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 and I used have quite the chuckle at all my "strengths" identified by my team and peers ... because they liked me and I was effective they attributed positive characteristics to me that I did not have.
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. the lesson i take away was powerful - if people "like" you there is almost no level they won't go to make it work out.
one thing we can do about this is cry about it. the other thing we can do is to figure out how to "hack" likability. i think my mother taught me most of the basics already.
of course - much easier to do this for one hour in an interview, than for an entire year at a job. but there is something to be said for smiling, a few kind words, and then ... graceful evasion of everything else when you want to do real work.
Likability is underrated. Someone who is easy to work with, improves workplace morale, and makes other developers feel comfortable at work is a valuable asset. Certainly, it shouldn't be a substitute for technical ability, but it can be a very significant complimentary attribute.
360 isn't perfect but it's better than the alternative.
You're basically saying that those who worked daily in close interaction with the 10x developer and had to work with the code that developer produced, had lower regard for his technical ability than a manager who presumably is further removed?
You can't ignore the social aspect. A team with social frictions isn't going to work as well as a team that enjoys working together. Obviously just being social isn't enough but a strong team needs a combination of the social and technical aspects. Also 360 should mean going beyond the team, so the manager should be evaluated by his peers, his managers and his team and technical people on the team should be evaluated by members of other teams they work with.
I've always been highly sociable compared to my other coworkers and have also noticed I get attributed things that weren't really accurate. Notably non-technical coworkers seem to think I work at break-neck pace when I really just work at pace with everyone else, most likely because I actually talk about what I'm doing with them more often.
What makes you think that your judgements are any better than theirs? How do you judge performance? Do you look at code? Or do you simply go by how many feature check boxes they get through in a given time frame?
edit: and I don't ask this to be insulting, but judging performance is a very difficult task and I've never seen a reliable methodology for doing it. Thus, I'm naturally extremely skeptical when someone claims that they can do it better than others. Especially so when it includes broad generalizations about a group of people.
What's the point of doing a 360 review if you're going to attribute away all the results you don't agree with to bias? Why not just do the reviews yourself and save everyone else from wasting their time :)
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.).
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.
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 suspect this is an institutional problem, having been started by exactly that sort of person.
It's this that causes the backstabbing and the mess that people attribute to "stack ranking". Until we put value in changing this culture, I don't see too much changing.
(Disclaimer: my team at Microsoft is sort of odd - we're not in Redmond, and I don't see a lot of this backstabbing that is oft-reported. I do see our managers overvaluing the brilliant IC and I do see my organization undervaluing teamwork, but at least we're not doing that stupid game playing like joining weak teams to get great reviews.)
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.
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) or not (see Vista). Consequently, their biggest threat was actually internal. Stacked ranking enforced this, and prevented internal response.
Now that situation is changing (or has changed). Microsoft is looking at actual competition in the form of Apple and Google as mobile and search erode the desktop. On the datacenter side, Amazon and other cloud provider are threatening Microsoft's server profits.
When the heat gets strong enough, there will be a unifying force within the company (or it'll just crumble - personally don't think that's the case).
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.
I think that's an accurate assessment. It certainly wasn't stack ranking that made J Allard leave. Microsoft has an inward looking culture because there is so much money to play with when Microsoft launches a huge initiative like XBOX or Windows Phone. Google's "moon shots" and Apple's "hobbies" are not instant tickets to the top of the organization.
Overlaid on those high-stakes struggles for control and prominence are some correspondingly huge egos, whence come dogmas like "Everything Windows."
The Enterprise part of the company suffers less from this because the growth there is more organic.
From the outside as a developer, you can feel the effect of such a drama-driven system as Stack Rank. MS's obsession with perfect backwards compatibility means they can't make mistakes, because those mistakes are forever.
So why embrace a process that seems to celebrate daring? A move-fast-and-break-things approach to projects? You'd think MS would be an analysis-paralysis company, because every MS product needs to integrate with hundreds of other MS products and be supported on oodles of platforms for like a decade.
But instead? We see this crazy wasteful churn of APIs and packages and MSDN Magazine-driven fashions.
I mean, how long will MS be stuck supporting Silverlight? Or Linq2SQL? Or ClickOnce installers? Or the zillion different SKUs of SQL Server and Access?
I think the main problem with stack ranking is that you convince your employees that their personal competitors are their teammates and not actual business competitors.
Any time the best way for me to get ahead is by using "The Art of War" on my peers you have set up your organization for eventual failure.
You know what, though? Productivity on a team can be just as separate from people's perception of you (i.e. how much they like you) as individual productivity is.
Imagine this experiment: you have a great, productive team who has one member they all hate (and therefore assume isn't doing much for the team.) You take that person off the team... and the team's productivity plummets.
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 thought of MS to be like one of those 'defense' companies [4]. You either don't really want to work there, because even if the technical challenge and the available resources are great, you don't agree with their mission or you fear that your friends and peers would look down on you. But to make up for that, they have really good work conditions [5]. Thats at least what I hear from people who worked on military projects at Raytheon, Boeing and EADS.
Hope you don't take this comparison as an insult. I think MS makes great things! OneNote, VisualStudio, Kinect, Age of Empires are all great products. And personally, I would have much, much (!!!) less reservations against working for them, than a so called defense company [6].
---
[1] And, I can't help myself pointing out, that MS's version control system is called 'Team Foundation'. New speak?
[2] The exception is MS Research, which is awesome, but thats not really MS.
[3] Most of us were born in the 80's (and many including me in Germany) and grew up hating MS. Even if you wouldn't use computers on your own, everyone including parents and teachers would tell you how bad MS, their products and their business practice were.
[4] Other examples are 'big pharma', tabaco, finances, esp. investment banking. I know people working in all of those industries. They all report excellent work conditions and compensations. Some are ok with the company actions it, some are proud to work there. But all of them look very self aware when they get asked "What do you work?"
The counterexample are jobs like social work, medical care taking, NGOs, academic research and yes, usually engineering as well. Many people want to work their, either because they believe in it, or because it brings them social prestige. As a result the high demand allows for poorer working conditions and less pay.
[5] Salaries at MS are still very good, as far as I know.
[6] Though, DARPA projects are very attractive. I can't deny that.
This sounds pretty good to me. If they actually implement what they wrote about here, I think Microsoft could become one of the better big companies to work at.
(I have a friend who works at BofA. They wanted him to take on a new project that he wasn't interested in. As a reward for agreeing, they went back to his old performance reviews and changed them from "Meets expectations" to "Exceeds expectations" and then promoted him for excellent performance. LOL.)
This 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.
Sounds like an evil but effective way to combat the BS of stack ranking - keep a couple of obviously subpar staff chained up in the corner ready to be sacrificed at the review altar then replaced. Honestly, I can see the benefits of SR as a once off "clear the decks" purge, but as a continual measure it's insanity.
We 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 lower bonuses to another. Giving everyone the same bonus discourages high performers from staying (and also working on the same team). People who receive little to no bonuses take the hint to leave, just as if they had received a 4 or a 5. Considering only 10% of employees receive a 4, and 5% receive a 5, I'm thinking that effectively, there has been no change.
If two people are both performing at about the same level, they can get the exact same bonus. In a ranked system one employee must get more than the other, even though their actual output is pretty close to identical.
Not to mention when you make the ratings tied to rewards, as opposed to punishments, you're removing a lot of politics. Stack ranking discourages high performers from working together, as their performance rating is penalized by their proximity to smart people. Because stack ranking is inherently punitive, this also makes these employees less mobile. So not only are you stuck in a team full of super-ninjas who make you look bad, but the stack rank you got makes you toxic when it comes to internal transfers.
A fixed bonus pool won't fix the "everyone near me is too smart" problem, but it at least would give people a way out to another team. An otherwise good employee who rolled the dice wrong when picking teams does not gain a permanent black mark for it.
A healthy organization will always "manage out" people who are not fit for the job. At Microsoft, folks are given the hint early enough that they can explore other internal options before leaving the company entirely.
Though, to be honest, if someone just can't cut it, they will leave the company.
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 evaluation and compensation. You could be VP of a 500-person division and instruct your directors and managers to rank everyone in your org in a single pool; or you could delegate to your directors and tell them to do what they think is best for their groups within their own individual budget constraints, which you assigned.
Critical question unanswered by the letter: Is the bonus pool for a team primarily fixed in advance as a law of nature, or primarily determined by team performance as a whole, at the end of the period?
If it's the former, you're right and the details of how individual bonuses are assigned don't matter much.
The latter however would could up real opportunities: a team that gets together and delivers beyond expectations could all be generously rewarded instead of having the weird fight over who was the individual star performer that gets all the credit.
At least now there is a 'base income' of sorts, and if you are unsatisfied with your job and/or the bonuses you get, you have ample time to find another job. You also have the opportunity to try to improve. This is a great improvement over 'pack up your shit and leave.'
Bonuses must be distributed in some manner, and at most companies it is ultimately zero-sum. Giving one person a higher than average bonus means somewhere in the company (maybe on your own team, maybe someone across the world) will have to get less.
There difference is, theoretically, some teams could all be composed of high performers, and other teams disproportionately of low performers.
The forced curve before meant that every team needed to assign x% as high performers and x% as low performers.
Now, how you assign the high and low performers, from a limited pot of 'rewards', when every manager is going to want most of his team to be considered high performers -- well, that's what the 'forced curve' was intended to deal with. But I don't doubt it also led to increased competition and politics and decreased teamwork, as the one well-known critique of it suggested.
Stack ranking is created by management's inherent inability to trust people.
And that, in turn, is created by management's inability to trust in their own abilities. This is proved to be true in case of Ballmer and overall Microsoft's performance while under his leadership.
These changes are surely a positive sign for Microsoft.
I saw the downfall of stack ranking immediately after a company I worked at was acquired by Microsoft. The workplace changed within a month from one focused on teamwork and support to Lord of the Flies. When the only way you can succeed is by being "better" then someone else you are forced to step upon others.
I believe that this is also the effect of working for a public company with a stock that hasn't moved in price in 10 years.
Interesting 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.
This is absolutely great for Microsoft and its employees. Grade by curve creates internal friction that is harmful to the team. I am a manager in a large company. I always suggested to grade by performance against job level. There is written requirement for each job level, it is relatively easy to measure against the written description by both managers and peers. Everyone has incentive to get salary raise, bigger bonus, promotion. There is no need to use internal competition to add more pressure.
On the other hand, the lower 5% people only cost about 2% of companies spending. It is not even worth to worry about it. You need to interview equivalent to 50% of employee count to replace that 5%, plus whole set of HR bandwidth to handle it. Microsoft has been losing a lot of value to fire lower 5% while keep a lower 5% CEO at the top for so many years.
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 sink a team. Obviously forming a really elite team in the US is easy, since you can purge from the bottom, provided you don't affect morale too negatively. But how do you do it in countries where firing for underperformance isn't an option? It's really hard to get away from a bell-curve team.
Part of the new program is an explicit focus on frequent feedback. If anything, there ought to be fewer surprises than the current once (twice-ish with midyear discussions) a year feedback.
The risk going forward is that without being forced to a distribution, wishy-washy managers will trend towards the middle. High achievers will be under-compensated, and under-achievers will be overcompensated. The budget hasn't changed, so the same pool of money has to be divided among the same set of people, managers now have more freedom as to how.
>We 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.
The compensation budget is the key part here. I don't know how this is going to account for:
- Failed products with smart developers and their retention.
- Avg products with very smart developers
- Less 'visible' projects. Those that management don't realize is necessary until you have no one working on it. (This happens a LOT in big companies).
All this can be solved by pumping a ton of money into this as they are alluding elsewhere though.
Overall the fact that they are taking feedback seriously and are working towards a solution is pretty positive though.
But, I think that leadership/true emotional control means that, even if someone is treating you wrongly or criticizing you, you can dissect the behavior, and then appeal to reason.
For example, I appreciate, and even invite, ruthless criticism ("go ahead and insult me if necessary") when getting feedback (on my code, performance, etc.)
The importance of having friends who can say, "you're an idiot - you don't understand X, Y, Z" is high.
Sometimes I dislike when, at previous jobs, I've had to mask the truth simply to avoid hurting someone's feelings. Because, if you hurt someone's feelings, that person will close up to you.
It's nice that now they are going to value teamwork and collaboration more highly, but I don't see the lack of a curve making much of a difference in compensation level for the average contributor. The total size of the compensation budget is fixed, and they have to spend all of it.
Just because now 30% of the staff can fall into the Exceed Expectations bucket doesn't necessarily mean that the budget increases. The money gets divided differently, that's all.
It does seem like a positive change though if they can improve the culture of the workplace and minimize the amount of backstabbing, cronyism and political nonsense.
This is a great move for the company. Especially now that so many competitors have internalized the process. It was the single most identifiable thing that poisoned the culture at the company. It will be interesting to see what they replace it with. The process certainly made it easier to make decisions higher up the chain (even if it was difficult for the managers and their direct reports).
It may also take some of the pressure off of high-level people who previously had their rankings approved by Ballmer. (I don't have anyone specific in mind. Yes seriously.)
This is interesting in the context of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712717 "Why are Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo copying Microsoft's stack ranking system?" - the feature copying usually goes the other way.
i hope this will curb people from constant backstabbing that I witnessed during my short duration there. It was painful to watch very smart, bright people indulge in really pathetic behavior consciously to 'protect' themselves..
[+] [-] Ensorceled|12 years ago|reply
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 and I used have quite the chuckle at all my "strengths" identified by my team and peers ... because they liked me and I was effective they attributed positive characteristics to me that I did not have.
[+] [-] lmg643|12 years ago|reply
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. the lesson i take away was powerful - if people "like" you there is almost no level they won't go to make it work out.
one thing we can do about this is cry about it. the other thing we can do is to figure out how to "hack" likability. i think my mother taught me most of the basics already.
of course - much easier to do this for one hour in an interview, than for an entire year at a job. but there is something to be said for smiling, a few kind words, and then ... graceful evasion of everything else when you want to do real work.
[+] [-] jredwards|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YZF|12 years ago|reply
You're basically saying that those who worked daily in close interaction with the 10x developer and had to work with the code that developer produced, had lower regard for his technical ability than a manager who presumably is further removed?
You can't ignore the social aspect. A team with social frictions isn't going to work as well as a team that enjoys working together. Obviously just being social isn't enough but a strong team needs a combination of the social and technical aspects. Also 360 should mean going beyond the team, so the manager should be evaluated by his peers, his managers and his team and technical people on the team should be evaluated by members of other teams they work with.
[+] [-] ddoolin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tensor|12 years ago|reply
edit: and I don't ask this to be insulting, but judging performance is a very difficult task and I've never seen a reliable methodology for doing it. Thus, I'm naturally extremely skeptical when someone claims that they can do it better than others. Especially so when it includes broad generalizations about a group of people.
[+] [-] tiglionabbit|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
[+] [-] michaelt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kabouseng|12 years ago|reply
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.).
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethomson|12 years ago|reply
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 suspect this is an institutional problem, having been started by exactly that sort of person.
It's this that causes the backstabbing and the mess that people attribute to "stack ranking". Until we put value in changing this culture, I don't see too much changing.
(Disclaimer: my team at Microsoft is sort of odd - we're not in Redmond, and I don't see a lot of this backstabbing that is oft-reported. I do see our managers overvaluing the brilliant IC and I do see my organization undervaluing teamwork, but at least we're not doing that stupid game playing like joining weak teams to get great reviews.)
[+] [-] RandallBrown|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] r00fus|12 years ago|reply
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) or not (see Vista). Consequently, their biggest threat was actually internal. Stacked ranking enforced this, and prevented internal response.
Now that situation is changing (or has changed). Microsoft is looking at actual competition in the form of Apple and Google as mobile and search erode the desktop. On the datacenter side, Amazon and other cloud provider are threatening Microsoft's server profits.
When the heat gets strong enough, there will be a unifying force within the company (or it'll just crumble - personally don't think that's the case).
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
Overlaid on those high-stakes struggles for control and prominence are some correspondingly huge egos, whence come dogmas like "Everything Windows."
The Enterprise part of the company suffers less from this because the growth there is more organic.
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
So why embrace a process that seems to celebrate daring? A move-fast-and-break-things approach to projects? You'd think MS would be an analysis-paralysis company, because every MS product needs to integrate with hundreds of other MS products and be supported on oodles of platforms for like a decade.
But instead? We see this crazy wasteful churn of APIs and packages and MSDN Magazine-driven fashions.
I mean, how long will MS be stuck supporting Silverlight? Or Linq2SQL? Or ClickOnce installers? Or the zillion different SKUs of SQL Server and Access?
[+] [-] Ensorceled|12 years ago|reply
Any time the best way for me to get ahead is by using "The Art of War" on my peers you have set up your organization for eventual failure.
[+] [-] derefr|12 years ago|reply
Imagine this experiment: you have a great, productive team who has one member they all hate (and therefore assume isn't doing much for the team.) You take that person off the team... and the team's productivity plummets.
[+] [-] FrojoS|12 years ago|reply
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 thought of MS to be like one of those 'defense' companies [4]. You either don't really want to work there, because even if the technical challenge and the available resources are great, you don't agree with their mission or you fear that your friends and peers would look down on you. But to make up for that, they have really good work conditions [5]. Thats at least what I hear from people who worked on military projects at Raytheon, Boeing and EADS.
Hope you don't take this comparison as an insult. I think MS makes great things! OneNote, VisualStudio, Kinect, Age of Empires are all great products. And personally, I would have much, much (!!!) less reservations against working for them, than a so called defense company [6].
--- [1] And, I can't help myself pointing out, that MS's version control system is called 'Team Foundation'. New speak?
[2] The exception is MS Research, which is awesome, but thats not really MS.
[3] Most of us were born in the 80's (and many including me in Germany) and grew up hating MS. Even if you wouldn't use computers on your own, everyone including parents and teachers would tell you how bad MS, their products and their business practice were.
[4] Other examples are 'big pharma', tabaco, finances, esp. investment banking. I know people working in all of those industries. They all report excellent work conditions and compensations. Some are ok with the company actions it, some are proud to work there. But all of them look very self aware when they get asked "What do you work?" The counterexample are jobs like social work, medical care taking, NGOs, academic research and yes, usually engineering as well. Many people want to work their, either because they believe in it, or because it brings them social prestige. As a result the high demand allows for poorer working conditions and less pay.
[5] Salaries at MS are still very good, as far as I know.
[6] Though, DARPA projects are very attractive. I can't deny that.
[+] [-] jrockway|12 years ago|reply
(I have a friend who works at BofA. They wanted him to take on a new project that he wasn't interested in. As a reward for agreeing, they went back to his old performance reviews and changed them from "Meets expectations" to "Exceeds expectations" and then promoted him for excellent performance. LOL.)
[+] [-] Patrick_Devine|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nikatwork|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shenglong|12 years ago|reply
Is this not in effect the same as a curve? Giving higher bonuses to one person means giving lower bonuses to another. Giving everyone the same bonus discourages high performers from staying (and also working on the same team). People who receive little to no bonuses take the hint to leave, just as if they had received a 4 or a 5. Considering only 10% of employees receive a 4, and 5% receive a 5, I'm thinking that effectively, there has been no change.
[+] [-] potatolicious|12 years ago|reply
If two people are both performing at about the same level, they can get the exact same bonus. In a ranked system one employee must get more than the other, even though their actual output is pretty close to identical.
Not to mention when you make the ratings tied to rewards, as opposed to punishments, you're removing a lot of politics. Stack ranking discourages high performers from working together, as their performance rating is penalized by their proximity to smart people. Because stack ranking is inherently punitive, this also makes these employees less mobile. So not only are you stuck in a team full of super-ninjas who make you look bad, but the stack rank you got makes you toxic when it comes to internal transfers.
A fixed bonus pool won't fix the "everyone near me is too smart" problem, but it at least would give people a way out to another team. An otherwise good employee who rolled the dice wrong when picking teams does not gain a permanent black mark for it.
[+] [-] robododo|12 years ago|reply
A healthy organization will always "manage out" people who are not fit for the job. At Microsoft, folks are given the hint early enough that they can explore other internal options before leaving the company entirely.
Though, to be honest, if someone just can't cut it, they will leave the company.
[+] [-] davidp|12 years ago|reply
I think what they've done here is to allow each manager in the chain to decide how to handle their organization's evaluation and compensation. You could be VP of a 500-person division and instruct your directors and managers to rank everyone in your org in a single pool; or you could delegate to your directors and tell them to do what they think is best for their groups within their own individual budget constraints, which you assigned.
[+] [-] bcoates|12 years ago|reply
If it's the former, you're right and the details of how individual bonuses are assigned don't matter much.
The latter however would could up real opportunities: a team that gets together and delivers beyond expectations could all be generously rewarded instead of having the weird fight over who was the individual star performer that gets all the credit.
[+] [-] chrismonsanto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HelloMcFly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|12 years ago|reply
The forced curve before meant that every team needed to assign x% as high performers and x% as low performers.
Now, how you assign the high and low performers, from a limited pot of 'rewards', when every manager is going to want most of his team to be considered high performers -- well, that's what the 'forced curve' was intended to deal with. But I don't doubt it also led to increased competition and politics and decreased teamwork, as the one well-known critique of it suggested.
[+] [-] gesman|12 years ago|reply
And that, in turn, is created by management's inability to trust in their own abilities. This is proved to be true in case of Ballmer and overall Microsoft's performance while under his leadership.
These changes are surely a positive sign for Microsoft.
[+] [-] jasonculbertson|12 years ago|reply
I believe that this is also the effect of working for a public company with a stock that hasn't moved in price in 10 years.
[+] [-] pmh|12 years ago|reply
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712717
[+] [-] moca|12 years ago|reply
On the other hand, the lower 5% people only cost about 2% of companies spending. It is not even worth to worry about it. You need to interview equivalent to 50% of employee count to replace that 5%, plus whole set of HR bandwidth to handle it. Microsoft has been losing a lot of value to fire lower 5% while keep a lower 5% CEO at the top for so many years.
[+] [-] alkonaut|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
- Difficulty knowing who the best employees are.
- Employees surprised by layoffs. "I thought I was doing well."
- Managers slacking on giving constructive feedback.
Performance management is such a tough subject. Both extremes (ruthless stacking, and no-curve) have issues and I don't know a better solution.
[+] [-] pagefault|12 years ago|reply
The risk going forward is that without being forced to a distribution, wishy-washy managers will trend towards the middle. High achievers will be under-compensated, and under-achievers will be overcompensated. The budget hasn't changed, so the same pool of money has to be divided among the same set of people, managers now have more freedom as to how.
[+] [-] SubuSS|12 years ago|reply
The compensation budget is the key part here. I don't know how this is going to account for:
- Failed products with smart developers and their retention. - Avg products with very smart developers - Less 'visible' projects. Those that management don't realize is necessary until you have no one working on it. (This happens a LOT in big companies).
All this can be solved by pumping a ton of money into this as they are alluding elsewhere though.
Overall the fact that they are taking feedback seriously and are working towards a solution is pretty positive though.
[+] [-] jmspring|12 years ago|reply
http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2013/11/09/realities-of-p...
[+] [-] kmeredith|12 years ago|reply
But, I think that leadership/true emotional control means that, even if someone is treating you wrongly or criticizing you, you can dissect the behavior, and then appeal to reason.
For example, I appreciate, and even invite, ruthless criticism ("go ahead and insult me if necessary") when getting feedback (on my code, performance, etc.)
The importance of having friends who can say, "you're an idiot - you don't understand X, Y, Z" is high.
Sometimes I dislike when, at previous jobs, I've had to mask the truth simply to avoid hurting someone's feelings. Because, if you hurt someone's feelings, that person will close up to you.
[+] [-] bmohlenhoff|12 years ago|reply
Just because now 30% of the staff can fall into the Exceed Expectations bucket doesn't necessarily mean that the budget increases. The money gets divided differently, that's all.
It does seem like a positive change though if they can improve the culture of the workplace and minimize the amount of backstabbing, cronyism and political nonsense.
[+] [-] ffrryuu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Todd|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anmalhot|12 years ago|reply