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Ask Slashdot: How Does Your Company Evaluate Your Performance?
jmcbain writes "I'm a former Microsoftie, and one thing I really despised about the company is the 'stack ranking' employee evaluation system that was succinctly captured in a recent Vanity Fair article on the company. Stack ranking is basically applying a forced curve distribution on all employees at the same level, so management must place some percentage of employees into categories of overperforming, performing on average, and underperforming. Even if it's an all-star team doing great work, some folks will be marked as underperforming. Frankly, this really sucked. I know this practice gained popularity with GE in the 1980s and is being used by some (many?) Fortune 500 companies. Does your company do this? What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
"What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Find another job where they treat you as a human being.
If you've got some serious skills, tell them to stick it and go work for a smaller company that's been around a while. Right now it's an employee's market so to speak with respect to certain technology skills (I've been off the market over a year and still get 10+ recruiters calling me a week, and I'm not all that great at all!). My thinking is that you've got more choice than they do, and that after you and hopefully everybody reading this reply, and then some, tell their HR departments that this kind of performance review bullshit is why you're leaving, things may eventually change.
If employers start seeing their very-hard-to-replace talent walk out the door because of draconian, 30+ year old management paradigms, they may be forced to change.
The only solution is to get another job because you cant win. You can get higher up but by then all you really do is internal politics, stabbing your friends in the back and running around PR-campaigning for yourself. Work, not so much. If you really like politics, lies, distortion and stuff, get a job in politics instead of masquerading as a coder when you in reality is doing politics full time.
HTTP/1.1 400
Overachieving isn't guaranteed to get you a high ranking. It's a political game, much like popularity in a high school. It's not about how well you perform, it's about who you know.
Does your company do this?
Yes.
What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Gamify. At my company, what makes things even worse is that to be considered in the top 20%, you have to show initiative and contribution *outside* of your core responsibility. This involves:
Whatever you do, absolutely never, ever get your head down for long periods and just get things done. That is the road to, at best, an "average" rating. You see, by doing your job well, you are simply doing what is expected of you. It does not matter how complex or easy your job is - no one knows or cares. All they see is someone doing their work.
Also, MS hires good people. If you are competing against other good people (not useless dolts), then it's hard to win on ability alone. It's far more effective to do a reasonable job, and suck up to your boss / make your boss look good / advertise your "achievements" to your boss's peers, etc.
Eventually, the people who are good at the game get promoted, and forget that the game is actually a bad thing. They start consciously rewarding people for playing the game (not getting fooled by it, but actually expecting their workers to game the system), and madness prevails.
Unions grow in power where employee rights legislation falls short of what people expect. Unions become a problem when they start to see companies as being the enemy, rather than something they're in partnership with.
They are the solution of last resort, that people turn to when there is no other way to protect themselves.
The correct way to deal with problematic unions is to have reasonable employee rights legislation and maintain it for long enough that nobody cares about joining unions anymore.
Get involved in the Union.
Seriously. Any powerbase will be abused.
Unions are democratic (or at least are supposed to be) representatives of their members. You don't get to stand back and do nothing, and pretend the unions doing silly things aren't you're fault or you're problem.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
This is well said. Nobody wants a union, they add bureaucracy, inefficiency, and they cost their members dues, but that's where people are sometimes forced to turn when employee abuse gets out of control. They're not great, but they're better than the alternative.
I agree, unions are awesome. I allows mediocre employees to receive the same compensation as the excellent employees.
I have no idea how my current employer does performance review. I haven't had to deal with performance reviews in over 15 years. This is one of the benefits of working as a consultant on a contract, and one of the things I don't miss about working as an employee.
I personally find consulting to be a more civilized, sane way to earn a living. My total compensation gets negotiated up front, for some prescribed period of time. Then, when the time is up, we just negotiate again(1). Simple. No fuss, no mess. You know how much you're making, and you don't feel shortchanged when the bean counters decide to cut down on some fringe benefit.
I guess that periodic contract extensions would count as a periodic performance review, of some sort. But there's no bureaucracy involved, and I don't need to dance like a pony, in front of someone. It's purely a business transaction, and nothing more.
The oft heard suggestion of unionizing is a joke. It's never going to happen. If you want to unionize, sure, but good luck to you. On the other hand, if you want to become a consultant, that can happen today. Your choice.
(1) Yes, I've went through an occasion of an 800lb corporate gorilla deciding, by fiat, to cut all their consultants' rates, for budgetary reasons, assuming that everyone is going to accept it and that they have no choice in the matter. As my then-managers discovered, that assumption was wrong. One of the other benefits of consulting, you see, is far fewer questions of what happened at your last job. Naturally, contracts come to an end all the time, and one's services are no longer required. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly understandable, and expected.
As with almost every problem the answer comes down to liberty. Unions are great IF they don't have laws written to give them special rights. A union should exist as a group of people freely associating to promote their self interests. But when laws are written to force people to join if they want to work in an industry that leads to corruption. This goes the other way too. There are some laws which prohibit employers from basing hiring on union status. That violates the employees rights as well. If there is a free union of electricians and they provide member training and other benefits and their members have a reputation of excellence an employer should be allowed to require employees join that union.
Problems always arise when you take something that is good when it's done voulentarily and use force.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Just like with healthcare, unless you're forced, you don't want to join. Who wants to spend 70 bucks of their paycheck every month for something they perceive as doing nothing for them? The power of the union comes from the collective. If your collective is only 25 to 30% of the working force, guess what? You're expendable.
The point, which you appear to have missed my several thousand feet, is that if you have decent management (or at least a set of laws which compel them to act in a decent way) there'd simply be no need for unions.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nobody wants a union.
You are either from the USA or bizarrely uninformed - possibly both.
1. Tell that to the UAW.
2. How long have you been waiting for an opportunity to say that?
If existing labor laws protect me sufficiently, why would I want to join a union? Yes, unions have their place (in particular where labor laws have been defficient), but their place is not universal (and in our recent history, they have proved to be detrimental, degenerating themselves from worker unions down to self-perpetuating cartels of nepotism.) I have no problems with unions in, say, Brazil. But here (the way many unions act), you bet I do have a problem.
Don't just look from the POV of your country's conditions. Look at it from our current conditions. We Americans typically get accused of looking at the world strictly from our biased eyes, but you don't seem capable of acting differently (at least in this particular topic.)
Unions become a problem when they start to see companies as being the enemy, rather than something they're in partnership with.
If you study the history of the labor movement and management/labor relations in the U.S., you'd realize how absurd that statement is. Owners, management, and labor are all eating from the same plate. It's the job of owners and management to keep the workers' share as small as possible, and this is best done by keeping them afraid of losing what little they've got.
This is true (and originally identified by Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations"). However, the point of unions wasn't just simply to increase wages (and in many cases, it was not at all). It was first and foremost, about better working conditions (.ie. not being required to work on a coal mine 7 days a week) and protection from unreasonable termination (.ie. because you refused to or physically couldn't work another sunday after working 7 days a week for months.)
It doesn't matter what the genesis of the unions was. What matter is the role of unions with respect to the private enterprise once reasonable labor laws are in effect TODAY. At that point, stewbacca's statement is right: a union's place is to be in partnership with companies, not to act as enemies. After all, it is companies who supply their jobs, and labor laws ensure abuses do not take place. So absent of corner cases and violations, a union's insistence in seeing a company as its enemy is simply not acceptable.
Just look at how unions operate in Germany for example. They work in excellent synergy with the private sector. The rhetoric of companies being the enemy does not do any services in these modern times.
The first thing is that, as a manager of a small team, you do NOT have to meet a curve. That's only required at high levels with hundreds or thousands of employees in the pool. You DO have to rank your people in order and argue for them at a meeting with your peers. If you have a team of 6 or 8 people, I'll be very surprised if you don't know who your best person is--and who the worst one is. As a general rule, you ought to be able to rank your whole team in order from best to worst, with perhaps a few ties. (Generally, though, I didn't end up with ties.)
So together with your peers, you now try to slot 50 or so people into three rankings: 4.0 for the best 25%, 3.5 for the bulk of the people and 3.0 for the bottom 20%. (There is special handling for superstars at 4.5 and total losers at 2.5, but that's a post-process with no quotas.) The argument always revolves around strong 3.5 people who "ought" to be 4.0 and weak 3.5 people who "don't deserve" to be 3.0. Not a surprise; every manager overrates his/her own people. The pressure to meet a quota forces people to have hard arguments about how valuable each person's work really was. It can even help a manager see the importance of putting people on the highest-value tasks. At the end of it, there are typically two or three borderline individuals, but everyone else pretty much has the rating they actually earned. The General Manager takes the result up to the stack ranking at the next level, armed with appropriate arguments for the borderline folks.
One time, I worked on a project with high-visibility and lots of pressure. At review time, we told management we wanted to give about 50% 4.0 (instead of the usual 25%) and only one or two 3.0 reviews (out of a team of ~100). They pushed that up, and it was granted. We did exceptional work, so they let us blow out the curve. But it only happened once in 14 years.
What are the alternatives? Have a Union that gives everyone the same rewards regardless of the work he/she did? Doesn't seem like a winner to me.
So to answer the OP's question, how do you succeed in such a system, the answer is: work hard, do good work, help others who get stuck, and BE SEEN DOING IT. When your manager says "Jane is my best worker," you want all his/her peers to nod and say "yeah, Jane is great! She helps us out all the time!" When your manager says "Jack deserves a better rating," you don't want his/her peers to say "that lazy bum? He couldn't find his ass with both hands!" But most important of all is for your manager to actually see you as someone who gets stuff done. Whatever anyone tries to claim, most teams only have a few such people on them. They rarely go unrewarded.
--Greg