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Microsoft Kills Stack Ranking
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft once demanded that its managers place their subordinates on a scale from 'top' to 'poor,' a practice that fueled some epic backstabbing within divisions. Last year, a Microsoft contractor with knowledge of the company's internal review processes told Slashdot that Microsoft was actively working to fix that system; just this week, the company announced that stack ranking was well and truly dead (and that's certainly one way to fix it). 'Lisa Brummel, head of human resources for the company, sent an e-mail to employees notifying them of the change today, according to my contacts,' ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley wrote. According to the memo, there are 'no more ratings,' 'no more curves,' and 'Managers and leaders will have flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that best reflects the performance of their teams and individuals, as long as they stay within their compensation budget.' They're trying to encourage more teamwork and collaboration throughout the company. As we discussed on Saturday, Yahoo is adopting this method just as Microsoft is abandoning it."
Maybe Microsoft will be able to re-invent a better version of itself.
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And yet both companies will have the same outcome - continuing their long decline into irrelevant mediocrity. Maybe both companies should consider looking a little further up the management chain to discover what truly ails them.
Yahoo seems to be on a roll with this, as they adopted a Win8 pane interface on Flickr right about the time Microsoft was forced to concede people without tablets, smartphones, and touchscreens on their computers (and some who do have those things) dislike it greatly.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
It seems plausible that Yahoo wishes to encourage employee attrition, and so is deliberately adopting an unpopular measure.
Well, that or they genuinely think it is a good idea... maybe the upper management should be stack ranked themselves.
People just loved the Flickr redesign.
A bunch of years ago a company I worked for was doing something similar.
They essentially demanded it be placed on a bell curve. So, in our group of 5 people, all of whom were good solid people who worked well together and got stuff built, management was insisting there be 1 awesome, 1 pretty good, 1 good, 1 needs work, and 1 terrible -- and that had nothing whatsoever to do with the individual strengths of the team, just some idiots vision of how these things should be managed. My manager didn't feel that anybody belonged below the top 1 or 2 rankings.
If you decide in advance that your ranking has to take on an artificial distribution, you end up with a really pointless management system which really just serves to give people with no knowledge of what really happens a nice easy to read (and often incorrect) metric.
It really does make for a pointless "management by inapplicable metrics" kind of culture. And so often it's all about making managements job easy and something they can point to the formulas -- and seems to offer zero insights into what is actually happening. The more companies blindly use metrics, the less they actually grasp what their organization is actually doing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The new review methodology will have subordinates placed in a grid of multi-sized squares and force management to use their fingers.
OK we know from MS history they treated customers poorly. We know they treated mom & pop shops poorly. They treated the companies that make apps for them poorly. Now we find out they even treated the employees poorly. Honest question, did they ever treat anyone right? I mean besides the management figures making 7 figures. Wait, that might not even be true. Wow, sure am glad I never worked there.
I'm old, not dead. Well that's my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary. I say what I think, not what you want to hear.
You are a shitty manager if you need to resort to "stack ranking" or whatever.
1. Your recruitment policies suck - that's a given for all of IT/Development/Software - industry - if you can't find qualified people, it's YOUR fault. If you do find "qualified" people and you still fail - look in the mirror.
2. If they get hired and fail, then WTF is the problem? Unrealistic deadlines? Changing scope? Death marches?
3. Every problem is management's fault. Period. End of story.
Don't get me started on the idiocy of Silicon Valley: Kids, don't work there. They are milking the reputation of true innovators like the Dave Packard (Business guy) and Bill Hewlett.(engineer) - today, they are a bunch of marketing phony assholes and cunts - looking at your camel toe Ms Mayer .
Silicone valley is for posers. Pass the word.
to the "freedom to innovate," did Microsoft finally buy up all the fledgling their ideas management could stifle?
Amazon is irrelevant too? They use it. As do many other companies that you probably love
Yahoo is adopting it because it's a great way to get rid of dead weight, as long as it's used BRIEFLY. It's really not meant to be used in the long-term (as MS and several other have tried to). In the short-term, Yahoo will lose some dead weight. In the long-term, they'll get paranoia, indecisiveness, etc. (in short, a company culture of fear).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
My ex-employer KPN (Netherlands) also does (did?) this; each manager was telling it just had to be in any group of at least 8 employees, and would then show a Gauss curve to prove it ... I'm happy I'm not there anymore.
Well, of course. Yahoo has such a stellar record of making sound business decisions that one should surely have anticipated this move. Word on the street is that Dilbert's pointy haired boss is slated to lead this new management initiative!
Obligatory
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
I think you glossed over my point. It's not these silly management initiatives which determine the outcome of a business's success but the core intelligence and culture of the business itself, particularly in its executives and management. Poorly-run companies are always latching on and off the the latest management fads because they lack core direction and competence.
...Yesterday's Solutions Tomorrow.
"I don't have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Lockheed Martin also employed stacked rankings. The local manager had no clue who people were. How can you even rank your employees when you have no idea who they are?!?!? I was called by another coworker's name multiple times. I finally called my manager out on it in front of everyone at a picnic. He didn't confuse me with the other individual after that... There was so much turnover we basically lost a contract due it and having to retrain new people ALL THE TIME. I don't blame those of us who left. Many people busted their asses and did an excellent job, only to be rated average or below because the manager had a certain number of slots to allocate certain rankings. AND THAT'S IF HE KNEW WHO THE FSCK YOU WERE!!!!!!
I worked at a large corporation whose name started with an A and ends with an E.
They too had a ranking system, the lowest got sent to a certain team in our general group where they were needled to death over their stats and either quit or accumulated enough "black marks" to get canned.
When the team rotation came around, the lower ranking people got suicidal, dread is the word of the day, when your name appeared on that "special team" list it was like getting sent to a death camp.
That person is now tainted and must be shunned.
I saw good techs go down for not having enough "personality" (flashbacks of *37 pieces of flair* from Office Space) and it was a dismal atmosphere.
I left that sh*t hole, never got my turn on the death team.
Frankly every large corporation I have worked for is the same in that they have all the makings of a cult... I mean if they wanted to go that way.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
While they don't have to be ranked so strictly you're still fighting over table scraps against your own team.
If everyone surpasses expectations and achieves a good result then everyone deserves to be compensated fairly.
Yeah, if you know you want to lay off 20% of a large workforce, it makes sense to take some metrics-- including some subjective evaluation-- and develop a ranking of employees from "extremely valuable" to "a drain on company resources", and then cut the bottom 20%. Do that as a one-time thing, or even do a couple rounds in relatively short succession. That could work.
But if you make it part of the company culture, you're going to end up with a company of paranoid back-stabbers.
And yet both companies will have the same outcome - continuing their long decline into irrelevant mediocrity.
Somehow despite geek opinions, Microsoft's revenue keeps going up. Yahoo is starting to look up as well, though how much of that is Alibaba is hard to say.
All industries eventually mature. Being on top of a mature industry is a good place to be, as long as you occasionally shake things up enough to stay on top.
Maybe both companies should consider looking a little further up the management chain to discover what truly ails them.
You mean like getting a new CEO, which Yahoo did and MS is doing?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Stack ranking works great if you use it to get rid of the bottom 1% every year. Surely in a department with 100 people there is at least one hire who didn't turn out great.
The problem is when it is applied at a 10% threshold. It is not hard after a few hiring/firing rounds to end up with teams of over 10 people all of which are very good, yet stack ranking still demands that you fire the "bottom" perfectly OK person-decile.
Yes, because Microsoft is barely breaking even.these days.
stupid HR fucks don't understand simple statistics.
Of course these are the same morons that want to play keyword bingo with your resume, think everybody in a 200,000 person company needs ethics training to make up for the moral deficiencies of the executives in the boardroom and want 5 years of experience with some technology that's only been around for 2.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
But if you make it part of the company culture, you're going to end up with a company of paranoid back-stabbers.
And what is the problem with that?" asks Larry Ellison.
Hopefully they won't be moving to a "everybody is a winner" scheme.
Failure is not an option. That means failure must be mandatory.
As long as we're all pulling for the same goal, that's what counts.
It sounds like Microsoft used this for too long and caused a lot of infighting and back stabbing in the long run.
I can understand why Yahoo! wants to try it - new management, and they want to cut the dead weight. Hopefully they do not do it for too long.
I work for a government-owned, contractor-operated lab where we are ranked 1..N, and it's not all that destructive. Why? Because there have been no significant raises in years! So, staff and management wastes months on performance reviews, then the results are put on file and never looked at. The end.
Stack Ranking came out of Jack Welch's management style at GE. Get rid of the perpetually lousy 20% at the bottom of the heap. What idiots like Balmer didn't understand was the nuanced nature of Jack's model. Somewhere in your company there is a bottom 20% - it may be a group of people, it may be a change in business direction, it may result in the elimination of a resource sucking internal policy or program. In short, get rid of that which is not contributing to the business. It doesn't mean that each team should have 20% let go - it means you should be able to get rid of 20% of the organization somewhere. Bring in new talent that drives the new business growth forward. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Stack Ranking was tried by us (begins w/ A, ends with N, Go Man-U!). We ended up getting rid of 20%... not because of stack ranking - but because 20% left on their own accord. What management didn't realize is that the 20% that left were the ones that knew how the systems were glued together, where the actual problems were, and could treat the customer right. In short, as soon as word of stack ranking came out they didn't loose the bottom 20% - they lost roughly the top 20%. Those marketable to get work somewhere else. The rest of us are still slaving away.
I hope MS pulls it off and can recreate themselves back into relevancy. It will be good for both Apple and Linux to continue to have the good, solid, stiff competition.
I'll wait for the first service pack before I install this, thanks.
Someone wrote that grading on a curve works in academia but not in industry. Why should it work for grading exams when it doesn't for ranking the workers? Especially the academics that are using it should know better.
Grading on a curve (or the MS stack ranking, which is the same) is one of the most unfair and vile ranking/grading systems invented. Why? Because your actual skills don't matter. What matters is how many better (or worse) colleagues you have. If you have are in a large team (or class) of good performers, you are screwed, even if you are good - someone will be given the short end of the stick only because there are only so many "good marks" available. An extreme example are students "hacking" their exams by handing in blank sheets. Even if they all (or sufficiently many) do that, with curve grading they are guaranteed some 75% chance that they will pass - by doing nothing, because only the low 15-20% fails. Shouldn't we be marking their skills and knowledge instead?
This system also demotivates the good learners/workers - what is the point of trying to work hard, when you will not get that good mark only because there is only a limited amount given out and simply too many comparably good candidates. Essentially the system forces (undeserved) bad marks on people even though they performed equally well as the best ones. This sort of thing does wonders for morale.
Finally, the second fallacy why this is fundamentally broken is the assumption that the skill distribution in a work team or class is normal (follows a bell curve). There is absolutely no guarantee of that, because, heck, you aren't hiring the idiots, are you? I am sure that the company is hiring only "rock star" developers. Same with the students - they have to pass stringent exams and fulfill admission criteria that the majority of the population isn't able. So you have a sample here that isn't representative of the entire population (where the bell curve would be valid) and all bets are off, because the system was built on an invalid assumption. The most extreme example of this is the constant distribution - the case when all students turn in blank sheet of paper (identical "skill" level) for their exam and still pass. You would have to pick the students or hire employees randomly out of the entire population if you wanted to have a normal distribution of skill. Not very practical, though.
To conclude, if you are responsible for examining students or for evaluating employees, for the grace of God, stop using relative ranking schemes like this. Comparing people to each other is certainly easier than to evaluate their "absolute" skill, but it isn't fair, doesn't represent what you think it does and it creates a toxic environment for everyone.
and is replacing it with a new scale. Employees will now be ranked on a scale of Kind of Works (ok to ship out) to BSOD (doesn't work; ship it out anyways).
Not against each other in the same company but against their peers across all companies. At the end of the year, the bottom 20% gets sent to the Thunderdome. 2 goes in, and hopefully zero comes out.
If you have to fire someone it can only mean one of two things. Either you didn't train the person well enough or you hired the wrong person. If you abstract what is going on enough all firings ultimately fall into one of those two categories, both of which are a ultimately the responsibility of management. This is why stack ranking is a bad idea. If you didn't train the person well enough then improve your training program. If the person was the wrong person for the job (insufficient work ethic, incompetent, unethical etc) then improve your recruiting program. Stack ranking treats the symptom instead of the disease. It takes emphasis away from focusing on hiring the right people and training them well.
No company will get every hire right (some people just aren't what they seem to be) but creating a culture where everyone is playing a game of "devil take the hindmost" will get people to worry less about getting the right person because if they are wrong they won't last. Hiring someone only to break them off later means someone made a very expensive mistake.
This was a practice also done at Enron.
Hey, Steve Balmer is leaving.. Jeff Skilling left Enron just before it imploded...
Quick, sell your shares now!
While I was at Microsoft, at one point my manager instructed me to stop having ideas that were outside my assigned area, because it was making another team member look bad, and this would impact the stack ranking of both the team member and my manager. So I saw up close how stack ranking sucks. Still, if I was still at MSFT today, I would be very concerned that the new system drives even more of the compensation process into closed-door management sessions, along with the horse trading and cronyism that invites.
One wonders what MS is going to replace stack ranking with? I think the answer is obvious, they're going to move to queue ranking! I've got no idea of the benefits, but it will clearly be the biggest thing yet! (I'm guessing they've already filed patents)
There was a joke about this I read from somewhere. In Silicon Valley, collaboration means working together to achieve. In Washington DC, collaboration means being shot for treason.
Make sure your company encourages the former.
Exactly. This system sounds great if you only adopt it for a short period. Microsoft was just stupid to continue the system, because it creates hostility. I'd actually envision this system to work well if you rotated it in every 2 years, for 6 months.
After all, it is a large enough company that you could make a career out of working there and not get too bored. I think there are some people that are tired of hopping from job to job just to get any advancement may find this appealing. And if the board makes a good pick for CEO, it could get really interesting. There always has been some talent lurking there, they have resources and a real R&D department and if they can cut through the management stagnation, we could see some neat stuff coming from Redmond.
At any rate, the fact that a major company has abandoned stack rating is great news. It's a terrible HR practice that needs to disappear for good.
Was it Dilbert PHB's or the BOFH who announced "Weekly redundancy notices will continue to be issued until employee moral improves".
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I'm a Marketing Analyst but also am called upon many of times to assist in KPI's for Employee Stack Rank's. Stack Ranks work out fair when the known objectives are ranked on a weighted scale that is agreed upon by all. Granted when you have knowns objective and metrics (Think a Call Center) then a stack rank works out in favor. I do understand in positions that allow much greater flexibility, where your daily activities can vary greatly or not directly influence or contribute to a specific goal of outcome, ranking your value becomes more difficult, but this is when a good Director or Manager understands you and accomplishments or failures.
First of all.. the first line managers do not decide these kind of ranking systems. The upper-levels and HR execs do. The best managers try to work AROUND the system they are forced to live in.
Second, stack ranking is not common in silicon valley companies at all. It is old-school large companies like GE, Microsoft, Accenture, IBM, etc. that employ it.
Increasing revenue and declining relevance are not mutually exclusive. Certainly microsoft will use much of its cash to dig its claws into everything further. Microsoft is a walled garden, and they can keep building their walls higher and continue being successful, but eventually the cost of getting into those walls becomes too high, while the alternatives outside them become too good, and microsoft's expensive walls become useless very quickly. It's already happened for mobile computing and casual gaming, it's happening for hardcore gaming, and it will happen for office apps. Microsoft can keep charging more while it loses its monopoly grip on the industry, but it will continue its long decline into irrelevant mediocrity.
True, Microsoft's revenue keeps going up, but that doesn't mean anything. They are no longer supreme dictator of the tech world, able to control the industry at their whim, as they were in the glory days of the nineties and early 2000s. I remember a time when the industry jumped at every word Microsoft said, when the mere thought that they were getting into something was enough to make the faint of heart pull out to avoid competing with them head-on. No more. They're about as relevant and dangerous to the leading edge of computer technology as IBM or SAP. Microsoft is turning into a boring old company just like them.
The other thing is that a vast portion of Microsoft's revenue comes from only two cash cows: Windows and Office, and those two are beginning their slide into irrelevance with the rise of mobile computing. Hence their rather pathetic efforts so far to try to get into that market. It's something that they must succeed in somehow, and they need someone with true vision to edge into the market dominated by Apple and Google. Ballmer wasn't it.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
You spelled 'pain' wrong.
You forgot a few other cases:
1) this kind of ranking assumes that people's performance never varies.
In fact, the performance varies along with motivation, because of the work becoming a routine, or personal problems.
2) stack ranking applied locally means that bad teams may survive because we only remove the N% useless.
I remember a similar example, where the managers were ordered to reduce the cost of a device by 10% (the device costed more than 1000$).
So they applied the 10% to all the components of the device.
This was not a problem for the most expensive components, but a nasty problem appeared when they took 10% cheaper screws (perhaps 10 cents, reduced to 9 cents).
The new screws were of so bad quality that they ruined the whole device.
3) you get what you measure.
If you measure performance using any arbitrary system, you'll get a performance oriented towards this system, not towards reality.
In fact, the real problem is that managers are unable to do their work, that is to manage people, so they use these methods as a way to avoid human contacts.
Finally, I'd like to point an interesting article explaining similar things:
http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get-shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/
I had a prof in college who explained the whole 'grading on a curve' thing.
He started his explanation by saying that a good exam would have:
* several of no-brainer questions to check if everyone had at least done the minimum and give them a warm-up for the real questions
* several of real questions, to make sure people actually did study, and to produce some differentiation amongst the general population
* one or two incredibly difficult questions. Questions so tough that most people are NOT expected to get them. Questions so tough that if you do get them then you the prof should come talk to you about majoring in the area (the prof taught Freshman/Sophomore level math).
According to him the point of grading on a curve was to be able to put that third category of questions on the exam without destroying the grade of everyone else in the room.
I, personally don't grade on a curve but I thought it was interesting that it can serve a purpose in some situations.
*cough* that's just "several", not "several of". I should have just stuck with " a couple of", as defined by XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1070/
Well, I think Office is here to stay, if you include the cloud-based office. But I don't see it growing, except as a result of "technically literate world population growth". But that in and of itself isn't really a problem. Look at United Technologies, which most geeks have never heard of but is arguably the world's oldest tech giant, and still doing fine: at a certain point of maturity, cash cows are forever (assuming your business stays internally healthy).
I guess it's the difference between "relevant" and "relevant to the leading edge". The latter is just a means to the former.
What remains to be seen is where Microsoft's push to stay relevant in the consumer space goes (they're pretty much set for decades in the enterprise space, IMO). Will the Xbone be a good smart TV? Will their cloud services be the best? Will they tie the ship to the sinking mobile stuff? Ultimately, I think if they sold a dev platform that let you write once for PC, mobile (including Android), and Xbone they could charge back into the leading edge, but that would be a real mindset change for them. (I would love to be able to write Android apps easily in C#, but I'm not betting it will happen).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yahoo is starting to look up as well
In what way? They're getting more coverage in the blogosphere?
> Yahoo is adopting this method as MSFT ditches it
Well, that's certainly one way to keep ex-Microsofties from applying. :-) "What did you hate most about your last employer? Uh, yeah, we got that now."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The problem with those rankings is that it wasn't just 1..N, they had labels associated with them, such as "Exceeded" or "Underachieved". You can imagine the reaction of a person who has been busting their ass only to be told that they are "underachieving", because they ranked the lowest on their team - because everyone on their team is also working hard. And getting into the lowest bucket is not just about not getting the promo/bonus - get it twice in a row, and you're firmly on the exit trajectory.
Then, of course, the ranking itself does matter when raises and bonuses do depend on it, and in MS those are actually pretty significant. In the second highest bucket this year, I've got a bonus that amounts to 20% of my base pay, on top of a 10% raise. A guy in the lowest bucket would get no raise and no bonus.
I agree, but it depends on the Market.
First of all, the Mecca of IT in the east is either Boston or DC, everyone else is distant to those two places.
And a good sysadmin will cost you about $120K.
I'm in a moderate sized IT shop, and for a junior architect, we're paying $125K. For a seasoned architect, we're paying more like $145K. For superstars, more like $160-175K
Cash cows are forever? Hardly. Tell that to buggy whip manufacturers at the advent of the automobile, or more to the point, tell that to IBM's Mainframe Division in 1978. All cash cows will eventually die as they fall out of relevance, and cash cows in the computer industry have a far shorter lifetime than they do in other industries as the computer industry moves far more swiftly.
True, MS's cash cows probably still have a few more decades of life in them yet, but Microsoft is at least smart enough not to rest on their laurels and make an effort at getting into the mobile sector, however pathetic their current attempts at doing so are.
By the way, I looked up United Technologies, and well, I don't know why you bring them up. They're a technology company all right, but they don't look a computer company to me. They look more like Boeing than Microsoft or IBM, and well, the aerospace industry is rather different from the computer industry, and doesn't have anywhere near the same rate of change that the computer industry does.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I'm afraid I've seen similar systems used elsewhere. The idea is too easy to promote and make a procedure when a company is large and has many layers of management. And the middle management, accustomed to such a system, will fall back into using it with a new name as swiftly as they can. Discarding such an embedded system means essentially replacing the entire hierarchy and especially middle management bureaucracy procedures.
I'd expect it to return to normal use within a year, once again without the rank and file employees being informed of the genuine nature of the new system.
I've gone through this transition once before... now every manager has a budget that pays exactly enough for a bell-curve distribution of his small team.
Now you have a choice of reducing the bottom 10%'s raise by even more to give some of the previously "middle-ranked" employees a bigger raise, or you can take away from your best performers to bring the bottom 10% into the middle-ranked category. Because your team is small, both swings are rather large, and quite unfair.
You still can't win, because "borrowing" the budget from another manager goes back to the old stack-ranking horse-trading show of trying to determine whose team has better performers.
The only way around it is to have only VP-level budgets, and allow managers to assign any ratings they feel are correct, with some adjustment of expectations by their directory. Then, the VP spreads the larger budget accordingly.
It yields variable, but more fair, rewards.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
As long as the performance of the team is factored into the performance of the individual, this isn't a terrible way to quantify people in the short term. If the team's overall performance is not factored in however, then it's no better than simply cutting across the board by cutting the lowest performer in each team. Even with a ranking for the team, it's quite easy to cut good people while still leaving dead weights around, especially where the management structure is fairly flat (like Google's).
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Intel's draconian Rank & Rating (R&R) system is legendary in the industry. It has disappointed and upset many many good employees including myself. For instance, there is even a website that documents some Intel's R&R atrocities: http://www.faceintel.com. I worked at Intel for a number of years, won a number of awards (including the prestigious Intel Achievement Award + several Divisional Awards) that made me proud of my achievements at that company. But their R&R system is absolutely horrible and I was glad when I left to never look back again. Unless they have made significant changes to their R&R system, I cannot NOT recommend anyone applying for a job at Intel. It creates a poisonous atmosphere in the workplace. It is no wonder that Intel has failed on nearly every single venture outside of their x86 monopoly business.
IBM's mainframe division is still a major cash cow for IBM. Sure, you have to keep up, like MS is trying to with their cloud-based Office offerings, but once you offer something basic that a business needs, by all means keep doing that!
The reason I bring up UTX is that there's nothing magical or special about "computer company". All new technologies start as something that changes and innovates constantly, but over time they mature, they reach the point where they mostly do what most people need, and innovation slows to the same pace as other mature technologies. UTX has a big business in elevators and escalators. There's still technological advancement in that field, but it's not like they need to keep up with startups. "Computer companies" are reaching the same place, and the enterprise stuff as largely gotten there. It's been mostly about cost control for a while now, and that road ends with everything in the cloud.
Enterprise software has matured, feature-wise. Non-mobile computing has matured. Game consoles have matured. Mobile computing is still changing fast, but we're just not that far away from them reaching the same place PCs have reached, where buying the latest gets you nothing new.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why do people keep saying this crap? Until such time as Windows forces everyone to use the Windows Store and you cannot run traditional Win32 programs and/or unable to sideload apps, then we'll start talking about Microsoft as a walled garden. Until such time, I'll keep playing Gabriel Knight in DOSBox on Windows 8.1 thankyou.
That's definitely better than the "every department cuts a fixed percentage of their workforce" nonsense that a lot of companies do. I've always thought that the best way to go would be to do a ranking and cut the bottom X% and give the top Y% cash bonuses in the very same swoop. Layoffs have a way of shaking people up, and your best people can easily find another job if they decide they don't like to live with uncertainty.
Give them a pat on the back and a bonus offer the same day you're laying people off so they know that they're not at risk, and make the bonus vest over a few months to keep them around long enough to see that things are OK. You're saving recurring salary and HR costs on X% of your workforce, so the cash is there for a one-time payout.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I would think the buggy whip manufacturers also did other leather crafting, such as belts, and even upholstery. As to coach builders, many of them switched over to cars, and wouldn't be surprised if many either merged with, bought out or were bought by the car mfgs...
I don't think that Microsoft is going anywhere, any more than the likes of IBM have... their business may change, but they are deeply entrenched and here to stay, just like IBM and Oracle.. and even if plenty of people don't care for their products... I actually have a lot of likes and dislikes. YMMV
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Also I find grading on a curve hides the fact that it's likely a bad/ignorant professor.
I typically had lots of professors conduct lectures with either note inconsistently or with simple general case demonstrations/examples, then assigns you a poorly written text book (favor for some PhD friend?), and gives you problems that are so difficult, everyone, and I mean everyone gets it wrong: the highest score is like 33% out 100%. And then grade under a curve, so everyone gets A,B,C's and looks "fair". As an advanced Physicist, I remember 1 question final exams that took 3 hours to solve and again, the highest grade was 40/100. Throw it in a curve and viola, looks fair, but everyone ends up very frustrated and no one learns anything!
Boy, it sure builds character, but does show how bad the professor has prepare his class to tackle the problem--he didn't basically. I means I'm sure I was in a class with bright folks, but there is such thing as proper prep to be able to get 50% or more...
The place where I work recently introduced OKRs and Stack Ranking, bragging about how teh awesome it was at great companies like Zynga, so it MUST be teh great idea at a stupid place like ours.
This was when Zynga was deep in death throes and shedding value like a hairy dog in July sheds hair. For HR, pride. We're like some internet company the executive assistant has heard of! For people who know things about struggling companies, completely laughable.
We are teh bullshit INC. Let's be like Zynga! Oh yeah!
We're about to see what the first quarter of OKRs will bring, where, as they say, the trickle down cascade goals (which nobody has bothered to discuss with me at all) are not actually supposed to be reachable. "Because reaching them means you didn't set the bar high enough." Not reaching goals ALSO means you no longer qualify for pass/fail bonuses or promotions so the meager cash kick (typically one third of a regular paycheck; that's right a fraction of, not a multiple of) we get is effectively eliminated. Nobody is going to meet goal any more. But they promise OKR scores are "not to be used" for eval purposes.
Then what the fuck ARE they for? Shits and giggles? They expect us to believe this bullshit. "Your metrics show... oh you didn't meet any of your goals! Tsk Tsk. You are now on automatic probation!"
I expect, no, I WANT to be first against the wall when the stack ranking cuts come. Cash me out. Give me my unusable vacation time and some severance and free me from this madhouse. And they damn well won't DO it! They know what I want and won't do it.
Damn them.
Sig for hire.
FWIW, Google uses stack ranking, too, although in a different way. I would expect Marissa is bringing more of a Google approach to Yahoo than the MS approach, but I could be wrong.
In Google's version, the rankings are done by peers, not managers, and they don't rank all of their peers, just a randomly selected subset (3-4 of them). I'm guessing all of the separate stacks get combined somehow (pairwise voting algorithms like the Condorcet method would work well) to provide some overall stack, but even then the result is only used as one input to performance evaluations, and not a heavily-weighted one. I'm told that its function is to double check the main evaluation method.
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The classwork, labs, and exams are structured poorly, then. The whole class shouldn't be scrunched up into the 95th - 99th percentile and the people in the 95th percentile given a failing grade.
Back when I took physics in college, I was grouped with the top 100 incoming freshmen in the science/engineering school. Scores for physics at the end of the term ranged from the 20th to the 70th-80th percentile over the whole term. Those down at 20 got a C (the assumption being that a 20th percentile mark for the "top 100" corresponded to a 50th percentile mark in the general physics class; maybe some got worse, I don't know); those of us at the 70-80 end of the spectrum got an A. The distribution of scores resembled a normal distribution almost to a T.
When I hit grad school, I was a teaching assistant. The score distribution on classes of more than 80-100 students was definitely a normal distribution, as a rule. Smaller upper-division classes were generally graded A-B-C without a curve, as the profs knew that a normal distribution didn't model how well the students knew the material. (Upper division classes were generally A-B; C's were rare, and there was the rare F mark for the odd student that spiraled out or didn't file the necessary paperwork to withdraw from the class early. The first two years of classes did a good job of weeding out the uninterested, to be sure.)
It isn't "geek opinion" that has forced Ballmer into early retirement. Microsoft have seen hugely increased revenues in the past decade, but most of that has come from very successful expansion of its enterprise business. Ballmer deserves credit for that, but it has come at the expense of their being also-rans in new consumer IT markets: First music players, then smartphones, and now tablets. Of those, smartphones is the big one, because the mobile telephone market is absurdly large, it dwarfs the PC market, which is how Apple makes more money just from selling iPhones than Microsoft does from everything. For a company like Microsoft, who always defined itself as the anti-IBM, determined to dominate consumer IT, it is a disaster for them to lose out so badly, and it likely does presage a decline into irrelevance within the consume space.
I've read that the performance distribution at a good tech company is more like a Pareto and not like a bell.
A gigantic backlash for the consumers.
As a fellow human being I congratulate all the people who have previous been subjected to this regime. As a consumer I lament its retirement since Microsoft has shown all too clearly that they are a vile which can only be fought with a weapons-grade evil; a sort so nasty it can only be produced in Redmond. We need them to keep infighting, lest they unite and concentrate their efforts to force their vileness on the so far free parts of the world.
Remember, Microsoft was never about having the better product, it has always been about forcing you to use their stuff.
... I used to regularly score 'above average', or in MSFT stack rankings, a 3.5 or 4.0 (the latter was hard to achieve if you weren't the golden-boy - required to balance the team score). This meant I would get a performance based bonus, which was great.
I made the mistake of pushing for a promotion. I felt that because I was consistently out-performing my role, that I should be promoted. Eventually they promoted me and a few other guys. We got a 'Senior' title. Now comes the problem.
The promotion only came with a 2% pay rise. The following annual performance review, it was now deemed that I was not exceeding my role (due to the new title), so I only scored a 3.0. This score means 'you met all your objectives'. Unfortunately, at the time, the policy was bonuses were only awarded to those exceeding their job description. I got no bonus. That year, or the following year. It probably left me on average $5k/year out of pocket.
Moral to the story? Don't be an employee :-)
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
Agreed. Doing this well would not necessarily require a 20% layoff in every group. It should, for example, take into account the individual team's relevance to overall business plans-- i.e. the team working on the flagship product should probably have fewer layoffs than people working on a floundering product that may be discontinued in the near future.
My understanding is that at Microsoft, the bonuses are largest for rank 1, slightly smaller for rank 2, etc... and the bottom of the list get kicked out.
It doesn't matter if your ten person department has people with IQs from 180 to 189, the person with 180 is going to lose their job unless they game the system to rank ahead of a colleague. (Might be fun to watch a group of super geniuses outwit each other, though.)
I don't know that I'm skilled enough to make it through Microsoft's hiring process, but the stack ranking system is one of the things that prevented me from even applying.
At Microsoft the ranking system determines who is fired, and who gets the largest bonuses. That's why it was so divisive - if you're near the bottom, stabbing a colleague in the back could be the difference between keeping your job and getting fired. If you're not in the bottom, stabbing a colleague in the back, or at least failing to help your colleagues, could make a $10,000 difference in your bonus.
Measuring people is fine. Giving the measurements an impact on employment and pay destroys collaboration, and as a secondary effect it attaches a larger incentive to working fast (so you can show your manager a big list of accomplishments) instead of attaching an incentive to doing high quality work (which might lead to a shorter list of accomplishments, but fewer security holes and other errors that need to be fixed later).
I think the problem is that too many members of the geek community allow their hatred for Microsoft to influence their industry forecasts. I try not to do that. I hate them, but I see their decline, if it happens at all, happening at least 10 years from now.
If we the Microsoft haters are very lucky, ARM processors will continue to improve, Android productivity applications will continue to improve, and HTML5 applications will continue to improve to the point that people will be able to use real spreadsheets, real video editing software, and real software development environments on a 2025 Android tablet with bluetooth keyboard and mouse and micro-HDMI display output. Then I can see Microsoft's decline starting.
Today? Microsoft Office is still the undisputed heavyweight champion of the business world office suites, Exchange is the king of business email and calendar software, and Windows Azure is a credible IaaS and PaaS offering. Windows Phone, Bing, and Surface might be all but dead in the market, but Microsoft can afford to waste tens of billions of dollars on each every year for the next decade without harming the company.
Measuring people is fine. Giving the measurements an impact on employment and pay destroys collaboration, and as a secondary effect it attaches a larger incentive to working fast (so you can show your manager a big list of accomplishments) instead of attaching an incentive to doing high quality work (which might lead to a shorter list of accomplishments, but fewer security holes and other errors that need to be fixed later).
Giving the measurements an impact on employment and pay is necessary, and it needn't destroy collaboration or incent accumulation of technical debt; it depends how the measurements are defined. Doing it well is hard, and requires judgment and regular fine tuning, but you have to have some way of making those employment and pay decisions, and doing it as objectively and as measurably as possible is much better than the alternative.
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Doing it well is extremely hard - but further, it may not be necessary. If your team is productive and doing high quality work, why do you need to measure individuals instead of the team as a whole? "Hello everyone. Your team reached all goals for this year, and the defect rate exceeds our required threshold. There have also been no formal complaints filed against anyone on the team for failing to contribute, or any form of harassment. We're dividing the bonus equally. Congratulations, keep it up."
There are many problems with that approach.
The first problem with managing at the team level is that you don't have any way to identify which are your strong contributors and which are dragging the team down. It's possible that while the team met its goals, it would also have met them just as well, and at lower cost, if one or two team members were removed, or perhaps it would have accomplished more if one of them were replaced with someone better. In pathological cases it can be true that removing a person increases team effectiveness, though those cases tend to be so bad that it's very visible to everyone in the vicinity of the team.
A related problem is that without a way to identify the strong contributors, you don't have a good way to grow those people into greater levels of responsibility and impact. And it's harder for employees to move between teams, even at the same level of responsibility, without some sort of objective measure the receiving manager can use to evaluate whether or not the person is going to be a good contributor. These issues are related to lack of individual measurements, rather than not tying measurements to employment and pay, but if the measurements aren't tied to employment and pay, odds are the measurements aren't going to be very good, because few will really care about them.
Finally, it fails to scale, in at least two ways. One, it's almost guaranteed to drag a lot of deadwood along when you get larger teams (this is the first problem, but it gets worse with scale, fast). Two, as you expand your scope to a much larger level, with many dozens (or hundreds) of teams, with lots of different managers, it leaves you with no way to ensure any level of consistency with how employees are being treated and managed. Excessive inconsistency has all sorts of negative effects.
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As I see it the major failure (which continues full force) is the belief that they need to sell a phone OS, instead of a software development platform that's cross-platform to Android. Sure, if Windows phone had taken off there would have been a ton of money there, but in this universe that's a dead idea. OTOH there may be a bunch to be made long term by becoming a major player on Android phones.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm not saying you should avoid a review process. I'm saying you should avoid a ranking process and tying team or individual compensation to their review. Otherwise, you get all of the problems that Microsoft and millions of other major and minor companies have.
- Managers give mediocre reviews to star employees, because they want to avoid having the person promoted out of their department. Losing a star would hurt the department's overall performance, so the manager screws the employee to protect themselves.
- Employees kiss the manager's ass because they know review rank improves compensation.
- Employees actively avoid helping each other because someone else's success becomes a risk that they will get a better bonus or faster promotion.
- Departments actively avoid helping other departments because another department's success becomes a risk that the other department will get a bigger share of funding, and this department's manager may be reprimanded or replaced.
An incompetent or corrupt manager can screw his underlings whether there's a formal or informal review process in place. So I say, skip the formal review process. Make performance bonuses pretty general and global, so teams don't get penalized for helping each other out. Give individual managers discretion to cut dead weight. Go out of your way to avoid attaching a financial incentive to holding competent underlings at lower positions. If I lose my best developer because she goes on to be a kick-ass manager to another team, that should be a credit to me for mentoring her, not a penalty while I'm training the next round of future kick-ass managers.
An incompetent or corrupt manager can screw his underlings whether there's a formal or informal review process in place.
This is one of the things I like best about the Google process: Managers don't do the reviews. The reviews are done by neutral parties, based on writeups by employee peers and the manager -- and the manager's input is not focused on performance evaluation but on project evaluation -- how important/impactful is the project.
Also, manager ratings are heavily influenced by the ratings of their employees in addition to the team results, so they're motivated to help their employees be ranked highly as well as to be successful.
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I guess you haven't really been paying attention. If you want to see want their future Windows direction, just look at their Surface RT/2 approach has been. It's already is an extremely locked down environment. No sideloading, no alternative web browsers, no non-Microsoft app stores, no Java, no VPN, no open source programs, etc. All your apps must come from a 30% Microsoft taxed store. Windows 8 is just the initial phase down that road. Microsoft has already announced that in the next version of Windows they are taking steps to reduce the visibility of the desktop. They already foist secure boot and TPM2 on desktop users. Do you really believe that it's for the benefit of general desktop users? Or are these moves intended to place the market in a place where at some future time they lock down the desktop just like their Surface/ARM products?
.NET, WPF, Silverlight, and yes, even Win32 for a very incomplete WinRT environment. With Win8, M$ has been much begun the process of locking down the desktop into a walled off garden, for which only they control the keys to, and if you want entry you must pay an extremely high price to enter.
The Microsoft apologists are saying Windows 8 isn't bad because there is sideloading. But when you investigate further, there only is sideloading when you have joined a domain. And you must pay exorbitant fees for that privilege. And you must be running the enterprise edition version of Windows for it to really matter. There is NO sideloading for that single desktop. And this is the current Windows 8. As far as I'm concerned, if you want to develop Metro applications, then you really have no other option than pay M$ their 30% tax. All this really does is make me think twice of even creating a Metro version of my program. And if I do I am going to price it much more expensive on M$ store. And if you don't believe me, just compare the cost of the same app on both Google store and M$ store. When you do find that an app has been ported over, it is on the order of over 500% more expensive on the M$ store.
Yes, for NOW you can still load Win32 application on Win8. But that environment is no longer being actively developed. M$ has pretty much discontinued a whole slew of technologies, including
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Someone wrote that grading on a curve works in academia but not in industry. Why should it work for grading exams when it doesn't for ranking the workers? Especially the academics that are using it should know better.
The use of a curve in academia is more practical because the student's primary output is the grade, which is numeric. In contrast, the primary output of an employee is the work they do, which can only be (poorly) measured by metrics. Whether or not it's a good idea is a separate question though.
Finally, the second fallacy why this is fundamentally broken is the assumption that the skill distribution in a work team or class is normal (follows a bell curve). There is absolutely no guarantee of that, because, heck, you aren't hiring the idiots, are you? I am sure that the company is hiring only "rock star" developers. Same with the students - they have to pass stringent exams and fulfill admission criteria that the majority of the population isn't able. So you have a sample here that isn't representative of the entire population (where the bell curve would be valid) and all bets are off, because the system was built on an invalid assumption.
The most extreme example of this is the constant distribution - the case when all students turn in blank sheet of paper (identical "skill" level) for their exam and still pass. You would have to pick the students or hire employees randomly out of the entire population if you wanted to have a normal distribution of skill. Not very practical, though.
This isn't quite true, and seems to be based on the idea that people are reducible to one-dimensional numbers. Yes, the ability of the individuals (as measured by the admission/hiring process) will be a truncated bell curve (the highest N candidates from the applicant distribution). But the quality of the work done will be normally distributed, because there are countless other factors that contribute to the result. The only exception to this is when they operate collectively to alter the distribution, as in the example you gave above.
My opinion on the subject (as a student) is that relative grades are somewhat useful, since they help to normalize for the difficulty of different units, which would otherwise penalize students who took harder units. However, the scaling or change in grades should be monitored, since a change of more than 15% indicates something very wrong with the unit.
Perhaps more fundamental is the idea that the grade distribution should only be translated, not made to fit any particular distribution. This ensures that the average mark can be adjusted, while ensuring that the relative grades are retained.
Another line of thought is that scaling should only ever increase marks, not decrease them, so as to avoid demotivating students. Increasing the difficulty of the unit in future years is the preferable solution for that.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
I though it was "flogging will continue till employee morale improves"