Slashdot Mirror
Don't Call It Stack Rank: Yahoo's QPR System For Culling Non-Performers
An anonymous reader writes "Employees don't like to be graded on the bell curve (or any other curve except for Lake Wobegon's) — we know that from the Microsoft experience. But Yahoo is struggling with what some say is vastly bloated headcount, and CEO Marissa Mayer has implemented a 'quarterly performance review' system that requires, or strongly recommends, that managers place a certain quota of their charges in the less-than-stellar categories. That sounds a lot like the infamous GE-Microsoft stack rank system. But according to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, who (as usual) broke the latest story about life inside Mayer's Yahoo, Mayer's curve may more similar to the elaborate evaluation system used by her old employer, Google."
The main effect of this is to chill work-place climate, and foster distrust and back-stabbing. The result of that is always the ones that have alternatives (i.e. the best ones) leaving first. Sure, you can get rid of some dead wood that way too, but the overall effect is disastrous. A real manager know that, but Mayer has shown several times now that she does not even understand the basics of management.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
the performance of your employees is, there will always be a top 10% and a bottom 10% in the bell curve or in any other system that is.
FUD, but without the friend / foe distinction.
I don't think you need one. Give it a go for a couple of years: remove the CEO and see if they made any difference.
Because I suspect that you have at least one too many CEOs in your company.
In a way this is bad for employee morale because nobody likes to see people fired and nobody likes to be ranked. Then again, the stories (and lack of new great products) out of Yahoo seems to indicate that employees are demotivated. I hate that it takes firings to motivate some employees, but Yahoo seems like a company that needs a "shock the system" moment and this steps combines with the work from home ban to send the message to some employees who may have been drifting along just cashing paychecks for the past few years. Hopefully they will only have to do a year or two of firings or no bonus/raises before the demotivated employees step up and the program can be scraped.
The name matters not. It is the threat of being layed off that is offensive.
Having worked for an organization that decided to follow this strategy, I did what all the good employees at my company did: we left for better jobs elsewhere. Yahoo is on its way to the dustbin of history, helped along by its senior management. My recommendation to Yahoo employees: get out while the gettin's good! Otherwise, you're in for the demoralizing experience of riding a sinking ship to the bottom!
A coward instills fear. In the long run, fear is a destructive force in a company. In the short run, it can boost profits. I am sure that Marissa will be long gone, after collecting an enormous bonus for that short term boost, to see the real results of her actions.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Case in point is an example from the article about how a manager was forced to ding a well-performing employee simply because the implied curve system requires someone to get a negative mark. What's ironic is that these 'systems' were created because executives assume middle management can't be trusted to make consistently good personnel decisions, thus their decisions were replaced with a mechanized process, which means management itself suffers from the same problem executives are trying to solve at the employee level.
who (as usual) broke the latest story about life inside Mayer's Yahoo, Mayer's curve may more similar to the elaborate evaluation system used by her old employer, Google."
Stack rank for grammar = 0.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
If you have a staff full of time-servers, implementing a no-exceptions rank-n-yank that kick out the bottom 10% without exception is the right thing to do. God knows I've worked in a few companies that would have benefited from a few iterations of that. But if you on the other hand have a staff that is essentially competent and motivated, a rigid system like that is going to do more harm than good as the staff compete to stay on the top of the pile by whatever means necessary. And in the process, not much useful work is getting done, but everyone looks very alert and busy. It's a hard problem, with no perfect solution. Solving such problems is why companies pay smart, experienced, successful people big bucks. If only more of them could sort out problems like this...
Thanks for letting me know about these shenanigans, I will not consider joining yahoo anytime soon.
The whole performance review one's got to go quota system has been going on at SpaceX for a couple years now as well. Elon passed down a "one from every group" quota where at least one person in each group would be given 90 days to improve or get fired. Some of the managers refused to put any of their team on a "process improvement plan" but others just picked someone. It's shitty to watch good employees who are working long hours and getting it done get scared into working harder and faster. The real problem this creates is some of the fluff groups with good managers hold onto their crap employees because the manager will stick up for them whereas the hardcore groups that have bad managers will lose someone who's making good contributions because it's gotta be someone.
There isn't much concern from the top about losing the good ones though, there seems to be a general consensus that some smart kids from college will replace them in a few months once they're gone.
Yeah, and like the rest of the slobs who get canned because "they didn't make the cut", when a CEO gets canned, they get tens of millions of dollars to leave.
Marrissa is just aping Google and getting 60 million dollars for it - regardless of how well it works.
The rich have not earned their money - they just have better contacts.
Yahoo! simply is trying to get rid of non-performers. There are many. She is using a "system" so as to lay the groundwork for the terminations and avoid EEOC problems and/or law suits. Good for her.
There seems to be a lot of vitriol for Mayer in these comments. But, how did this go at Google? Did it work? How did morale change? Reference please.
I worked for a large defence company a few years ago. I got an excellent review, as I had each year. Senior management (external to the project) moderated it down - criteria unknown. 3 months later I was relieved - my replacement was "a good friend of the CEO". The company was down-sizing. ;). Bad woman (tongue in cheek).
Each review system is a rigged game, even when there are specific measures.
I just wonder if this vitriol has anything to do with Mayer wearing a skirt? I would agree she doesn't seem To have a plan, but I don't feel she deserves some of the lambasting being handed out. Maybe some people are intimidated? She ruffled feathers at Google, now at Slashdot
There is absolutely nothing wrong with measuring employee performance relative to other employees. That's how you identify and promote the most promising candidates for internal promotion, and eliminate people who don't measure up.
What there IS something wrong with is using irrelevant metrics to make those measurements. Goals and deliverables must be objective, reasonable, and attainable. Many companies already named in this thread have a bad habit of setting subjective, unreasonable, and unattainable goals for employees they want to get rid of.
QPR has always been shit. Their last "top performer" was Les Ferdinand ...
It's not the spreadsheets - at least the spreadsheets allow people to base this BS on actual numbers instead of gut feel - it's the difference between a good and a bad CEO. Some CEOs actually earn their pay, mostly by seeing the folly of this sort of thing (and killing 2D animation did ultimately lead to Eisner getting the boot despite amazing entrenchment).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
you make lemonade.
this marissa person needs to get off her duff and find something for these people to do, that's all.
obesity is not cured by surgery.
Over and over and over. Yes, it seems right. Yes, it feels right. There's just that little matter of how it's failed at every place it's been tried. Used a Microsoft product lately?
There is certainly a time and a place to fire troublemakers and low performers, but forcing the firing even when there aren't any troublemakers or low performers is just a recipe for expensive turnover, lowered morale and the loss of long term institutional knowledge.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It's just part of the death spiral. There simply IS NO WAY to fairly implement such a policy, anywhere, ever, period.
Brown nosers and "old boys" stick around, top performers leave voluntarily, the people left start back-stabbing, manages play favorites, and any few remaining positives in the employee culture slowly die. Of course there are a _few_ exceptionally loyal high-performing employees who stick around, but on the whole, it's a MASSIVE negative. If you ever hear of a company doing this get ready to dump the stock at the first sign of trouble because unless a miracle happens after that, major problems are on the horizon! It's happened more times than I can count, seen it from the inside and the outside, it's ugly and demonstrates profoundly incompetent management.
as Kara is not an experienced HR?IR professional - she is qualified to comment on this matter how exactly.
After all, the money is paid to get "the best for the job" and the money is comensurate with the TOP 10% of executives, so they really ought to be looking to drop the botton 80% of CEOs, to leave a little wiggle room for improvement of an underperforming chief executive officer.
we need unions to stop BS like this and make it so you can't fire demote some one with out real proof.
it would be applied to all levels from the C-suite on down.
But it is never applied to executives, and it seems to always be applied as a rigid, statistically-impossible bell curve on any group, regardless of its size or history
How can a group of 5 high-performers be ranked into those buckets fairly?
How can the inherent biases of managers be removed so that the rankings are not distorted?
How can the bell curve apply to a group after several rounds of culling the bottom 10%, even assuming it was a valid distribution of ability at the start?
The short answer is IT CAN'T
[captcha is "coddle"]
Lets say that your recruitment aims are actually achieved. Yes, that would require that your management and HR departments actually be able to do their job, but that's what they insist they can do, so lets go with that, right?
So you hire people who really REALLY DO make a contribution that means the company benefits from their work for far more than their personal renumeration costs the company.
In what way, then, are ANY of the employers actually underperforming?
They aren't.
Lets say that they have the best, the actual best, in their field.
Ranking them means you have a bottom and a top.
Yet the bottom would still be a HORRENDOUS waste to fire merely because they weren't as good as someone else.
The ONLY ranking needed is whether you're getting your value out of your employee. If they are producing excess value for the company, then you are WRONG to fire them. Even if they're shit: since you're paying shit and they bring in little, but even that little is enough to pay for your entire profit structure.
At first the system trims the "fat" and it seems to improve the things, because corporations tend to accumulate fat. However soon the system becomes victim of its own success. There is no more fat to cut. So it starts to trim more and more "muscle" and less and less fat. This goes until the corporation collapses when it can not support its own weight anymore. In the mean time it may show symptoms of anemia and massive internal infection.
The best it can tell you is the relative work abilities of one small group and really tells you nothing at all abou the qualities of each member. This method would have fired Pauli and Born because they ranked 'ranked' below Einstein, Heisenber, Shroedinger and Bohr.
after all, how many developers do you need for a weather app.
bickerdyke
There is absolutely nothing wrong with measuring employee performance relative to other employees
Yes there is, because as you allude to later, it's IMPOSSIBLE to do it consistently and fairly across teams, and rankings within a given team have absolutely no relation to each other. Is a marketing guy who produced a successful campaign more or less important than a salesperson who actually sold the products being marketed, or an R&D engineer responsible for the innovative feature that the marketing guy highlighted and the salesperson sweet talked customers with? How about the IT person who developed innovative solutions to provide R&D, marketing, and sales with the systems, tools, and support they needed to do the above? What about each of those folks' direct managers who motivated and directed their teams to excel? It's just not possible to compare those people to each other objectively.
If you want a lame car analogy, how about we get rid of the low-performing car parts, but we have the driver pick which ones to keep? You can get in the end you'll still have a comfortable seat, A/C, and the stereo, but the car probably won't actually be able to move...
Just hire competent managers, do some manager and job rotation, encourage high performance and risk-taking without fear of consequences for ideas that didn't end up being the next big thing, you often need hundreds of "failures" to get one huge success.. The biggest thing is to treat employees extremely well, show them they are valued, trust them, go the extra mile for them, and they will most often return the favor. Just be very very very very careful in hiring, and if necessary use temporary contractors for grunt-work or temporary demand spikes, etc. The goal should be zero layoffs (you can of course still fire "for cause" IF you have a true problem employee). Avoid unions like the plague if at all possible as they are incompatible with the above, they look out _only_ for themselves, and to some small degree, workers, but not for the company as a whole. You want a culture where everyone across the company is in it together, NOT us-versus-them. You will be richly rewarded if you can succeed at that. In hard times employees will band together and be willing to accept less compensation and go the extra mile because they know when times are good you'll return the favor, the company looks out for its own. There's a huge benefit to being a private company in that respect because there's less pressure from greedy shareholders for short-term quarterly profits.
we need unions to stop BS like this and make it so you can't fire demote some one with out real proof.
A union isn't going to solve any of Yahoo's problems nor those of the people who work for Yahoo. I'm guessing from your rather glib comment that you don't have much actual experience with their being a member of a union or having to deal with them as management. Unions are appropriate in some cases, particularly when workers are being treated to truly awful and/or dangerous conditions or genuinely unfair pay. There are places where management can be described as evil for lack of a better word and in those places, that is where we need unions. While Yahoo has some serious problems (poor management not the least of them), I'm pretty sure people at Yahoo aren't paid badly (perhaps overpaid if anything) or being forced to work in hazardous conditions. In fact I'm pretty confident that working at Yahoo is relatively pleasant compared to most places I've worked. Come work in a steel plant or a coal mine or even work a heavy manufacturing assembly line sometime and get a little perspective.
Additionally I think you need to explore what at-will employment really means and why it is standard practice. Sometimes people don't perform well and I've worked directly with far too many unions which fight to protect a lot of deadwood employees. It's not hard to find examples of unions that forgot their real purpose (to provide safe working conditions, reasonable work rules and fair compensation) and instead actively work for goals that ultimately hurt the company and the very workers they were supposed to protect.
Don't give increases except to directors and officers and fire everyone else more or less randomly according to what the accountants want.
Of course, this doesn't address the problem that in most bad groups, the biggest problem is the incompetent, dishonest manager. Stack ranking gives these little Mussolinis the perfect opportunity to cast blame for their failures on a non-performing team member.
I've got a better idea: If your project fails, you are out. The members of your team may be assigned to other groups depending on their performance, but you're definitely out, because you picked the team, set the goals and direction, and set the schedule. As you go up the ladder, your compensation goes up, but so does your risk. Manage successful projects, and you shall be rewarded lavishly. Run one into the ground, and you're out on your ass.
"Oh, but if we have performance criteria for managers, then we won't be able to attract top talent"
If they are overstaffed, just friggen do a layoff of all the people over 40 like the rest of Silicon Valley does. If some people sue just settle.
Sad to say, but some arbitrary random process like this will piss people off only once, unlike the stupid quarterly arbitrary random review process pissing everyone off 4 times a year.
I've never met Marisa, but dang her HR ideas are completely insane.
I am sure they will use the same biometric review system for management as well.
[/sarcasm + /disgust]
"How did Microsoft squander the lead they had with the Windows CE devices? They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy." ref
They didn't, they could have been way ahead of the curve, when they joined the Tron consortium, but not totally owning it, they acted to supress it in the US while promoting the much inferior WinCE. A replay of the WinNT - OS/2 collaboration/war with IBM.
'Microsoft Teams Up with Japanese Group That Promotes Archrival Tron'
'Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it would collaborate with a consortium that promotes an open operating system for consumer electronics called TRON'
'Microsoft Corp., which was the first U. S. supplier to lobby Washington about TRON'
'We don't want the Japanese to create a specification that would preclude competition,', former Deputy U. S. Trade Representative Michael B. Smith
Sure enough, there's a bell curve with a diagram: 10% A, 20% B+, 40% B, 20% B-, 10% C. Seriously, HR dept.? Way to improve morale.
Who ever thought it was a good idea to make over Yahoo! into a poor imitation of Google (and a broken one at that) should get an F on their review and escorted to the door. I used to use Y! Mail and Groups several times a day. Now I hardly use mail and don't use groups at all. Glad I left Y! 10 yrs ago. It stopped being fun they relocated from the Keifer complex.
When they implement a process which requires N% "misses", then you're back to stack ranking.
And, of course, the whole goal setting process is subject to being gamed. It's back to the "do you grade for effort or skill level?" in school.
There's also the whole "future value of this piece of human capital" aspect. What if you have a Nobel prize winner on gravity on staff, and you only get questions needing her once every 10 years, and in the intervening 9 years, she basically has to find make-work?
I have observed the "changes" made since Mayer has been in power at Yahoo,
and it resembles America Online's brand of stultifying mediocrity.
Yahoo will cease to exist unless Mayer is deposed, mark my words.
Corporate ethics - We won't take responsibility for sucking and thus having to fire you to make our quarter, so we'll create a lie that makes it look like you sucked at your job even though it will fuck your job hunt.
Nice.
the layoffs will continue until performance improves.
Here's one way to identify slackers: Have daily agile-like "stand-up" meetings, in which developers tell other developers what they accomplished the previous day.
It's not a perfect solution - some people aren't good at speaking clearly. But it would be a start.
I think the engineers and senior engineers know who the dead wood is, but to ask them? nahh never.
Id day get rid of 90% of the managers, outsource it to india at 1/10th the cost.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
My manager told everyone 3 month before year end eval.
"I don't expect you to kiss other manager's ass, but I do expect you to be nice to other managers. This is because during eval, us dark lords are getting together and deciding your fate. Therefore, smile to other managers so they won't recommend you for weak performance".
I've seem many new college grads getting low performance because they just don't know how to be nice to other managers. Unfortunately not knowing the politics really hurts...
Union Pacific in Nebraska does this for IT employees. If you don't play the game, you don't get a raise. So it's in your best interest to be unhelpful to competitors yet helpful to the managers, who decide ranking. When I asked to shift some of the burdens on me to even the load a little, the team manager made a point of stating that he could no longer claim those items in my ranking review. It is easily the most stressful part of an IT employees' career.
AFAIK, the problem with "stack rank" was that it let go of people at the bottom regardless of how good their performance was in absolute terms; that's not reasonable, because sooner or later you end up kicking out good performers. Letting people go who actually are performing badly is different, and seems reasonable.
Since Mayer has been allowed to reach a high management position there before jumping ship to CEO of Yahoo... I don't think either Google or Yahoo is a nice place to work.
Real-Time OS for Embedded Systems
.. was launched in 1984 .. An article in IEEE MICRO, a magazine focusing on computers, gives an overview of RTOSs by comparing several popular RTOSs including ITRON, and T-Kernel."
"TRON(*)
When your HD is full you have so purge the girls who did not made the top of the list. No that you wouldn't do them if you met them of course, but you know, the HD is full and you have to cut the dead branches.
One of the most senior people in my agency once said to me:
"I expect everybody to do a good job. I promote those who do more."
He explained that basically everybody is pretty much equally talented and met the job requirements. There is variability but half the time that has less to do with talent and more to do with circumstances, either personal or corporate. The real stars were people who did 'extra'. The persons who stepped up to corporate or personal challenges: organized the corporate safety program, family days, were scout leaders or involved in their community. When promotion time came, or cuts were required, the rewards went to people who simply did more than was asked or required. Not surprisingly, those who rose were loyal to the agency, some left but never because they felt underappreciated.
Bottom line: if all you do is the job, then your loyalty is to your work (and self) not your company. Big difference. And in a group of self-interested people, the company will be basically picking the best it can from a bunch of bad apples. So really, who cares about the mechanism?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
It's not spreadsheets that caused the problem. It all goes back to a saying older than any of us: "Penny wise, pound foolish"
Learn to love Alaska
One of the things bean counters got rid of is the extended paid sabbatical, companies should bring it back!! It encourages two things: cross training and extended personal reflection (that leads to transitions). By bringing these back companies would encourage those who are ready to leave to leave on their own (instead of hanging around doing the bare minimum) and those who want to stay to be invigorated and ready for more focused work.
Second get rid of the lazy manager, managers that use ranking systems to determine the quality of their workforce don't spend the time to really get to know their employees and instead focus on serving the bureaucracy of the company. If you can't trust your managers to manage or grow the staff, get rid of them.