. Its a kind of a dish which will taste horrible if don't get the ingredients right to the very pinch.

For stack ranking to work you will need awesome leaders at the top rung in the company. You will need to fight out politics, processes and eliminate bureaucracy. You will also need a fair measuring of performance. Without all of this you see managers awarding their yes-men(their pets and bootlickers basically) top ranks and the good guys will leaving the organization. Unfortunately its very easy to get into this mode, especially if you are a large company will several layers of management- this kind of things can run for years until irreversible damage is caused. The net result after years will be false or irrelevant numbers floating in the company, while the best talent has already left.

Even Jack Welch, mentions that stack ranking works best if everybody in the organization is stack ranked all the way up to the CEO. So that if some one cheats in the middle he will get ranked low under his manager and so on an so forth. This is very different to what happens in most big corporates. Managers are generally left immune to this process. The net result is they begin to form gangs of yes-men around them. Whoever refuses to be a part of it, slips out of favor of the manager and gets a bad ranking. Net result in mass is a disaster. Which is not apparent until very late.

So if you are company with a culture of politics, processes, nepotism, bureaucracy and biases. Stack ranking will not help, but rather destroy you.

I saw all this at a Mega Corp here in India. Needlessly to say that company today is struggling fallen far below from its original glory days.

KirinDave2• 14 years ago

I wonder what the stack ranking in MSR (the pure research arm of Microsoft) looks like.

codeonfire2• 14 years ago

I always found it amusing that Enron did stack ranking while at the same time cooking it's books. They were just doing it to be assholes.

Got a 4? You just got fired from Microsoft

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