It resulted in a strategy where some teams have hired puffer people with the only purpose to have poor performance ratings assigned to them and let them go when the demand for such inevitably rose for such from HR. This shielded the core team allowing them to focus solely on actual business requirements.

There were people in the office taking decent salary, doing barely anything with kind of no expectations of their performance whatsoever. Some were doing their masters, some hit the gym very hard, some were just chilling out.

This was my first lesson on how focus on tactical goals and metrics can fundamentally screw up the long term vision.

My anecdote - at a former big tech company, we had a long hiring freeze, and they even decided that when someone leaves or gets fired, their headcount goes back up to senior leadership who decide where that headcount should be (so as a manager, if you fire someone - you might lose the position entirely).

So, naturally, even since then there have been zero people fired, even if they are low performers, since managers want to keep their headcount. But talented people obviously still get offers and leave, and when they leave, their headcount disappears.

So after a year or so of this great policy, the average level of talent across the company is steadily dropping, which also means it'll be much harder to recruit top talent even after this policy is over - because most talented people want to join a team where they can still learn and evolve, collaborate with other smart folks, etc.

For example, I explained that if it takes a foot-high pile of paperwork to obtain an internal use SSL certificate, then the highly predictable outcome of that policy is not "greater security", but unencrypted HTTP everywhere.

The inevitable response to such feedback is that "people ought to do the right thing", which is laughable on its face. Nobody, and I mean nobody in their right mind will subject themselves to months of paperwork, procedure, and pleading for something that they consider to be optional.

"But, but, the right thing is for them to jump through those hoops anyway!" is the typical response to such logic.

This kind of argument is just futile. Someone up high has decided that they know better, that human nature will bend to their will, and will forge ahead despite being told they are wrong.

Compare that to other companies that practically gave out no-limit credit cards and full access: imagine which companies attracted the best talent.

But, it amazes me just how long a company can survive being just mediocre and siloed. You often don't see the long-term effects until after those who implemented the policies have left or been promoted. I often look up those companies to see how they're doing. And, they're still chugging along, being barely profitable.

This really annoys me about politics. They seems to reason as: We have problem A, so let's do solution B to solve this. And then the reasoning ends.

What should happen is to evaluate all the consequences of solution B. And sometimes those consequences work in such a way that they make problem A even bigger.

Reasoning about an interconnected system is crucial here. And as developers we are very well aware of systems and the impact changes can have. But it seems a lot of people are not able to reason about systems.

If there's one thing we should be teaching in schools, this is it. You can leave school and have no clue that everything is connected to everything else, and that if you're not focused on that reality your actions can have completely unexpected and counterintuitive (to you...) consequences.

I’m so tired of this advice. Maybe metrics are bad, but the only thing worse than metrics is no metrics.

Discouraging an action just because it doesn’t work 100% of the time doesn’t seem efficient either.

The argument really should be that certain metrics are bad. Sure, propose a better one, but saying that leaders don’t think hard enough just because a metric turns out to have ill effects seems useless advice. How can you be certain in advance when you have thought hard enough?

A better approach is probably to recognize that metrics are hard. Keep an eye on them, iterate, and be willing to make mistakes as that’s the only way to improve.

A good rule of thumb is when you find yourself making "obviously bad decisions" because you know as a result the metric will go up, not because a generally favorable outcome for the business is expected to be the result, then you might be a redneck middle manager driving the metrics.

No one should generally exercise tunnel vision and you should not be completely focused on metrics. (Although it might be OK to have one person in the business whose job is to maintain the tunnel vision, if you're telling the whole company to do this then you are likely creating blind spots that will come back to haunt you.)

If you focus on driving up the metrics it can be at the expense of the vision. The business is not the metrics, and the vision is not fully defined by the metrics.

Add autonomy and judgement for the managers, along with a battery of metrics that aren't binding.

Everyone will see that it doesn't help to sign up loads of customers while having loads of complaints coming through the helpdesk, or having loads of extra helpdesk staff with no sales. Where the balance goes is judgement.

Success is one of those nebulous things that can't be described sharply, but people often have an idea of how things are going anyway.

I think it's the same issue politicians have. No one of those in power ever thinks of unintended consequences. My guess: it takes a special kind of anal person to actually want to get into power (and thus to eventually get into power) - and they just can't imagine people acting not according to their great master plan.

This sounds like a former professor of mine who would order phones and tables for everyone from the spare money on the end of the fiscal year for "research purposes" since otherwise the department would lose the budget.

It’s the employees who don’t know that they’be been hired as the designated sacrificial goat I feel sorry for: That’s a potentially awful position to be in.

My first job was in an old newspaper printing business (this was back when newspapers were highly profitable and a respected medium). We had a few old people in our department who were basically kept there doing nothing because they didn't want to retrain on new technology but they were friends with management so they weren't let go before retirement. Which sounds super humane and socially sensitive. Except there were a few of us new hires that couldn't get permanent contracts because the departments were "fully staffed", we were busting our ass and making 1/2 of what these guys were for doing nothing. And this "fair treatment" wasn't there for everyone - just the people who were friends with upper management - basically if you paid tribute by inviting a few people up to the management offices now and then, bring a bottle of nice booze and locking the door for a few hours, doing out of work favors, etc. There were people who were laid off and who had to retrain to remain.

It was a sobering experience after my rosy childhood world views about fairness in society.

When they are on the clock, people generally want to be at least a little bit useful, at least do something that will be of value to someone. Sitting there doing nothing is not fun.

There are lots of people who would love to just get their salary and date people online + do their private stuff all the time, and I think it's totally fine that not everybody wants to work hard.

The problem here is of course that it's not good for people who are working hard.

Sama is super proud that there are only 250 people in OpenAI, he understands that slackers destroy companies.

Being friends with management is doing something though. It’s messed up but if I had the resources there’s definitely people I know who I’d pay to have around just cos socializing with them helps me work better with no requirements on their own output.

Sort of how Google could have thousands of employees doing nothing and still be insanely profitable. Since they were employee owned after transitioning from communism (majority share at least) there was no pressure to optimize profits. The pathologies of that were interesting to say the least.

I dunno, seemed like to worked out very profitably for the boomers. Maybe they’re onto something.

If the “lifers” actually did something, you would not have been hired at all, right? So, in a way, their slacking actually created a job for you.

Also these kinds of environments (people having too much time on their hands, nothing to do) has other nasty side effects - it's the extreme of corporate politics - clan/tribes and all that. I was good with computers so I got moved to IT department and I got to see it for a while - it was surreal compared to things I've seen in tech.

These guys are puffers at big investment banks getting well over 6 figures while they pump iron and work on a masters degree. No comparison, or sympathy.

What he did argue was that if you put people to work and pay them for it that's better for the economy as a whole than if they did nothing and earned nothing, even if the work they do is of low (perceived) value. Digging holes and filling them back in is simply an extreme example to emphasize the point.

The reasoning is of course a pretty standard demand-side argument: giving more people more money causes more money to be spent, which boosts the economy.

Yes, you're right--I didn't mean to suggest that it was a serious policy proposal to dig/fill in holes.

According to OP's description it is neither universal nor basic.

Spoiler: it didn't end well.

Having grown up under communism, I think UBI might amazingly be a worse idea still. Because while yes, socialist economies did not work out and people were standing around a lot doing nothing (because they had nothing to motivate them to), there was undeniably a communal aspect to it which wasn't all negative. UBI doesn't even have that, it's pure populist perfection. Give monies!

Yes you could say that's because of communism, but in practical terms these countries had way more problems than just being communist in the first place.

> why communist countries have failed

please enlighten us.

Would be awesome to get a 6 figure salary on the side while I work on my startup.

(I'm very good at leetcode-interview BS so will have no problem passing your interview and will be happy to take the severance when you need to fire me)

Edit: And don't worry about any bidding war with other managers. I'll just put you in my queue and rotate through you all as needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

So ... how do I apply for such a puffer position?

I am pretty sure I am this person right now. Got the job but mostly not qualified for it, though I'll concede it's a niche field and they probably have to train people regardless. But it feels square-peg round-hole.

What do?

"This was my first lesson on how focus on tactical goals and metrics can fundamentally screw up the long term vision."

I don't get how you take that away from this - this is a lesson in how bad managers who refuse to do what is asked, and apparently have no accountability, can screw up the system.

Stack ranking may be good or bad, but if your managers are working around the system, and nobody is holding them accountable for it, that's a separate, and honestly bigger, problem.

If they actually did what was really being asked (instead of trying to work around it), either

1. it would work, and the company would be better off.

2. it would fail miserably, and the company would either stop doing that (and be better off) or go bankrupt (and we'd all be better off because it would be an object lesson).

The reason this went badly is precisely because of a lack of real accountability, not because of stack ranking itself.

Who watches the watchmen? In a large-enough organization, the stack ranking system is set by some executive high up the mountain. The low-level line managers and group managers are incentivized to work together to get the budget (for puffer employees) to help them keep their proven performers. Finance doesn't care as long as (a) the bottom-line improvements from firing puffers keep getting realized and (b) management keeps being able to pay puffers below-market salaries. Puffers themselves shouldn't care in this day and age, taking the opportunity to take the puffer paycheck as a 100% remote position with no actual responsibility, while working full-time somewhere else that actually appreciates them, so puffers basically get a free paycheck out of it for nothing.

It doesn't matter if it's a good system in theory. It only matters if it works in practice. There's an old joke about economists - they treat the real world as a special case.

So it doesn't even fail your first test of "the system can't tell". The system can tell. It's just not doing anything about it. That's the failure i'm describing.

Beyond that: If people work around the system, it will never work, regardless of the system. Any system can be worked around, good or not. There are no magically good systems that can't be worked around, or don't even incentivize people to work around them.

All good systems try to deal with bad actors in some way. If they don't, they fail. Plain and simple.

Saying that any system that doesn't work because it has bad actors is a bad system is silly. You will no-true-scotsman your way into having no systems at all.

And think about the corollary: how much additional effort would have to go into monitoring managers to make sure they weren't circumventing the "spirit" of the given bullshit metric? A company like that would resemble a dystopian regime.

"how much additional effort would have to go into monitoring managers to make sure they weren't circumventing the "spirit" of the given bullshit metric?'

Zero - Everyone already knows when it is bullshit. They all sit in a room, knowing someone else is saying bullshit, but avoid saying anything about it because they want to say bullshit too.

Rational actors do act rationally all the time - the system has to deal with that, and isn't here. That's the point - none of the bad behavior was dealt with.

It's rational to do lots of things. Kill your competitors in the drug game before they kill you, embezzle and rip people off who are vulnerable who can't fight back, etc. Rational is a silly bar, and definitely does not lead to viable systems. It has no moral component. It has no business component. It is only logic.

No system works if it doesn't hold people accountable, even if they are acting rational.

Those people are known as "sacrificial lambs." I ran across the term in a previous position. More than one person specifically included this concept in their planning.

There is the one where the company wants to reward top performers. I think this one is most common, and I have never worked at a company that doesn't so some form of bonus budgeting that tries to capture a group of employees who are performing well and give them a bonus. The budget itself dictates how many employees can fit into that group, so ultimately what happens is a natural bell curve of the biggest rewards going to the perceived top performers, as agreed upon by managers usually at the organization level.

The other more insidious stack ranking involves a punitive element, whereby a group must necessarily be singled out for performance improvement reasons. This is the type of thing where managers, no matter what the team members actually accomplished, have to put someone on a performance improvement plan or start performance managing them to "get them up the bar" because someone naturally has to fall into the "bottom performer" bucket of stack ranking.

I think the former is common and pretty unavoidable unless a company has an unusually large bonus budget pool available. The latter approach is what causes problems with companies, because all of a sudden team mates become competitors and cultures can go downhill rapidly. Think Amazon, Microsoft under Ballmer, and GE under Walsh.

It's kind of interesting how many companies who are doing the former bonus budget pooling eventually get seduced into doing the latter and destroying their culture.

The more obvious way is very obvious: we had a professor who told us he'll be grading us by first tallying up the answers, and then applying a bell curve to the scores, so that X% of the students get an A, Y% get a B, etc., and some Z% of the students will fail. As you can imagine, everyone was up in arms about how obviously unfair this is.

The less obvious case, but close to what you describe, was scolarships. For almost every "track"[0], scolarships were awarded for top X% of students. In the "track" I was in, and another one in our faculty, the scolarships were instead given to anyone who crossed a certain absolute grade threshold, in (IIRC three) tiers. The higher the tier you reached, the more money you got, independent of how other students fared (probably subject to budget constraints, though).

Now, I can't prove it, but there was one other notable difference between our "track" and that other one with same scolarship model, and every other "track" at the university I was aware of: ours were famously cooperative, everyone else was fiercely competitive. I don't think it's a coincidence. My university experience was that of everyone helping each other out, because it was always a win-win both socially sometimes financially. Everywhere else, this was unthinkable - helping other students created a risk of them getting ahead of you and taking your scolarship.

I'm dismayed to see the same thing repeating in companies too.

--

[0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.

  [0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.

It worked the same way at my University with the same outcome as yours. 7 years after graduation we still maintain regular contact as a group with my classmates.

The term I'm looking for, though, is the set of batches abstracted over time. That is, all students who take CS at particular faculty of particular university, regardless of the year they started. A sequence of "batches". Such students will share curriculum and specific teaching staff. This is in contrast to another such group that e.g. does Applied CS at the same faculty, or Theoretical Physics at different faculty.

EDIT: perhaps a picture is in order. Imagine an university tallying up how many students started a given class on a given year, per class, across entire university. They could create a spreadsheet that looks like:

  |                        University of Example                       |
  |----------+---------------+-----------------------+-----------------|
  |          | Division of   | Division of           | Division of     |
  |          | Telecoms & EE | Robotics & Bio        | Social sciences |
  |----------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------|---------|
  | Class of | Appld | Tele  | Biomd | Appld | Auto  | Social| ...     |
  |       ↓  |  CS   |  comm | eng   |  CS   | matics| media | ...     |
  |     2022 | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ...     |
  |     2021 | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ...     |
  |     2020 | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ...     |
  |     2019 | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ...     |
  |      ... | ...   | ...   | ...   | ...   | ...   | ...   | ...     |

> For almost every major, scholarships were awarded to the top X% of students of that major.

Yes, I believe "students of a major" is the best term.

(I did some manual post-processing inside HN text box though, as Org Mode doesn't support having single cells spanning multiple columns or rows.)

Although that usually refers to former students, and doesn’t include current students.

The problem with this is not the size of the bonus pool.

The immediate problem is the thresholding. Due to the sharp threshold, the bonus will practically never stand in proportion to performance. An employee that is judged to perform at a level of 6.1/7 gets nothing, but the one at 6.3/7 gets a lot. This makes the scheme anti-collaborative.

The less obvious problem is the ridiculousness of the idea that you can assign accurate individual performance numbers to people. These things are insanely noisy to the point of being meaningless. It ends up effectively a lottery. That would be fine if you called it a lottery, but by pretending it's not you create perverse incentives.

There are only two ways to do bonuses well:

- either forego individual bonuses and reward the entire company equally (or maybe scaled by salary) based on company performance, or

- hand out individual bonuses only to true (statistically verified) outperformers -- in this case you might end up not handing out any bonuses most years.

Goldstein and Spiegelhalter did a paper on league tables for organisations (e.g. schools and hospitals) along the lines that noise in the data made the results questionable.[1]

Perhaps the idea transfers to individuals within an organisation that uses stack ranking?

[1] https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmm/migrated/d...

Good managers recognize the value of role players. Not everyone can be a top performer. It's an absurd expectation to have for any organization.

There are no boni for top performers in my company at all. If business is good everyone gets a bonus. The only exception here is sales. Here people are more competitive. I guess I would get martyred if I even suggested it for other departments. And I believe it would be pretty bad for morale and teamwork overall. It is good that people don't use energy to present themselves in a good light and instead solve the problems we have. I still believe there is a lot of incentive for employees to see the company performing well. As you said, I have the impression that this becomes a background issue if employees compete with each other.

There was a time I would love to have worked at Blizzard, even while being aware of the volatility and risk of the industry. I wouldn't want that today regardless of compensation. Still, I don't believe it is either or. Both systems you suggest probably have an overall net negative effect for development. There are other forms for employees to participate on company success. Administration for employee boni is wasteful overhead for the most part.

If it is true what the article reports, I believe the manager did the correct thing. On that metric he might be a high performer among his peers.

It can be difficult for line managers to fire their entire team.

Couple iterations of that and you'll have people who are hired and/or paid extra for the purpose of being a "fuse" that protects the high performers during layoffs by being first to get fired.

1: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...

For many junior employees, far more likely to be predesignated as H2F, you onboard as a hire to fire employee.

Then immediately begin networking for an adjacent team to join.

It's never about what you can do.

Always about who you know.

Everybody wins. I get a salary for doing nothing. Hiring manager protects his team from a cruel system. High-and-medium-performing coworkers are secure in their jobs. Recruiters meet their hiring goals.

I tried very hard (google & wiki) to look for an English term but I failed. It's 謝罪代行 in Japanese. Literally Apology as a Service.

It seems to me that the process of dealing with customer complaints is pretty well tested and routine at this point. Apologize, either eat the loss (if the problem is serious or not worth the hassle) or spin some BS story (if it's not), then politely ask the customer to rescind their negative review on the e-commerce platform - and if the customer is not cooperating with that last step (which is the most important one for the vendor), continue through pressure, begging and offering freebies.

I feel the whole dance could be outsourced to a professional "customer complaints service", and improved effectiveness would let even more bad sellers thrive with near-perfect review scores for even longer.

> Always about who you know.

Sorry for a tangent to a tangent, but I keep hearing this being said all the time as something negative - even though it's obvious, natural, and how everyone says it should be. Some ways of promoting this arrangement include statements like:

- There's no "I" in "team"

- Team productivity matters more than individual productivity

- Most valuable employees are force multipliers for their team

- Being 2x multiplier for a team of 5+ beats being a 10x engineer

Etc.

How do people saying these things (and this is nearly everyone, it's the industry zeitgeist) think it works in practice? That you can skill up in being "a force multiplier for a team"? That you can grow your team multiplication factor from 1x to 2x to 3x to ... in isolation, and then slot yourself into any team to give them an instant bonus?

No, any kind of force multiplication is achieved through working relationships. The fuzzy stuff. Two people equally competent in their field and with equivalent EQ aren't freely swappable between the teams, because they don't have identical personalities, quirks and habits. Force multiplication involves people working together for some time, molding themselves to fit each other.

In the process, people working well together grow to know and like, or at least respect, each other. They become each other's "first on the list for X", or "example of how to do Y". Which is exactly how "it's about who you know" works in practice.

They don't. Well, they think that about themselves personally, but otherwise, no, they don't really believe it en masse.

It's vranyo: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vranyo

I respect OP (TeMPOraL), he(?) has a long track record of great comments and insights on HN. I always look forward to his comments. But what he is describing is kind of a fantasy that we tell ourselves to get through the unpleasantness. Or more accurately, it's how the working world works in theory, but not in practice. "Team productivity" "Individual as force multiplier" these are phrases straight out of the employee handbook. It's how the company pretends career development works. And a lot of people believe it!

How it actually works is like High School. There are cliques. There are in-groups and out-groups. If you're part of the in-group, you're going places. Your individual performance sometimes matters, sometimes doesn't. Your actual teamwork and team accomplishments sometimes matter, sometimes don't. If you're in the out-group, nothing you do matters. You could be Ken Thompson but if you're not in the right clique, your career is going nowhere.

I've seen it almost everywhere I've worked. A low or medium performer manages to charm his way into the right clique, get liked by the right exec, and his career skyrockets, despite spotty actual work output. Despite their projects failing, despite their direct reports quitting. All the way up to Director level at FAANG--the sky is the limit. All because they got into the in-group and befriended the right people. I've seen top performers stagnate and quit out of frustration, because despite both great individual output and team success, the VP just didn't like the guy, and that was that. There's no way around it. I had a boss who picked favorites and villains. If you were the Golden Boy, you could do no wrong, and you were on track for promotion purely for being in her favor. If you were the unlucky villain, you could do no right and ended up just being a punching bag.

The actual corporate world in practice is nothing like the optimistic and egalitarian employee handbook. It's 80's High School again with jocks and cheerleaders and dweebs and losers.

Yes :).

> But what he is describing is kind of a fantasy that we tell ourselves to get through the unpleasantness. Or more accurately, it's how the working world works in theory, but not in practice.

I think I've failed to communicate clearly that I don't buy into the fantasy. I mostly agree with your description, though I think reality is somewhat better on average than High School. The "school dynamics" at workplace are moderated a bit, as the market adds a degree of back-pressure to which adults are more sensitive than teenagers - basically, someone has to do some things right at least some of the time, or else companies go under and people lose their livelihoods.

My point is that you (the generic you) can't at the same time extol teamwork, being a force multiplier, etc., and also complain that the working world is about "who you know" and not "what you do". Those are two sides of the same coin. Strong teamwork requires people to adjust to each other, and over time this does create an in-group of sorts. People learn to trust each other, and become "better than random" choices for each other for future opportunities.

If the professional world wants to double-down on humanity, team-building, collaboration, then it must also find a way to live with how the humane, social aspects actually work - people build relationships, webs of trust, and tend to favor those connections strongly, because they're the known quality, the variance-reducing, safe alternative to random outsiders. Conversely, if the professional world wants to double down on blind fairness as a principle, then it must stop with the "good team work > individual competence" mantra. I don't think you can have both - they're fundamentally opposed.

And personally, I haven't made up my mind on which perspective I prefer. (Or even my reasoning here is sound.)

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrificial_part

What would you give for that performance? I cannot see anything that would benefit the company. Not even employment costs, because employees certainly price that in.

Seen this happen for teams where the manager loves everyone on their team.

Most of the response is the usual PR speak, but "differentiated compensation" seems like a new level of back-bending to avoid saying "less pay."

The real issue is that stack rankings compel managers to meet a quota for low performers. Even if the team is full of top tier engineers, one or more get dealt the short straw every review period.

While I'm just a developer, my wife is a director at the same company.

I multiple years, she's turned in her evaluations and had the director and VP above her tell her to lower several employees ranking.

One example was an engineer who didn't get along with the people on his team for a pretty high profile project. They know the guy's brilliant and don't want to fire him, so they move him to a lower profile project to decommission several server farms they had been struggling to get done. Dude goes in and absolutely kills it. They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars by the tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned and renegotiated several large contracts the company was on the hook for.

My wife ranked him in the upper tier. He wrinkled a few feathers, but once they reallocated him, he absolutely thrived and saved the company literally a ton of money.

Nope.

He pissed too many people off, her boss and bosses boss mandated she give him a low ranking with a miniscule pay increase and minimum bonus in order to punish him for his behavior early in the year. Nothing he did after that mattered to them. Nothing.

When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.

Sounds a little far-fetched. Slack, Airbnb and Netflix spend about 6M, 17M and 28M on AWS monthly; to SAVE "hundreds of millions" the company would need to be ridiculously large and inefficient.

GP could also be talking about savings over expected life time of the servers if they were not decommissioned, which could easily be 5+ years.

Fortunately for me a director from another group who knew my work, took me under his wing and I was finally able to thrive.

Does not matter the exceptional work you do, its always about listening to your "superiors". Ofc this depends on the organization. Not every place will be like this

Your ability to get on well with others, and work effectively as a part of a team is a component of your _actual performance_. It’s probably the most important component. The only real mistake here seems like this guy should have been fired instead.

Not all work is being performed by cooperating teams.

A lot of high-value work is carried out by individuals.

Some of those are not cooperative.

You don't need to be cooperative to be of high value.

It just helps in a lot of cases, and it's nice for others either way.

> This isn’t true at all.

Yes, it is true, because if the opposite were true, all work is being carried out by groups.

I have personal testimony, which is all you need when making a “not all” claim. :-)

But that is not what I’m saying; I’m saying you can be a disagreeable person on average, but because you work on a team of you, you only need to get along with your boss, who will leave you alone most of the time.

You filled in gaps in GP's post with a lot of assumptions. I read it as someone that can work effectively in a team. But also had conflicts with coworkers. If those were those healthy conflicts or unhealthy conflicts wasn't even discussed. That your first conclusion is to fire based on the absence of info is absurd. You jumped onto bandwagon of others opinions and acted recklessly. Maybe you should be fired instead?

Good management can de-escalate the situation and exploit his personality to work the system better. Not a lot of management Chess going on here, just people valuing feelings over making money. Not paying the guy the fair market worth for the work he did, isn't going to make him any more nice to work with.

Engineers don't negotiate contracts at large companies. The legal department does. Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.

I can see this guy exaggerating the work he actually did, and taking credit for the work of others, which would explain the low rating and why everyone else dislikes him.

I imagine you need to cross a certain combination of company size and project profile/visibility before legal & procurement aren't just sanity-checking and rubber-stamping whatever purchase orders the engineering teams send their way.

It's entirely normal to see engineers negotiating contracts at large companies. Large companies are, after all, mostly a collection of smaller teams that self-manage to a large degree.

> Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.

That's what the sales people want you to believe - to ensure they don't have to deal with anyone who understands the problem space of the product/service they're selling.

It's pretty clear from the replies to my comment that you guys don't actually know what is involved in negotiating a B2B contract. The stuff the engineers are allowed to participate in is the layer of snow covering the tip of the iceberg.

Last time I dealt with this as an engineer, I picked a vendor, procured a quote, discussed how license applies to our usage (which was somewhat of a corner case for the license), and forwarded it to procurement - few days later, we got the exact thing I asked for, on the conditions and for the price I agreed to with the vendor. Were there extra negotiations I'm not aware of done to close that deal? I don't know. If they were, they didn't have any impact I could observe from where I was sitting.

The real negotiating happened when you handed it off to procurement. Their job was to secure the contract with the terms and features you wanted, and it sounds like they did that. I think that's part of why so many programmers de-value the work of the back office (Legal, Finance, HR, etc). Good back-offices work in the background to get important shit done with minimal, if any, interference to the revenue-generating operations of the business.

It was for around £120,000 per year, probably the equivalent of about a quarter of a million pounds sterling today.

This would make some sense if employees were like cells or fruit flies. But in most companies, employees are like organs. You can't improve a body by cutting out 5% of its organs and waiting for them to reappear. At best, you'll degrade the body's performance. At worst, the body will die.

The only viable exception to this I’ve seen is in organizations like sales where there’s some reasonable, objective criteria to evaluate an entire workforce on. Nothing good exists like this for software engineers though.

If you measure just total contract size and think this is all there is to evaluate sales on, you incentivise bad sales.

Turned out it wasn't really the sales guys fault: the CEO was trying to get acquired and figured that a well-stuffed order book looked better, just so long as the cheque cleared before the chickens landed.

And now you have the additional issue that evaluations need to be objective, which is hard, while a manager never wants to lose member of their team, so they're naturally pushed to overrate their people to protect them from ending up at the bottom.

> "ensure employees who don't meet performance expectations receive more honest feedback, differentiated compensation, and a plan on how best to improve their own performance."

Honest feedback? Great! A plan for how to improve my performance? Sure, sounds good [if you don't know what the social realities of a PIP are]. Differentiated compensation? Wait a second...

The only place I know were this does not seem to be the case are government employees were everybody is paid according to a fixed grid and were salary increases are purely time gated. My experience with working with people compensated on a such a model has been… interesting.

If you want to make a big jump money wise, you have to switch jobs. That's what I see in practice.

My theory is that people are reluctant to switch jobs and so companies count on that fact and pay less. And so to motivate someone to switch they need extra money.

Half of my jobs didn’t rewarded people on performance.

Hell, I got demoted during a reorganization and was told my current performance merited my previous title but because I didn’t perform at that level 9 months ago, I was demoted. And they promoted someone older than me into my previous position purely because of his age. He did not meet any of the requirements for it.

I think this is true literally everywhere. Another factor may be competence, but of similar people, the one whom is liked will probably earn more than the other.

The entire point of stack ranking is that it does not do this. The article is about a lead who resigned/got fired because the system wanted to penalise someone who was meetings expectations.

Doesn't a normal distribution typically arise during random sampling? I.e., if there's some statistic you calculate based on a sample, then when you take a bunch of independent population samples, that statistic will tend to be normally distributed over those samples.

If that's the only reason we'd typically expect to see a normal distribution, then I don't understand why we'd expect employee ratings to be normally distributed.

But of course it isn't randomly distributed because you hope you recruitment process isn't just picking up random people from the street.

So yeah, it makes no sense - it's just cargo cult business school science.

But you can make a plausible argument against the performance metric being normally distributed among your employees because that would mean the way you hired your employees was completely random with respect to that performance metric.

I don't think there's any reason to believe that employee scores (out of 100, say) should be normally distributed.

Yet somehow, management/HR can classify these 16 with enough certainty to decide that 8 deserve good compensation/promotions, and the other 8 should be PIP'd?

In some teams I work with, every single employee is what I consider an 8 through 10. Yet the 8's should be RIF'd/PIP'd?

Evaluating and compensating employees is tough enough without using voodoo like Stack Ranking.

If Blizzard was just hiring people off the street then yeah, sure I'd expect a bell curve.

But given the whole recruitment process, it's not necessarily going to form a bell curve.

Plus, the implementation is usually at the manager level - so each manager has to meet a quota of x% good, y% okay, z% bad etc., and each manager doesn't have 10k employees.

That would be neat, but probably bad for a variety of other reasons. Like, why is all of sales getting fired? Well, they unfortunately all ranked poorly...

It's more like, a manager has 7 employees and he has to stack rank them 1 to 7 and manage #7 out and rehire a replacement. Was #7 a bad employee? Why would any system of management assume that they are? Such as system assumes that the sea is full of employees of rank #1 to #6 and that the difference between 6 and 7 was so great as to warrant the costs associated with termination, hiring, training, on-boarding, and ramping up a new #7. Will they be better enough to warrant doing it all again?

W. Edwards Deming is rolling in his grave.

(sarcasm) shouldn't you have all good people because your leetcode hiring process only produces "the best" (/sarcasm)

Add to the fact that "rankings" are often largely political. There's a "minimum talent" aspect and then the last 1-2 points is most often political and representative of machiavellian power levels in the corporate dominance hierarchy.

Also, the article headline should explicitly call out Stack Ranking.

Stack Ranking basically admits one of two things:

1) your recruiting sucks

2) your work culture sucks

Well, and #3: corporate culture doesn't value balance or having any "bad times" in your life.

...companies still use it ? Thought microsoft taught industry a lesson here

The process itself was flawed because people had a tendency to stay in the rank where they were submitted because frankly managers didn't have the time, energy or interest in really talking through every employee. It was just easier to rubber-stamp the whole process and move on. Also it was nearly impossible to get rid of the process because of course people who had succeeded in it didn't want change. I couldn't in good conscience continue like that, so I took over rankings for my location. It went from one day to a week-long process and I made people vote anonymously and incorporated a ranked choice system and then aggregated the results. It was a far more time consuming process but IMHO fairer. I still hate forced ranking despite succeeding in it. It becomes part of your job - managing to the metric.

Vestiges of it remain because people still don't know how to distribute compensation without ranking people, particularly for employees that have the same review rating.

But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.

I don't know how many people the lead in the article managed. If it was a team of 15, he has a legitimate gripe. If it was a team of 200, not so much.

Yes, managers are supposed to keep that from happening but this policy tells them that a) you don’t trust them to do their job, b) their job now focuses on protecting their people from the system, and c) being busy playing the same game on their own personal behalf.

> Someone who closes out tons of tickets but is a complete asshole and hated by their teammates should get a worse performance review than someone who codes less but provides mentorship and guidance and is generally pleasant to work with.

They should get a talk with their manager about the attitude and if they don't fix it they should be fired; not wait for any ranking to cull them.

Keep in mind it was never a hard quota, though in my case at amzn I did have a few times where the GM (so manager of ~1500 org) pushed back and said not enough people were in LE for our department, in which case a few borderline people did unfortunately have to get put into LE.

Also seems to ignore these aren't replacement parts, these are your team mates or reports, actual humans with names and families attached. If they weren't coasting or not showing up for work, what you describe sounds like yet another alienating, dehumanizing process at work.

Unless it's a super small company or you're the owner of your company.

What's hellish is that the ranking is forced, you must put people on a PIP or rank them "low", which is absurd. Being told to meet a quota for low performers is bizarre.

> But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.

I mean, below average performers will be around 40-60% just because how averages work.

The problem is that the question is "is their performance low compared to team", while the question you should be answering is "is their performance low compared to the market.

If team's management is on point with hiring the "worst" won't be that much worse than average anyway, so if you want to replace the bottom few % you essentially waste time as new hires might be at same productivity level.

On other side if you recruiting sucks and 20% of the dept does the 80% of the job, it isn't going to help either.

from my own experience, a bad hire rate of 15-20% is what I usually see accepted across the industry.

20% of the 4% rehired is 1/5th%, leaving 3 and 4/5ths of a percent of to come from the better performers.

If your team leads could be trusted to measure appropriately, you wouldn't need stack rankings because they'd correctly identify those under-performing. Stack ranking is conceding that your managers can't properly measure performance. Shouldn't that reflect more on management?

so whatever psychopath games they are playing, its not working.

So managers everywhere who only saw lots of headlines thought it must be cool just like Scrum and microservices and decided to adopt it.

I didn't know this existed until now. The problem with this (among others) is that I can never personally know where I stand. If I'm doing well, but being excelled by others, I still get penalized. There's no guarantee, it's almost random.

Also, I now have a new question to ask in interviews, and if it does exist in a hiring company, I can negotiate by declining bonus pay performance reviews and in lieu of ask for higher wages (not that any company would go for this).

But if times are good and everyone is performing well enough and contributing, why get rid of them? If they're not performing well enough, then you shouldn't need stack ranking to figure that out, and you don't need to arbitrarily set a percentage of employees to put on performance improvement plans or fire.

It depends. In medium and large (and even some small) organisations, the intention behind layoffs is not only to save on the salary bill, it's to cut those divisions, projects, groups initiatives and work units that are a net loss or that are not contributing to the bottom line.

IOW, the intention should be to get rid of certain positions; it's a side-effect that people are usually in those positions.

For example, at Amazon I would imagine that even the high performers in the Alexa team would be considered for layoffs over the low performers in the cash-cows.

It's positions that get laid off, not people.

There seems to be an assumption people will interview for their own job again at the end of the severance period.

But that's kind of irrelevant when layoffs are coz shareholders want more returns this yeah, not because company has problems...

Companies change product strategies all the time to pursue profit, trim unprofitable ventures, etc., and that's all fine. But it's dumb to lay off good employees when they can just be re-deployed somewhere else, assuming the company isn't having financial hardship that actually requires them to shed headcount.

Yep, Currently working for an absolute horror show of an employer who proudly uses stack ranking during yearly and half yearly reviews.

Cant wait to move on from this place.

Oh, really? I haven't followed this kind of stuff in a while. So they're good now?

How would they rank for software development, in general? Game studios are notoriously subpar when you start comparing them to FAANG, big enterprise sotware development shops, etc.

I don't think this has changed substantially. It's supply and demand: lots of people want to build games for the sake of building games. At least in theory it sounds more exciting than maintaining whatever microservice for a FAANG. So, because there's a lot more supply than demand, they get paid less.

Further, stack ranking mostly ignores the existence of human psychology. As soon as metric is chosen to be a benchmark for the measurement of performance, it almost immediately because useless as a benchmark for performance, because people are people. People will find out how the game works, and they will play the game. Employees will sabotage other's work to make themselves look relatively better, managers will hire whipping boys for the specific purpose of giving a low rating so they can take the sword. Sure this happens with any performance rating system, but the worse behaviors are accentuated with fundamentally broken rating systems.

How should employee evaluation be done then? It's straight forward:

* Set clear expectations.

* Get peer feedback

* Manager decides how the employee performed in comparison to the expectations that were clearly communicated to the employee based on the manager's personal knowledge of their reports work, and from that of peer feedback.

No zero sum hunger game bullshit required.

This is the fundamental flaw with stack ranking that really irks me. Stack ranking force fits people to a normal distribution but that's backwards. With normal distributions you're supposed to measure the phenomena then use statistical formulas to see if the data fits a normal distribution. Maybe it does. Maybe it's bi-modal, or tri-modal. Maybe the data is evenly distributed.

But no, companies butcher the concept of a bell curve and end up doing serious damage to the culture of the company as everyone starts optimizing their behavior to succeed in an utterly irrational system.

absolutely, it may work (possibly) if you could apply that 5% over an entire large department

but each line manager only has visibility over their (hopefully) small number of reports

so if you have 3 excellent reports on a high performing team: who do you dump in it?

the usual answer is the person with the least leverage/ability to resign, which is grossly unfair

1 of 3 things will happen:

- The world will be populated with enlightened companies structured in pro-worker models that are wonderful for everyone involved

- You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful

- You will balance option 1 and 2 in some better fashion that moves the needle closer to your idealized vision

Isn't that better than just hating your life, punching a card, and waiting for the axe to fall on your head?

As a business owner, who doesn’t have to worry about being stack ranked, I’ll say: continuous annual stack ranking to ensure a specific percentage of employees are put onto a pip or terminated is a terrible idea, and the people who institute it are bad at their jobs.

I’m not convinced that stack ranking is a good solution to this problem. A good organization and HR team knows how to terminate someone who is not performing well without incurring legal liability.

It can be a somewhat drawn out process, but a stack ranking system doesn’t seem like it would make it a lot faster to me.

My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is), and if you could continually prune the worst performing 3% of the org you could continually improve the quality of the remaining workers.

I’m fairly sure it really isn’t. Unless you hire random folks from the street it’s likely pareto or close. Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb because in the fat tail they’re all pretty close

Sure, I'd agree with that. I was just trying to say I can see where the "on paper" logic comes from. But the on paper falls apart in the real world, where we're not dealing with "resources", but people.

But, yea, I think even the "on paper" case is weaker than it naively appears.

I don’t see an issue with employees protesting or trying to sabotage a system they see as unjust.

If the company cannot convince you that its policies are efficient and moral, then that is their mistake for hiring somebody who sees the world fundamentally differently. If they don't want people to do that, they should tell every new manager in the hiring interview "Part of working here as a manager involves stack ranking people as low, even if they are doing great work, and not telling them they are under stack ranking, and if you cannot do that you won't want to work here"

i think a healthy working relationship involves employer & employee collaborating according to a set of mutually beneficial rules, which prevents either party from taking advantage of the other.

this is (at least idealistically) what employment contracts are for, even if they have a natural tendency to favor the employer in most situations.

besides that, i think there are plenty of examples from recent history which demonstrate that it's not healthy for the rules under which an employee operates to be solely outlined by the owner of the business (e.g. because that owner may attempt to take advantage of the employee).