Microsoft is having a horrible time hiring anyone due to the stack ranking. The rot is now too deep.
Microsoft does away with stack ranking
21–30 of 159 posts
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#22This was seemingly inevitable whether this is actually useful or not. Microsoft has been getting increasing heat about our stack ranking system, both from employees and from external people. But I don't think stack ranking is our problem. I think our problem is that we value this notion of the brilliant and excellent individual contributor instead of valuing employees that value teamwork and team problem solving. I s…
I haven't seen much backstabbing either, but what I have seen is plenty of people acting way differently than they would if the stack ranking curve doesn't exist.
People are constantly doing stuff to make them "visible" instead of doing what is best for the project. How many features do people fight nail and tooth for, that should be cut, just because if they aren't in the product they won't have anything to show for their work when review time comes around?
People are terrified of making decisions, because if they make a bad one, it's going to look poorly when they're ranked. I don't know if you've noticed this, but our managers tend to give "guidance" rather than outright telling us what to do. That way when something goes wrong, it isn't their fault. They didn't say we had to do it the wrong way and it's our fault for not bringing up that it was wrong sooner.
The first year I was here, I didn't think anything of the stack ranking. It was just one of those evils of working at a huge company. Then I started to notice that people were just doing weird stuff. Calling pointless meetings, making big stinks over small things, and just doing weird things just to create more work for themselves. I realized all of that was just so people could have more bullet points on their list of accomplishments at the end of the year.
Sure, killing the curve won't solve everything and I think there is a lot of truth to what you're saying about not valuing teamwork. I just think that killing the stack ranking is a BIG step in the right direction.
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#23This was seemingly inevitable whether this is actually useful or not. Microsoft has been getting increasing heat about our stack ranking system, both from employees and from external people. But I don't think stack ranking is our problem. I think our problem is that we value this notion of the brilliant and excellent individual contributor instead of valuing employees that value teamwork and team problem solving. I s…
Stack ranking is just one part of the many problems in MS's corporate culture. Once it's gone it won't end the politics, they'll just find other outlets (of which there are many). Another big problem is the review system in general, regardless of stack ranking. MS prioritizes highly visible and easy to complete work over more important and more difficult work. This creates perverse incentives to, for example, avoid fixing things that are known to be broken, or even assuming responsibility for them. It's far more beneficial to spin up a new project of trivial value than it is to take ownership of some broken or long abandoned system or tool that desperately needs improvement.
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#24This was seemingly inevitable whether this is actually useful or not. Microsoft has been getting increasing heat about our stack ranking system, both from employees and from external people. But I don't think stack ranking is our problem. I think our problem is that we value this notion of the brilliant and excellent individual contributor instead of valuing employees that value teamwork and team problem solving. I s…
Stack ranking is just one part of the many problems in MS's corporate culture. Once it's gone it won't end the politics, they'll just find other outlets (of which there are many). Another big problem is the review system in general, regardless of stack ranking. MS prioritizes highly visible and easy to complete work over more important and more difficult work. This creates perverse incentives to, for example, avoid f…
Is there a human organization of any size that doesn't have politics?
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#25This was seemingly inevitable whether this is actually useful or not. Microsoft has been getting increasing heat about our stack ranking system, both from employees and from external people. But I don't think stack ranking is our problem. I think our problem is that we value this notion of the brilliant and excellent individual contributor instead of valuing employees that value teamwork and team problem solving. I s…
Isn't it the case the stacked ranking exacerbated the backstabbing issue? I see this move overall as a positive one for Microsoft - without removing the perverse rewards to screw over your teammates and other teams, the actual cultural fix can't take place. I think the culture will shift soon - Microsoft, for more than a decade, had no real competitors. They made more money each year whether they executed (see Win2k)…
My point was that no, I don't think stack ranking provides a greater impetus to backstabbing your coworkers than this sort of vague compensation model. In fact, I think a continuous model may lead to more backstabbing than exists now.
Currently, I go into a bucket - let's say I'm a two, for instance - and all the twos get the same compensation. Can I backstab somebody so that I get a two and they get a three? Maybe.
But if we remove the buckets and we have some continuity, where now if my coworker outperformed me and we were both twos... now this coworker just straight up outperformed me. I'm more inclined to want to stab that person in the back so that I'm better, since being almost as good isn't valuable anymore.
Now, it's possible that we'll end up with stack ranking all over again. The previous compensation before the current stack ranking system put you in a bucket from 5-1 where 5 was good and 1 was bad. So... it turns out that we don't change this very much even when we do change things.
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#26Interesting timing given the article and discussion yesterday [1] about other companies using stack ranking. I wonder (and to some extent hope) that the others follow suit. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712717
Especially interesting considering the author of that article works at Microsoft
Yeah - as a manager, he probably knew about the changes a day earlier and hence decided a pen a post criticising other companies' ranking systems.
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#27This was seemingly inevitable whether this is actually useful or not. Microsoft has been getting increasing heat about our stack ranking system, both from employees and from external people. But I don't think stack ranking is our problem. I think our problem is that we value this notion of the brilliant and excellent individual contributor instead of valuing employees that value teamwork and team problem solving. I s…
I haven't seen much backstabbing either, but what I have seen is plenty of people acting way differently than they would if the stack ranking curve doesn't exist. People are constantly doing stuff to make them "visible" instead of doing what is best for the project. How many features do people fight nail and tooth for, that should be cut, just because if they aren't in the product they won't have anything to show for…
The visibility thing is an excellent point: I've been told before that I need to work on more visible projects. But when I work on very visible projects I get feedback like "provide more leadership".
This reminds me very much of the article the other day, "You're only getting the nice feedback": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712289
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack ranking is just one part of the many problems in MS's corporate culture. Once it's gone it won't end the politics, they'll just find other outlets (of which there are many). Another big problem is the review system in general, regardless of stack ranking. MS prioritizes highly visible and easy to complete work over more important and more difficult work. This creates perverse incentives to, for example, avoid f…
Is there a human organization of any size that doesn't have politics?
That's a bit like asking whether or not there is a human population of any size that doesn't have STDs.
Sure, that's plenty true, but it's one thing to have a small incidence of herpes and another thing entirely to have a pandemic of HIV or syphilis.
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#29We will continue to invest in a generous rewards budget, but there will no longer be a pre-determined targeted distribution. Managers and leaders will have flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that best reflects the performance of their teams and individuals, as long as they stay within their compensation budget. Is this not in effect the same as a curve? Giving higher bonuses to one person means giving lowe…
Thanks to the law of averages, a "stack ranking" system isn't harmful as long as the size of the group is sufficiently large. Employees aiming to be in the top 20% of a 5000-person organization are incentivized completely differently from from those aiming to be in the top 20% of a 5-person organization. I think what they've done here is to allow each manager in the chain to decide how to handle their organization's…
This assumes that everyone within such a large group would end up ranked accurately.
But the truth is that when you assemble such a large group, you end up comparing apples to oranges. Jane works on a doomed software project and valiantly manages to salvage some of it for other efforts, but management ultimately looks at her project as a failure and has trouble disassociating her work from the result. Meanwhile Bob works on a fairly straightforward hardware project that gets completed on time and within budget, but not necessarily as a result of his actions, and looks like a "team player" who gets rewarded as such.
Assigning a single scalar value ("top $x%") to each of these people necessitates ignoring a huge number of important differences both personal and contextual. Small groups with similar functions allow you to make more meaningful comparisons but only at the cost of ruining the statistical basis for making those comparisons in the first place.
The whole problem with forcing a predetermined model on your organization is that performance appraisals should be an empirical process where the observations peers and management make determine the model that is ultimately adopted (and which will guide future hiring/firing decisions). Forcing a predetermined model onto your organization gives you no data and leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy at best and corruption and politicking at worst.
Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking
#30This is good to see. The whole premise of stack ranking is fundamentally flawed.
Clearly there is a curve that when applied to an entire population shows that there are under-performers. So far, so good, however, the problem is that stack ranking isn't applied to the entire population since it's impossible to normalize the performance of each individual. Instead, companies that stack rank do it on a team-by-team basis, which is a statistically inaccurate sample of the population where there can be a lot of skew.
Since it's up to the manager to rank their employees, this causes a lot of problems. This is particularly a problem if the manager sucks at hiring, or over hires for their team, and there is a lot of chaff. There is a massive incentive to do this, because the more employees a manager has, the more corresponding perceived worth in the organization they'll have. Plus, if it comes time to cull, it's really easy to shield the favourite employees, even if they have performed poorly, without disrupting the organization.
On the flip side, if you're really, really careful about who you bring on board, your team is in a weaker position because there is no one to terminate. This means you get rid of good performers based on bullshit metrics. I saw this happen at a largish virtualization company where one of the best employees on our team was let go because he had some minor HR-ish type issue. This caused a big percentage of the team to be demoralized and ultimately leave.