Slashdot Mirror
How Adobe Got Rid of Traditional Stack-Ranking Performance Reviews
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Bob Sutton reports that in 2012 Adobe moved from yearly performance rankings to frequent "check-ins" where managers provide employees targeted coaching and advice. There is no prescribed format or frequency for these conversations, and managers don't complete any forms or use any technologies to guide or document what happens during such conversations. They are simply expected to have regular check-ins to convey what is expected of employees, give and get feedback, and help employees with their growth and development plans. 'The aim is to give people information when they need it rather than months after teachable moments have passed,' writes Sutton. Donna Morris, Adobe's senior vice president for People and Places, says her team calculated that annual reviews required 80,000 hours of time from the 2000 managers at Adobe each year, the equivalent of 40 full-time employees. After all that effort, internal surveys revealed that employees felt less inspired and motivated afterwards—and turnover increased. According to Sutton, Adobe's bold move seems to be working. Surveys indicates that most Adobe managers and employees find the new system to be less cumbersome and more effective than the old stack-ranking system where managers must divide employees into groups — for example, maybe 15 percent of people can be assigned the highest rating. 'That goes against our core value of being genuine,' says Ellie Gates, director of management effectiveness at Adobe. 'Our goal should be to inspire people to do their best work.' Since the new system was implemented, voluntary attrition has decreased substantially, while involuntary departures have increased by 50% because the new system requires executives and managers to have regular 'tough discussions' with employees who are struggling with performance issues—rather than putting them off until the next performance review cycle comes around. 'It is reducing unnecessary cognitive load, while at the same time, nudging managers to engage more often and more candidly with direct reports to help them develop their skills and plan their careers,' concludes Sutton. 'It also bolsters accountability because managers have far more responsibility for setting employee compensation than under the old system.'"
Stack Ranking only works on a short term basis where you want to trim the fat.
If you do it for too long, two things happen (a) you start cutting into good performers (b) people will not collaborate to make others look good
Stack ranking is for managers who are not grown-ups.
Train your people. Teach them to improve. Defend them while they learn. Make them better and they will make the company better.
If you are in charge and something goes wrong, it's your responsibility. It's your fault. And if it isn't your fault, it's still your fault because you're the manager.
You are responsible. 100% of the time. No exceptions.
Take responsibility for your job and do your job. Train your people. Take care of your people. Grow up.
In my opinion, the answer to Beta is to try to create an alternative /. with the existing or an older design and try to woo people there on virtue of being better. Which of course any site that manages to be Slashdot without the new shit, and with perhaps actual editorial work, can't help but be better. But will they come if you build it?
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Because this could explain why the Adobe software I used in the 90s and early 2000s (e.g. Premiere) was such a crash-ridden heap of bugs.
I guess Adobe learned what happens when you let the "Business Intelligence" folks get their grubby little hands on everything. Kinda like slashdot beta.
In Japan, the Manager is responsible if an employee screws up. If an individual does something merit worthy, the entire team takes credit. As well, the freshman hires have no say in their job assignment - higher ups work all that out and take any heat...they sort it later as skills and relationships mature.
I'm waiting for a Downfall parody on this theme.
Also, fuck Beta.
factor 966971: 966971
HA! You were already told once IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS that you are an AUDIENCE not users. Lusers maybe but users. Beta still sux!
Never been prouder to be part of this community. I'm imagining William Wallace painted half-blue on a horse screaming "They can take our Classic, but they can't make us use BETA!".
Stack ranking, meet regression to the mean.
Yes, p accomplishes 1-p (for some p, always) but it's not necessarily the same people in the p pie slice year over year. The Pareto does not state that 20% of the people with account for 80% of the output and will continue to do so, because as we all know 100% of what drives performance is whether you have it, or you don't, end of story.
Sapolsky on Heights And Lengths And Areas Of Rectangles:
What does stack-ranking achieve as a long-term evolutionary pressure? It helps the company accumulate the people who are best at concealing their dips, no matter how the chill winds blow.
Just what you want cultivate, a whole cadre of engineers specializing in meteorology.
There was a different passage about genetics I was trying to find. A population will only retain multiple genetic phenotypes if each of those phenotypes is advantageous in some circumstance or environment. Any phenotype that dominates across the board, in nearly every circumstance, soon extinguishes the competition.
That we have so many phenotypes indicates that human circumstance is extremely fluid.
Fuck creative cloud.
Cs6, and that's the way it stays.
Until Dice managed to alienate the majority of its users, that was only a pipe dream. But now, that just might work. Perhaps Altslashdot will succeed.
" 'The aim is to give people information when they need it rather than months after teachable moments have passed,' "
This is a very important thing, and it's kind of sad that it IS something that people in business sometimes realize, rather than being something we could assume everyone capable of forming complete sentences understands.
And that's why it is really important that Timothy, who thinks we form a passive 'audience' here, who somehow imagines that occasionally pushing the button to publish a user submission under his name, without even fixing the obvious typos first, qualifies him as the creator of the site, really needs to feel some backlash today. Not in 6 months when the whole site goes, today.
It's also why each and every member of the staff that encouraged the delusion that this 'beta' was a reasonable, workable idea needs to be gone now. Not in 6 months when the whole site goes, today.
Because those teachable moments are short, and these are not minor little mistakes anyone could make. These are possibly the biggest mistakes anyone in their position could make, in regards to their work. They are mistakes that you would expect from someone who was just recruited from a business school last week and had spent no more than 20 minutes lurking before deciding to change everything.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You know, I can't help but feel this boycott will be alot like Randy Marsh and SouthPark's Walmart boycott.
... And some chips... And butter. And some new pliers."
Randy: "Hey... Gerald, what are you doing?! We said we weren't going to shop at the Wall*Mart anymore!"
Mr. Garrison "Well what are you doing here, Randy?"
Randy: "I came because I wanted to make sure nobody was shopping here.
Stan: "Dad!"
Randy: "Oh all right, em maybe I was gonna buy a glass. One glass!
Fuck beta
Is not something I really want, ever.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The Beta version rocks. I like it, I like it a lot.
Don't understand the beef you have with Dice or the Beta.
Because they want to lose users and shut down the site. That's why.
Fuck this court. Fuck Jim Lahey. Fuck Randy. Fuck those two idiot cops right there. Fuck suit dummies. As a matter of fact fuck legal aid. Fuck Danny and Terry's Buffalo Chicken Wings. Fuck all the old wood in here. Fuck the moon. Fuck corn on the cob. Fuck squirrels. Fuck me, fuck you, FUCK BETA!
And fuck you, Dice
http://AltSlashdot.org/
Hey look - this is a comment input from the beta.
I'll give you the white space. It feels like we've all got pitchforks and are standing at the gates of the User Experience.
Maybe the UX designer got a deal on whitespace from the cloud vendor. Next will be pastel colors and strange thin outlined buttons that convey nothing to the user until they click them (cough... iOS7).
Nobody buys Playboy for the articles. They do it for the hot, nude women (sadly, sans grits). It just so happens that /. is exactly the same. No one reads /. for the articles. The articles were news two days ago. And no one reads /. for the summaries. The summaries are almost always wrong.
Everyone reads /. for the comments.
Well no, I for one read /. for the hot, nude women.
Wir sind geboren, um frei zu sein - Rio Reiser
Too much time and effort is spent on verifying whether the user is a paying customer rather than making their software work. It crashes frequently, freezes up, the 'tech support' is useless, installing and updating is a nightmare. Furthermore, if you are a Adobe cloud user and not near an internet connection (to verify you are a paying user, even though you paid and installed everything) it will not work until you get near a hotspot to sign in and then you can use it. Somehow, we are forced to use this crap in the industry. Even if they open a linux port, I am not sure that will make Adobe less glitch-ridden.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing. When was the last time Adobe did something with peoples best interests in mind or anything that would be considered even remotely humane? If Adobe hated /. Beta, that would be one of the only ways i'd even consider embracing it.
Since one of the things that drives me the MOST crazy about my current job, and MOST makes me think about quitting, is in fact the near-constant requests for writing various self-assessments, goal documents, and other such things that are not actually related to my job, and which don't actually seem to be used for anything other than making the people responsible for requiring all of those documents look like they're doing useful things. Drives me crazy. After all that, our performance reviews tend to basically say "yep, you're doing fine. Have a raise that is exactly in line with inflation, just like everyone else is getting."
Dice made it perfectly clear that, even after all the backlash, Classic will soon be gone:
"Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready."
Dice ignores our complaints, while pretending to listen. Ruining every single discussion is the only option we have left.
Beta delenda est!
Sounds kind of intimidating.
You couldn't be more wrong!!!!!!
This is Readers' Wives.
My opinion may be ugly, it may even offend you, but it's mine, and I'm gonna lay it out in front of you whether you like it or not!
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I misread "stack-rank" as "slack-rank." Not sure there's a difference. Glass is half full or half empty either way.
the beta isn't so different than the classic. Stop whining!
"I should have stuck with Web 1.0, like Stalin!"
Fuck Beta and fuck you.
Calling us the Audience is like the Bee Keeper calling the Bees the audience.
Bees make honey. You can set up bee boxes and have bees live in the boxes and make honey that you can harvest. But the bees are free to leave at any time. The only reason the bees stay is because the boxes are less trouble than building a beehive. Try making the bee box unusable and the bees will just go build a beehive elsewhere. Don't believe it? They've been building beehives for a lot longer (*cough* Usenet *cough*) than bee boxes (*cough* Slashdot *cough*) have been around.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Dice holdings may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion
or by moral principle, and moral principle does play a role for the
Dice holdings employee of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle
cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too
prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power.
Moreover, much Dice Holdings behavior is not rationally calculated to be of
benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help.
For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black
people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or
dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a
diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal
and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative
action discriminates against them. But Dice Holdings do not take
such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs.
Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems
serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and
frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black
people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white
majority tends to intensify Slashdot mutiny.
I for one am half with you, yet not.
I'm getting sick of seeing "down with beta" etc. Versus the discussion I like seeing.
At the same time this 'handful of crotchety people' seems to have made quite a loud noise, and seem to make up quite a few people.... and they have a point. Beta is not ready. To say that they(slashdot) were going to make beta mandatory in the near future, in a similar state it's in now. THAT is a joke.
We might be sick of seeing it, but I think it's a necessary evil. Now if we could get this kind of response to truly important matters *cough*NSA*cough* then we might have some hope for humanity.
Currently that site is a wiki. I assume that will change.
Even Beta would be better than a wiki-based slashdot.
Ok, fine! I'm going to build my own alternate /. with blackjack and hookers!
Every time Adobe releases a new version of Flash, I install it, hoping against hope that finally Flash will no longer crash several times per week (or drain my laptop battery like a vampire). If Adobe has such enlightened management, why haven't those things been fixed?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I have already used up my Mod Points Offtopping you guys.
Bwahahahahahahahaha!
With Beta Slashdot, you won't even have those?>
no sign of a trend yet, perhaps there is a twitbook tag? http://www.google.co.uk/trends...
I agree. I have an awful habit of coming here. The only way i get anything done is to drop it into my hosts file with an invalid address.
HEYYY thats an idea we can get the hosts file guy to add it to his list!
How dare you!
I'm an alcoholic, and I can assure you that my turds have FAR more substance than Slashdot Beta.
it's not just not ready, it is a complete disaster. and i had to see it to agree with those people
Rich
"There is no prescribed format or frequency for these conversations, and managers don't complete any forms or use any technologies to guide or document what happens during such conversations. They are simply expected to have regular check-ins to convey what is expected of employees, give and get feedback, and help employees with their growth and development plans."
So instead of having some ridiculous regimented (10-question, 2 page form weekly! monthly! quarterly!) bullshit, they're going to let their managers be humans, and let them manage their employees? What a ground-breaking idea. Let me jot that down somewhere.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Feedback from our bosses should be like saving a file: early and often. I can't tell you how many times I've heard of a manager showing his/her dissatisfaction too late: during 'the talk' about the direct report being let go.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
The real way to do assessments is peer ranking. Managers often don't even know what their reports are doing, at least in any detail. However, everybody on the team knows that Bill in the cube near the window has been spending more time reading slashdot beta than working, or that every time Sanjeev tries to do anything, things get fucked up beyond belief.
This opens up a whole set of other problems, but it allows managers do what they should be doing, which is to set goals, and then to acquire resources needed to accomplish them on, so said reports can do whatever the company actually needs. If the team is then judged on results as a whole, the incentives are in the right place to get things done.
Having a manager offer mentoring assumes the manager actually has something useful to say. This is nearly always false. Line managers are typically either brown noses who got promoted because they failed miserably in their primary job, or technical people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, want to continue to do technical work, got sucked into management, and have no idea how to fulfill their real job (setting goals and acquiring team resources.) The first ones can get resources, but usually let their teams spin out of control while they dream of moving up to middle management, and the second ones argue with their managers, preventing them from getting resources, while they micromanage to the point of stifling any creativity, causing anyone with talent (this manager's competitors) leave the team in search of a team managed by the first type. This leads to teams where the talented are out of control, wasting resources on stupid projects that aren't in line with the real goals of the company, and other teams where the untalented are being dragged along by a former superstar who can't get any resources, and further can't understand why her lazy team members aren't willing to work 80 hours a week doing things (badly) that they could do much better during a long lunch.
All of this goes away with peer ranking, which enables teams to self-assemble and repair themselves when required. If you then fire or reward entire teams based on how well they accomplish their goals, you may actually get something done. I don't define releasing buggy adobe shitware as 'getting something done'.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
I don't even care anymore if beta barely works, I will muddle through it. It's worth it to me to see the pain inflected on the Beta Assholes. That is how annoying they, not Beta, have become.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Look to the left of you... Look to the right of you...
These are not your friends. They are your competition.
My workplace seems to be devolving to this base level (not that we have these kinds of reviews). Why would I contribute anything positive to your project when I may be competing against you on a continuous basis? In fact why wouldn't I try my best to torpedo anything you do in hopes of increasing my own position.
Not that I do that, which is probably why I am still a peon, but it is the sense I have been getting lately.
It also means those that might find better employment elsewhere probably will, leaving you with...
I haven't had my daily checkin today.
Clearly, fuck beta.
Mod parent up!
If you don't like it, leave, or at least shut the fuck up, I'm tired of seeing pages of this shit. You aren't going to get your way, they don't care what you want, they have to make changes or they don't have any reason to be employed. Logically once you hit 'perfection' any change you make is going to be worse, and thats where you are.
No changes - no job, and they aren't going to actually find a real reason to be useful, thats why they are still here with slashdot and all the smart staff left long ago.
So please, stop, you're not going to change anything and if you're not going to change anything than what you're doing is just obnoxious.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
...they will stop making the lowest ranked programmers write Flash for Linux?
It sounds like in this case Adobe is learning from one of their mistakes. Stack ranking was an error they made. I believe that, and there is probably something to learn from that.
Greatest "Fuck the Editors" post on /. ever. Good work.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
For a manager: Hire the best people, give clear direction, followup relentlessly, fire the losers. A good manager should hire the best people the budget will bear. They should 1) prepare clear, complete direction for each staff member and 2) communicate the direction to staff as a team and as individuals. They should follow up relentlessly-requirements are always changing and problems are always pressing time and effort estimates committed by staff members and by the manager; it's on the manager to know whether the direction for each staff member is out of date and to update direction to individuals and the team. Nothing is more important than dismissing poor performers. They consume enormous portions of the teams members' time for marginal output. When the team succeeds, publicly credit the team and publicly credit deserving staff members for their specific contributions. Money works well.
That's absolutely where I am with it also. I've had no fewer than 5 calls from Adobe before and after the CC business and I've told them each time I'm never buying another one of their products until they sell perpetual licenses. They insist they won't buckle on the issue, but I believe they will have to eventually.
It would be harder to resist CC if they put in a single compelling feature in a product since CS6, but that simply hasn't been the case.
I'm outta here
When your whole team are Great("Rockstar") Developers stack-ranking makes less sense
So this is a satellite site for Digg now?
You just won the /. debate
You seem to be taking this personally. It's not you, it's that your design really sucks badly. Please go back to McDonalds. UI design isn't your thing.
People who scream Beta should get their IP redirect to Slashdot Beta
Meh. The comments are a nice plus, but the average quality has gone down the past couple of years. There's more trolls, and the site has taken a considerable liberal slant. Previously, all political comments was pretty much was treated for what it was.... intelligent trolling and mainly down-modded. Now, liberal leaning comments of this nature are generally modded up as insightful. Trolling has always existed, but now it's being modded up. It's pathetic.
Any organization that has a "Senior VP of People and Places" needs to rethink what the hell they are doing. Stupid titles are a sign of stupid management. I bet Slashdot has a "Senior VP of Beta:".
Damn it! I did it again. Sorry...
Oh well... Fuck beta!
That is all.
Just reading what they discovered;
annual reviews required 80,000 hours of time from the 2000 managers at Adobe each year, the equivalent of 40 full-time employees. After all that effort, internal surveys revealed that employees felt less inspired and motivated afterwards
It's like seeing Allan Greenspan when he realized Wall Street had greedy people who would totally abuse his "hands off" approach to oversight and regulation.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I don't even care anymore if beta barely works, I will muddle through it. It's worth it to me to see the pain inflected on the Beta Assholes. That is how annoying they, not Beta, have become.
I'm really trying to give a shit about Beta, but I can't seem to do it. This sort of reaction happened the last time they redesigned, too. Everyone got over it. /shrug
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
> If you don't like it, leave, or at least shut the fuck up,
So your solution to all your problems is to run away from or ignore them???
Next week, Monday 10 February to Monday 17 February. BOYCOTT Slashdot week. Don't come here, not even anonymously. Let them see the drop in page hit traffic. It's likely the ONLY thing that will wake them up to reality. They've been listening to asshole MBA types and image consultants way too much lately.
Help US teach THEM a lesson about BETA.
Block slashdot.org at your router if you think you may be tempted, out of habit, to have a look at /. during the week.
Let's see... is this a way to dress up their system where they collude with Intel, HP, Google, Apple and others to limit wages?
I actually entertained doing exactly one month of Creative Cloud to get a full copy of Acrobat so that I could have tools for visualizing which parts of my cover art exceeded a preset ink coverage limit. But then I thought about it some more, and realized that even though I can't figure out how to get a CMYK representation out of a PDF file using NSImage, I *can* successfully open CMYK TIFF files and access the raw CMYK data. And, of course, in Photoshop CS6, if I save a CMYK Photoshop project as a TIFF file, it produces a CMYK TIFF.
In short, I realized that I'd rather reimplement the wheel and spend an hour or two writing some really hackish GUI code than pay Adobe one more cent. So I did.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
When BOTH are true ?
Stack-ranking is *perfect* for a corporate situation where short-term results that make upper level managers look good enough before they move up the ladder and cash-out is desirable to said management.
Of course, this is done at the expense of everyone else, but hey, THAT'S AMERICA.
He's not wrong. And neither are you !
The entire system would be too internally efficient, and compensation would be too immediate, and would have to naturally be more evenly dispersed from somewhere, from the top-down...
Look here, something dull and annoying to distract you from thinking about how you're not being compensated fairly. IT ALL RUNS LIKE THAT.
Adobe must share % of profit with its employees, not just with share holders.
Casteism
Stack ranking is for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Casteism
I read Slashdot for the hot nude women.
Ehhh some people don't have issues with it or don't care enough for it. Some here want to discuss on the article and not have to deal with the hate beta spam