> The process, called "stack ranking," requires managers to give about 5% of their employees a low performance evaluation to fit on a bell curve of relative performance.
...companies still use it ? Thought microsoft taught industry a lesson here
That's about the only time I can think of where it makes sense. If you have to lay off some people, then obviously you want to get rid of the lowest performers.
But if times are good and everyone is performing well enough and contributing, why get rid of them? If they're not performing well enough, then you shouldn't need stack ranking to figure that out, and you don't need to arbitrarily set a percentage of employees to put on performance improvement plans or fire.
The rationale is that there can only be so many employees and if natural attrition is low then they’d prefer to re-roll on mediocre performers in an attempt to capture the top ones.
That's a bad rationale. Mediocre performers, are, by definition, average. Unless your hiring process has completely changed, you're not likely to get anyone better if you toss out a mediocre performer and hire someone new: the new person could be better, or could be worse. Moreover, the mediocre person is experienced and productive; the replacement will not be, and probably won't be for a long time. (If the mediocre performer isn't productive, then they're not mediocre unless most of your employees are terrible, and should be fired for bad performance.)
Earning money is not really relevant to whether people are good employees or not; that's based on the market, management decisions, etc. I'm sure there were lots of great employees at BeOS, but the fact that the product failed financially wasn't their fault.
Companies change product strategies all the time to pursue profit, trim unprofitable ventures, etc., and that's all fine. But it's dumb to lay off good employees when they can just be re-deployed somewhere else, assuming the company isn't having financial hardship that actually requires them to shed headcount.
> If you have to lay off some people, then obviously you want to get rid of the lowest performers.
It depends. In medium and large (and even some small) organisations, the intention behind layoffs is not only to save on the salary bill, it's to cut those divisions, projects, groups initiatives and work units that are a net loss or that are not contributing to the bottom line.
IOW, the intention should be to get rid of certain positions; it's a side-effect that people are usually in those positions.
For example, at Amazon I would imagine that even the high performers in the Alexa team would be considered for layoffs over the low performers in the cash-cows.
If the facts don't fit your theory, change the facts! The US obsession with force-ranking everything is unhealthy, and I say that as someone who has often been fortunate enough to end up on the right hand tail.
The problem with the 2000s-era Microsoft method, as I understand it, was that the population sizes they used were too small. Stack ranking was done at the individual team level, and that did indeed lead to people sabotaging each other, because in a team of 10 only 2 people could get the highest pay raises and 1 person would be placed on a PIP (or whatever the ratios were).
But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.
I don't know how many people the lead in the article managed. If it was a team of 15, he has a legitimate gripe. If it was a team of 200, not so much.
If you have a hiring process that results in only a 4% bad hire rate, create a business right now because every business in the world will want to pay you massive sums of money for the secret to such an amazing process.
from my own experience, a bad hire rate of 15-20% is what I usually see accepted across the industry.
You're incorrectly assuming 4% are let go, which is untrue as many are provided coaching/guidance to fix performance issues, and not accounting for additional headcount.
That’s one of the two but the bigger problem is how you measure performance. It’s notoriously hard to measure outside of the simplest jobs and once you tell people they’ll be punished unless they juice a particular number, well, that encourages all kinds of undesirable behaviour: rigging tickets or other metrics, encouraging people not to do maintenance programming or hard tasks, setting competitors up to fail, not doing things to help or train less experienced colleagues because that isn’t captured, etc.
Yes, managers are supposed to keep that from happening but this policy tells them that a) you don’t trust them to do their job, b) their job now focuses on protecting their people from the system, and c) being busy playing the same game on their own personal behalf.
The way it was done at amzn was to get all managers for the department together in a room and provide information about each of their team members and why they were ranked the way they were. If an employee was doing a small number of hard tasks and providing a lot of mentorship it was quite the opposite, they were much more likely to get a "highly valued" ranking than be marked as a low performer. Obviously if you use stupid metrics like lines of code or story points closed you will get stupid results.
Largely you're still ranking your performers from top to bottom, so it's a matter of placing the line at the bottom in the right place to get the desired percentage. Even then there was still a lot of debate among department managers around people on the borderline least effective category. There were usually very clear outliers who were definitely LE (people clearly coasting, people who didn't show up to work regularly), and sometimes that was enough. Other times managers did have to push each other to be brutally honest about those who were borderline, essentially asking, "If you fired this person and got a replacement, would the replacement be more effective than the current person within 6 months?"
Keep in mind it was never a hard quota, though in my case at amzn I did have a few times where the GM (so manager of ~1500 org) pushed back and said not enough people were in LE for our department, in which case a few borderline people did unfortunately have to get put into LE.
Also seems to ignore these aren't replacement parts, these are your team mates or reports, actual humans with names and families attached. If they weren't coasting or not showing up for work, what you describe sounds like yet another alienating, dehumanizing process at work.
What's hellish is that the ranking is forced, you must put people on a PIP or rank them "low", which is absurd. Being told to meet a quota for low performers is bizarre.
I mean I've never seen any performance "measurement" system that isn't just subjective review with another name. Objective metrics can be useful, and certainly could be a part of a manager's evaluation of an employment, but they never tell the whole story. Someone who closes out tons of tickets but is a complete asshole and hated by their teammates should get a worse performance review than someone who codes less but provides mentorship and guidance and is generally pleasant to work with.
That's the problem. The system wants to assign one number to performance and fire based on that yet even getting an approximation of that is hard
> Someone who closes out tons of tickets but is a complete asshole and hated by their teammates should get a worse performance review than someone who codes less but provides mentorship and guidance and is generally pleasant to work with.
They should get a talk with their manager about the attitude and if they don't fix it they should be fired; not wait for any ranking to cull them.
> But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.
>Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.
I mean, below average performers will be around 40-60% just because how averages work.
The problem is that the question is "is their performance low compared to team", while the question you should be answering is "is their performance low compared to the market.
If team's management is on point with hiring the "worst" won't be that much worse than average anyway, so if you want to replace the bottom few % you essentially waste time as new hires might be at same productivity level.
On other side if you recruiting sucks and 20% of the dept does the 80% of the job, it isn't going to help either.
No manager has direct insight into performance of 300 people (at least in tech). They have to rely on subordinate managers/teamleads, each of which can be unreliable for different reasons. Some may be playing politics, some may just be bad managers. Some will overhype their employees, some will be honest to a fault. Get them all in a ranking board, and all sorts of games get played.
If your team leads could be trusted to measure appropriately, you wouldn't need stack rankings because they'd correctly identify those under-performing. Stack ranking is conceding that your managers can't properly measure performance. Shouldn't that reflect more on management?
The stack ranking on my team at MS was done across a team closer to ~60 developers. Each manager managed 5 or 6 and then they would all get together and fight for their team members. It was insanely toxic. Not sure if every team was the same.
>> Stack ranking has received continuous criticism since General Electric popularized it in the 1980s.
I didn't know this existed until now. The problem with this (among others) is that I can never personally know where I stand. If I'm doing well, but being excelled by others, I still get penalized. There's no guarantee, it's almost random.
Also, I now have a new question to ask in interviews, and if it does exist in a hiring company, I can negotiate by declining bonus pay performance reviews and in lieu of ask for higher wages (not that any company would go for this).
Ah the 1980’s when Neutron Jack Welch (he kills the people but leaves the buildings intact) was seen as a visionary. He was ahead of the curve in massive layoffs while doing tons of mergers and acquisitions that years later seem to have been questionable at best. Nice to see this MBA hookum continue to survive like some radioactive zombie cockroach
Just move somewhere people are incompetent and you'll be safe and the best programmmer. Unfortunately when you hit a new crossroad, you'll need to reach out to outside peers to get moving in the right direction and spend a lot more time on self study.
I managed a small team in a company that then used stack ranking. I hated the process and as others here mentioned pointed out many times applying a bell curve to a small population is bad math. While we still used the process I saw everything from voting blocs, managers intentionally submitting all of their employees ranked up one notch from where they should be, managers collecting "dirt" on employees managed by others so they could shoot down those employees during the ranking process and more.
The process itself was flawed because people had a tendency to stay in the rank where they were submitted because frankly managers didn't have the time, energy or interest in really talking through every employee. It was just easier to rubber-stamp the whole process and move on. Also it was nearly impossible to get rid of the process because of course people who had succeeded in it didn't want change. I couldn't in good conscience continue like that, so I took over rankings for my location. It went from one day to a week-long process and I made people vote anonymously and incorporated a ranked choice system and then aggregated the results. It was a far more time consuming process but IMHO fairer. I still hate forced ranking despite succeeding in it. It becomes part of your job - managing to the metric.
Vestiges of it remain because people still don't know how to distribute compensation without ranking people, particularly for employees that have the same review rating.
I am refusing to believe that a company has less than 5% low performant employee ratio. With pretty much everyone is pulling their weight with no employees that are plain slacking and/or bad hires that delivers less than expected.
In fact 5% is quite a low estimate in my opinion. I would estimate it 20%, easily 1 in 5
Maybe there is a bigfoot out there but I will refuse to believe until I see one
Stack ranking seems to be a solution for managers that are not doing their job. Either because they are trying to be nice or oblivious or just don't care. Since this guy quited to me it sounds like the first.
> Else it's a bigger problem than you might realise
Then talking about it or protesting may be the way. When the climate where we all can start our business and make a significant change in this landscape will come that will be the best solution. But right now it’ll barely do a dent, if that. I sense that what we are facing are systemic problems
You should see something wrong with someone actively sabotaging a system. It's fine and maybe encouraged to protest or move on to a better opportunity, but sabotage just means they're making the whole world a little bit worse off.
The US government is more than happy to sabotage the rest of the world to retain just a bit longer their crumbling dominant position. (And those are closer to assasinations, coup d'etats, and economic warfare)
Hard disagree. If a system has virtue, it needs to stand up to various kinds of scrutiny. Using housing as an analogy, pushing zoning, wealth, and development restrictions to their limit, people either leave their communities to find homes elsewhere, or they start setting up tents in backyards until the police can't do anything about it. The system should crumble at a certain point.
I think a lot of people simultaneously acknowledge that a business can be difficult to start for themselves, but fail to acknowledge that it wasn't any easier for their current employer to get started either. (Probably, in most cases, cue exceptions.) And that part of the tradeoff in working for someone else who actually did go out and achieve what you do have available to you but are not doing, is accepting that you work by their rules. And that you can negotiate and influence but at the end of the day it is their decision, just as you would want when running a business you've started.
> [...] part of the tradeoff in working for someone else [...] is accepting that you work by their rules.
i think a healthy working relationship involves employer & employee collaborating according to a set of mutually beneficial rules, which prevents either party from taking advantage of the other.
this is (at least idealistically) what employment contracts are for, even if they have a natural tendency to favor the employer in most situations.
besides that, i think there are plenty of examples from recent history which demonstrate that it's not healthy for the rules under which an employee operates to be solely outlined by the owner of the business (e.g. because that owner may attempt to take advantage of the employee).
No, when a company hires you, the company becomes part you. And you have every right to do whatever you want that you think is best for the company's future, even if it undermines what managers says -- be that whistleblowing, refusing to stack rank, refusing to hide the fact that a stack-rank policy exists.
If the company cannot convince you that its policies are efficient and moral, then that is their mistake for hiring somebody who sees the world fundamentally differently. If they don't want people to do that, they should tell every new manager in the hiring interview "Part of working here as a manager involves stack ranking people as low, even if they are doing great work, and not telling them they are under stack ranking, and if you cannot do that you won't want to work here"
It sounds like you joined the wrong company and/or they should fire you. You equally have the ability to vet the company before joining with sufficient questioning.
That attitude only works in Amazon warehouses. If a software developer at Amazon takes a long bathroom break the powers that be aren’t going to do a damn thing about it.
Employees in tech have a lot of power. It’s much better than the alternative.
I’ve been a software developer for years and nobody has ever paid me to do anything other than work. Nobody has ever paid me to leave a bad review about their company either so I’ve never done that. I draw a stark line between where my business ends and their business begins. I call this being a professional.
Lol nobody has ever paid me to write a good review either but there was a time years ago when I posted one just to help the average for a company I worked for, marketing and PR is always somewhat a group effort, whether people realize it or not, similar concept to an employee wearing a clean vs. sloppy uniform or being polite/helpful to customers
There are some employees that will never be satisfied no matter what management does - it's never enough, they always want more say, any amount of compensation for executives is "too much".
I say, great! Sounds like you could do it better, so please go for it.
this is a bizarre straw man to stand up in response to GP, especially given the context of the post we're discussing.
in my experience, the framing and rhetorical style that you're using is often used to make excuses or apologies for business practices that diminish the power employees have in the workplace.
we'e not talking about some nebulous "they" that "always wants more", we're talking about the specific case of Blizzard utilizing stack ranking and then firing a manager who is unwilling to be opaque about the capricious evaluation they are being asked to do to their direct reports.
> You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful
No one [0] denies this. The problem with stack ranking is that you are forced to find problematic employees even when there are none.
I do agree with the overall point you are making, but I think that option two could be formulated in a less inciting way. Sometimes it might make sense for a company to do worker-hostile actions, but stack ranking just seems like a generally bad idea and not really related to getting rid of antagonistic employees; at worst, it probably helps making them.
> The problem with stack ranking is that you are forced to find problematic employees even when there are none.
Could you share some insights on how you organise an hiring process and a company to reach a point were despite having several hundreds employees and adding/replacing few dozens per month, there are no problematic individuals. I have never seen, anywhere, ever.
If you can offer some evidence that you can replicate that consistently, please open some consulting business, you’ll make millions and help so many organisations.
The thing isn't that you don't have a number of problematic employees, as you correctly pointed out you most likely have them in any sufficiently large organization. The problem is that you can't find a static number for them.
It's quite easy to see this, actually. If you let the bottom 5% go, stack ranking now dictates that you still have 5% problematic people. Repeat this cycle a few times and people previously considered perfectly average are now problematic. This obviously doesn't make any sense.
In reality, some companies might be super lean and only have 1% bad performers (as in negative business value), while some companies might be 90% overhead. For some companies the bad employees might be spread over all teams, while in others some teams are incredibly efficient and others are completely worthless. Coming in with a 5% brute-force hammer just doesn't make much sense in general and comes with all the morale and infighting drawbacks mentioned sufficiently in this discussion.
If I’ve already done that, do I earn the right to complain about stack ranking?
As a business owner, who doesn’t have to worry about being stack ranked, I’ll say: continuous annual stack ranking to ensure a specific percentage of employees are put onto a pip or terminated is a terrible idea, and the people who institute it are bad at their jobs.
In a world where every single person except a heterosexual, healthy Caucasian male under 40 has a potential lawsuit against their former employer when they are terminated, be it age / sex / race / disability / and on and on, stack ranking can make rational sense when trying to improve efficiency across the board at scale while dodging lawsuits. This is, IMO, the reason it was originally instituted. I agree with you it isn't the best way and I think stack ranking is inefficient. But there is a logic to it.
This is pure mythology: very few people sue, because it’s expensive and stressful. Most who do have good reasons but if they didn’t, stack ranking wouldn’t help because the rankings are subjective and involve considerable managerial discretion - what projects you’re assigned to, the working environment, the standards used to assess quality, etc. are all going to come up no matter whether the corporate defense is that they were stack ranked or not.
You can do 100% of the legal ass covering that you need to do, with performance evaluations, pips, and careful documentation.
I’m not convinced that stack ranking is a good solution to this problem. A good organization and HR team knows how to terminate someone who is not performing well without incurring legal liability.
It can be a somewhat drawn out process, but a stack ranking system doesn’t seem like it would make it a lot faster to me.
My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is), and if you could continually prune the worst performing 3% of the org you could continually improve the quality of the remaining workers.
> My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is)
I’m fairly sure it really isn’t. Unless you hire random folks from the street it’s likely pareto or close. Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb because in the fat tail they’re all pretty close
> it’s likely pareto or close Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb
Sure, I'd agree with that. I was just trying to say I can see where the "on paper" logic comes from. But the on paper falls apart in the real world, where we're not dealing with "resources", but people.
But, yea, I think even the "on paper" case is weaker than it naively appears.
With a Pareto distribution you may as well fire the bottom 30-40%, but I suspect the remaining 60% of workers will redistribute their relative contributions again to go back to a roughly 80/20 split of relative contribution.
That’s right the 80/20 arises from hierarchy and associated bias in how the work is being assigned unless you happened to pick up highly uneven talent which is unlikely.
You seem to have strong opinions about the demographics of plaintiffs in employment-related lawsuits. Is that based on evidence? I’d be interested in seeing any relevant data. My impression of lawyers is that they can look at a prospective client of any color of the rainbow and see green.
Stack ranking is irrelevant to all that and doesn't solve that "problem". If you want to protect yourself from lawsuits, just have a documented policy for evaluation/incentives with a papertrail showing you adhere to it and your decisions. Stack Ranking can have a poor papertrail too. Consider how you would respond to: "This ranking board was all men, and all the women were ranked low. Why?" That's when you want something more substantive behind the ratings.
- You will lose your health insurance, someone in your family will have a medical emergency, you will have to declare bankruptcy and lose your house and your car, you will become homeless, get arrested by some broken windows policy wonk police directive, go to jail where they will ignore your pleas for your medicine for your chronic, treatable illness, and you will die alone on a concrete floor next to Bubba while he is shitting in front of you on a toilet telling you to stop shouting for the guards because they don't care.
This is hilariously true & I find it quite depressing that a good portion of HN users probably have not the slightest clue about how hilariously true it is.
Sort of like the premise of Dance with the Devil by Immortal Technique.
Running a business is extremely hard; but no one is forcing these businesses to grow to be so fucking large that they are induced to justify all of their inhumanity on the impossible difficulty of operating at scale. THEIR EXECUTIVES CHOSE THE CHALLENGE. Kotick threatened to have his secretary killed, and we're still touting this MBA bullshit that the greatest challenge he faced in running Activision-Blizzard is how to sell the next Call of Duty?
CEOs manage that just fine. Their greatest challenge is building a culture of empathy; something psychopaths generally would find difficult. Call of Duty, The System, sells itself; a distributed self-healing machine like those found at Microsoft, Salesforce, Nestle, Pfizer, and every other giga-organization, nine-thousand eight-hundred neurons aligned toward the goal of deleting or absorbing competition.
Encouraging more kind-hearted people to start businesses is a magnitude of naivete which begets an unrealistic level of faith in the system which created the companies that rip our economy apart. Sure, you can go start Slack; and eventually be faced with the impossible choice of submitting to one overlord or being annihilated by another. You grew your business beautifully. Your customers and employees love your organization. You made mistakes, though not a tenth the number your competition did. But, they have Unlimited Capital, and were willing to cross the lines you wouldn't because the lines don't even exist in their morally-depraved worldview.
But; you're right; you'd discover that you can balance one and two, if you get lucky and stay small; like hiding from a hungry bear in the woods. This doesn't minify readers' dissatisfaction and frustration with a system that allows bullshit like this to happen, nor does it justify an out-of-touch ultra-Republicanized soundbyte about pulling up your bootstraps and getting to work fixing a system that loads fifty trillion dollars into a cocked gun and points it at anyone who respects the human condition just a bit too much.
- You'll realize that building an organization not built on exploitation is not viable in an exploitative economic system. You'll always be undercut by companies treating their employees shittier, that's what capitalism optimizes for.
The bell curve thing is so idiotic. It has very perverse effect such as intentionally hiring low performers to let them go during the next cycle and make sure you can keep your team.
It’s true. The bean counting is Jira workflows and constant discussion about modifying them. The dedication to process as a startup grows is really astounding. It changes work relationships in my experience and turns people into robots.
> A Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg that the evaluation process is designed to [...] "ensure employees who don't meet performance expectations receive [...] differentiated compensation.
Most of the response is the usual PR speak, but "differentiated compensation" seems like a new level of back-bending to avoid saying "less pay."
If your compensation consists of base pay plus a bonus, that is usually tied to performance, then why should you get the bonus payout if you don't meet expectations?
There are employee evaluation tools that try to measure if employees are meeting expectations.
The entire point of stack ranking is that it does not do this. The article is about a lead who resigned/got fired because the system wanted to penalise someone who was meetings expectations.
There's nothing wrong with getting paid less if you don't meet performance expectations. I'm just impressed with the term they made up ("differentiated compensation") to try to make that sound nicer.
It's also funny how they try to wrap it so that it almost sounds like they're doing it for the benefit of the employee:
> "ensure employees who don't meet performance expectations receive more honest feedback, differentiated compensation, and a plan on how best to improve their own performance."
Honest feedback? Great! A plan for how to improve my performance? Sure, sounds good [if you don't know what the social realities of a PIP are]. Differentiated compensation? Wait a second...
I don’t know about you but far before I showed up for the very first day of my career my expectations were that if I performed better than my peers I would be paid more and if I underperformed I would be paid less. And generally that has proven to be roughly true, with the occasional weird stuff here and there.
The only place I know were this does not seem to be the case are government employees were everybody is paid according to a fixed grid and were salary increases are purely time gated. My experience with working with people compensated on a such a model has been… interesting.
It really depends what company you work in. There are a lot of places where how much people like you determines how you are compensated. You can appear productive while you’re the one who is constantly creating the problems that you swoop in and fix to save the day.
Half of my jobs didn’t rewarded people on performance.
Hell, I got demoted during a reorganization and was told my current performance merited my previous title but because I didn’t perform at that level 9 months ago, I was demoted. And they promoted someone older than me into my previous position purely because of his age. He did not meet any of the requirements for it.
> There are a lot of places where how much people like you determines how you are compensated.
I think this is true literally everywhere. Another factor may be competence, but of similar people, the one whom is liked will probably earn more than the other.
My experience in this industry, and as I've been learning not uncommon in office jobs outside software, is that relative performance is at best noise. The primary factor determining your compensation is your job interview - you get whatever you negotiate when being hired. As a consequence, the compensation is strongly correlated with how recently were you hired - new employees usually start with higher salaries than seasoned employees couple levels higher on the career ladder.
Sounds reasonable, but in practice (at least in Belgium), practice seems otherwise.
If you want to make a big jump money wise, you have to switch jobs. That's what I see in practice.
My theory is that people are reluctant to switch jobs and so companies count on that fact and pay less. And so to motivate someone to switch they need extra money.
Most companies prefer some attrition to keeping everybody up to date with the crazy run that the software eng market has been in the past 10+ years. Reality is, if your company is good place to work at otherwise, most people won't start looking for a new job only because it could pay 20-30% more. And, at the same time, in many companies payroll is the biggest cost, so if you can keep it lower by that 20-30%, it will have huge effect on the bottom line.
This blurs the real issue. You can still have different compensation and PIPs and everything else without stack rankings.
The real issue is that stack rankings compel managers to meet a quota for low performers. Even if the team is full of top tier engineers, one or more get dealt the short straw every review period.
While I'm just a developer, my wife is a director at the same company.
I multiple years, she's turned in her evaluations and had the director and VP above her tell her to lower several employees ranking.
One example was an engineer who didn't get along with the people on his team for a pretty high profile project. They know the guy's brilliant and don't want to fire him, so they move him to a lower profile project to decommission several server farms they had been struggling to get done. Dude goes in and absolutely kills it. They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars by the tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned and renegotiated several large contracts the company was on the hook for.
My wife ranked him in the upper tier. He wrinkled a few feathers, but once they reallocated him, he absolutely thrived and saved the company literally a ton of money.
Nope.
He pissed too many people off, her boss and bosses boss mandated she give him a low ranking with a miniscule pay increase and minimum bonus in order to punish him for his behavior early in the year. Nothing he did after that mattered to them. Nothing.
When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.
> When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.
Your ability to get on well with others, and work effectively as a part of a team is a component of your _actual performance_. It’s probably the most important component. The only real mistake here seems like this guy should have been fired instead.
The person described in the parent post was so difficult to get on with that they had to be moved to another project, and they are described has having pissed off a large number of people, including more than one level of management. The two possible explanations are, the majority of the company is highly toxic, this particular IC is highly toxic. So unless the posters wife is a remarkably toxic manager, the most likely explanation is that the IC is. Definitely sounds like the company would benefit from sacking them.
This isn’t true at all. Unless you are the only person who consumes the work you produce, and you produce it without the input of anybody else, then you work on a team, and how you get along with the other people in that team is the most important factor in your success.
When the code doesn't work you can let the customer know that the team bond has never been stronger. The most important thing is delivering the product, working on a team is often critical for that but sometimes you need a few skilled individuals over a army of collaborators to get a product over the finish line.
So you are not assigned work by anybody? You do not rely on any other person to provide an input to the work you are doing? You do not deliver the work that you complete to anybody? And it is not subsequently used by anybody else for any purpose? Because if you do any of those things, then congratulations, you have to cooperate with other people to do your work.
I did have such a job, yes. No customers, no clients, no end users.
But that is not what I’m saying; I’m saying you can be a disagreeable person on average, but because you work on a team of you, you only need to get along with your boss, who will leave you alone most of the time.
If you disincentivize (constructive) conflict, then you end up with a team stuck in groupthink that can't critically evaluate problems. It can be unpopular to present differing opinions, but it can also make the team stronger.
You filled in gaps in GP's post with a lot of assumptions. I read it as someone that can work effectively in a team. But also had conflicts with coworkers. If those were those healthy conflicts or unhealthy conflicts wasn't even discussed. That your first conclusion is to fire based on the absence of info is absurd. You jumped onto bandwagon of others opinions and acted recklessly. Maybe you should be fired instead?
Whether conflict is constructive or toxic depends on personality traits, not the topic of the conflict. The person described in the parent post doesn’t seem to have a personality capable of constructive conflict, otherwise they wouldn’t have “pissed off” the large number of people the poster alluded to.
I disagree. You can piss people off without doing anything wrong too. Complaints should be investigated, not taken at face value. This kind of ranking creates cliques and in-groups which can result in brigading. If someone is pissed off at another coworker, first question should be why.
The management is the one holding a grudge for something he did in the past. Not a lot of "turning the other cheek" for someone who you can bury into tasks and come back with reward.
Good management can de-escalate the situation and exploit his personality to work the system better. Not a lot of management Chess going on here, just people valuing feelings over making money. Not paying the guy the fair market worth for the work he did, isn't going to make him any more nice to work with.
>> They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars... tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned
Sounds a little far-fetched. Slack, Airbnb and Netflix spend about 6M, 17M and 28M on AWS monthly; to SAVE "hundreds of millions" the company would need to be ridiculously large and inefficient.
GP didn't provide a denominator. Assuming a year, which is typical for such calculations, your example figures become: Slack: 72M, 204M, 336M. Two out of the three are already in "hundreds of millions of dollars", per year.
GP could also be talking about savings over expected life time of the servers if they were not decommissioned, which could easily be 5+ years.
Engineers don't negotiate contracts at large companies. The legal department does. Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.
I can see this guy exaggerating the work he actually did, and taking credit for the work of others, which would explain the low rating and why everyone else dislikes him.
The legal department doesn't do discovery and evaluation. Its job is to ensure the contract is good for all relevant parties and stakeholders - not to pick the brand of the turbo encabulator you need for your IoT Web3 crane welder controller dashboard project.
I imagine you need to cross a certain combination of company size and project profile/visibility before legal & procurement aren't just sanity-checking and rubber-stamping whatever purchase orders the engineering teams send their way.
It's entirely normal to see engineers negotiating contracts at large companies. Large companies are, after all, mostly a collection of smaller teams that self-manage to a large degree.
> Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.
That's what the sales people want you to believe - to ensure they don't have to deal with anyone who understands the problem space of the product/service they're selling.
Engineers will participate in selecting contract features; it's the equivalent of telling a car dealer you want a car with Android Auto and a sunroof. Engineers absolutely do not negotiate contracts.
It's pretty clear from the replies to my comment that you guys don't actually know what is involved in negotiating a B2B contract. The stuff the engineers are allowed to participate in is the layer of snow covering the tip of the iceberg.
I suppose we have a different perspective (and experience) about what is the snow, and what is the iceberg.
Last time I dealt with this as an engineer, I picked a vendor, procured a quote, discussed how license applies to our usage (which was somewhat of a corner case for the license), and forwarded it to procurement - few days later, we got the exact thing I asked for, on the conditions and for the price I agreed to with the vendor. Were there extra negotiations I'm not aware of done to close that deal? I don't know. If they were, they didn't have any impact I could observe from where I was sitting.
Yeah, as far as contract negotiations went, you picked the color of the car and got the quote from the dealer.
The real negotiating happened when you handed it off to procurement. Their job was to secure the contract with the terms and features you wanted, and it sounds like they did that. I think that's part of why so many programmers de-value the work of the back office (Legal, Finance, HR, etc). Good back-offices work in the background to get important shit done with minimal, if any, interference to the revenue-generating operations of the business.
Not true. I negotiated a major software license at a large company over twenty years ago - when I wasn't even a permanent employee, (I was working on contract).
It was for around £120,000 per year, probably the equivalent of about a quarter of a million pounds sterling today.
At the beginning of my career, I had faced the same issue. This was at a casino gaming company. During the first year I was the top performer, but due to the GFC (2008) i got peanuts. The next year, the director got his old report as a manager for us. This manager created interference between me and the director, i got multiple people coming and telling me to listen to the manager and submit to him.
I was entirely sidelined, given miniscule raises and bonuses. other people who deferred to the manager and followed his words were promoted.
Fortunately for me a director from another group who knew my work, took me under his wing and I was finally able to thrive.
Does not matter the exceptional work you do, its always about listening to your "superiors". Ofc this depends on the organization. Not every place will be like this
It would be less obviously bad, but the same issue applies: say the company has three teams of ten people and they are all good: one gets fired/lower salary anyway each round.
And now you have the additional issue that evaluations need to be objective, which is hard, while a manager never wants to lose member of their team, so they're naturally pushed to overrate their people to protect them from ending up at the bottom.
All companies with stack ranking do some sort of merge sort to achieve this, typically called “calibration”. You have to rate employees at the team level because as you go up the chain, managers stop knowing how individuals more than one level of management below them perform.
The only viable exception to this I’ve seen is in organizations like sales where there’s some reasonable, objective criteria to evaluate an entire workforce on. Nothing good exists like this for software engineers though.
Common misunderstanding. Good sales is far more than closing big contracts. Good sales is about finding low cost customers, good fits, and prospects that challenge the expertise in the company in the right ways.
If you measure just total contract size and think this is all there is to evaluate sales on, you incentivise bad sales.
I contracted on a bespoke project that was in desperate straits, huge extension with no way of delivering anywhere near the sale price. We had some beers with the buyer's representative when he came to inspect progress, and asked him what they were really wanting. "Oh we didn't originally want such a system, but your sales guys named a price that we just couldn't walk away from!"
Turned out it wasn't really the sales guys fault: the CEO was trying to get acquired and figured that a well-stuffed order book looked better, just so long as the cheque cleared before the chickens landed.
I’m not saying it’s the right way to do sales. Only that some companies can skip calibrating employees in sales organizations by using objective criteria for evaluation.
I wonder if people pushing for stack ranking are justifying this in terms of natural selection. That is, even if the company is all top performers, periodically cutting bottom 1% or 5% or whatever is going to improve average performance even further over time.
This would make some sense if employees were like cells or fruit flies. But in most companies, employees are like organs. You can't improve a body by cutting out 5% of its organs and waiting for them to reappear. At best, you'll degrade the body's performance. At worst, the body will die.
Companies still use it. The company I retired from three years ago still uses it. If the manager is doing their job, their team’s performance, relative to the rest of the company, is not normally distributed. Stack ranking is a stupid idea, as many of Welch’s ideas are now considered.
Why is it distributed? Maybe if you took people at random but:
(sarcasm) shouldn't you have all good people because your leetcode hiring process only produces "the best" (/sarcasm)
Add to the fact that "rankings" are often largely political. There's a "minimum talent" aspect and then the last 1-2 points is most often political and representative of machiavellian power levels in the corporate dominance hierarchy.
Also, the article headline should explicitly call out Stack Ranking.
Stack Ranking basically admits one of two things:
1) your recruiting sucks
2) your work culture sucks
Well, and #3: corporate culture doesn't value balance or having any "bad times" in your life.
Curve fitting "performance" to an "expected" bell curve is clearly idiotic, even from a mathematical perspective. In the described case one won't have a symetric bell curve and the population is going to be too small, even if measuring performance was done right, which it clearly wasn't. Whoever invented this process has done so without understanding normal distributions. It's a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
It may be, but remember that most companies do stack ranking at some roll up level, not over the entire population. I had 40+ developers in my organization with two peers having comparable sized teams. We were expected to horse trade amongst ourselves to insure the VP got his distribution. However, the VP would always try to browbeat each of us into matching the curve. It was pretty intense and he frankly didn’t give a rat’s rear end who got steamrolled in the process. To say I was thrilled to have outlasted his employment would be an understatement.
And in your imagination of stack ranking, every employee gets a rank number from 1 to 10,000?
That would be neat, but probably bad for a variety of other reasons. Like, why is all of sales getting fired? Well, they unfortunately all ranked poorly...
It's more like, a manager has 7 employees and he has to stack rank them 1 to 7 and manage #7 out and rehire a replacement. Was #7 a bad employee? Why would any system of management assume that they are? Such as system assumes that the sea is full of employees of rank #1 to #6 and that the difference between 6 and 7 was so great as to warrant the costs associated with termination, hiring, training, on-boarding, and ramping up a new #7. Will they be better enough to warrant doing it all again?
But the sample size could be a billion and it wouldn't matter if the process that generates the population isn't random.
If Blizzard was just hiring people off the street then yeah, sure I'd expect a bell curve.
But given the whole recruitment process, it's not necessarily going to form a bell curve.
Plus, the implementation is usually at the manager level - so each manager has to meet a quota of x% good, y% okay, z% bad etc., and each manager doesn't have 10k employees.
Sure. That's a large enough population that you're going to see a vaguely bell shaped curve, even if all the employees are exactly alike. From just random day to day variation. If you punish and reward based on that, you'll get better results, right?
My company has about 4K employees. My team? 20. As best as I can tell, we have two stellar employees, two terrible, and 16 who are all basically the same. How these 16 are ranked is based on how well they get along with their boss, the PM that manages the projects they're assigned to, and the managers of other teams that they periodically interact with.
Yet somehow, management/HR can classify these 16 with enough certainty to decide that 8 deserve good compensation/promotions, and the other 8 should be PIP'd?
In some teams I work with, every single employee is what I consider an 8 through 10. Yet the 8's should be RIF'd/PIP'd?
Evaluating and compensating employees is tough enough without using voodoo like Stack Ranking.
Doesn't a normal distribution typically arise during random sampling? I.e., if there's some statistic you calculate based on a sample, then when you take a bunch of independent population samples, that statistic will tend to be normally distributed over those samples.
If that's the only reason we'd typically expect to see a normal distribution, then I don't understand why we'd expect employee ratings to be normally distributed.
They may be normally distributed or may not be. Actually hard to tell even given the data.
But you can make a plausible argument against the performance metric being normally distributed among your employees because that would mean the way you hired your employees was completely random with respect to that performance metric.
Ignoring some techincalities, the normal distribuiton pops up when you add together a bunch of independent random values. So in 50 question exam, I might have a probability p of getting any question correct. My final score might be something like the sum of 50 biased coin tosses, which will be approximately normal.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that employee scores (out of 100, say) should be normally distributed.
Yes, you are describing the sampling distribution, which is the distribution of a statistic like the mean. This is different from a distribution of an actual sample. The confusion people encounter comes from the fact that statistical nomenclature couldn’t have been more confusingly designed if one tried.
I think there are also two different "flavors" of stack ranking usually at play.
There is the one where the company wants to reward top performers. I think this one is most common, and I have never worked at a company that doesn't so some form of bonus budgeting that tries to capture a group of employees who are performing well and give them a bonus. The budget itself dictates how many employees can fit into that group, so ultimately what happens is a natural bell curve of the biggest rewards going to the perceived top performers, as agreed upon by managers usually at the organization level.
The other more insidious stack ranking involves a punitive element, whereby a group must necessarily be singled out for performance improvement reasons. This is the type of thing where managers, no matter what the team members actually accomplished, have to put someone on a performance improvement plan or start performance managing them to "get them up the bar" because someone naturally has to fall into the "bottom performer" bucket of stack ranking.
I think the former is common and pretty unavoidable unless a company has an unusually large bonus budget pool available. The latter approach is what causes problems with companies, because all of a sudden team mates become competitors and cultures can go downhill rapidly. Think Amazon, Microsoft under Ballmer, and GE under Walsh.
It's kind of interesting how many companies who are doing the former bonus budget pooling eventually get seduced into doing the latter and destroying their culture.
I've seen this play out at my university in two different ways.
The more obvious way is very obvious: we had a professor who told us he'll be grading us by first tallying up the answers, and then applying a bell curve to the scores, so that X% of the students get an A, Y% get a B, etc., and some Z% of the students will fail. As you can imagine, everyone was up in arms about how obviously unfair this is.
The less obvious case, but close to what you describe, was scolarships. For almost every "track"[0], scolarships were awarded for top X% of students. In the "track" I was in, and another one in our faculty, the scolarships were instead given to anyone who crossed a certain absolute grade threshold, in (IIRC three) tiers. The higher the tier you reached, the more money you got, independent of how other students fared (probably subject to budget constraints, though).
Now, I can't prove it, but there was one other notable difference between our "track" and that other one with same scolarship model, and every other "track" at the university I was aware of: ours were famously cooperative, everyone else was fiercely competitive. I don't think it's a coincidence. My university experience was that of everyone helping each other out, because it was always a win-win both socially sometimes financially. Everywhere else, this was unthinkable - helping other students created a risk of them getting ahead of you and taking your scolarship.
I'm dismayed to see the same thing repeating in companies too.
--
[0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.
'Batch' is the term commonly used for the set of students who start a program at the same time. For instance, the CS MS batch of 2023, who are expected to finish their MS in CS in 2023 (So they all should have stared in 2021 assuming a two-year program).
I thought it was just "class", as in "CS class of 2023"?
The term I'm looking for, though, is the set of batches abstracted over time. That is, all students who take CS at particular faculty of particular university, regardless of the year they started. A sequence of "batches". Such students will share curriculum and specific teaching staff. This is in contrast to another such group that e.g. does Applied CS at the same faculty, or Theoretical Physics at different faculty.
EDIT: perhaps a picture is in order. Imagine an university tallying up how many students started a given class on a given year, per class, across entire university. They could create a spreadsheet that looks like:
| University of Example |
|----------+---------------+-----------------------+-----------------|
| | Division of | Division of | Division of |
| | Telecoms & EE | Robotics & Bio | Social sciences |
|----------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------|---------|
| Class of | Appld | Tele | Biomd | Appld | Auto | Social| ... |
| ? | CS | comm | eng | CS | matics| media | ... |
| 2022 | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ... |
| 2021 | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ... |
| 2020 | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ... |
| 2019 | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ... |
| ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
The term I'm looking for is the one you would use to call a single column of ### here - e.g. "all classes (years) of Applied CS in Division of Robotics and Bioinformatics".
Thanks, that seems closest to what I meant, perhaps exactly so. Could you look at the diagram I edited in after you posted your reply, and tell me if "major" is the right term for this?
I did the table in Emacs (Org Mode), so it didn't take that much of effort: Org Mode auto-aligns the table as you modify i, and has plenty of shortcuts to quickly add/remove/rearrange rows and columns :).
(I did some manual post-processing inside HN text box though, as Org Mode doesn't support having single cells spanning multiple columns or rows.)
[0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.
Many in the US would call it the Department of Computer Science. At my university this was within the College of Engineering, Computer Science & Technology. There was a dozen or so departments in this college, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, etc. There were other colleges like Arts & Letters, Health and Human Services, etc.
> The higher the tier you reached, the more money you got, independent of how other students fared (probably subject to budget constraints, though).
It worked the same way at my University with the same outcome as yours. 7 years after graduation we still maintain regular contact as a group with my classmates.
They tend to behave exactly the same though. If you rank only good performers, it's a small step before you use that against bad performers: "you've been with us 5 years and never managed to get on the top performers list. I am afraid you are not a good fit for our culture here"
It's very easy to see how people might make this logical jump, but honestly if your bosses manage you out for never being a top performer they are doing you a favor: you don't have to work for their dumb asses anymore.
Good managers recognize the value of role players. Not everyone can be a top performer. It's an absurd expectation to have for any organization.
> I think the former is common and pretty unavoidable unless a company has an unusually large bonus budget pool available.
The problem with this is not the size of the bonus pool.
The immediate problem is the thresholding. Due to the sharp threshold, the bonus will practically never stand in proportion to performance. An employee that is judged to perform at a level of 6.1/7 gets nothing, but the one at 6.3/7 gets a lot. This makes the scheme anti-collaborative.
The less obvious problem is the ridiculousness of the idea that you can assign accurate individual performance numbers to people. These things are insanely noisy to the point of being meaningless. It ends up effectively a lottery. That would be fine if you called it a lottery, but by pretending it's not you create perverse incentives.
There are only two ways to do bonuses well:
- either forego individual bonuses and reward the entire company equally (or maybe scaled by salary) based on company performance, or
- hand out individual bonuses only to true (statistically verified) outperformers -- in this case you might end up not handing out any bonuses most years.
"These things are insanely noisy to the point of being meaningless."
Goldstein and Spiegelhalter did a paper on league tables for organisations (e.g. schools and hospitals) along the lines that noise in the data made the results questionable.[1]
Perhaps the idea transfers to individuals within an organisation that uses stack ranking?
I believe evaluating software development only works at the bottom line of tasks with formal metrics like issues, bugs or tickets solved. Also in general only possible in larger teams and probably more for maintenance tasks than active development.
There are no boni for top performers in my company at all. If business is good everyone gets a bonus. The only exception here is sales. Here people are more competitive. I guess I would get martyred if I even suggested it for other departments. And I believe it would be pretty bad for morale and teamwork overall. It is good that people don't use energy to present themselves in a good light and instead solve the problems we have. I still believe there is a lot of incentive for employees to see the company performing well. As you said, I have the impression that this becomes a background issue if employees compete with each other.
There was a time I would love to have worked at Blizzard, even while being aware of the volatility and risk of the industry. I wouldn't want that today regardless of compensation. Still, I don't believe it is either or. Both systems you suggest probably have an overall net negative effect for development. There are other forms for employees to participate on company success. Administration for employee boni is wasteful overhead for the most part.
If it is true what the article reports, I believe the manager did the correct thing. On that metric he might be a high performer among his peers.
it will likely be months (if not years) before they are permitted to operate again, likely killing the habit for a large percentage of their player base
I wonder how the droid that initiated that contract re-negotiation was ranked?
Should my gamer heart flutter at the idea that this might be long good-term for Blizzard?
NetEase seemed to have an extraordinary influence in making modern Blizzard as financially extractive as possible of its player base. And surely, there are other relations that have made modern Blizzard into what it is, but you can see the NetEase fingerprints on every title released since 2008.
I know WoW in china operated under a completely different business model where you pay by the hour instead of a expansion packs and a monthly subscription
I'd be more optimistic about the Microsoft deal than anything. There's a potential that they could treat Blizzard's IP as a loss leader into the MS ecosystem, and lighten up on that stuff.
> Should my gamer heart flutter at the idea that this might be long good-term for Blizzard?
Why would you want that?
Companies don't make games. People make games. All the people at Blizzard who made the games that you remember fondly have moved on. There's nothing left but an empty shell of a brand running on the fumes of inertia.
Yeah. I can tell from playing OW2 that there are literally 0 "old Blizzard" employees left. Even ignoring the things that players really hate like monetization strategies, you can tell the culture is gone. New characters say their own name wrong for months after release ("Hey, it's Keiko!" did get fixed). New characters have identical silhouettes to existing characters (try identifying Nemesis Ramattra versus Sigma through a wall). It's just little things like that where they've given presentations and written blog posts on how it's so important to not mess things like that up, and then you watch them mess it up and charge you $10 a month to play a game you already bought.
It's sad to watch because the figureheads go off to start their own companies, and the games just aren't as good. Blizzard spent way more money on game design (mythology, iteration after iteration of characters before release) than any startup could ever afford to, and they really reaped the rewards. Then Activision buys them, decides they should focus on Candy Crush, the employees all sexually harass each other, and it's over! (To be fair, I think a lot of people left because they made more than enough money over their career. Who wouldn't leave when you have enough to retire.) It's sad because it will be a long time before we see a similar game studio appear again. If you like their games, pray and take up a hobby like fishing. It will be a while before we're having the same kind of fun that we used to have.
> If you like their games, pray and take up a hobby like fishing. It will be a while before we're having the same kind of fun that we used to have.
No. I will take to my keyboard and begin work. Someone has to actually do this or it will never happen. I can't sit idly by anymore. What they did to OW1 was unforgivable to me. I intend to build my own arena shooter at this point.
We need to learn to work within our new constraints. You are right - Getting as much original capital involved would be impossible. Doesn't mean we can't do it a different way. There are other ways to have fun that don't require 8 figure art budgets or selling our souls to the various platform vendors.
That's fair. I have had the same thought, but I really don't have the skills to make a gaming startup successful; no network, no experience, etc. The code is do-able. Everything else is hard. Have a good plan (or people that you can trust) for that part.
The one change I'd make to Overwatch is to just balance each rank separately. Let the bronzes run around doing 300 damage railgun shots. Don't let pro play make the game less fun for casual players that just want to meme for a couple hours a week, but do have some progression so people can outgrow that. I've watched a lot of videos of new players trying OW2 for the first time, and the game is just impossible for them. The next FPS/MOBA hybrid should be as approachable as Overwatch was in 2016.
> The next FPS/MOBA hybrid should be as approachable as Overwatch was in 2016.
Absolutely agree. I feel like the reason OW1 was so damn good in 2016 was a combination of a few things. The biggest being that there were no "professional" scene or related expectations around how to play the game. Everyone did what they wanted and the strategies were totally bonkers.
Once the esports crap leaked in, SBMM and meta became a huge sticking point for the average player. League of legends did the exact same kind of thing to the player base over time. Item stacking and other wackiness was removed in favor of the grays and browns of a more broadly-marketable, competitive balance patch.
I would never offer a vendor-sponsored e-sports program, nor would I pander to any sort of efforts to construct one. Competitive is good, but there is a point where you have totally jumped the shark. Having clear progression of skill is critical, but we also cannot make it the entire point of the experience. I would actually make efforts to "patch-out" certain competitive scenes if they were to become problematic for the average player. I think TF2 did a fantastic job of this with a light sprinkle of RNG via critical shots. You can instantly bifurcate your audience and put the monsters into their own pen with this kind of feature.
The notion that a native-Chinese company isn't trying to steal every ounce of IP it can from foreign businesses is naive at best. One should start with the assumption that theft of IP is a primary goal of these companies and work from there.
I followed the story with mild interest a couple months ago. According to insiders Blizzard (1) wanted a very substantial increase to their cut; (2) demanded that NetEase develop more of those money sucking mobile games like Diablo Immortal for them but NetEase wouldn’t see any profit from the international market. On mobile now so won’t dig up links; also some of the reporting might be in Chinese.
Given gp’s post history I doubt they are privy to details, more likely a knee jerk shot given the chance.
"Chinese gaming giant Tencent recently unveiled its new MMORPG Tarisland, and it wasn't long before fans noticed it bears more than a passing resemblance to Blizzard's own World of Warcraft. Like WoW, Tarisland looks to be a fantasy MMO with an exaggerated, more cartoonish art style. There are paladins, mages, dragons, elves with an affinity for the color purple that live in a giant tree, and more. That, of course, wouldn't be enough to justify the clone label, but taking a closer look reveals that many of the game's characters and environments look to have borrowed liberally from WoW. The designs of the game's elementals, dragons, airships, and even some of the game's playable classes and races, in particular, all appear to be heavily inspired by Blizzard's signature style. The game's announcement trailer even features a dragon that looks incredibly similar to WoW's Deathwing landing atop the ramparts of a city, in a scene that is extremely reminiscent of the WoW: Cataclysm cinematic."
but then Blizzard themselves aren't known for their originality, rather their polish (or were anyway)
Warcraft itself was supposed to be a licensed Warhammer game, and then when they couldn't get the license they changed a few names and released it anyway
They're part of the same company, i.e. the Chinese government. The implication is that NetEase was pressured to drop the Blizzard deal in order to benefit Tencent.
Firstly, Tencent has enormous sway and many friends in the party. There does not need to be any chairman-level dictat, only the usual greased palms. Secondly, the Chinese government is extremely interested in tightly controlling the media that the people of China consume, so who would object?
It's only "conspiracy theory nonsense" if one is completely unfamiliar with how gaining access to the Chinese market works. I've been involved in more than one of these kinds of operations. These companies' primary goals when dealing with American companies (and, I'm guessing, any foreign company) are: 1) acquire IP so that China can control it; 2) acquire data on users, especially Chinese citizen users, but in general all the users. The notion of "competition" in the sense you imply is at best a distant second consideration. These companies can and will subvert what a typical Western capitalist would view as their own interests in service to that, because otherwise the CCP can and will destroy them.
Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, N% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that N% of each team are. The weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team.
Further, stack ranking mostly ignores the existence of human psychology. As soon as metric is chosen to be a benchmark for the measurement of performance, it almost immediately because useless as a benchmark for performance, because people are people. People will find out how the game works, and they will play the game. Employees will sabotage other's work to make themselves look relatively better, managers will hire whipping boys for the specific purpose of giving a low rating so they can take the sword. Sure this happens with any performance rating system, but the worse behaviors are accentuated with fundamentally broken rating systems.
How should employee evaluation be done then? It's straight forward:
* Set clear expectations.
* Get peer feedback
* Manager decides how the employee performed in comparison to the expectations that were clearly communicated to the employee based on the manager's personal knowledge of their reports work, and from that of peer feedback.
> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, 5% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that 5% of each team are. Further, the weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team.
absolutely, it may work (possibly) if you could apply that 5% over an entire large department
but each line manager only has visibility over their (hopefully) small number of reports
so if you have 3 excellent reports on a high performing team: who do you dump in it?
the usual answer is the person with the least leverage/ability to resign, which is grossly unfair
> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work.
This is the fundamental flaw with stack ranking that really irks me. Stack ranking force fits people to a normal distribution but that's backwards. With normal distributions you're supposed to measure the phenomena then use statistical formulas to see if the data fits a normal distribution. Maybe it does. Maybe it's bi-modal, or tri-modal. Maybe the data is evenly distributed.
But no, companies butcher the concept of a bell curve and end up doing serious damage to the culture of the company as everyone starts optimizing their behavior to succeed in an utterly irrational system.
I don't understand, why would they fire someone who stated they intended to resign? I always thought the game was to get employees to volunteer to leave instead of formally terminating them?
The cat is out of the bag. Now the managers can quietly collaborate with the team and everyone can take their turn being the dunce until they move on in a couple of years.
To send a message, seems like. "Senior engineering lead fired for challenging corporate directive" might deter others who thought of taking a similar stance.
"Senior engineering lead resigns in protest of corporate directive", on the other hand, seems like a call to arms for the conscience-driven; a thorn in corporate's side. Better to squash it and deal with the one-off "firing". Especially if it's for "cause"—then they can give nothing as severance, and quote a violation of the "employee agreement" as the reason.
I don't really understand how stack ranking is supposed to work. If 5% of employees must be ranked low, and they improve, they'll either be ranked low again or someone who wasn't ranked low will be ranked low- even if that person's performance hasn't changed. This just seems designed to ensure there's always some group of fall guys and also to create teams that are competitive with themselves to a toxic degree.
These companies also have a general policy of 5-10% 'natural' attrition a year, i.e. they expect a large percent of people to leave. The bottom 5% of stack ranked folks are almost always targeted for this attrition. They're put on 'performance improvement plans' that demand daily monitoring and check-in, and other onerous rules designed to make them quit. With stack ranking the bottom bucket is basically assumed and designed to be ejected from the company every year.
GE didn't just split into three companies. Before this current split it basically shedded entire industries worth of spin off companies. Short term thinking led to over commitment to financial services like annuities, which paid upfront but then they had to pay back more than they got in the first place. It also led to sales with steep discounts on maintenance contracts, once again gaining significant cash upfront at the cost of a long tail of costs. This was directly related to the competitive culture, where anyone questioning something bringing in cash was seen as risk adverse and unaggressive.
I think "work" in the POSIWID [1] sense here means to give the people on top feelings of power by creating suffering and tension among the serfs, while increasing the need for middle managers to play power games, which keeps them busy and keeps the drama levels high.
It's totally repulsive to me. But as this guy's firing clearly indicates, part of the point is repulsing people who care about staff and want to actually get things done. If an organization focused primarily on being effective, that would be a huge disadvantage to the ladder-climbers and intrigue-lovers that have clawed their way to the top.
Yeah, so stack ranking doesn't really create toxicity at a company, it merely reveals the toxicity that is already there. The best advice for regular people applying for jobs or regular employees whose companies introduce stack ranking is summed up in two words: get out.
Why not both? As we see in some of the stories people are posting here, it sounds like stack ranking teaches both managers and employees to be toxic. But yes, I agree on the getting out part.
Interesting to see POSIWID on Wikipedia, and furthermore on HN (finally).
Wondering if you have heard of these works, and further resources?
The utterance of the shibboleths:
The New Plague
Friends in High Places
Have Fun at Work
Design for Prevention
I can find nothing else, but I welcome a renaissance of control theory and hard transparency, if we only had the participatory groups exist, or tools that were developed around these ideas.
My assumption has always been that it's never actually supposed to have been about "improvement", just about trying to scare people into submitting more to management demands. If your manager in a stack-ranked company decides to tell the team to work overtime on the weekends to get the release out faster, no one wants to be the only one to say no when you're all quite literally competing with each other to not be in the bottom. It's not a coincidence that stack ranking turns unreasonable demands from management quite explicitly into a prisoner's dilemma problem.
>> I don't really understand how stack ranking is supposed to work.
It doesn't. Ever.
I'll give you two examples.
I currently work at a company that does stack ranking. The first year I started at the company, I started in the middle of the year. I was told because of that, I wasn't eligible for a bonus or salary increase. I later found out this was total BS.
Second year? I work my ass off. Stay late, develop new tools for the team which are then used on other teams. I got some visibility with those tools with several managers. I consistently take on extra work, present to project leaders, go to any and all conferences, make reports, and suggest new technologies my manager and other managers. I feel like I hit it out of the park. Nope. Two project managers didn't like me and rated me low. My manager ranked me in the lower tier. I got a pittance for a bonus and no salary increase.
Third year? I'm a bitter, frustrated developer. I decided, "Well fuck it, I gave you a great effort and got nothing in return. This year, the company gets fuck all." I barely worked. I did the absolute minimum. I was "quiet quitting" before it was cool. I'd log off early every day. I refused to take on more work. I missed or ignored meetings that weren't absolutely required. I worked on several side projects instead. I was getting paid a high six figure salary to do as little as possible. It was completely glorious. We get to the end of the year, I get the same low ranking. Same pittance of a bonus, and because it was my third year, I got a small raise in my salary.
That was the end result of stack ranking. It didn't matter what YOU did, it only mattered what your co-workers did and how they felt about you. You could have the best year of your life, be totally plugged in and kicking ass, but if someone didn't like you? It was all for not which I soon realized very quickly.
Its incredibly hard to try and be your best when you're constantly looking over your shoulder. Its impossible to be "all in" when you absolutely know your effort will be for nothing.
Even Microsoft famously gave up on it when they realized it cost their company a decade of progress because stank ranking encouraged managers to sabotage their co-workers projects in order to look good on their own year-end reviews.
Its absolutely staggering to think there are companies still out there using this to measure employees performance. Its beyond toxic and will suck the life out of your team, your managers and your employees.
Most companies use peer feedback for ratings in one way or another. Stack ranking encourages a toxic level of sharing as everyone is looking for anything which can be used against you. It’s a lazy management strategy.
I worked at Microsoft just as they were getting rid of the stack rankings.
My first review I got the normal "You're doing a good job" rating that the majority of the company gets.
Next review comes along and my original manager that hired me has quit. For most of the review period a senior dev on the team that had zero interest in managing was leading the team. Right before review time we get a new hire that's a bit of an idiot. I was still the newest person on the team and got ruined in my reviews because there wasn't anyone to advocate for me. I got the lowest rating.
This is when I found out there are apparently two versions of the lowest ratings. One where you're on the way to being fired and one where it was assigned because somebody has to get it. My rating was the latter. My manager then explained that there was a class of employee at MS that simply accepted these low ratings and moved on, collecting their salary. The only good advice he ever gave to me was that if this happened again I should find a better job. (I don't think he ever felt like it was his fault I got that rating.) I almost immediately tried to transfer to a different part of the company, but my low rating prevented me from doing that.
Shortly after that, the team was reorganized and I ended up on a different sub team with a different manager. My new manager told me they were surprised at my previous poor review and nothing in it reflected how they thought of the work I was doing. He started asking me to collect stories about what developers on other teams I was helping to use as ammo during the next review time. It felt very off-putting. I didn't want to throw my coworkers under a bus any more than I wanted to be thrown under one.
So I left the company. That previous review ended up being the last where they used the stack ranking. I think I did get one final review right around the time I left but I never even saw it.
It can work well with large groups, especially if they're doing fairly homogeneous work.
Rather than an attempt to create fall guys and internal competition, I think executives are doing it sincerely to find and weed out low performers, but fail to understand that works well for 100 employees at a retail store doesn't work well for 6 employees on a SWE team, or even 40 employees under a large heterogeneous tech org.
Related joke: Any program has a least one bug and can be made shorter by at least one line. So any program can be reduced to a single line that doesn't work.
Stack ranking seems to bring in the assumption that any company can be reduced to a single employee on a performance improvement plan ;-)
I have said it in the past and I will say it once again: fuck Blizzard!
They have bastardized every single game franchise and turned it into an unregulated online casino of loot boxes. They defiled Diablo by making a mobile version. They defiled World of Warcraft. There was never a Starcraft 3. They don't give two shits about anyone's opinion. They will keep pushing shitty products and exploiting their workers until they have sucked everybody's soul. If you are a Blizzard North fan, refrain from buying anything from the money-sucking parasite that Activision/Blizzard has become.
MBAs programs are a ritual of cargo cult indoctrination that that reinforces beliefs based on pseudoscience and irrationality.
Not only they're completely clueless about how to generate value for a customer, they have taken every revenue generating activity in America, applied some fucked up short-term thinking, and ruined them.
For every Steve Jobs (value generating individual) there's a John Sculley (MBA), ready to milk every cash cow dry. The best thing that occurred to Apple was to undo the entire legacy of John Sculley and send him home.
Contrary to popular belief: nobody fucking needs MBAs. MBAs are a mistake. The US had a much better economy before MBAs were invented.
What's the contribution of US MBAs? making China the #1 country by GDP, and normalizing clown-like botox faces. Truly the most idiotic cargo cult ever created.
If you want to consider it as a maximization of shareholder value, then you're dead wrong. They're pumping the value of US shares making CEOs and large shareholders even more filthy rich than they ever worth this lifetime, so pat them on the back for that. Blame them for greasing palms and watering down corporate tax rates. Blame them for maximizing profits by shifting jobs overseas. All that money flowing to the top is making a very few people a lot of money and in that role they're doing great at it, at least as long as I've been old enough to pay attention.
It's not MBAs that are the problem you hate, it's capitalism stretched to it's _naturally_ anti-competitive pinnacle.
- Employees are ranked, some % at the bottom is terminated, some % at the top is promoted or rewarded.
nth round:
- A strong candidates comes to an interview. The interviewer thinks: "If we hire this candidate, my ranking will lower and I'll be closer to the bottom. Better pass on this guy!" (sabotage)
- A weak candidate comes to an interview. The interviewer thinks: "If we hire this candidate, my ranking will go up and I'll be farther from the bottom. We need to hire this guy!" (sabotage)
- Someone asks for help with documentation. The team mate think "Uhm, I should work on my tasks instead of helping others, that will boost my rank"
- The employees that choose not to sabotage the company will be punished.
So:
1) a company that implements stacked ranking is performing self-sabotage.
The problem with stack ranking is when companies are international. Cultural nepotism ends up making this system completely fall apart.
Case in point, I had an Indian engineering manager report that had his staff PiPs entirely down racial lines.
Thankfully, jira and our GitHub repo proved otherwise. I gave the Indian dev lead his own PiP.
By the next year he wished up but I had a long enough list to can him for other reasons. Meanwhile, a whole year had to go by before we could can this pain in the rear.
This type of BS is why companies like Microsoft lost to companies like google or apple. I'm not surprised blizzard is going down the same rabbit hole.
Ah that makes sense. The paywall thing is an annoying issue of course. But on HN, if there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.
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