Ask Slashdot: How Does Your Company Evaluate Your Performance? 525
jmcbain writes "I'm a former Microsoftie, and one thing I really despised about the company is the 'stack ranking' employee evaluation system that was succinctly captured in a recent Vanity Fair article on the company. Stack ranking is basically applying a forced curve distribution on all employees at the same level, so management must place some percentage of employees into categories of overperforming, performing on average, and underperforming. Even if it's an all-star team doing great work, some folks will be marked as underperforming. Frankly, this really sucked. I know this practice gained popularity with GE in the 1980s and is being used by some (many?) Fortune 500 companies. Does your company do this? What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Like nuclear war. (Score:5, Funny)
The best way to survive is not to play the game.
Re:Like nuclear war. (Score:5, Informative)
How Does Your Company Evaluate Your Performance?
Seldom! Reviews are the time that raises are brought up.
Betting most places are like that. Our "yearly" reviews come every 18 months, if at all.
Wanna see someone sidestep like a politician? Ask a suit " when are reviews coming?"
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In five and a half years, I have received exactly two performance evaluations. I also received one flat raise aside from that, not tied to performance: everyone in the company got 2.5%.
Three raises in over five years: doing the math, I see that my salary, adjusting for inflation, is only slightly greater than it was when I was hired.
One former employer of mine was going to do annual performance reviews without any merit (or fixed) raises. That night I went home to polish my resume, which has lead me to my current (and much better) employment situation.
Some employers can't afford to give raises because the financials aren't looking so great. Remember that a raise today means they will pay X extra per year for each employee until they leave since formal pay cuts are not generally part of our culture. This is one reason why bonuses
Re:Like nuclear war. (Score:5, Funny)
Judge Smails: Ty, how was your evaluation?
Ty Webb: Oh, Judge, I don't keep score.
Judge Smails: Then how do you measure yourself with other workers?
Ty Webb: By height.
Re:Like nuclear war. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Like nuclear war. (Score:4, Interesting)
Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Informative)
What's the best way to survive this type of system?
It's called a union.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Funny)
Or bombing the car of the guy who proposed it.
But a union is better.
And if it comes to it, a union can hire the bomb guy.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
As with almost every problem the answer comes down to liberty. Unions are great IF they don't have laws written to give them special rights. A union should exist as a group of people freely associating to promote their self interests. But when laws are written to force people to join if they want to work in an industry that leads to corruption. This goes the other way too. There are some laws which prohibit employers from basing hiring on union status. That violates the employees rights as well. If there is a free union of electricians and they provide member training and other benefits and their members have a reputation of excellence an employer should be allowed to require employees join that union.
Problems always arise when you take something that is good when it's done voulentarily and use force.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like with healthcare, unless you're forced, you don't want to join. Who wants to spend 70 bucks of their paycheck every month for something they perceive as doing nothing for them? The power of the union comes from the collective. If your collective is only 25 to 30% of the working force, guess what? You're expendable.
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Who wants to spend 70 bucks of their paycheck every month for something they perceive as doing nothing for them?
I don't. And I resent people like you trying to force me to. If you think unions are so great, then spend your time convincing others that it's worth it.
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It's not convincing. For example, many places don't have unions (most places), and they still get weekends, sick days, paid vacation, and health insurance. It is hard to believe that these would go away without unions, because they haven't, especially in my industry.
Note, I am certainly not anti-union, and I certainly appreciate them historically, and if I feel there is a need, I will join one, I just don't see a need right now. Things change, once unions were necessary, now the
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Free unions would never work and never survive the first attempt to a strike. Those, not members of the union will claim the right to still work and the employer will finally just hire those which aren't member of the union or are not showing any interest to be member of a union. Sorry, but this game is a all or nothing game.
Corruption exists everywhere and isn't particular to unions which aren't free. That's an oversimplification to say so.
Corruption exists at the corporate level either.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me get this straight. There are non union members that want to work for a company and the company wants to hire them. This is a two way voluntarily exchange. You somehow claim you have a superior right to a job with that company so you initiate the use of force to prevent those workers from working and prevent the company from hiring. And you claim this is good?
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It's the same thing as force, but instead of using violence, you're using economic coercion, like the threat of firing someone, to do something they wouldn't do voluntarily.
This is a pretty basic concept, and to not recognize it exists nullifies just about any point you'd make about "liberty". Violence is not the only force out there, and you can do severe harm to someone through means other than beating them up.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Informative)
A union should exist as a group of people freely associating to promote their self interests
Unions aren't social clubs; they exist so that labor can deal with management on a level playing field in the process of collective bargaining. The purpose of "right to work" laws is not to promote "freedom" from association for workers, as the name suggests. Those laws exist to destroy unions by permitting workers to benefit from collective bargaining without contributing to the process. If you look at who promotes them, you'll find precious little evidence that they were motivated by any concern for the rights, welfare, or safety of working people.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:4, Insightful)
Unions aren't social clubs; they exist so that labor can deal with management on a level playing field in the process of collective bargaining.
Fine. Do it without the use of force.
The purpose of "right to work" laws is not to promote "freedom" from association for workers, as the name suggests. Those laws exist to destroy unions by permitting workers to benefit from collective bargaining without contributing to the process. If you look at who promotes them, you'll find precious little evidence that they were motivated by any concern for the rights, welfare, or safety of working people.
I am against "right to work" laws as well, I had a typo in my original post. You are right as to their purpose. They are a violation of the employers rights to hire who they want to. If an employer wants to only hire union members they should be free to do so. If the employees in a company organize a voluntarily union and negotiate a contract with an employer that states they will only hire union members that is a voluntary contract and should be upheld. But in that negotiation an employer should not be forced to bargain with the union. If they want to fire everyone and start over with new hires that is their right as well unless it violates an existing contract.
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And in sane countries Employers are not able to fire you without cause
Given the incredible imbalance in the employer employee relationship this acts as a check on companies abilities to fuck with society more than they already do.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Interesting)
Unions are great IF they don't have laws written to give them special rights.
Unlike corporations, then.
Unions exist with special legal status precisely because corporations exist with special legal status.
A corporation is not a "a group of people freely associating to promote their self-interests": it is an inherently coercive organization protected by the full legal muscle of the various Companies Acts around the world. When a person employed by a corporation interacts with someone outside the corporation they are protected by a shield of laws that completely over-rides the ordinary operations of free behaviour.
So, if you really want unions to not have special legal protections, you need to eliminate the special legal protections given to corporations, which means you need to eliminate corporations as such, and go back to the situation before 1850 or so when the first modern Companies Act was passed in Britain. That system was unwieldy and inefficient, as no single entity with quasi-individual legal status (the corporation) could do anything like sign contracts, etc.
Yet for some reason I have never heard anyone who makes the kind of arguments you do against unions point any of this out. Why is that?
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Interesting)
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, he is not violating my right.
Society came up with the idea of rights when it decided that the people will not be ruled by monarchs, they will not be property. This required people to set the law above the government, otherwise this would never have happened on its own.
The law above the governments sets the LIMITS TO AUTHORITY for what government can do, and those limits to authority stop where your 'rights' begin, but your rights are a meaningless construct outside of that situation.
Your 'rights' only m
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From what I've seen, unions only ensure than people end up not being fired even if they *are* completely useless, while paying them the same regardless of ability. It's not a solution, just a different problem. A sane company would just evaluate their employees and keep them (or not) based on their individual merits.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
Unions grow in power where employee rights legislation falls short of what people expect. Unions become a problem when they start to see companies as being the enemy, rather than something they're in partnership with.
They are the solution of last resort, that people turn to when there is no other way to protect themselves.
The correct way to deal with problematic unions is to have reasonable employee rights legislation and maintain it for long enough that nobody cares about joining unions anymore.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody wants a union.
You are either from the USA or bizarrely uninformed - possibly both.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
The point, which you appear to have missed my several thousand feet, is that if you have decent management (or at least a set of laws which compel them to act in a decent way) there'd simply be no need for unions.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants a union.
You are either from the USA or bizarrely uninformed - possibly both.
1. Tell that to the UAW.
2. How long have you been waiting for an opportunity to say that?
If existing labor laws protect me sufficiently, why would I want to join a union? Yes, unions have their place (in particular where labor laws have been defficient), but their place is not universal (and in our recent history, they have proved to be detrimental, degenerating themselves from worker unions down to self-perpetuating cartels of nepotism.) I have no problems with unions in, say, Brazil. But here (the way many unions act), you bet I do have a problem.
Don't just look from the POV of your country's conditions. Look at it from our current conditions. We Americans typically get accused of looking at the world strictly from our biased eyes, but you don't seem capable of acting differently (at least in this particular topic.)
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If existing labor laws protect me sufficiently
That's just the thing: In the US at least, they typically don't.
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I don't know about ending the need for unions. We don't need to have permanent pain to go to the dentist and we don't need the threat of permanent litigation to have a lawyer retained. Why should we dismiss the services of unions when things are going well? When the litigation or conflict arises, it is certain that the company will have a legal representative, why should the employee think it's all going to be friendly and everyone will be complying with the relevant laws because the legislation is clear an
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
Unions become a problem when they start to see companies as being the enemy, rather than something they're in partnership with.
If you study the history of the labor movement and management/labor relations in the U.S., you'd realize how absurd that statement is. Owners, management, and labor are all eating from the same plate. It's the job of owners and management to keep the workers' share as small as possible, and this is best done by keeping them afraid of losing what little they've got.
This is true (and originally identified by Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations"). However, the point of unions wasn't just simply to increase wages (and in many cases, it was not at all). It was first and foremost, about better working conditions (.ie. not being required to work on a coal mine 7 days a week) and protection from unreasonable termination (.ie. because you refused to or physically couldn't work another sunday after working 7 days a week for months.)
It doesn't matter what the genesis of the unions was. What matter is the role of unions with respect to the private enterprise once reasonable labor laws are in effect TODAY. At that point, stewbacca's statement is right: a union's place is to be in partnership with companies, not to act as enemies. After all, it is companies who supply their jobs, and labor laws ensure abuses do not take place. So absent of corner cases and violations, a union's insistence in seeing a company as its enemy is simply not acceptable.
Just look at how unions operate in Germany for example. They work in excellent synergy with the private sector. The rhetoric of companies being the enemy does not do any services in these modern times.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:4, Insightful)
Well stated. I've always thought, if government did its job properly, there'd be no need for unions.
Business have lobbyists to influence government to pass legislation favouring them. They form associations specifically to do this. How are individual workers supposed to have their voice heard, let alone taken notice of if they don't form a collective to speak for them to both government and employers? Without unions continually exerting pressure, workers will lose more and more rights.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
Get involved in the Union.
Seriously. Any powerbase will be abused.
Unions are democratic (or at least are supposed to be) representatives of their members. You don't get to stand back and do nothing, and pretend the unions doing silly things aren't you're fault or you're problem.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Interesting)
My reply had been to the GP, about union problems.
Anyway, if they insist on stack ranking, then hire (or transfer) someone in to be the bottom of the pile. Game theory is the only way to play silly games.
A previous boss of mine (in IT, an American employer) did something like this. Played internal politics and "transferred" someone from another group in the company (we shared our building with multiple groups from the same multinational). It was understood that the company would play silly games like this, and the person in question kept working for group B, but technically belonged to our cost centre, and was there as ballast to be made redundant when the 10% chop came around. He knew it, and was already working on his plan B (planning his own company, I believe, which would be ready the moment he got his redundancy money).
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:4, Insightful)
There also has to be some strong blame pointed at HR as well. HR budgets for certain amounts of raises (rises) and firings. They do not care what it does for productivity and employee morale so long as they stay within their budget.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Funny)
But... but... socialism!
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Funny)
What's the best way to survive this type of system?
A race for the bottom.
If everybody performs badly, they still have to label some as overperformers.
Re: (Score:3)
You've correctly identified this as a problem in game theory. Alas, it is the same as the prisoner's dilemma. If you convince everyone else to slack and then you actually work, you are guaranteed to be the overperformer and get the raise/bonus. So everyone ends up promising to slack while working to try to stab the others in the back. This is also why every time Opec gets together to fix oil prices it never lasts more than a year.
Re:Easy answer for non-americans (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, unions are awesome. I allows mediocre employees to receive the same compensation as the excellent employees.
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I've worked in several places (in the US, even) that were unionized, and none had policies (whether as part of the union contract or otherwise) which forced that. They all required justifications for a wide array of decisions, which might have the effect of levelling salaries with lazy, unmotivated managers -- but those managers probably wouldn't be making salary decisions that would really
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I agree, unions are awesome. I allows mediocre employees to receive the same compensation as the excellent employees.
As opposed to stack ranking, which allows excellent employees to get the same evaluation as mediocre employees.
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Funny, but I'm sure you don't believe any of those people were hired because of union contracts. They were hired because someone had a perception that their well-known names would help persuade the public to spend money. Having a famous name that helps sell movies is a skill of sorts, and it's one of the few that Paris Hilton has ever displayed--she's a first class attention whore*--and, like it or not, that's a valuable skill in Hollywood.
* No, I don' t think she's any other sort of whore, nor do I think
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Self employment.
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Self employment.
This is spot on. You can't even be ``fired''---the worst folks can do is not extend your contract (just as bad for you, but technically, not ``fired''). I've also never seen consultants escorted out the door by security... yet I've seen that to TONS of employees on their pink-slip day. With corporations, its like that portal song, ``We do what we must because we can.''
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Actually, I have seen Unioned companies more apt to layoff workers than non-unioned ones. Unions self interest is based on increasing the number of Union Members, so it will tend to agree at the bargaining table, to layoff the expensive skilled workers, so it can bring on twice as much unskilled labor. For the unskilled labor there is the usually 90 days, if we like you we will keep you other wise you are out, which means after 90 days if there is any question on the employees skill, they are out, because
How to survive (Score:5, Insightful)
"What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Find another job where they treat you as a human being.
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This. A hundred times this. So many times I hear people complain about their situation and how they can survive it. When the easiest and most powerful option is to just walk away from it. What's the point of just surviving it. If you want a better work environment. Look for one or create one. It's possible, people do it all the time. You just have to want it. If you don't then suck it up and live with the crap.
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If you're working for MS then you have options beside "suck it up" and "starve in a stinking pit"
Re:How to survive (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever seen zebras (or other animals, but I like zebras ^^) cross a river in Africa? They pile up, the alligators wait, then some zebras start crossing, at which point all zebras try to cross as quickly as possible, while alligators pick a few off (like eating zebras in a river). End result? A few dead Zebras; instead of all of them dead, because they were stuck on the wrong side of the river. If each zebra did what you consider the smart thing to do, they'd all die.
And guess how even the pitiful rights employees have today were achieved for the most part? By people taking risks for what is right, instead of being part of the pressure against others by not doing so. That's right; because if NOBODY would take shit, employers would have no choice but respect their workers, or they would have none. But as it is now, they can choose from a huge pool of spineless, shortsighted people. (shortsighted because the trouble with selling your soul is that it doesn't end up making anything easier or better)
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
-- George Orwell
"Freedom is what we do with what is done to us."
&
"Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery."
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
Yet that, family businesses if you will, is how everything started out. Seemed to work just fine when we though the moon was something to eat, and sacrificed virgins to placate volcanoes and whatnot. I can totally see why it wouldn't work today though! No, wait...
The system is designed broken and creates shortage, so change the system. But don't you fucking dare say the natural order of things is slavery, and that man can only exploit man. Speak for your fucking self.
Re:How to survive (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm... Can you stop protesting stupid here...
1. You don't like your job, look for a new one... 99% of the time people can do that while keeping their existing job. They leave their job when they get hired. You look for a new job and then Quit. that way you can pay your bills.
2. Not to sound like a right wing nut. But surviving is the easy part, america already has a Social Security infrastructure to help people survive. We have 10% unemployment however we don't see 10% of the population dying off in the streets. Even in a tough economy you don't need feel like you are getting abused, you still have the right to grow.
3. The Parent also said "Look for one" which doesn't mean you need to start your own company... On the same vain you can Create a better work environment without having to leave your existing company. Most of the time the company wants to change its own environment but no one is willing to stand up and help push it. It may be just as easy as being a little more supportive to the new guy, do the little more extra, help the other guy out more. Try to encourage more team work in your environment
4. As the company owner, you don't have to be the bad guy. Being the boss isn't always about giving orders and punishing people. It is about supporting your workers giving them direction.
Re:How to survive (Score:4, Informative)
Because you are doing it wrong. You are pushing the work to your boss to make the change. As I stated examples, to help change the environment the first step is to make sure you don't push it down to others. You fix the environment in your team, as best as you can... If this change makes things better, it will trickle up to your manager, who may take credit for it or not, however he has model of a system that works, which he can bring further up.
Going to your boss and say this is wrong we need to fix it, causes problems. Much of a bad environment isn't because of a policy, but due to people pushing down the bad environment over time.
Re:How to survive (Score:4, Interesting)
My understanding of these systems is that they are simply budgeting protocol.
Company X plans to allocate Y funds to a bonus incentive pool. They have 5,000 employees. How do they distribute the payout?
This is where ranking comes in.
There are a known quantity of employees at various plan levels. There are a known quantity of teams of qualified employees.
Do the math to come up with an annual bonus payout and include that in your budget and your SEC filings as a component of operating costs. Keep a small buffer for surprise superstars.
It's not possible to do the math if you payout soley on merit unless you budget the highest payout for all employees. That is not rational and could hurt the company.
So ranking it is.
Network. (Score:3)
Network.
Find the smarter people who are better-connected than you, ask if they know why your idea is dumb. Get them thinking about it. Let it percolate.
Re:Network. (Score:4, Informative)
Better connected people will just swipe your idea and present it as theirs, with an option to blame you if it fails. That's how they become better connected.
First, the right well-connected people will usually give you some credit even if it works--and even if they don't, they remember you, so you have a great connection if it works. Second, wouldn't you rather work at a company that works right, even if you don't get the credit for it?
Re:How to survive (Score:4, Insightful)
Game theory and logic suggest that you are correct. Sabotage your fellow workers whenever the opportunity presents itself. Whisper slanderous lies to your boss about fellow workers, give the impression that you think they are pedophiles, spouse beaters and communist druggies. Play their game and destroy their company.
Tell 'em where to stick it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've got some serious skills, tell them to stick it and go work for a smaller company that's been around a while. Right now it's an employee's market so to speak with respect to certain technology skills (I've been off the market over a year and still get 10+ recruiters calling me a week, and I'm not all that great at all!). My thinking is that you've got more choice than they do, and that after you and hopefully everybody reading this reply, and then some, tell their HR departments that this kind of performance review bullshit is why you're leaving, things may eventually change.
If employers start seeing their very-hard-to-replace talent walk out the door because of draconian, 30+ year old management paradigms, they may be forced to change.
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Wait, how is it an employee's market?
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Because certain skills are in high demand in the tech industry, so if you have those skills, companies will try to recruit you. The OP already said this.
Yes, the job market really sucks right now for people with no skills, or who only know how to work retail or wait tables, or who have other professions that aren't in high demand, but many tech jobs are open right now, such as mobile software development.
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It's always an employee's market for the top talent, who are usually in demand regardless of the rest of the job market. The trick is knowing whether or not you're in that special pool. A lot of people think they are ... most are wrong.
Get even (Score:5, Funny)
1. quit job
2. build start-up
3. ???
4. Profit!
5. hire jerks that gave you bad stack result
6. treat them stack performance game
7. Revenge!
Change job, you cant win. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only solution is to get another job because you cant win. You can get higher up but by then all you really do is internal politics, stabbing your friends in the back and running around PR-campaigning for yourself. Work, not so much. If you really like politics, lies, distortion and stuff, get a job in politics instead of masquerading as a coder when you in reality is doing politics full time.
Re:Change job, you cant win. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've just finished a job with what used to be a great company and more importantly with a great team with common sense (immediate) management (so no bullshit metrics). The whole atmosphere in the team was to share all knowledge, 100% cooperation, no competition. Holes in knowledge were filled very quickly, everyone loved work, and everyone ended up an over-performer. (So kudos to the recruiters for getting the right kinds of people who thrive in that kind of environment in on the project.)
I suspect I'll not find a company like that again, which is a real shame. (Having said that, the seeds of a start-up are forming...)
That's easy. (Score:5, Funny)
1. create dummy identities in your team
2. make those dummies look underperforming compared to you (I know, this is the hard part)
3. next stack ranking comes, they get in the pool, so you are above average.
4. profit!!!
I believe this technique is called "stack overflow" and I bet it will work for microsoft for another 30 years at least.
Benner Model (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, and it sucked! (Score:5, Informative)
At a former employer I joined a team that was under-performing. I worked hard to get things back on track and I did my absolute best. At my bonus meeting my boss told me that I had done a great job and I was the best performer on the team by far, but he had to give a certain number of people a good review, some a fair review, and one an under-performing review. He didn't do this by job performance but by length of service, and since I was a new guy he gave me the poor review so I got almost no bonus! After that I didn't work so hard....
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Performance review outcomes purely on the basis of length of service? That's abysmal! Sure sounds like you had a very good reason for making them your former employer. What a bunch of total jerks.
Re:Yes, and it sucked! (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember a job 10 years ago when the "metrics" were rolled out one year. I had basically taken over the work from ~8 student workers, and had spent almost all of my time rewriting clumsy buggy code with tight maintainable code. In so doing, I was working at about -5 kloc/year. Therefore I was the "least productive" person remaining on the team. My manager laughed as he delivered the news. We laughed. However, my request for them to "stop even taking meaningless metrics" was met with "sorry, ain't ever gonna happen".
Re:Yes, and it sucked! (Score:5, Funny)
After that I didn't work so hard....
This should be a lesson to you: next time don't work so hard from the beginning.
Exactly. Make it impossible to underpay you; achieve negative productivity.
Grand poobah (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the best way to survive this type of system?
Set up your own religion like L. Ron Hubbard.You could also found your own Fortune 500 corporation but that's more work. Which ever path you choose it boils down to the same truth, if you are the grand poobah you don't have to perform, only punish your underlings for not doing so.
Gamify (Score:5, Insightful)
Does your company do this?
Yes.
What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Gamify. At my company, what makes things even worse is that to be considered in the top 20%, you have to show initiative and contribution *outside* of your core responsibility. This involves:
Whatever you do, absolutely never, ever get your head down for long periods and just get things done. That is the road to, at best, an "average" rating. You see, by doing your job well, you are simply doing what is expected of you. It does not matter how complex or easy your job is - no one knows or cares. All they see is someone doing their work.
Re:Gamify (Score:5, Insightful)
A 10 minute talk during your coffee break with your boss can influence your rating just as much as that report you've been working on for 4 months. Your boss will spend about the same time on both (10 minutes).
Re:Gamify (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Something like this happened to me at my first job. They had flexible hours, so I'd come in a little late (like 10AM), and leave after everyone else, only working 8 hours plus lunch break. My boss had no complaints. Then I decided I'd like to get home earlier so I could do stuff in the evenings, so I started getting up early and getting to work early, like 7AM. Again, I worked 8 hours plus lunch, but now I was leaving while my boss was still there (as he was showing up around 9AM), so he complained that
Avoid being black-mailed (Score:4, Interesting)
This might be a difference in work-place culture, but whenever I choose a job I always only considered the fixed salary part for comparison. If I was happy with that, the job is ok. If I need some bonuses to make a decent living, it was re-negotiation time. The nice consequence of this is, that I don't care much about the rigmaroles with performance reviews to decide on the bonus. That makes me very relaxed and whatever comes in is just a nice bonus and nothing I really need. In the end by not caring, I swim along with the average, but I still can tell them to get stuffed if the idiocy becomes too rampart. And being the one to stand up and voice what everyone is thinking sometimes makes you popular or someone to be consulted beforehand.
In the companies I worked for, the more formal and stupid the system was, the easier it was to gamble. I liked best the system with self-defined yearly goals, where the road to success was in the skill to formulate impressive sounding goals where the non-performance was hard to verify. Or to be part in projects that get shut down because of reorganisation before being delivered. That never got me top rates, but before going through the hassle of digging through the bones for some real data average success and bonus (or slightly above average, if I bickered too much about my valuable contributions) was assumed independent of the actual performance.
For me that gives the best results for a minimum of exposure to the whole idiocy.
It is an system well adapted to microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
This ensure that the company only keeps burnt our overachiever and political sharks.
With a little bit of luck it'll drive them into the ground.
And anyway anybody working for microsoft deserves "advanced corporate management techniques" being applied to him or her.
Here's how we do it... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we're still a Fortune 10 company... we manufacture consumer products globally, and have a global performance evaluation (PE) process. I will be as generic as possible in the terminology. Oh, I'm a manager who conducts PE's, and also a volunteer on the personnel development forum (PDF) for non-management personnel.
For PE's, we have a top-tier level that's limited to 15% of the eligible pool. In my department so far this year, we've not nominated enough people to meet that 15% (we're in a new region, and all of the local employees are new). Then there's 70% to 85% of people that are achievers. This bracket is slightly open because there's an allowance of 15% of under-achievers and non-performers. The key is, we're *not* forced to bracket anyone into the lower tiers. And like I said for the top tier, we're not forced to bracket people into that tier, either.
Our system makes sense. Not everyone can be a super-star; even when everyone is a super-star, there's always a small percentage that have a little bit of an edge. And because we're not forced to rank anyone as under-achievers, we recognize that even the weakest link might be carrying his or her weight -- and carrying weight (do your job) is all we ask!
To prevent abuse, all of the top 15% and the lower 15% (if any) all go to the PDF committee that I mentioned I'm in. There, my fellow managers and I review the proposals for the highest-achiever rankings, and we all have to agree. Basically, you can't screw your way to the top, or other methods of brown-nosing.
And as a low-level manager (organizationally-speaking), I'm subject to the same process at my pay grade. And I'm fairly happy with it.
360 degree reviews (Score:4, Interesting)
best way to survive (Score:4, Informative)
Within: Is to remember that the ratings are subjective. Make friends. Particularly make nice with the boss. Then perform competently so they have no reason to downrank you, while having reasons to rank you above the other competent people.
Without: Is to leave for a place that uses a sane management system. There are plenty. Some of them are eating Microsoft's lunch right now. People who are actually competent software engineers are in extreme demand right now, there's no shortage of jobs for that skillset. A recruiter can get you a list of a few hundred positions for you to choose from on a moment's notice.
No, not quite like that (Score:3)
Most competence systems I've seen has a 1-5 performance rating where 3 is performing okay, 4 well and 5 exceptionally. On occasion there's a 2 for underperforming and very rarely an 1 which is basically fail but it's rare because you shouldn't get promoted to that level if you aren't already performing like one. That's usually reserved for total mishires or people who've had some kind of personal breakdown. Saying that X% of your workers are underperforming is saying that your hiring process fails X% of the time - that figure should be close to zero.
Of course before that there's usually a set of skills that your employment level should have, so the demands on a "Senior Developer" is different from a "Junior Developer". Usually these are set up in a competence matrix, so when they're looking at possible promotions they can say yes, you're coding at a Senior Developer coding level but you lack skill X which is required to be a Senior Developer. Skills development is related but actually quite distinct from your work performance, you can have done your job excellently but done very little to improve your skill set.
Sane companies also look at professional development, if you're a first year Senior Developer whose performance has improved but still is below average you're probably a better choice than the 5th year Senior Developer whose performance has declined and is now equal to yours, those two are connected. It was probably a better idea to promote him to an okay performing Senior Developer than for him to be an overachieving Junior Developer. That's another reason 5s are so rare, if you are that good you should be in a position with higher demands.
That said, when it comes down to it managers can pretty much manage to tweak the rating however they want. That said, even the worst of managers want to look good to their team/departments bosses and customers. If they know you're critical for them to deliver on time and in good quality, you'll survive most of the office politics. But without trying to kiss too much ass, make sure your boss knows what you're doing for him. Don't expect him to find out on his own.
Try being a manager who has this imposed on you .. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, that's what ended up happening, not that any of my workforce found out about that 'deal'. I lasted a further four years of management in increasingly Kafka-esque circumstances until I decided that I should stop trying to rise up the ranks of management, give up and go back to being a techie. I've never regretted the decision, and I can sleep at night.
I don't know (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no idea how my current employer does performance review. I haven't had to deal with performance reviews in over 15 years. This is one of the benefits of working as a consultant on a contract, and one of the things I don't miss about working as an employee.
I personally find consulting to be a more civilized, sane way to earn a living. My total compensation gets negotiated up front, for some prescribed period of time. Then, when the time is up, we just negotiate again(1). Simple. No fuss, no mess. You know how much you're making, and you don't feel shortchanged when the bean counters decide to cut down on some fringe benefit.
I guess that periodic contract extensions would count as a periodic performance review, of some sort. But there's no bureaucracy involved, and I don't need to dance like a pony, in front of someone. It's purely a business transaction, and nothing more.
The oft heard suggestion of unionizing is a joke. It's never going to happen. If you want to unionize, sure, but good luck to you. On the other hand, if you want to become a consultant, that can happen today. Your choice.
(1) Yes, I've went through an occasion of an 800lb corporate gorilla deciding, by fiat, to cut all their consultants' rates, for budgetary reasons, assuming that everyone is going to accept it and that they have no choice in the matter. As my then-managers discovered, that assumption was wrong. One of the other benefits of consulting, you see, is far fewer questions of what happened at your last job. Naturally, contracts come to an end all the time, and one's services are no longer required. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly understandable, and expected.
questions i ask in the interview (Score:3)
Could this be a long time coming? (Score:3)
I got introduced in this system twelve years ago. In the nineties I had never worked for a company which did such evaluation.
I have no qualms about evaluations per se, but when I heard how this worked, my immediate reaction was a real WTF moment.
I have in the course of school and my career been introduced into statistics several times, and I know the Gauss curve. So my first reaction really was, wtf. you do not go measuring and plotting your data, and then expand your bell curve. No, if you want to know if there are outliers then you do this match against your mean and your standard deviation. That way you can see the underperformers, but also the people who are really, really good (or one should investigate the matter).
However, the biggest wtf is really that I am working in a company with many engineers (master level engineers). I expect these people to understand these issues in probability/statistics and made a statement against this misuse of mathematics a long time ago, which is absolutely not the case.
subject (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe my company has the same system, only the complete gutting of bonuses years ago and the fact that a stellar rating gets you around 0.3% more on the pathetic annual salary increase means that no one cares.
My last performance review contained two directly contradictory statements from my manager, in what I suspect was an uncorrected cut-and-paste from the previous year. I didn't bring it up, because either way I was getting the same shitty raise. That's motivation for you.
Start your own business (Score:3, Insightful)
When it comes down to it EVERYONE has their own business. When you are traditionally employed, your business has one customer, and if you lose that customer by quitting or getting fired, you're out of business. Start your own business and remember each customer is an income stream. Multiple income streams mean more money and more security, and also give you the ability to fire customers you don't want to do business with.
This doesn't mean it's easy or even possible for everyone. My business was much harder to start than I ever thought it would be, but the challenges have been worthwhile both in income and in getting out of corporate BS like the stacked ranking game.
Middle managers who have no skills beyond playing office politics and self-promotion are pretty much stuck in the corporate rat race, but people with real skills that translate to marketable goods or services can make it on their own if they can learn how to build business structures and processes to run their business and a marketing plan to get customers.
The Slashdotter who said the best way to win is not to play the game was right. This post suggests one way HOW get out of the game.
gamut (Score:3)
I've worked for big companies (IBM) that had twice-a-year reviews that involved goal setting, evaluation of whether goals were achieved, and rating yourself on a bunch of silly categories. Bonuses were tied to your score. I've worked for small companies that tried to do the same, and I've worked for even smaller companies where there was no review system (or performance bonuses) whatsoever. I vastly prefer the latter. If I'm doing a crappy job and am in danger of losing my job then tell me. If I'm doing an awesome job and you're especially pleased with my performance then tell me. If I'm meeting expectations but not doing anything awesome then don't waste my time (and create awkwardness between manager and employee that needn't exist) by making me go through performance reviews.
My company used to do this (Score:4, Informative)
My company used to do this and yes, it does suck. Not only because it does force unnatural rankings depending on the mix of people, but because the good old boys and people who have connections don't get weeded out as part of the process. I remember one of my good employees getting 'targeted' to land in the bottom of the rankings and having to haul the rank meeting manager and the HR person into a different room and asking if they wanted to continue tarring and feathering the good employee, or should I go back in and bring up the couple of 25 year plus employees who did nothing more than recirculate the air in a cubicle. Turns out they didn't.
How do you defeat this? Pretty much perception, perception, perception. To succeed in one of these things, the managers in the room folding, spindling and mutilating your annual contributions should all know who your employees are, approximately what they do, and have a favorable impression of them. This is a year long marketing effort to get recognition for your people, name them in staff meetings and in written status reports when they do something good. Death is some manager in the meeting that one of your employees did something to during the year, but they decided to wait until the review process to bring it up.
The difference between the guys at the top and the guys at the bottom are the ones at the top got talked about and everyone in the room said "Yep, good guy" while the ones at the bottom were people nobody knew, someone had a bad experience with them, or nobody understood their accomplishments.
So the marching orders are a) make sure you know what you're working on and that what you're working on has measurable value and is important to the business. If you cant identify the value and importance, simply stop doing it. Make sure everyone knows what you're doing. Make sure every time you interact with a manager that its a positive outcome or bring it up with you so you can repair the situation in advance of the review session. Market the heck out of your people and put them in front of as much management as possible. I used to send employees in my stead to meetings or have them make major presentations where most managers want to do it themselves.
Done properly, this could be a good tool. Not done properly (and it usually isnt done properly) its a stress inducing sales job and whoever has the best skills at presenting employees and hardballing the HR people will get the results.
There are also a number of other little things to pay attention to. I found out that each of these sessions has a hunk of money and stock options to give out to the group, but that they rarely allocate all of it and if it isn't allocated, that falls back into the general pool. So I found out that if I approached the HR person and asked if there was any residual we could divvy up among the top 2 or 3 people, they'd often do it.
Worst System Except for all the Others (Score:5, Insightful)
The first thing is that, as a manager of a small team, you do NOT have to meet a curve. That's only required at high levels with hundreds or thousands of employees in the pool. You DO have to rank your people in order and argue for them at a meeting with your peers. If you have a team of 6 or 8 people, I'll be very surprised if you don't know who your best person is--and who the worst one is. As a general rule, you ought to be able to rank your whole team in order from best to worst, with perhaps a few ties. (Generally, though, I didn't end up with ties.)
So together with your peers, you now try to slot 50 or so people into three rankings: 4.0 for the best 25%, 3.5 for the bulk of the people and 3.0 for the bottom 20%. (There is special handling for superstars at 4.5 and total losers at 2.5, but that's a post-process with no quotas.) The argument always revolves around strong 3.5 people who "ought" to be 4.0 and weak 3.5 people who "don't deserve" to be 3.0. Not a surprise; every manager overrates his/her own people. The pressure to meet a quota forces people to have hard arguments about how valuable each person's work really was. It can even help a manager see the importance of putting people on the highest-value tasks. At the end of it, there are typically two or three borderline individuals, but everyone else pretty much has the rating they actually earned. The General Manager takes the result up to the stack ranking at the next level, armed with appropriate arguments for the borderline folks.
One time, I worked on a project with high-visibility and lots of pressure. At review time, we told management we wanted to give about 50% 4.0 (instead of the usual 25%) and only one or two 3.0 reviews (out of a team of ~100). They pushed that up, and it was granted. We did exceptional work, so they let us blow out the curve. But it only happened once in 14 years.
What are the alternatives? Have a Union that gives everyone the same rewards regardless of the work he/she did? Doesn't seem like a winner to me.
So to answer the OP's question, how do you succeed in such a system, the answer is: work hard, do good work, help others who get stuck, and BE SEEN DOING IT. When your manager says "Jane is my best worker," you want all his/her peers to nod and say "yeah, Jane is great! She helps us out all the time!" When your manager says "Jack deserves a better rating," you don't want his/her peers to say "that lazy bum? He couldn't find his ass with both hands!" But most important of all is for your manager to actually see you as someone who gets stuff done. Whatever anyone tries to claim, most teams only have a few such people on them. They rarely go unrewarded.
--Greg
Re:obvious answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Overachieving isn't guaranteed to get you a high ranking. It's a political game, much like popularity in a high school. It's not about how well you perform, it's about who you know.
Re:obvious answer (Score:5, Interesting)
This doesn't work though.
I can give you a real world example. My partner was a retail manager for a well known denim retailer, and was consistently the top in the country each year in terms of year on year growth no matter which store she was assigned to. The problem is only one manager was allowed to be graded 1 on a scale of 1 to 5 or whatever it was. She obviously deserved it as she was the one consistently performing the best, but this had issues.
If it was given to her year on year, the other managers felt they had no chance and just had no motivation to excel themselves because they were only going to get a 2 anyway - they could try really hard and almost do as well as her, but not quite, so why try when they'd get a 2 regardless? The worst part being these grades were linked to your annual rise, so no matter how hard you tried you'd only get a smaller rise against her.
So the management figured well hey, we need to motivate the other folks, so we'll give it to them for how hard they tried, rather than actual results, and so then it's my girlfriend who despite her stellar performance instead suffers and gets a lower payrise. Then she has no motivation to really continue to outshine, because she's not gaining anything for it, in fact, someone that performed worse than her is getting a better reward than she did.
Of course, the solution may then be to increase the number of people who get a 1, but then at that 1/2 boundary you have the EXACT same problem. Those who try real hard can never quite catch the top performers so are not motivated to do so. Really, the only solution is to instead rank people based on a sensible balance of effort and performance without any cap on how many can be deemed to be top performers. If you extend it to say 5 out of 30 people can have the top grade, then what happens when your survival of the fittest type management system gets the 6 best managers in the country in? well, the 6th one will fuck off elsewhere because they'll be getting shit on relative to the others. It'd be far better if all 6, or all 7, 8, 9, or 10 could get equal reward so that you retain the 10 best managers in the country, rather than stick yourself permanently with only the 5 best, letting the other 5 fuck off to your competitors.
The problem with your theory is that yeah, it works great for the top person, but what the fuck is the use in a system that means that 29 of your 30 staff just have no reason to be motivated? That's a complete failure of management.
I've personally not had a problem being in the top percentile myself, but I'd absolutely fucking hate to work under this system because it'd mean everyone around me was unmotivated meaning I'd be carrying the team - I want my coworkers to be motivated, I want them to do well, to be praised, to be given reason to care about their job, because that makes my life easier regardless of whether I'm a top performer, or a bottom performer.
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
If you hire good managers you don't need this kind of crutch, the good managers will know who deserves what praise and reward, and who needs to be fired.
Re: (Score:3)
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
I think the term "manager" has been severely overloaded in the modern corporate world. I think there are at least three different types of management:
1) Budget management - bean counting and other forms of paper-pushing
2) People management - acting as a buffer between your team and the rest of the company, as well as dealing with issues internal to the team like personality conflicts, motivation, career path, etc
3) Product management - mostly technical and creative work all revolving around the life-cycle
Re: (Score:3)
"Your GF should have been promoted to a trainer of other managers, given a raise and been told that she now only meets expectations and is competing with other top retail management trainers. Now she's responsible for creating more copies of herself."
Which is exactly what she ended up doing. But how does that help the problem? someone simply fills her place and you still have the exact same problem again with the person who filled the space left by her exit.
"They also need to break that group up. Make it a
Re:obvious answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, MS hires good people. If you are competing against other good people (not useless dolts), then it's hard to win on ability alone. It's far more effective to do a reasonable job, and suck up to your boss / make your boss look good / advertise your "achievements" to your boss's peers, etc.
Eventually, the people who are good at the game get promoted, and forget that the game is actually a bad thing. They start consciously rewarding people for playing the game (not getting fooled by it, but actually expecting their workers to game the system), and madness prevails.
Re: (Score:3)
Only it doesn't work, because this type of system ensures that only the top percentile remain in the team in the long run, meaning that last year's top performances become this year's average target. In short, if you're an overachiever, you'll raise the bar for everyone else, including yourself. It's a self-defeating system.
On top of that then there's the issue of actually measuring who the top performers actually are. Ok, with some jobs that might be fairly straight forward. However most of us here are techies, how do you measure the performance of a software engineer or quality assurance. (I ask because I know some of the people in the company get rated highly because their managers talk them up and the company gets this fantasy about how great they are. Should I mention I have a QA person now that basically had me waste mon
Re: (Score:3)
Don't put up with that shit. Vote with your feet and quit your job. Stop being a bitch.
Or, depending on your region work opportunities and your physical appearance, start being one.
Re: (Score:3)
... is be ranked the best.
FTFY.
Re:Blame Management (Score:4, Insightful)
> To survive in an environment with a forced bell curve, let me paraphrase Shakespeare: "Kill all MBAs."
The people who do nonsense like this are often not MBAs. MBAs should be telling them why this is a bad idea. In my experience, MBAs are taught that this is a bad idea.
> if the company did its job correctly in the first place (hiring great people and not hiring bozos)
Unfortunately, this is hard. Sometimes you make a mistake and hire a bozo. Sometimes you hire a star, and he becomes a bozo. Personally, I like the motto "Hire slow, fire fast." which I think goes to your doing "its job correctly in the first place." Take the time to hire the right people. When you end up with a bad apple, don't take a year to get rid of them, especially if you have a 90 day probationary period.
Actually, that might be one thing that leads to systems like this. It's hard for a big company to fire just one person. They tie themselves in HR knots. But if it's standard operating procedure to fire X% every year, well that's easy! I'm not saying I approve, merely that I may see why this particular pathology develops.
Re:Lockheed Martin (Score:4, Interesting)