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How Adobe Got Rid of Traditional Stack-Ranking Performance Reviews

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the rate-yourself-on-a-scale-from-excellent-to-awesome dept.

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.'"

100 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. I'll keep saying by BigDaveyL · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:I'll keep saying by DaTrueDave · · Score: 1, Informative

      Stack Ranking might not work long-term, but the moderation at Slashdot has worked long term. Let's not give it all up by moving forward with the beta site.

    2. Re:I'll keep saying by cellocgw · · Score: 2, Informative

      Absolutely. There are ways around the problem that top management claims exists, i.e. that every manager will claim his group is better than the other groups (which is why they believe in small-group stack ranking). It takes a lot of effort, and a dedication to cross-team performance evaluations, root-cause analysis as to why one team may have had better schedule or cost performance than another, but it could be done. But given that most corporations consider it a workplace violation for peons to exchange salary information, don't hold yr breath.

      --
      https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
    3. Re:I'll keep saying by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      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

      Plus, this is Adobe. They probably had to give up after HR was the victim of 15 stack-smashing attacks in a row.

    4. Re:I'll keep saying by chispito · · Score: 1

      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

      What Adobe's talking about shouldn't be revolutionary. They're just formalizing good management technique. I'm fortunate to have a great manager that already provides and accepts this kind of ongoing, timely feedback. That we have to also do the annual, stack-ranked review process is, well, unfortunate.

      --
      The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
    5. Re:I'll keep saying by DickBreath · · Score: 2

      Stack Ranking works forever. Just like Downsizing. It's like printing money. It's infinitely scalable. Furthermore Stack Ranking is sustainable -- indefinitely. Any MBA could have told you that.

      And as for your talk of "good performers" those are just the creative people who upset the apple cart and don't fit into the mold properly. The worker units are all supposed to be interchangeable like spark plugs. You run them until you burn them out, then throw them away. Geez, have you even been to business school?

      --

      I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
    6. Re:I'll keep saying by noh8rz10 · · Score: 1

      I've never heard these phrases before: " Since the new system was implemented, voluntary attrition has decreased substantially, while involuntary departures have increased by 50%". what's an involuntary departure? getting canned? separately, what hoops do you have to jump through to fire poor performers in California without getting sued? some people around me could definitely use an involuntary departure. ahh, if I were the boss man...

    7. Re:I'll keep saying by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

      I think the downmodding started by legit users once they posted their reply. Whether their reply will end up being worth anything is another issue, but if they've heard the outcry (and it seems like they have), there's no reason to continue bitching until they come back with their new plan.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    8. Re:I'll keep saying by eulernet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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

      You are wrong.
      As soon as stack-ranking is used (and not after "too long"), it shows that the individual performance is more important than the group's performance, so collaborating goes against your own interest.
      Once everybody is focused on his own agenda, the best performers are getting tired by the competition and thus quit their job to a better living place.

      Basically, stack-ranking encourages selfishness.

    9. Re:I'll keep saying by richlv · · Score: 1

      but what about static website without comments ? that would be slashdot beta, of course ! ;)

      --
      Rich
    10. Re:I'll keep saying by bobbied · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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

      I'm not so sure those are the only two options. Like any system that ranks employees performance, it's all about what you are actually measuring in the ranking system. If you consider "collaboration" important and have a way to measure it that works, then I can assure you that employees will respond with more of it.

      The issue is that most companies don't want to take the time to design performance rating systems where they are actually measuring what they really want. So they resort to using short cuts or stupid metrics and then get what they deserve.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    11. Re:I'll keep saying by MarcoAtWork · · Score: 2

      it is still really shortsighted anyways, because you might end up with a top performer that's going through a temporary rough patch (divorce, health issues, ...) and they could get caught and let go when if the company stuck with them a bit longer they would reap the benefits. I remember some time ago reading a comment here on a previous discussion on reviews where the manager stuck for this employee (who was going through a divorce iirc) and a year later and for many years afterwards they ended up being extremely, extremely, extremely high performers (as well as loyal, showing gratitude for what the company did for them).

      When I read this article and read that 'involuntary departures went up by 50% because there are more frequent "tough discussions"' it makes me feel like this could easily degenerate in a climate-of-fear where if you have an off month you might end up being let go, a yearly review is not optimal but short-term dips are obviously more easily counterbalanced by good productivity the rest of the year when the issue was resolved, not to mention if you have yearly reviews on record for several years it becomes it more obvious when dips are temporary or there is an underperforming situation (which might not be the employee's fault, could simply be an issue of not having the right person in the right job or vice-versa).

      As an addition I do think companies should decouple raises from performance reviews, in general the budgets tend to be fixed and low, so if you have a good team you can't really give people the raises they merit, because say if you give the right amount to three people they'll be happy and the rest will get nothing (even if they did well) while if you give a little to everybody nobody's happy (since they'll feel they just got a cost-of-living adjustment for a really good solid year of effort).

      --
      -- the cake is a lie
    12. Re:I'll keep saying by BigDaveyL · · Score: 1

      When I read this article and read that 'involuntary departures went up by 50% because there are more frequent "tough discussions"' it makes me feel like this could easily degenerate in a climate-of-fear where if you have an off month you might end up being let go, a yearly review is not optimal but short-term dips are obviously more easily counterbalanced by good productivity the rest of the year when the issue was resolved, not to mention if you have yearly reviews on record for several years it becomes it more obvious when dips are temporary or there is an underperforming situation (which might not be the employee's fault, could simply be an issue of not having the right person in the right job or vice-versa).

      I think you hit a good issue that has to be addressed. I think you need to be able to determine when there is a dip and take it on a case by case basis. Your divorce example is a good one. I think IF management knew that you may have a month or two off, they actually have the context and could give you the support you needed BEFORE any problems occur.

    13. Re:I'll keep saying by BigDaveyL · · Score: 1

      I get what you are saying, but it basically forces you to reluctantly collaborate, not collaborate because it is a Good Thing (tm). It's like the taxes you pay aren't charity in the strictest sense of the word.

    14. Re:I'll keep saying by bobbied · · Score: 1

      But my point is that you get what you pay for as an employer. I.E. You get the performance you measure. If your employees start to collaborate because they get bonuses for it, GREAT, assuming that's what the employer wanted. If an employer doesn't measure the right things and pays bonuses for things they really don't want, who's fault is it?

      I'll tell you though, few employers actually take the time to measure the right things. That's why we end up with huge bonus payouts to executives who just presided over the bankrupting of their companies or mindless "stack ranking" processes that do more harm than good because they are not objective or based on what is actually *important* to the company. Such companies are measuring the wrong things, and then reap the pain they cause themselves.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    15. Re:I'll keep saying by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Exactly!

      Aren't you as manager supposed to hire an "all-star team" to begin with?

      Let's say I'm doing my job as a great manager and only accept the best people that mesh well with the team; then why the hell should I be artificially forced to get rid of X % of my good employees??

      Short term thinking indeed.

    16. Re:I'll keep saying by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 1

      Absolutely!

      Instituting Stack Ranking at a company is a prelude to severe layoffs.

      When Stack Ranking is instituted, you should immediately put your resume out and start looking for a new job.

      Speaking from experience! MANY of those who didn't notice that at Sysco were shocked by massive layoffs (90% of the staff) and transfer of the work to indian staff.

      They have some NEW trick where they pay the indian staff indian wages and the indian staff is only tecnically "visiting" the U.S. They can stay for 6 months in each calendar year and then must return to India.

      The result is technical staff for 1/3 the cost of a local. (I prepared project budgets so I know).

      I think it involves an "L" visa.

      Anyway, they stay four to an apartment within walking distance, have no car, and then return to india to work remotely. Very hard to compete against college educated people able to work under those conditions.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    17. Re:I'll keep saying by Swave+An+deBwoner · · Score: 1

      And I wondered if the decrease in "voluntary departures" (e.g., "I quit") was a simple consequence of the increase in "involuntary departures" (e.g., "You're fired").

      Or the state of the job market could be affecting the "voluntarily departing" crowd's decision to wait a bit before their announcing their departure.

    18. Re:I'll keep saying by waveman · · Score: 1

      ... and everyone becomes obsessed with politics and 'visibility' - because those who do not are out the door.

    19. Re:I'll keep saying by Alomex · · Score: 1

      Stack ranking also works if you aim for a 1% trim rate instead of a 10% rate. In a 100 workers it is not hard to find a bad hire or a previously good now demotivated worker, and the average folk need not fear. Of course one should be able to let underperformers go without any target rate, but in practice many people find it really hard to fire someone unless told they have to.

    20. Re:I'll keep saying by visualight · · Score: 1

      You might appreciate this documentary, if you haven't already seen it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

      --
      Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
    21. Re:I'll keep saying by BigDaveyL · · Score: 1

      I would agree with this assessment. It works if the sample you're looking at is big enough, and you're not looking to cut 10% or some non-trivial percentage.

    22. Re:I'll keep saying by eulernet · · Score: 1

      Interesting, but in companies, it's difficult to encourage altruism when the management is selfish.

      In our culture, the individual is considered superior to the group, but in Saudia for example, I was surprised to discover that the family was more important than its individuals (of course, people expect that their effort towards their family will be rewarded).

    23. Re:I'll keep saying by bbsalem · · Score: 1

      Then Dice should sell Slashdot rather than destroy it. Go tell Dice that they need to run Google+ and be done with it.

    24. Re: I'll keep saying by bbsalem · · Score: 1

      Fuck Beta!

    25. Re:I'll keep saying by bbsalem · · Score: 1

      If Stack Ranking encourages selfishness, a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, that that fits right into the way most people do business, especially when they have to reduce their work force. The shift of paradigm can come very quickly. A Company can go from being a Masses of Asses operation, not able to hire fast enough, to just the opposite in a couple of years, thanks to the short investment leash most managements are. Stack Ranking appears quickly just has the back channel to whistle blow on the chain of command vanishes. I know, I saw this happen in 2003. They got to pay me to leave, much more than a meisly lay-off package.

      Damn, I almost forgot: Fuck Beta and Fuck Dice.

    26. Re:I'll keep saying by eulernet · · Score: 1

      I agree with you: the paradigm can change very quickly.
      The problem is that in order to succeed, you need teams.

      How could you encourage teams when you use stack ranking ?

    27. Re:I'll keep saying by bbsalem · · Score: 1

      Teams should be built on trust and relationship. trust that the people you have can do what tasks have been assigned and relationship to them to win their support.

      In my experience stack ranking has been used in place of stable relationships and in a situation where the management has decided that people have to be laid off. It is not necessary unless relationships in the company are unstable or the management does not know the people who work with them.

  2. Immature by The+Cat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Immature by tFunc · · Score: 1

      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.

      Well said. Wish I still had mod points for this.

    2. Re:Immature by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Defend them while they learn.

      This. One of the best managers I've ever worked for used to say "My job is to go into meetings and deal with the bullshit so that you don't have to." His only criteria was that for it to work, we had to be honest with him and tell him what was going on. We knew we could trust him with that information, he knew we were being honest, everybody was happy.

      Oh and he never, ever, micro-managed. You were given a task, you were given a timescale or deadline, and you were trusted to do it. If you didn't, then see above: but God help you if it was your fault.

    3. Re:Immature by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      Agreed.

      Also, Stack Ranking sends the wrong message to employees.

      It tells employees that they are an liability instead of an investment. Oh, gee, we forgot to include the cost & time of training their replacement. /Sarcasm Nah, that can't be a valid factor to consider. Talk about the cliche "Cut off your nose, to spite your face".

    4. Re:Immature by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Hereabouts, most managers (all that I spoke to, at least) hated stack ranking just as much if not more as developers, when we still had it. Because they were the ones having to explain people why they were ranked in the low bucket when they did a good job.

    5. Re:Immature by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Mod points? I wish I worked for him!

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. Re:For great justice! by dosius · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    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
  4. When did stack ranking start? by 0123456 · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:When did stack ranking start? by Voyager529 · · Score: 1

      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.

      As a Premiere user since 6.1 (and not switching from 6.5 until PPro 2.0), I too am grateful that the requirement of setting auto-save to every five minutes is, for the most part, behind us. However, as much as Adobe gets to shoulder plenty of the blame, consider the state of computers during that era...

      My church bought a turnkey video editing system for about $7,000 back in 1998. It had a 733MHz P3 processor and 192MBytes of RAM. Those are essentially rounding errors by today's standards. Since IDE drives maxed out at MAYBE 20GB on the high end, and they didn't spin fast enough to capture video in real-time, we had all the fun of getting a quartet of 18.6GB SCSI drives and RAID-5'ing them for a whopping 50GB of storage space. This, of course, involving an Adaptec SCSI card and Windows 98SE, and the drivers to get the two of them to talk to each other. Since NTFS was, at the time, only supported by NT 4.0 (which, IIRC, was NOT supported by Premiere itself), that pesky 4GB file size limit kept rearing its head in the most obnoxious of situations. Rendering on that 733MHz processor was no picnic, especially if you were rendering to MPEG-2 on top of it - you'd literally be there all night waiting for a render to happen. To help with that, there were some people at Canopus, Matrox, and a few others, who made hardware acceleration cards, and those were half-awesome. By "half-awesome", I mean that machines of that vintage were able to have multiple 3D video effects on a single clip, working in real-time, on processors that ancient. The not-so-awesome part involved the fact that the hardware - and their associated plug-ins - had a tendency of crashing. A LOT. I lost countless hours to a Matrox plug-in that just decided to throw up and cause the last hour of editing to go into the trash can.

      Ultimately, I'm not giving Adobe a completely free pass on not getting their act together. I will, however, give them at least some leeway based on the fact that no one /else/ was able to make a stable video editing application on Windows 9x, either...especially when one considers that the hardware required for video editing on the PC platform at that time was a lot more exotic (and ten times more expensive) than it is now.

    2. Re:When did stack ranking start? by waveman · · Score: 1

      > such a crash-ridden heap of bugs.

      Luxury. My rich cousins have that release. Ours was much worse, perhaps because we live in a hole in the road.

      On my Android it takes 20 seconds to display a page on the pdf file I am reading at the moment. 2014!

  5. Reviews by djupedal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Reviews by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 1

      That sounds noble. But I think it's noteworthy that about the only Japanese software I ever come across is hiding in embedded systems. So I'm not sure we can point to that Japanese model as something we should clearly emulate.

    2. Re:Reviews by inasity_rules · · Score: 1

      I have found Japanese embedded software to be very well written. Even their programming interfaces. [rant]With the exception of Toshiba that makes PLC software from the 1900s which sucks worse than the /. beta interface (seriously, if you think beta is bad, write a complex system in TDP32. Really - black holes have nothing on PLC software without search and replace).[/rant]

      --
      I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
    3. Re:Reviews by mythosaz · · Score: 1

      I recall getting fed that line about Japanese management models in my 89's copy of Rising Sun, and while watching Gung Ho in the late 80's.

      ...and while there's still a Wikipedia article about the Japanese model of management that talks in the present, I have to ask? Is it still true? I know the quarterly profit driven model of western countries drives our management, and Japanese companies don't fall prey as much to it as we do, but... ...I was still under the impression we've poisoned eastern companies all the same...

    4. Re:Reviews by djupedal · · Score: 1

      We can imagine all the poison we want, but what really happens around the water cooler remains strong. They might say they agree and will adhere, but in the end, they still prefer the ways that got them where they prefer to be, even if a Western concern thinks they own the place. Same goes for S. Korea and China.

    5. Re:Reviews by Jiro · · Score: 1

      Japan is known for making video games. And they're software.

    6. Re:Reviews by antifoidulus · · Score: 1

      One downside to that model if you are a star is that you basically get paid the same as everyone else no matter how much they fuck up and how good you are.... Depending on the company there are some places that will give you a better bonus, but for the most part it's all the same. It's much better to be a fuck-up there than it is in the US, much worse to be a star, for the middle of the road people it doesn't matter too much.

      --
      Monstar L
  6. Re:Let me be the first to say... by doti · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'm waiting for a Downfall parody on this theme.

    Also, fuck Beta.

    --
    factor 966971: 966971
  7. They don't care! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    HA! You were already told once IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS that you are an AUDIENCE not users. Lusers maybe but users. Beta still sux!

  8. storm drain by epine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

    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:

    The problem with "a" gene-environment interaction is that there is no gene that does something. It only has a particular effect in a particular environment, and to say that a gene has a consistent effect in every environment is really only to say that it has a consistent effect in all the environments in which it has been studied to date. This has become ever more clear in studies of the genetics of behavior, as there has been increasing appreciation of environmental regulation of epigenetics, transcription factors, splicing factors, and so on. And this is most dramatically pertinent to humans, given the extraordinary range of environments—both natural and culturally constructed—in which we live.

    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.

  9. Re: Let me be the first to say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Fuck creative cloud.

    Cs6, and that's the way it stays.

  10. Re:For great justice! by emmagsachs · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    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.

  11. There is a lesson here for slashdot by Arker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    " '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.
    1. Re:There is a lesson here for slashdot by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Can you imagine what the Beta site dev team's reviews will be like?

      "Well, everyone hated it so much they threatened to leave the site. A few went off and set up alternatives, some organized a boycot, others just bitched about it in every single story. The entire project seems to be a complete disaster and everyone wants to keep the old site. On the plus side you managed to get a personal best 27 buzzwords per paragraph into the requirements spec, so well done and here's your bonus."

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:There is a lesson here for slashdot by Arrogant-Bastard · · Score: 1

      This. One hundred times this.

      The teachable moment for Dice is RIGHT NOW. They can either admit what everyone knows (that Beta is a horrible downgrade and should be killed immediately) or they can let their massive out-of-control egos continue to drive their decision making...and drive Slashdot right off a cliff.

      The question that remains is whether they're smart enough to realize that, or whether they will persist on the path they've chosen -- which leads inexorably to a future where people talk about Slashdot in the past tense and catalog its downfall alongside that of other sites whose operators failed to listen to their masters: US.

      My money is on the latter. Every response I've seen so far from them is full of PR happytalk and bullshit. I think they truly believe that they can pull this off if they lie about it long enough and consistently enough. After all, that's how business is done these days, for the most part.

  12. Re:For great justice! by Arith · · Score: 1

    You know, I can't help but feel this boycott will be alot like Randy Marsh and SouthPark's Walmart boycott.

    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! ... And some chips... And butter. And some new pliers."

  13. Comment from Beta by ripvlan · · Score: 1

    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).

    1. Re:Comment from Beta by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 1

      Maybe my work browser isn't processing the Comment JS correctly. Odd...

      --
      If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  14. Re:For great justice! by mwehle · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  15. Adobe is a glitch-ridden heap of garbage by ikhider · · Score: 1

    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
  16. Yep, that makes sense by neminem · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

    1. Re:Yep, that makes sense by sydbarrett74 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That self-assessment stuff is mostly wankery. I want my boss to be candid about what I'm doing right, and what I'm doing wrong. And tell me then and there, not six months later.

      --
      'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
    2. Re:Yep, that makes sense by ISoldat53 · · Score: 1

      Crap! They want managers to manage? If they do that how are they going to have time to kiss ass. Every manager I ever had had me write my own evaluation. Modern management is down-up "What can my employees do for me," in stead of what can I, as a manager, do to make my employees more productive.

    3. Re:Yep, that makes sense by swb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This.

      I hate the annual kabuki theater of the performance review, with it's empty and meaningless self-assessments and the usual empty criticism ladled on top to make sure the review is 'balanced' (and mostly to be just intimidating enough to dampen any expectation of a salary increase).

      The once a year part is annoying as well, since anything good you've done that wasn't last week has been pushed off the stack. It'd be much better to have more often candid discussions, whether they were regular or based around projects or project milestones where some good could come of them.

    4. Re:Yep, that makes sense by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      The once a year part is annoying as well, since anything good you've done that wasn't last week has been pushed off the stack.

      Worse than that, anything good you've done that wasn't during a one week span of time five months ago has been pushed off the stack. There is usually a delay in large companies between creating an assessment and sharing it with an employee that lasts a few months.

      Oh, and during that few-month dead zone nothing counts. If you do something big during this time it will just be considered part of the baseline for the next review.

  17. fuck beta! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!

  18. involuntary departures have increased by 50% by fredness · · Score: 2

    Sounds kind of intimidating.

    1. Re:involuntary departures have increased by 50% by Moof123 · · Score: 2

      Yeah, that caught my eye too.

      Dead wood needs to be cleared out, and I am curious if that is what is going on, or if it is just creating a climate of fear. Dead wood generally doesn't up and leave because of a bad review, good talent with other options does. Think Wally vs. Dilbert. Wally learns to burrow in year after year, Dilbert pulls his hair our over the failures he didn't cause but gets blamed for. So in the common stack system, dead wood tends to accumulate despite poor reviews, and good guys who just had a rough year end up motivated to leave.

  19. Re:For great justice! by fatphil · · Score: 1

    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
  20. Misread by xymog · · Score: 1

    I misread "stack-rank" as "slack-rank." Not sure there's a difference. Glass is half full or half empty either way.

  21. Re:I'm waiting for a Downfall parody on this theme by M.+Baranczak · · Score: 1

    "I should have stuck with Web 1.0, like Stalin!"

  22. Re:Let me be the first to say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Fuck Beta and fuck you.

  23. Re:For great justice! by DickBreath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  24. Re:Slashdot, make Beta permanent NOW! by Arith · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  25. Re:For great justice! by hubie · · Score: 1

    Ok, fine! I'm going to build my own alternate /. with blackjack and hookers!

  26. And yet, Flash still sucks by GPS+Pilot · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:And yet, Flash still sucks by hack++slash · · Score: 1

      What pisses me off about Adobe's Flash is the installer, every time it asks me to update it asks me wether I want to have it automatically updated in future, or ask me, or never. I select ask me, and it asks me every fucking time, I bet if I selected the automatically one it would never ask me again.

      It's annoying nagware, and they'll never change that aspect because they just want everyone to blindly accept every new version they shove out.

      And it's still shite at playing video in a webpage compared to a standalone video player.

      --
      To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
    2. Re:And yet, Flash still sucks by dysmal · · Score: 2

      You could try overriding those update settings. It means you're no longer on the bleeding edge of the Flash updates but it makes your life significantly less irritating. http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-p... I 100% agree that Flash is a pain no matter what you do to customize it and think it should be roasted over the burning hulk that used to be known as Beta.

  27. Re:Slashdot, make Beta permanent NOW! by richlv · · Score: 1

    it's not just not ready, it is a complete disaster. and i had to see it to agree with those people

    --
    Rich
  28. Amazing! by sootman · · Score: 2

    "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.
  29. Just like saving a file... by sydbarrett74 · · Score: 1

    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
  30. Sad and Stupid by romons · · Score: 1

    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
  31. Re:Slashdot, make Beta permanent NOW! by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    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
  32. Ender's Game by DarthVain · · Score: 2

    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...

  33. Re:For great justice! by emmagsachs · · Score: 1

    Mod parent up!

  34. haha. Adobe's MISTAKES. by raymorris · · Score: 1

    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.

  35. Re:For great justice! by Dishevel · · Score: 1

    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?
  36. their real job by vrhino · · Score: 1

    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.

  37. Re: Let me be the first to say... by tbuddy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  38. It's a Greenspan moment! by Vitriol+Angst · · Score: 1

    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!!!"
  39. Re:Slashdot, make Beta permanent NOW! by Anonymous+Psychopath · · Score: 1

    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.

  40. Re:Fuck Beta by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

    > 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???

  41. Teaching Week by PingXao · · Score: 1

    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.

  42. Re:Ricky said it best. by lukeshep · · Score: 1

    Domain now parked by joker.com, how apt.

  43. Re: Let me be the first to say... by dgatwood · · Score: 1

    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.

  44. Why pick one by ToddInSF · · Score: 1

    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 !

    1. Re:Why pick one by eulernet · · Score: 1

      I said that he was wrong on the delay.
      I don't disagree, since we are saying the same thing, except that I explained how it works on a personal level ;-)

  45. But if results weren't withheld by ToddInSF · · Score: 1

    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.

  46. Re:I don't get it by bbsalem · · Score: 1

    Oh, Beta IS different. The Beta lacks most of the complexity needed to address points made by others that we have in the current UI. It is more like blogging and social media in which no one talks to one another but past one another in a phony nice-nice self censored way. On Social Media you can address other replies but you really have to work at setting the context, to whom and what you are replying to. People self-censor on blogs and Social Media because the chance of being misunderstood get very great. Social Media is a way for site owners to control the agenda and ignore their readers. They have confused not communicating with their moderation role, and even may not care if their users get to communicate. I even think that many business people would easily trade profit for democratic processes and institutions. That is why, at least, they are so unaware of what they are doing, and given their politics, they may be well aware of what this means. They most be stopped or abandoned.

    If you are young and all you know is social media, then you won't get it, because the insight comes from another era before marketing corporations got control of the Internet. If you want to see how to break communication go read Google+. It is like LinkedIn for bloggers. It is a bunch of self-promoters talking past and not to each other. I have no problem with commercial uses of the Internet provided that they do not crowd out other uses, provided that they don't quell discussions we need to have.

    There are ways to manage on-line communication so that people can thrash out differences and have detailed conversations, most blogs and social media don't suffice and Slashdot is one of the few exception. So, what we are facing here is that dice.com is trying to push the social media business model into Slashdot via the Beta, and probsbly for the same reason as Google and Facebook push it. I am making a case that this is bad, generally.

    To make my point, it may be that we will have to find a new way to have discussions on the Internet beyond the influience of social media and marketing. That may be to resurrect the text-only USENET on a free platform, to bring back mailing lists and Listserv, and to begin to replace blogging with structured forums web sites. Demand for the website frameworks, Drupal, WordPress, etc. that they provide an alternative to the blog positing and the text-area, a full featured rich text editor by default, one which provides the features of a good Mail User Agent, contextual reply to posts, and change of topic. Also this shift should allow for threaded discussions. We need to end blogging and replace it with discussion, USENET-style discussion even if we don't use the heirarchy, although I think a heirarchy by topic is better than a topic that is just the subject of some article written by a website owner, a marketer, or an editorial board. I argue that most of the abuses of blogging can be mitigated by a structured discussion. OT and change of topic posts can get their own subthreads and trolls can be taken to task directly. Much of the pain users experience with blogs is due to their inherit inflexibility. Slashdot is able to handle many of these problems. They are the reasons people self-censor and censor others on Social Media because blogging lacks the tools to manage a normal discussion between people complete with the efforts native to humans to manipulate, change the topic, and try to control others.

    Oh yes, FUCK the Beta. If it is adopted I will not use Slashdot.

  47. Profit by NewYork · · Score: 1

    Adobe must share % of profit with its employees, not just with share holders.

    --
    Casteism
  48. Peter principle by NewYork · · Score: 1

    Stack ranking is for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

    --
    Casteism
  49. Re:Fuck Beta by nhat11 · · Score: 1

    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