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Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

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Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#51

Post by grumps »

Standard Big 4 Consulting implementation. It provides value for a few years until employee realize that it's a lot easier to:

1. Get a job elsewhere 2. Hide in mediocrity because the effort to achieve a high ranking is greater than the reward by a lot.

In my personal experience with force ranking systems, is that it also drives politics within the organization. As an example:

I once was skipped a promotion because when we went to demo a unit the shipping department did a poor job packing the prototype equipment that I had just spent an entire summer building. Due to the packing job, a single RS-232 pin because slightly unseated causing intermittent behaviors for one of many features. It was still the most successful demo the company had ever given. So success we received a request for pricing the Military 24 hours later, which is unheard of. Despite this the Chief Engineer blasted me for the failure, and our inability to find the issue on site (mind you he was there too). When I brought this up at my review I was indirectly told by my boss that he didn't agree with my rating/rank but it was over his head. After that, I practiced both Items 1 & 2 but discovered that my new company also followed this practice. So it was a rinse and repeat to make sure force ranking is not within my new companies.

Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#52

Post by paulyg »

DerpDerpDerp wrote: post #31
ethomson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of my group (which may not apply to all parts of Microsoft, of course) is that our 6-person groups are too small to stack rank, so stack ranking rolls up to the next level. So Microsoft doesn't apply stack ranking at such a micro level either.

My understanding is that they don't /officially/ apply them at such a micro level, but it requires an unusually persuasive manager for the "low ranks" not to be shared around evenly between the people having to rank their workers.

My wife worked at a company that did stack ranking and that is exactly the way it worked out for her 5 person team. You also need an unusually persuasive manager to get more than one high rank.

Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#53

Post by tedunangst »

kvb wrote: post #19
brown9-2 wrote: post #6

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.

What leads you to believe that Microsoft applies the curve at that level?

There's an evil way to do stack ranking and a not evil way to do stack ranking. Obviously, Microsoft does it the evil way because Microsoft.

Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#54

Post by craigyk »

varunsrin wrote: post #26
brown9-2 wrote: post #6

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.

Stack ranking at Microsoft has a min populaton size (x) - you generally walk up the org chart until the number of employees >= x, and then apply stack ranking to that group.

but the mechanism by which it migrates up is 'calibrated' by managers arguing with one another, isn't it? In which case the politics and opinions of a small number have a disproportinately large effect on people's scores in aggregated groups.

Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#55

Post by nilkn »

Angostura wrote: post #32
mtrimpe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each employee receives a single unit of value. Let's call it a 'credit.' Each employee then has to distribute all of his 'credit' to other employees. Each employee then gives away any credit received according to the same original distribution. Each employee continues doing so until the credit received and distributed reaches an equilibrium. Each employee is then ranked by the total amount of 'credit' they've accumul…

Presumably this leads to people passes their credit to the worst candidate, in an effort to stop the good candidates from surpassing their own score.

If everybody did this, they'd still be helping someone else surpass their own score. It also puts a lot of power into the hands of that one guy, who gets to redistribute all those credits.

Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#56

Post by jstelly »

kvb wrote: post #21
yuhong wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think michaelochurch advocated open allocation.

How does open allocation address performance evaluation/compensation? Doesn't Valve have both open allocation and stack ranking?

Valve's review system bears little resemblance to the stack ranking being discussed here. It has no forced or expected distribution of results, for example.

Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#57

Post by bowlofpetunias »

jellicle wrote: post #48
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about approaching managers in the same way we always like companies to approach developers, i.e., hire good ones and empower them do their job in the best way they know how? 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…

Managers have a bias to like and want to keep "their" employees, because they know them, because they are friends with them. Even if Steve is objectively a poor performer, you know him; you met his wife; you saw pictures of his kids. He's a nice guy. If you fire him, you either don't get a replacement (bad) or you have to interview 20 people to find a replacement (also bad). It's hard to hire - what if you choose poo…

You've just described not one, but two bad managers.

Steve's manager, who doesn't have what it takes to make the hard decisions and is to lazy to do job interviews, and the manager of Steve's manager, who won't let him get a replacement if he fires Steve, but is perfectly willing to keep paying for Steve.

Now you can defend Steve's manager because he's nice to Steve, but if I had a dime for every employee who's pissed at their manager for not ditching the underperformer that's dragging the team down I would be rich. Steve's manager is a textbook Bad Manager(TM).

Now most of us agree that no amount of process and system can compensate for bad software developers, and that although process can help, everything stands or falls with the quality of the developers.

Why don't we apply the same logic to management? Or do we simply assume manager == incompetent?

Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#58

Post by tedunangst »

Metrop0218 wrote: post #35
varunsrin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack ranking at Microsoft has a min populaton size (x) - you generally walk up the org chart until the number of employees >= x, and then apply stack ranking to that group.

I think opponents of stack ranking generally overlook this fact. Yes, it's terrible if you have a 5 person team, but the data becomes more normal as you add more people.

Sort the members of each group of 5. Then take the bottom performer from ten groups and sort them. Take the bottom five from ten such groups and sort them. Fire the bottom ten.

If Google did it, they'd call it MapReduce and it would be the coolest thing ever.

Re: Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?

#59

Post by WalterSear »

Metrop0218 wrote: post #35
varunsrin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack ranking at Microsoft has a min populaton size (x) - you generally walk up the org chart until the number of employees >= x, and then apply stack ranking to that group.

I think opponents of stack ranking generally overlook this fact. Yes, it's terrible if you have a 5 person team, but the data becomes more normal as you add more people.

More normal != enough normal to be a good way to do things.

I'm sure that it works very well in a sweatshop, though.

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