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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you being subtly ironic or completely insane?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Oh goody, so instead of people who don't play politics with the manger get fired, people who don't play politics with the manager or the union rep get fired. Sounds like such an improvement.
Please. This is slashdot, we hate everyone in top management. Does Stephen Elop wear a skirt? How about Steve Ballmer? (If he does, please post pictures, I could use a laugh).
It's pretty much impossible to say how this went at Google because Google has rarely laid off full time employees (aside from acquisitions like Motorola Mobility, which obviously were not under Google's performance system)
I know a few people who encountered this at Google. They found that it was absolutely lethal to team morale, because by definition it was actively harmful to you to help other people who report to the same manager; people worked around this at least some by forming teams of people reporting to different managers. But basically, of the people I know who work at Google, roughly 0% think the HR and staffing policies are reasonable, and I know more than one person who is being massively underemployed because of an arbitrary checklist of things that they have to do before they can be moved into a role that would use their stellar skills.
This will be a bit garbled, because my memory is vague and I want to shuffle details to keep people from being identified, but basically, imagine that you have a usual progression of programming roles from entry-level to senior, say. And similarly for sysadmin, and so on. And you have someone who is currently working as a relatively entry-level sysadmin, who would be an excellent senior programmer. You can't move that person to the programmer job because they haven't met the checklist of items for mid-level sysadmin yet, therefore they can't be evaluated for a possible change in job responsibilities. So your options are (1) acquire some meaningless credentials to do with obsolete operating systems no one still cares about or (2) look for work elsewhere, but not (3) move to a job inside Google where you'd be incredibly valuable to the company.
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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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
It's hard not to have vitriol for people who get paid enough in a year to support a family for life and then make stereotypical bonehead move after bonehead move.
It's obvious that Yahoo's problem isn't poor employee performance, it's that there hasn't been a half innovative idea from management in nearly a decade. Every time I see a story about Yahoo, my first reaction is "they're still here? I thought they died".
If you think it's just female CEOs who get vitriol here, you've missed the Billgatus of Borg icon, all the monkey boy and chair boy comments, Larry The Ego Ellison, etc.
I've been working as a software engineer at Google for about three years.
This is absolutely not the case, at least with my experience on my particular project. I feel like I am treated well, and we're not stack-ranked in any way that I'm aware of. My manager exercises discretion with letting people into the project and almost everyone I work with makes decent progress adding new code to the project and the code is of decent quality with relatively few problems in production. I feel privileged to work with the people around me for 40 hours each week at this point in my life.
I know this is pretty much a vague anecdote but I'd be happy to answer any questions or explain further.
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.
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.
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.