Microsoft does away with stack ranking • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#141

Post by kabouseng » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 11:34 AM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #34

One major thing I learned from 360 reviews is how bad developers are at judging each other or their manager. I've had employees on probation for lack of productivity judged as excellent by their peers because of their ability to socialize their "abilities". I had the best developer on my team (a 10x developer if ever there was one) get slammed on technical ability rankings because of his prickly personality. My VP an…

Thats a fair comment, but in a similar vein; do you trust your own ability (as manager I presume) to evaluate the work output and business value of the employees? Or otherwise do you trust a / your manager with this?

One thing that is true, is often times the manager has more information about the various reasons for certain choices and goings on in the business, and thus is in a better position to evaluate people.

The question then is just, how do you make sure that manager do not discriminate based on soft indicators (personalities match / clashes / favouritism etc.).

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#142

Post by kabouseng » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 11:37 AM UTC

lmg643 wrote: post #42

Ensorceled wrote: post #34

One major thing I learned from 360 reviews is how bad developers are at judging each other or their manager. I've had employees on probation for lack of productivity judged as excellent by their peers because of their ability to socialize their "abilities". I had the best developer on my team (a 10x developer if ever there was one) get slammed on technical ability rankings because of his prickly personality. My VP an…

I once had a similar experience - in an interview situation. (I can be likeable in person, just not in comments...) The guy was attributing statements to me, from the conversation we were having in that moment, that i had never said. He would even say "what you said, or what you were going to say..." I found it extremely bizarre. I am a pretty precise person, and I wanted to correct him but i realized it is pointless…

And even if your mother did not teach you much, you can get most of the lessons from "How to make friends and influence people" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influenc...

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#143

Post by marshray » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 12:22 PM UTC

FrojoS wrote: post #140

ethomson wrote: post #5

This 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…

Thanks for sharing. It honestly surprises me that MS gets away with having such poor working conditions and team work [1]. I guess the end of stack ranking shows that things are changing at least. I know lots of people in IT, but somehow no one who works at MS [2]. Its seen as uncool or worse unmoral in my circles [3]. And these people, including me, didn't even know how bad the working conditions are at MS! I always…

I'm sure all the stories you hear are true -- for one or even many. It's a huge place and I'm sure there are some teams in that "bottom 20% bucket" of pleasure to work in.

I work in dev in Redmond. All I can say is, for me, it really is a wonderful fun place to work and not at all like the outside impressions.

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#144

Post by jmmcd » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 12:45 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #81

tensor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People who think judging performance is hard have a broken development methodology or no technical chops. And this is exactly why I asked the question. Here you have judged me, since I said judging performance was hard, on both my development methodology and technical chops. Yet you know nothing about me at all. The problem of evaluation is an important one, and one I'm always interested in reading more on. Unfortun…

In fairness, you judged me first. I've never had a problem judging performance when I was doing my job right. Any time I've been unsure it's because I was either not managing the team properly or did not have enough technical knowledge to evaluate the estimates and claims (e.g. this took longer because of X and Y). I know you can manage performance in a way that allows evaluation even if you don't have the technical…

> I've never had a problem judging performance when I was doing my job right. Any time I've been unsure

It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just ain't so.

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#145

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 2:09 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #92

Ensorceled wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I know what a 360 is, I've participated in them. In the situations I indicated I was also a developer on the team so I knew how productive and skilled the 10x prickly developer was. His peers ranked him high on technical skills but only as high as more amicable and lessor skilled peers. I'm not saying I ignored the social aspect, in fact that is why I called him "prickly". I'm just saying that, while his teamwor…

Did you manage a self-selected team? I swiped the Roman Evaluation Method from Luke Hohmann. During interviews, a No from one is a No from all. Self selecting teams is one of those agile advices. If your prickly superstar was chosen collectively, he would have been given a lot of latitude. Eyes wide open kinda thing. The only sticky interpersonal problems I've had is when some higher ranking genius assigns people to…

Self-selected teams while good from that perspective actually have a huge downside: politics and pleasing your friends.

Next thing that happens is people start choosing members based on how much comfortable they are (which doesn't translate into technical skills and delivering stuff) or start talking to each other, trying to convince people.. this sucks!

While it might work for small companies with not much variation in technical skills and sociability between employees.. for anything else it's kinda hard.

Plus, that initial list of 2-3 employees that start talking and picking others was selected by someone, wasn't it? And the list that they can pick from was also selected, no?

I think if you need a team of 10 and you have 30 possibly good candidates within your company (and they are all available to move to your team).. sure, why not. You as a manager already pre-selects a bunch of people and then let your team members filter it even further.

But putting that responsibility from the beginning solely on the team members.. I guess that's risky. But anyway, how often does that happen?

If we are talking about selecting 1-2 people for a already formed team than fine.. of course other team members should do it (but that's mostly the norm in a lot of companies.. the manager/tech lead runs the resumes through people he/she trusts, ask them to participate in interviews.. no big difference there).

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#146

Post by dreamfactory » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 2:38 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #121

dreamfactory wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder if he wasn't a prolific tech debt producer who was seen by management to GTD.

No, but I know exactly what you mean. Years ago I was on a team where the "super star" was assigned all new work. The rest of us had to fix the bugs in their code. At the finale, 5 people were doing nothing but fixing bugs in the "stars" previous projects. That's when senior management finally clued in to the problem and fired both the manager and the "super star".

going by the upvotes, we aren't the only people to have seen this anti-pattern...

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#147

Post by Ensorceled » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 3:51 PM UTC

dreamfactory wrote: post #146

Ensorceled wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but I know exactly what you mean. Years ago I was on a team where the "super star" was assigned all new work. The rest of us had to fix the bugs in their code. At the finale, 5 people were doing nothing but fixing bugs in the "stars" previous projects. That's when senior management finally clued in to the problem and fired both the manager and the "super star".

going by the upvotes, we aren't the only people to have seen this anti-pattern...

Yeah, this is why I kind of like project ownership even though it's now considered out of fashion. If you create technical debt, you own it and it's your future productivity that takes the hit. Eventually your productivity grinds to a halt as you fix problems in the crap you wrote before.

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#148

Post by Ensorceled » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 3:56 PM UTC

SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #120

JSZZHlmumeUE wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who think judging performance is hard have a broken development methodology or no technical chops. I suggest you reflect on this. It seems to me that you've convinced yourself that you are good at certain things but there isn't really any evidence supporting your beliefs. When I was younger, I actually used to think like you - that perf evaluation is easy and a good engineer (e.g. me) would be able to evaluate…

This kind of thinking throws me into infinite loops. I think I'm not such a good developer, which makes me think that I must be a good developer because I recognize my limitations, which makes me think that I'm not such a good developer because I think I'm a good developer, and so on.

HN has a real problem with people who self identify as good programmers ... there is always a bunch of "no you're not" and "you only think you are" and "people who say they are good usually suck" type of responses. It's pretty weird reaction for a tech site where many good programmers hang out.

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#149

Post by alkonaut » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 4:14 PM UTC

nness wrote: post #91

alkonaut wrote: post #36

I wasn't aware that US companies ranked employees and used rankings when purging the workforce (when I think about it it's a pretty obvious idea). In countries with stronger labour laws "underperformance" basically isn't a reason to fire someone. The employer is responsible for the employees performance (training etc.). This can be frustrating in the software business when just a few really poor performers can really…

What countries are those?

I'd say most of northern Europe. At least Nordic countries and Germany, in varying degrees. Probably similar in other european countries as well.

Re: Microsoft does away with stack ranking

#150

Post by mathattack » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 4:20 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #34

One major thing I learned from 360 reviews is how bad developers are at judging each other or their manager. I've had employees on probation for lack of productivity judged as excellent by their peers because of their ability to socialize their "abilities". I had the best developer on my team (a 10x developer if ever there was one) get slammed on technical ability rankings because of his prickly personality. My VP an…

It's very hard to separate emotional liking of people with being able to rate their abilities, since rating for most white collar jobs is so subjective. This is why forced stacking can be so insidious, and also why ratings frequently seem unfair. It's also why office politics creep in to the process. People trade on their likeability because they're not confident that their skills will be properly weighted.