I'm just trying to explain the background of this concept, since people seem surprised at this when it is considered management 101. The GE doctrine was 10%, but my company was more reasonable at 5%.
Yes, the whole point is continual improvement so there is always a new 10%. And yes sometimes someone that was good enough last year is now on the bottom. But we are talking across large teams, not small teams. if you aren't talking about 50+ people or maybe 100+ the numbers are too small. yes you can assemble a great 10 person team, but over that you its hard to keep perfection.
For what it is worth, the PHB's are included in the ranking process as well, at least at my company. That is how we get rid of the PHB's that are problematic as well.
And honestly, if you are at Sun (as another person commented) or another firms with PHBs that don't get it, then by all means vote with your feet and get out of there.
It did at Sun. 10% of *every* team had to be marked as poor, and that 10% got laid off.
Yes, I will admit that many people don't get it. In fact, I could even believe that most companies do what Sun did, which would mean forced ranking is evil because it's misapplied more often that it is applied correctly. Of course, if you are an employee or shareholder in a company that uses it correctly, there are benefits.
I've been on both sides of this issue. I don't understand how techies can argue against the fact that half of their team is below average *for the team*.
Many posters have claimed that management is not doing their job if there are people at the bottom. But relative to others, there are always people at the bottom. Forced ranking seems to be the only way for a middle manager to get a picture of who needs work and to get the line manager to acknowledge it.
This forced ranking was popularized by the GE management book a while back, where people were ranked A/B/C with a breakdown of 10/80/10 percent.
Being in the 10% of C's doesn't mean you get fired, it is a tool for management to decide who to focus on. The correct solution might simply be to move to a different group or position better suited to the persons skills or interests. Or it might mean more training. Or yes it might mean they will be put on a performance plan to make managements expectations clear, possibly leading to termination.
Such need not be public. The forced rankings can be divorced from annual review ranks, where someone could receive a meets expectations and still be a C. It could be managements job to figure out how to make this merely good employee be great.
For example, you might have a developer who writes good code, but who is very slow because they don't use tools to automate there work. I've seen this a lot. Getting a traditionally IDE oriented developer to learn to use command line tools, perl, or a decent editor with macros can increase their productivity. You wouldn't just fire them off the bat because they aren't as good as your other developers.
Letting someone else build the guts of OSX was the smartest thing they ever did.
You, sir, are an idiot.
NeXTStep, the basis of OS X, was developed at NeXT while it was owned and run by Steve Jobs. "Someone else" didn't build the guts -Jobs oversaw it's deveoplment. When he moved back to Apple, Apple acquired NeXT, bring both his children together.
NeXTStep was largely based on Mach from CMU which itself relied heavily on BSD from UC/Berkeley.
I'll grant you that NeXTStep did add a lot on top, especially in the application framework as well as a new driver architecture, but even OS X shows its BSD roots pretty clearly.
After further reading of slides and comments, I think they needed a 50gb disk for a build, but that includes space for: - OS - compilers and tools - intermediate files (.obj/.lib files etc) - other applications they might have
Second point: The odds of getting one's hands on the full source to NT4/2K are slim to none--even most Microsoft folks couldn't do that. The code is probably scattered across multiple servers in Redmond, for starters, and you'd only be given access to the parts you needed to work with.
The many body of 2870 is below. 2872 requires the company to notify you of this.
-bri
Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just trying to explain the background of this concept, since people seem surprised at this when it is considered management 101. The GE doctrine was 10%, but my company was more reasonable at 5%.
Yes, the whole point is continual improvement so there is always a new 10%. And yes sometimes someone that was good enough last year is now on the bottom. But we are talking across large teams, not small teams. if you aren't talking about 50+ people or maybe 100+ the numbers are too small. yes you can assemble a great 10 person team, but over that you its hard to keep perfection.
For what it is worth, the PHB's are included in the ranking process as well, at least at my company. That is how we get rid of the PHB's that are problematic as well.
And honestly, if you are at Sun (as another person commented) or another firms with PHBs that don't get it, then by all means vote with your feet and get out of there.
Yes, I will admit that many people don't get it. In fact, I could even believe that most companies do what Sun did, which would mean forced ranking is evil because it's misapplied more often that it is applied correctly. Of course, if you are an employee or shareholder in a company that uses it correctly, there are benefits.
I've been on both sides of this issue. I don't understand how techies can argue against the fact that half of their team is below average *for the team*.
Many posters have claimed that management is not doing their job if there are people at the bottom. But relative to others, there are always people at the bottom. Forced ranking seems to be the only way for a middle manager to get a picture of who needs work and to get the line manager to acknowledge it.
This forced ranking was popularized by the GE management book a while back, where people were ranked A/B/C with a breakdown of 10/80/10 percent.
Being in the 10% of C's doesn't mean you get fired, it is a tool for management to decide who to focus on. The correct solution might simply be to move to a different group or position better suited to the persons skills or interests. Or it might mean more training. Or yes it might mean they will be put on a performance plan to make managements expectations clear, possibly leading to termination.
Such need not be public. The forced rankings can be divorced from annual review ranks, where someone could receive a meets expectations and still be a C. It could be managements job to figure out how to make this merely good employee be great.
For example, you might have a developer who writes good code, but who is very slow because they don't use tools to automate there work. I've seen this a lot. Getting a traditionally IDE oriented developer to learn to use command line tools, perl, or a decent editor with macros can increase their productivity. You wouldn't just fire them off the bat because they aren't as good as your other developers.
I'll grant you that NeXTStep did add a lot on top, especially in the application framework as well as a new driver architecture, but even OS X shows its BSD roots pretty clearly.
After further reading of slides and comments, I think they needed a 50gb disk for a build, but that includes space for:
- OS
- compilers and tools
- intermediate files (.obj/.lib files etc)
- other applications they might have
Microsoft gave a talk at usenix: Windows A Software Engineering Odyssey
This slide indicates the full source is 50gb and took a week to setup and 2 hours a day to update.
That implies to me that people could have the whole source but it would huge.
Slide 24 talks about their new perforce based system that only takes 3 hours to setup and 5 minutes to update.
A copy of the law can be found here.
The many body of 2870 is below. 2872 requires the company to notify you of this.
-bri
Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
We are currently having one of the worst storms of the season in the bay area and there is not any problem with reception.
Buying a non-integrated TiVo is a bad idea. With integrated, you can use two streams at the same time. So you can:
1.) record two shows while watching a third
2.) watch a show while recording another
3.) picture in picture
As mentioned, the upcoming Hughes HD-DVR250 DIRECTV HD DVR which does HDTV seems the way to go.