Slashdot Mirror
Former Yahoo Employee Challenges the Legality of Yahoo's Ranking System (nytimes.com)
whoever57 writes: A former employee of Yahoo is challenging Yahoo's performance review and termination process. The ranking system was introduced to Yahoo by Ms. Mayer on the recommendation of management consultants McKinsey & Co.. Gregory Anderson, an editor who oversaw Yahoo's autos, homes, shopping, small business and travel sites in Sunnyvale, Calif. is claiming that the ranking and termination process was flawed to the extent that the terminations were not based on performance and hence constitute mass layoffs, which require notice periods under both California and Federal law. He is also alleging gender discrimination, under which women were given preferential treatment over men in the hiring, promotions and layoff processes.
It looked so much like layoffs that I thought it was layoffs.
Maybe I misunderstood and they were just trying to get rid of bad programmers. From what I understand, Yahoo had a lot of them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I had to read several sentences in the find out we are talking about some kind of work rank system, not search ranking. You know... it being a search engine company and all.
It's great to be a CEO: get paid millions, then use the company's money to bring in consultants to do your own work!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I really don't have a problem with it, it's better than seeing incompetent dumbasses coast along while everyone else carries the weight. And if they don't like you and want to get rid of you, they will find a reason, I don't care what the laws say.
Will be fun to see who prevails.
I had a manager who was a big fan of Jack Welch and implemented a policy to fire the bottom 10% every year. Except he didn't hire replacements and the middle soon became the new bottom. The top 10% saw the writing on the wall and vacated for greener fields elsewhere. I was the third of a dozen senior testers who left the company. The manager rode the company all the way into bankruptcy, unwilling to admit that his channeling of Jack Welch was wrong.
> He is also alleging gender discrimination, under which women were given preferential treatment over men in the hiring, promotions and layoff processes.
That could be long and expensive to prove. I talked to a lawyer recently about "protected classes" (in the context of a large layoff the preponderance of which were over 50). Going from memory (IANAL), the issue comes down to what is a "protected class", which makes suing for discrimination a realistic possibility. Age is indeed a protected class. The female gender is a protected class. Races other than white tend to be protected classes.
Interestingly enough, she said specifically that contractors from India working in the US are a protected class (at least in this state, YMMV) which is why it's so difficult to go after H1B abuses. But that's another story.
Anyway, point is, he's going to have a difficult time (more difficult than this ever is) proving gender discrimination against males.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Carly Fiorina did wonders for HP...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Ya know, I've always felt like a lesbian trapped in a man's body.
A beautiful, 5'10" lipstick supermodel lesbian, not one of those linebacker ones.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I've seen a couple of places do this with a forced bell curve.
They had pre-defined that you can only have so many at each level, and had to fit -- if you had 10 people, the number at each level was defined by a formula.
Which meant the ranking system couldn't say "wow, I have a bunch of good people", or "shit, I have a bunch of dullards".
Morons who manage by arbitrary metric tend to do a lousy job of it. Because apparently reality is a problem for such people.
I find that style of management pretty pathetic, because it's just drooling idiots blindly following stuff they don't understand, and can't see why it's failing them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Women are no longer paid less than men, as there are now laws in place to prevent that. If you know it is happening then report it.
Feminist will never admit pay is fair, because the alternative was true for so long and still really sounds convincing now. Chances are you owe them reparations forever and ever.
He is also alleging gender discrimination, under which women were given preferential treatment over men in the hiring,
Yeah, let me know how that works out for you...
What is interesting to me here is the charge of gender discrimination. Typically you would expect this to be levied by a female. In this case it appears to be a guy that is alleging discrimination. Reverse discrimination basically and it flies in the face of what Silicon Valley and indeed corporate America have been promoting for quite some time now.
To me this is a perfect example of how two wrongs don't make a right. This guy had nothing to do with what happened in the past so why must he be made to suffer for it?
So it's "whining" to complain about open, pervasive, and unfair discrimination? I guess that makes Martin Luther King, Jr. a black-whiner.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
They had pre-defined that you can only have so many at each level, and had to fit -- if you had 10 people, the number at each level was defined by a formula.
The company I worked for had a bell curve at one point. They funny thing is that the QA department as a whole did an honest assessment to fit the bell curve perfectly. The other departments, especially the department managers, all ranked themselves very highly. The executive team had a hard time bringing reality to the other departments that not everyone was a special snowflake.
I had a manager who was a big fan of Jack Welch
Ahhh. Neutron Jack. Brings a tear to my eye when I think back to him!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Who is crazy enough to still be working for Yahoo?
We once had a related problem in a university. Some admin-troll decided that exam scores or term-paper grades in any courses must fit some Gaussian distribution. If not, it means you have either mass cheating or teacher incompetence.
Obviously this is bone-headed. In practice, we find it quite likely that some exams display such a distribution: you have a light tail of low grades, a fat body of mediocre ones, which gradually extend and tapers into the top scorers. The low-grade tail is lighter than that of the Gaussian.
As a result, professors began moving the mid-grade batch of students into the low-grade tail, by stretching the grading criteria selectively on the "suckers" picked arbitrarily. Gaussian curves were thus fabricated. The grades became meaningless.
Or, they could do away with stack ranking type of systems and go back to the old fashioned way of evaluating employees - by having the managers pay attention.
Look around Silicon Valley. When is the last time a major company there appointed a white heterosexual male to CEO?
Apple, homosexual
Hewlett-Packard, woman
Google, Indian
Microsoft, Indian
Facebook and Intel are it. And Facebook only has one because he's the founder.
Where is all this power again?
When I worked for a state university system I had occasion to read the DOE regulations about discrimination. Colleges are required to file various paperwork about racial and gender statistic of students who apply, students admitted, and students who graduate, to prove that they aren't discriminating. I was a bit surprised to find out that the DOE regulations explicitly state that discrimination against males and caucasians is not discrimination. I wonder of the Department of Labor has a similar rule.
Yes, I'm OBVIOUSLY privileged because some OTHER white guy got handouts from his dad or didn't get fired or got the cushy job. Yes, I'm sure that's my fault. And I'm sure simply by dint of being white I'm helping to contribute - how DARE me be the "wrong" race (or gender).
Get over yourself - bigotry (by race OR by gender) is ALWAYS wrong, not just when it's against minorities.
Discrimination happens to everyone - yes, even white guys. I really wish people would quit shoving caucazoids into the "defense" category, because MOST of us are in agreement with you.
I should not have to "defend" being a white male any more than any other person should have to "defend" being a black woman. If your boss treats people unethically that is a problem to take up with your boss, NOT with "the whites".
It's called "stack ranking" and it doesn't work period.
From an article in Vanity Fair: “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
"Ranking and rating" is what they call it at Intel... is that where Yahoo got if from?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I just saw "SJW" for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and already I'm seeing it everywhere.
(I cribbed this passage from "The personal is political" — some thoughts from Christopher Hitchens).
Concerning "SJW", I can't say I've experienced an instantaneous revulsion of this magnitude for a long time. It's the Roundup Ready MRE of smug snivellers. Move over smut, there's a new porn in town.
You are of course correct - ED.
Carly Fiorina did wonders for HP...
... by leaving the company. HP stock shot up 7% the day she left!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Does Ursula Burns count?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Didn't "ranking and rating" at Intel work the same way? (I was only there as a contractor, so all I know about it is what I've been told by employees.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The Yahoo redesign: proof that apparently nobody in the company is familiar with the concept of A/B testing. Has anybody said they actually _liked_ the new design? Couldn't they have gotten that feed back, oh, I don't know... maybe BEFORE they forced it on every user?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
To be fair quite a few people have not seen the website for some time and so quality testing might be a bit laggy. I have always loathed the colour purple, don't know why, just really, really do. The site leaves me feeling nauseated, really off putting to say the least. You can see the brains of an M&M at work, https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., what has Yahoo become under that particular M&Ms direction or lack there of, more consultants required ASAP.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As to the women given preference, considering they're paid less, on average, than men
The problem is that they're not. Women get paid on average the same as men, once you factor in experience, hours worked and contribution.
Women under 30 get paid more than men.
Women in part times roles get paid more per hour than men in part time roles.
Women spend most of the household income, even where it's earned by men.
Please, do some fucking research before spouting spurious divisive bullshit about gender pay differentials.
Per TFA: " The court filing said that managers were forced to give poor rankings to a certain percentage of their team, regardless of actual performance. Ratings given by front-line managers were arbitrarily changed by higher-level executives who often had no direct knowledge of the employee’s work." Once the Department of Labor steps in, Mayer's internal memos with her saying stay away from the "L-word" and use "remix" will bite Yahoo pretty hard. It's obvious Yahoo is trying to redefine these as "not layoffs"...it reminds me of the meme that if you have to say "I'm not a racist..." that you probably are at least displaying racist tendencies.
I recently was laid off from HP under their "Work Force Reduction" and the WARN Act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) was the reason it was the best job ending I've ever had. Yahoo will, if found in violation, have to go back and pay all their former employees some type of severance package; the WARN Act basically says either you have to give 60 days or pay people for those 60 days. No way the DOL will let Yahoo slide on this; if they did then the USA would never have another mass layoff and instead everything would just be "remixes" or whatever pointy-haired boss jargon of the week that they think they can get away with.
Morons who manage by arbitrary metric tend to do a lousy job of it. Because apparently reality is a problem for such people.
I don't think reality is the issue. The real problem is those people are simply bad at their job (managing) - but they are being paid large amounts of money do do exactly that. They are constantly terrified of being found out, so they grasp onto any simplistic "management" notion their little intellects can actually grasp.
#DeleteChrome
Sounds like Microsoft's completely fucked-up "stack ranking" bullshit, where you HAD to give the lower 10 or 20 percent of your team "failing" grades no mater how good or talented or productive they were. So fucking STUPID.
So you have this awesome team of ten people, they're all really good and the team works well together. Everyone is, in fact, a valuable contributing member with useful skills and knowledge.
TOUGH SHIT! At least two of them will have to be marked as "no good" or "non-productive" and fired. It doesn't matter that they were good, all that matters is the lowest 10% or 20% is marked for pruning. And sure as shit, it all came down to who you knew and how hard you could suck or buddy-up to the manager.
As a contractor I saw this time and time again at Microsoft. I was never subject to it (I was a contractor, ha ha!) but good, talented people would get cut from the team simply because "those were the rules". Utter stupid bullshit. It was appalling.
Didn't suck your manager's dick hard enough? Didn't bring her enough cookies and compliment her hair often enough? Didn't make enough small talk?
Out you go, and good luck finding another spot after being one of the "discards".
Yeah, this stack ranking idiocy contributed to a LOT of needless unhappiness at Microsoft and the back-biting and sabotage reached epic proportions, with people actively fucking one another over so their all-important "value" would stay above their coworker's "value".
It's what made me decide to never, EVER take a direct position at Microsoft. Any company that does this is fucked up. I'll work there and I'll drink your free soda, but at the end of the day I get to go home and leave all that office politics horsecrap behind.
Unlike the hapless direct employees, I never spent one sleepless night worrying about getting cut, or if I had to play "me suck you" with my managers. The instant I walked out the door each day it was, "Fuck you and the greasy dildo you rode in on", and that was that.
I was happier and better paid than any of the directs I knew, and I fucking reveled in it. I was out the door at 5:01 while the rest of the much-vaunted direct chimps slaved away until 7 or 8 each night hoping to be seen as "industrious" or "productive". Lol, losers.
Ha ha, suckers! You thought the Holy Blue Badge was the Key to Heaven, but it was nothing but a portable heartache and a clip-on reminder to buy more Xanax. Ha ha!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I had a manager who was a big fan of Jack Welch and implemented a policy to fire the bottom 10% every year. Except he didn't hire replacements and the middle soon became the new bottom. The top 10% saw the writing on the wall and vacated for greener fields elsewhere. I was the third of a dozen senior testers who left the company. The manager rode the company all the way into bankruptcy, unwilling to admit that his channeling of Jack Welch was wrong.
That manager was a "fan" of Jack Welch the same way a baseball-bat murderer is a "fan" of Derek Jeter.
I worked for GE under Jack Welch. On the day I was hired, there were about 6-7 people between me and Welch. That's it.
Then the group I was in - GE Aerospace - was sold to Martin Marietta because Welch was tired of the GE Aerospace business model of being a mere body shop for US government contracting that was using the GE name to attract young engineers, then underpay them while billing them out at a higher rate. By the time Martin Marietta was done "improving" our management, it took more than 6-7 managers to get out of the one damn building I was in.
As Welch said, "You work the week and at the end we pay you. We're even." Because GE used to pay workers every week. Hell, even as technically salaried employees we got paid overtime (and Martin Marietta shit their pants when they tried to put a stop to that. They wanted to require us to work overtime and not get paid. Yeah, right...)
Nice guy? No Welch wasn't, but he wasn't afraid to tell the truth. And there was nowhere near the bullshit at GE that I've seen elsewhere - there wasn't enough useless non-productive mid-managers around with nothing to do to generate that bullshit.
And if you didn't like your job at GE and somehow wound up complaining to Welch, he'd tell you something like, "You have a crappy job. It's your responsibility to change that."
Compare Welch to Norm Augustine - the first Lockheed Martin CEO (I went through that merger, too) Upon the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta, Augustine made a huge killing because of the way the stock prices jumped and all the options he had. OK, but Augustine published a long missive about how much he had done for the company, weaseling and trying to imply he didn't get paid - but in all his bullshit he never once denied getting the windfall.
I always had the feeling Welch in that situation would have said something like, "I was hired by the shareholders to make them money. I did just that and they rewarded me."
When you worked at GE, you knew Welch wasn't your friend. But you also knew he wasn't your enemy, and he'd tell you straight up why you were fired or why your plant was shut down. And he'd make those decisions on the basis of making money - and you knew it. You knew why the company existed, and you knew you were expected to contribute to that.
Myself? I respected Welch - and I wasn't alone.
We laughed at the battle hag who rode down from Martin Marietta HQs on her broom to "lay down the law" to us lowly GE types after we got sold.
I'd work for AOL or WebCrawler if they pay. Who cares.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I was at a rather bizarre all-company video conference meeting years ago on this topic. The head of software dev had been pushing to fire the "bottom" 10% each year, because he was a psycho who enjoyed firing people. The head HR woman came on the conference first and announced that there was a new policy that the "bottom" 10% would be place on an "improvement" program. Then dev head comes on and starts talking about firing people. HR woman drags him off, they come back in a few minutes, HR woman talks about "improvement" programs. Dev head comes on and talks about firing people. Repeat. It was amusing in a Dilbert sort of way.
I worked at a company that got taken over by a French company prior to the dot com bust, and a French VP took over the management team. At an all hands meeting he announced from his notes that everyone was getting stock options. Everyone cheered. The HR person did a face palm. He then announced that the stock options only applied to management and not regular employees. Everyone was pissed. He had no clue whatsoever as to what went wrong just then, underscoring the sad reality of French management. So everyone got stock options with a $20 strike price when the stock was $25 per share. The stock price slid to $0.20 per share over the next several years as the dot com bust took it toll.
According to these rankings, the guy performed worse than 90% of his coworkers, then he was laid off and now he claims that it was a wrongful termination?
"Whiney man-babies" aren't the ones demanding preferential treatment. We just want REAL equality.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... until morale has improved.
When it happens to them it's discrimination. When it happens to others it's because of unrelated reasons.
Count all the CEOs in Silicon Valley, the majority are white male. If you look at the entire country the vast majority are white male.
And last I checked, Microsoft isn't a Silicon Valley company and its CEO doesn't work here.
That's sort of why I hate layoffs that reduce 10% from every department across the board. Which means you lose some really great employees while also retaining some utter morons.
A lot of groups can be kept to a minimal number, so even if you have a bell curve you can not afford to lose the bottom person, there's just too much work to do. But then management insists on across the board cuts and open job reqs are closed and the pinch really hurts with those who are left. Which means your top performers are likely to start leaving voluntarily.
She's ok, but she's no Janet Reno!
Any real worker in Silicon Valley hated her. They knew she was destroying the heart of the tech culture. The media thought she was great, but the media resides outside of Silicon Valley. The media never understands Silicon Valley, they think it's all about entrepreneurs and investors and is just like those Hollywood movies and tv series.
We just got a new white male CEO end of last year. I don't think any woman was considered. Any time a woman is appointed CEO in Silicon Valley it makes the front pages; it's that rare.
I'm not sure I see alot of "not judging by others of my race's action" from the white people are discriminated against crowd. In fact, it seems like minorities in general are being lumped together, whether we identify ourselves that way or not.
I'm hispanic, but ethnically ambiguous. I get asked if I'm asian often and I thought I could pass for white, but my white wife disagrees.
Cheap storage VM.
Force you to move to a better place rather than go through a hundred cuts of this or that.
No, it's not ADA and it's not an easy-to-read guide like the link you mentioned. It's deep in the actual Department of Education regulations themselves. There are probably a thousand pages, so I don't have an hour or two to try to find that bit now. The wording is interesting to me because it says "discrimination ... is not discrimination ".
To paraphrase the part abbreviated by ellipses since I don't have it memorized, it's something like:
Discrimination in admissions or program assignment which is deemed disadvantageous to gender or racial classes which are not historically under-represented classes is not discrimination.
I think we are going to have to ask for a link (surely the document is online, and we can search it ourselves) because anecdotes about things people remember are, unfortunately, notoriously unreliable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's probably somewhere in Subtitle B if you want to go hunting:
http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/te...
So it's "whining" to complain about open, pervasive, and unfair discrimination? I guess that makes Martin Luther King, Jr. a black-whiner.
Nice try. The slight difference is that MLK did actually suffer open, pervasive and unfair discrimination. He wasn't some balls-aching MRA bitching becauwe his female boss gets paid more than he does.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
My father was near retirement as a manager and he refused to participate in that system. He chose to retire before it became active.
I have a friend who was one of the top engineers at IBM. Shortly after the ranking system was implemented, he got his pink slip. What happened was he got a promotion as a reward for his accomplishments and hard work, and unbeknownst to him this promotion lowered his ranking enough to put him in "the window".
Needless to say, his colleagues were shocked. His managers could do nothing to reverse the process despite the fact that he was a vital asset to the company. After he left, the shock wave impacted morale and left a corrosive environment that affected production and that drove out many valuable employees. My friend and many others refused to return to IBM. Word spread to colleges and many students refused to speak to recruiters from IBM.
GE tried the same system and eventually abandoned it.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
You didn't read a thousand pages of regulations in a few minutes. I'm pretty darn sure I remember quite clearly being surprised that it said so clearly, "discrimination ... is not discrimination". Think what you will, though. If you ever have to decipher the regulations you'll find it; until then you can imagine your own facts and believe your own imagination.
The problem is that they're not. Women get paid on average the same as men, once you factor in experience, hours worked and contribution.
OK, I'll bite. Experience and hours worked I will accept with the caveat that you've given them a penalty for having kids. But exactly how does one measure "contribution" in a meaningful fashion?
Hmm, good question. I'd have to hunt down the original sources and do some digging.
you've given them a penalty for having kids
Nonsense. I've subsidised their lifestyle choice and the market has accurately rewarded their work based on their experience and hours.
Women can choose not to take time off to have children. I know some that have made that choice. I have no issue with others that prefer a different life, as long as they accept that there are trade-offs involved.
Yes, I'm aware that hispanic is not a race, but thanks for clarifying.
Cheap storage VM.
No, not really. As I said, I don't care if you'd rather think that anything you imagine must be true, because you thought of it. I shared a anecdote that I found interesting - I have no reason to prove it to you.
I'm going to get back to work complying with the regulations now, and you can go back to guessing what they might be.
I've seen a couple of places do this with a forced bell curve.
They had pre-defined that you can only have so many at each level, and had to fit -- if you had 10 people, the number at each level was defined by a formula.
Which meant the ranking system couldn't say "wow, I have a bunch of good people", or "shit, I have a bunch of dullards".
Morons who manage by arbitrary metric tend to do a lousy job of it. Because apparently reality is a problem for such people.
I find that style of management pretty pathetic, because it's just drooling idiots blindly following stuff they don't understand, and can't see why it's failing them.
Don't forget the wonderful practice of hiring sacrificial cows so you can keep your "real" team intact. Hire someone, give them f-all to do, then they get terminated because they didn't keep up with the rest.
A pretty brutal workplace to enter. It's like work poker - you look around, if you don't see the mark, you're the mark. Fuck that, I work to get shit done, not play needless politics.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
you've given them a penalty for having kids
Nonsense. I've subsidised their lifestyle choice and the market has accurately rewarded their work based on their experience and hours.
Women can choose not to take time off to have children. I know some that have made that choice. I have no issue with others that prefer a different life, as long as they accept that there are trade-offs involved.
A thought experiment - take a married couple, put them in the same job. If they wish to have kids, the woman will suffer at least some lost time. You can argue that the man should take some of the hit on parental leave, but that doesn't change the fact that regardless of both the man and woman choosing to have a kid, only the woman is guaranteed to take a penalty to her "hours" and "experience".
This may be a cultural difference, though - Canada provides paid parental leave, so the perception may be different here. Or maybe when men take leave (I took three and a half months the year my kid was born) it doesn't get counted as a gap in hours or experience. At least, there's never been an instance where it's come up.
The woman benefits by not having to go to work, and by spending time with her child.
I'd love to have a few months off with the family. I don't expect this to happen with no financial repercussions.
maybe when men take leave (I took three and a half months the year my kid was born) it doesn't get counted as a gap in hours or experience. At least, there's never been an instance where it's come up
I support fathers getting the same time out of work for the birth of a child that mothers enjoy. A lot of men don't actually want this though.
It would be interesting to get a proper objective study in Canada or one of the Scandinavian countries (with a more balanced approach to parental duties) on whether time out of the office has a greater impact on men or women. Nonetheless I don't think it's unfair that there is an impact.
I dislike anti-discrimination laws in general. I think a good compromise would be to limit to manual labor jobs and the like which the laws was originally designed for.
"She even forbade her managers from uttering what she called “the L-word,” instructing them to use the term “remix” instead."
This is what's wrong with America.