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Microsoft's 'Cannibalistic Culture'
theodp writes "In the provocatively titled Microsoft's Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant, Vanity Fair offers a teaser for a story that will appear in its August issue on Microsoft's Lost Decade, which promises an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of Steve Ballmer. 'Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,' contributing editor Karl Eichenwald writes. '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,' says a former software developer. 'It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.' Also discussed is the company's loyalty to Windows and Office, which induced a myopia that repeatedly kept Microsoft from jumping on emerging technologies like e-readers and other technology that was effective for consumers. Having seen an advance copy of the full piece, GeekWire offers its take on what it calls an 'epic, accurate and not entirely fair' tale."
That may be the mother of misleading book titles. Microsoft has lost a step in some areas (as much due to Apple's ascendence as anything MS did wrong), but this sounds like one of those apocalyptic books you see about finance ("The Coming Great Depression" and stuff like that). It's essentially a tabloid headline on a book cover.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Every year for over a decade I've seen Slashdot posts about how Microsoft is doomed and that Microsoft is already irrelevant and failing. ...and yet, every year when the tech companies report their earnings Microsoft will put up big numbers that are bigger than last year's. Thus, every year they can accurately claim to have made a "record" amount of money.
I should be so lucky as to "fall" as hard as Microsoft.
MS has always hired some of the best and brightest, but for years the output has been unable to match. So if you have top people, but you can't produce stuff people want than what is the issue? Management. Duh. I know, and I'm sure many others do too plenty of smart people in the biz. The difference between the Apple, Google, and MS guys is slim at best. But what gets produced is obviously not favorable to MS in quality or innovation. Innovation to Balmer seems too "out of box" and scary to be worth it, so instead he comes late to every. single. party. in the last 10 years.
Mostly, stack ranking makes employees focus on butt kissing. Reviews are subjective so the manager's favorites get the good ranking regardless of actual performance or value to the company.
Law schools grade this way. It simply adds a very real incentive to undermine those in your group.
And that one fact explains so much about Western culture today that it's scary.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
This is the first time I've heard of stack ranking (you can tell I haven't worked in a corporate environment) and it strikes me as the most stupid, ineffective, counterproductive load of nonsense I have ever heard.
It is instantly obvious that it's a shit idea when you realise that you are obligated to have a set number of results at each grade level, so it will fail the minute you get a team that doesn't fit that perfect theoretical curve (many more good than bad, or all bad etc).
"Seven of you scored well enough to get the top grade, but I'm only allowed to give out 3 top grades, so I randomly picked those top three or simply chose the best ass kissers"
The four who don't get it are now disgruntled and lose motivation, and perhaps start looking for somewhere that appreciates them.
I can't believe this utterly retarded system got past the "throw us a crazy idea!" stage at a management meeting. Oh, management... of course. All is explained.
Except it's nothing like that. Getting into the top three in the Olympics is the entire point. It's why they train day after day after day. If you come in fourth or twenty-third the world may think you are a turd, but to your home country, you are probably still the best they have at that sport and #1 in their book - you may even still get endorsement deals. Those guys you are competing against? They are your actual competition!
In MS's case, those guys you are competing against are your teammates! It would be like a volleyball team ranking themselves against themselves rather than against opposing teams. And not be judged by their merits.
This concept was foisted upon the world by former GE CEO Jack Welsh. It has ruined one company after another and is an example of the cure being worse than the disease. Watch out when your company hires in HR people from places like GE, IBM, Microsoft, Nortel, AT&T, etc.. They will try to get a promotion by implementing a slightly different version of this which will have about the same results.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I like how one MS employee put it: They advertise for Internet Explorer's team..... they want the best 4.0 level talent on that team. Problem: Once that talent arrives only three out of ten will actually get the 4.0. The rest will get a mediocre 3.0 which makes them feel unappreciated. And the bottom two will be shown the door, even if they truly are top talent. (Probably headed off to google and chrome development.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Now imagine the lowest two of your ten people team just left. Who would you want as replacement? Certainly not anybody who is better than you at their job.
Your odds of surviving thirty years of this is approximately zero. Everybody has an off year eventually. Once people realize that, their commitment also goes to zero.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I find the whole process of stack racking fascinating in a Machiavellian point of way. It really points to incompetent management who have no idea how to motivate staff, how to create effective productive teams and of course how to create a healthy working environment. Basically it screams we have no idea what we are doing so we are going to introduce dog eat dog, into the work environment and let itself sort itself out and blame everything on middle management and take credit for any success.
I would look at stack racking in employee evaluation as a solid indication that a company has psychopathic corporate executives in charge. They enjoy the carnage that results, they revel in the benefits of favouritism, include gifts and sexual favours, the enjoy the ego boost of being able to destroy more competent people and they thrive in the hostile environment created. Insane people driving insanity in order to make themselves appear normal. This certainly explain a lot about M$'s failures in new product lines. No one willing to take risks, top to bottom favouritism and ensure the job permanence of current graders. A top to bottom scheme to ensure the survival of Ballmer and nothing else.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You really think they spend as much as 30% of their time working?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
This kind of stupid shit happens because management is not a science!
Just like how before chemistry we had alchemy, and before medicine we had blood letting, you're seeing the pre-scientific version of management. It shouldn't be surprising that it's a joke.
I've read a bunch of management books and the whole time I was screaming "CITATION NEEDED" inside my head. They're full of unscientific but plausible sounding mumbo-jumbo, and ridden with weasel words. No numbers. No studies. No control experiments to demonstrate an improvement relative to the existing gold standard. Probably because there aren't any standards to begin with.
Take stack ranking for example: how would you even begin to measure the effectiveness of such as technique, relative to other employee review systems? What units would you use? How would you run this experiment? I bet you can't answer this. I bet the person who came up with stack ranking can't answer it either.
That's a fair restatement of the article, sure. But nothing you said, and nothing the article said, explains why stacked ranking promotes butt-kissing any more than any other performance review system. The only way to avoid butt-kissing is to dispense with pay-for-performance altogether, since that way there's no incentive, either to kiss butts, nor to do anything else.
The fact is ALL companies do stacked ranking - you can find your "score" on your paycheck. There's no avoiding this (again, other than paying everybody the same amount). So the only question is how oblique do you want to be about it?
I spent a year supporting Exchange Server for business/premium customers. Unlike any other place I've worked, I've never had to double-check every suggestion I get to make sure it wasn't a way of sabotaging the repair. Also, if you make a mistake, your manager will throw you under the bus. I got let go for fixing a mysterious issue with a beta installation that was causing a loop in network traffic. Why was that a mistake? Because apparently fixing a problem in beta, even if you fully document the issue, is forbidden to the support guys. Only the beta team is allowed to actually fix a problem in a beta program, even if it is at 3 am and not a single fucking member of the beta team would answer repeated calls or pages (yes, we still used pagers back then).
But am I bitter about that? Well, yes, I kind of still am. Fuck Microsoft.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
There is another reason why such a system suck. It ignores the fundamentals of team dynamics in a development environment. In a team you have innovators, those guys who are always coming up with the new ideas. You also have the consolidators, those guys who do the dull stuff, like maintaining legacy code, documentation. If you have a team full of innovators they will always be looking at the next great thing and want to work on maintaining the present work. If you have a team of consolidators, you will get a static stale development team. The right mix is a combination of both.
One of the problem with stack is system is it emphasises one side over the other, usually the innovators, who tend to shout loudest anyway, and ignore the guys in the background who provide the support to those guys.
I firmly believe that there is no individual merit system that cannot be gamed and is not counter-productive to a team. If you wish to implement a merit system, rate the team, not the individuals. In the end a badly performing team will force out the poor performers themselves if there promotion/raises are based on the teams performance.
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Having read "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about the Enron debacle, I think a large part of the Enron collapse story was essentially a fallout of stack ranking -- a form of which they employed -- the remarkable thing, though, was that Skilling in particular and the other top managers were such libertarian wackos that they thought fostering internal competition within teams and between business divisions was a good thing. And then they combined this with a system where bonuses were paid based on deal sizes based on mark-to-market accounting, so the originator got a bonus and there was virtually no monetary incentive to actually service the back-end of the contract (and thus actually get paid and maintain a revenue stream.. but that's a different story).
Some of the behaviors that came out of that culture are hard to believe..
-The trading desks in different divisions taking opposite sides of the same position with leverage, guaranteeing the company loss (but not the division that won the trade)
-New MBAs were hired all the time, but not initially assigned to a team. They essentially had to shop themselves around, and were more or less allowed to transfer between teams at any time early in the process. Near the end this led, essentially, to something like 20% of the Enron workforce being shuffled around from team to team near evaluation time to take the 'bad slots' in the evaluation.
-They set up an entire subsidiary, Enron Energy Services, that would only be financially viable in the long term if deregulation in California succeeded, and became a national model... while having a division who's entire performance/bonus criteria was dependent on how badly they could exploit loopholes in the deregulation to make a short term profit from trading.
I think the bottom line is that if you let this type of Machiavellian culture take hold, it essentially means that you don't have a functional leader -- they've abrogated there responsibilities to the political abilities of their subordinates. If you look at Northern Italy and the northern part Holy Roman Empire, the former had no leader, de facto or de jure, while the latter had one de jure. Neither of those areas managed to centralize authority until 1860 and 1870 respectively, about 200 years after England, France and Austria managed to do so from more or less the same feudal starting point (they had leaders that were willing to intervene decisively in baronial disputes).