21–30 of 168 posts
So what's a better way to do it? You need a documented system. If you don't have a documented system then there will be an undocumented system which is the same problem with less documentation.
I think michaelochurch advocated open allocation.
The evil, destructive, part of stack ranking is when you need to apply the 20%/70%/10% breakdowns to all teams equally, meaning that even a team of 5 people needs to have one and only one "exceeds expectation" person and one person who "needs improvement", regardless of overall team level. It's not clear from this writeup that Amazon and Facebook are applying curves at such a micro level.
I wonder if you could fix that by exempting employees from individual ranking if they work in groups smaller than n , and then rank those groups as if they were individual contributors. That way, a mid-level manager with five groups of five people would have to cut the least promising group loose. ... Nah, still sounds like a stupid idea. Any ranking system where an individual's outcome depends on their number of col…
From the perspective of the company, it's not as clear how this approach is broken. Assumably promotions, hirings, and firings should be based on the current needs of the company, not what's fair to the employees or some ideological vision. I'm pretty sure attempting to apply any one method for evaluating so many different employees in so many different roles will fail in some manner.
Isn't there a fundamental difference between the FB rule of restricting the top rating to just 2% of employees and the Microsoft rule of decreeing that there must be a bottom 10% of "poor quality , less talented, undesirable elements" in the workforce. The FB system doesn't make the non 2% feel rejected and unhappy - it just makes it very hard to be crowned the superstar which I think most people find perfectly accep…
This is not unique to MS and MS tech, sadly.
Isn't there a fundamental difference between the FB rule of restricting the top rating to just 2% of employees and the Microsoft rule of decreeing that there must be a bottom 10% of "poor quality , less talented, undesirable elements" in the workforce. The FB system doesn't make the non 2% feel rejected and unhappy - it just makes it very hard to be crowned the superstar which I think most people find perfectly accep…
So what's a better way to do it? You need a documented system. If you don't have a documented system then there will be an undocumented system which is the same problem with less documentation.
You need a documented system. If you don't have a documented system then there will be an undocumented system which is the same problem with less documentation. So don't complain when your kid gets expelled from the second grade for pointing his finger like a gun and saying "Bang."
The evil, destructive, part of stack ranking is when you need to apply the 20%/70%/10% breakdowns to all teams equally, meaning that even a team of 5 people needs to have one and only one "exceeds expectation" person and one person who "needs improvement", regardless of overall team level. It's not clear from this writeup that Amazon and Facebook are applying curves at such a micro level.
So what's a better way to do it? You need a documented system. If you don't have a documented system then there will be an undocumented system which is the same problem with less documentation.
Using a system that is enforced from the top down is a perfect way to guarantee you'll only get the kind of below mediocre managers we love to bitch about.
All of these systems are based on the assumption that companies can't trust the people they hire to delegate responsibility to. They're basically methods of maintaining a toxic environment instead of dealing with the root causes.
And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it attracts the wrong people. What good manager you ever worked for would want to function in that kind of a system?
You can argue it's a bad idea not to have one or both of those policies, but it is certainly possible to have a review system based on what one did, rather than based on the necessary political fight over cutting up the budget pie.
My impression that these types of systems are more for culling than accurate performance review. Perhaps they need to drop a certain percentage of employees by some target date, and this is the most blame-free way to do it on a large scale.
The evil, destructive, part of stack ranking is when you need to apply the 20%/70%/10% breakdowns to all teams equally, meaning that even a team of 5 people needs to have one and only one "exceeds expectation" person and one person who "needs improvement", regardless of overall team level. It's not clear from this writeup that Amazon and Facebook are applying curves at such a micro level.