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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?"
I work in healthcare and the model often used is Brenners Novice to Expert. This looks at the development of an individual in their practice. While a great model since it allows one to compare themselves to themselves and looking for improvement, it also promotes team work. Of course this is a little difficult to apply many software firms. Another model is using a 1-5 scale, where 5 is exceptional, 1 is unsatistifactory, 3 meets criteria, 4 is exceeds criteria, and then they tally these for whatever metrics used and divide to get an average. Comparing staff to each other does not develop team work and only works in competitive environments like sales where you want people to outdo each other.
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When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Unions are great IF they don't have laws written to give them special rights.
Unlike corporations, then.
Unions exist with special legal status precisely because corporations exist with special legal status.
A corporation is not a "a group of people freely associating to promote their self-interests": it is an inherently coercive organization protected by the full legal muscle of the various Companies Acts around the world. When a person employed by a corporation interacts with someone outside the corporation they are protected by a shield of laws that completely over-rides the ordinary operations of free behaviour.
So, if you really want unions to not have special legal protections, you need to eliminate the special legal protections given to corporations, which means you need to eliminate corporations as such, and go back to the situation before 1850 or so when the first modern Companies Act was passed in Britain. That system was unwieldy and inefficient, as no single entity with quasi-individual legal status (the corporation) could do anything like sign contracts, etc.
Yet for some reason I have never heard anyone who makes the kind of arguments you do against unions point any of this out. Why is that?
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