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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.
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. "
Well, she is in the bottom 10% of CEOs at Yahoo.
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.
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.
God save us from 'HR professionals'. Air thieves, every one.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
This is pretty much exactly what is happening where I work.
We have an annual evaluation period, and yes, for the first 3 years we got rid of a lot of useless people. Also (surprisingly) we got rid of a lot of useless managers, which almost never happens. And it worked great, we have a very effective group of people, the right level of management, everyone is busy but not too busy and doing good work.
When they first started doing it, it worked as well in real life as it did on paper. For every group of like 5 or 6 people, there were 4 that were doing great, and 1 or 2 that were dragging everyone down. It was easy to look and say "yup, there's your problem".
Now those 1 or 2 are gone and you are making a choice between 4 people who are all about the same and definitely worth keeping. Luckily the system is now mainly just driving raises and not layoffs, but it still sucks.
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.
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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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.
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.