71–80 of 168 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Less documentation isn't always a bad thing. If you can't appeal to a written authority, you have to rely on your own judgment in the face of ambiguity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we put it this way, you answer your own question: :-) >> How do you know the data becomes more normal as your add [data points]? That said, yeah this is crazy. The worst problem with stack ratings is not what it do (firing people which don't work out will happen, it is often good even for those fired). The worst problem is that it destroys team culture as it is described at Microsoft: "if you're in a too good team…
Not all data fit's a bell curve. In fact most does not which is a real issue that's ignored by way to many people.
So, the obvious pathologies of the Microsoft stack ranking model aside, what are the reasons that a company will want to do this? The main reasons I can think of has to do with the dangers of getting comfortable in a large company. It's very easy for a lazy manager to just hand out "A"s to everyone on the team and just cruise along. Slackers are poisonous, but painful to deal with for a conflict-shy, comfortable mana…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Any ranking system where an individual's outcome depends on their number of colleagues is bafflingly broken. 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pisse…
To be more explicit: calling a human a bad manager for liking people is like calling a tree a bad tree for growing toward the sun. Humans are designed by evolution to like each other. The only humans that don't have this bias are broken ones.
So I refuse to consider someone a bad manager for not wanting to fire Steve. Good managers still don't want to fire Steve, and in fact if you had a manager who was 100% willing to fire Steve, that person would be a terrible manager in every other way.
So the question remains: you have a bunch of good managers, who nevertheless show a bias toward retaining people that the corporation might want to get rid of. Design a process to overcome that bias without making life miserable for everyone... go.
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've wondered if recursively propagating down "bonus points" would be a fair way of solving this. For example, Acme, Inc ranks on a 1-5 scale, and all things being equal, a manager will get (direct reports)x3 points to allocate for his performance reviews. But Acme has a good quarter due to a strong engineering effort, so the CEO decides that Bob, VP of Eng, gets a 4, and he gets to allocate (direct reports)x4 points…