For what it's worth, I thought their SWE interview was very fair. It was far more practical than my interviews at Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
I ended up accepting an offer from another company, but I'd say the entire experience was pleasant. I liked the engineers I talked to (of whom over half were women) and it seemed like they genuinely enjoyed what they did.
Oh, calm down, I was just making a snarky comment about Uber using antiquated and long-discarded processes and acting like they invented something new. In reality, I'm confident that an Uber interview would suck just as much, but not a smidgen more, than most tech interviews these days.
As for Mt Fuji. I was asked some stupid question about burning ropes at an interview. My answer was "I don't know, what's the answer?" The company hired me. I was talking to the guy later, and he said he liked to ask questions like that "to see how I think." So I asked him "How do I think?"
The answer, by the way, is to light one of the ropes on fire on both ends, the other on a single end. When the first is done, the second has half the time left and you can time whatever contrived thing you're timing with rope.
If your company does 360 reviews or has a "rating" system (smart companies refuse to call it a ranking), it's the same thing. It's in the corporate america HR handbook. If you are ranked highly, someone had to be ranked lowly.
I'm a manager at my company. We have a rating system, and there is no need for someone else to be ranked lowly for you to be ranked highly.
What that DOES mean, though, is that someone has to keep pressure on people not to rank everyone as awesome. Because, look:
a. Managers are, contrary to rumor, people too. We don't enjoy the awkward, painful meetings in which we deliver negative feedback. We don't enjoy telling people that they aren't getting a raise, or that they need to improve or be terminated. That sucks. Personally, it keeps me up nights, and I've heard the same from many other managers.
b. Managers are also graded themselves on how effective their employees are. Like, if your employees are persistently rated below average, well, what's the common factor across your employees? Vice versa if they're all high performers.
So if you just tell managers "rate your employees, follow your conscience," then there is a grade inflation incentive. Even if you're super-disciplined and make painfully realistic assessments of your employees' abilities, Bob one team over may give everyone fives, and then you end up looking like a bad manager and also maybe you get to go and put someone on a PIP.
The company needs some way to stop this. Stack ranking is one such way. I don't like it, I think it's overall a bad way, but it's a mechanistic way, which is more valuable the larger your company. Small companies can have a powerful manager or small group of managers who "keep people honest." That doesn't scale.
You can use another mechanic to keep people honest, but all mechanics are exploitable.
So one manager is below average at hiring and randomly hires people, ending up with a nicely fit bell curve range of high and low performers. Another manager is great at hiring highly performing people, but now if they rank correctly, you look at their assessments with your cheat metric, the good manager is 'inflating' their ratings. In other words, looking at the rankings alone doesn't do anything for actually enforcing quality.
Sure. There is no single silver bullet that actually enforces quality everywhere.
But look, inflation is bad. If grades aren't inflated, and I rate someone a 3, then we say, "This person is a solid employee. We're happy they're here, we're giving them an average raise, everything's cool. Do we have a little constructive feedback that says, 'Hey, here's how you could take it to the next level?' Sure. But we're happy with them."
If grades are inflated and I give someone a 3, then oh shit, maybe they're in trouble! Because some asshole had to give everyone in his team a 4 or 5, and now my solid employee looks like he's underperforming the company average.
The fact is, a solid 4+ rating means you're a really great employee. Teams that are all high performing are super rare, and tend to be really, really, really obvious within a company.
Now, is it a valid criticism of stack ranking that it makes it not just difficult but impossible to describe a team that's solidly above average? Yes, absolutely. Stack ranking is kind of dumb. But understand that despite interesting and compelling stories about people being unfairly rated lower than they deserve, that's not the big problem that companies face. In general, the incentives for everyone is to rate people higher than they deserve, not lower (with toxic exceptions like what Fowler faced). And if you set up your whole system to make really sure that it embraces the idea of everyone being super awesome, you probably don't get a highly functional rating system out the other side. It's probably better to set one up that embraces the idea of average teams (average for your company) and let people override the system when you say, "Oh my god, this entire team is just killing it this review cycle."
> Teams that are all high performing are super rare, and tend to be really, really, really obvious within a company.
Teams that don't fit a normal distribution are incredibly common.
And I think the bigger problem is money allocated for pay increases.
If the average 3 rating employee in your team can get a 10% annualised return each time they change jobs then the company should be budgeting 10% for a grade of 3. In practice this doesn't happen.
> Teams that don't fit a normal distribution are incredibly common.
This doesn't make a team of high performing folks any less rare because extremes tend to be rare. It just means that reality doesn't always look like the average. You might have no high performers but 5 average ones, or 2 high performers and 3 below average (maybe they are just learning?).
One team out of many being high performers might just be luck or a good manager, for sure, but it definitely warrants checking things out because of the rarity. The same would go for an entire team that is below par without obvious reason. It might not even be an issue with the supervising manager themselves, but with the way the company scores that sort of team.
> Teams that don't fit a normal distribution are incredibly common.
> > Now, is it a valid criticism of stack ranking that it makes it not just difficult but impossible to describe a team that's solidly above average? Yes, absolutely. Stack ranking is kind of dumb.
Isn't the solution to some of these problems to assess the teams results overall? If they are performing as required or expected (i.e. hitting targets) whatever the team metric, then wouldn't that explain rank inflation?
The ranking of people requires either one of two things:
1. fitting your group of people to a bell curve regardless of their proper distribution in reality
2. ranking inflation or deflation
Seems like a broken system designed either to generate make-work for managers and HR or to give the illusion of personnel manipulations to improve performance.
I thought of that, and it's a seductive answer, but I'm not sure anyone wants it to be done mechanically that way. (If you're just eyeballing things and then having multiple people have input to keep the primary manager honest, then yes, I think that the team's performance should be kept in mind).
Like, say your team didn't hit its OKRs. Should that mean that your manager has to make the average of your team's ratings be below 3? Certainly, one reason why your team failed to hit its numbers might be because most or all members of the team are poor performers. But it might also be that your manager didn't organize your work well, or it might have been that your numbers were unrealistic.
If a team didn't perform as necessary and all it's rankings were high, that would be some damn useful information regarding the manager, the teams it interacted with or depended on, and/or the companies goals, deadlines, and methods of setting those.
One answer (not necessarily the answer) is to ensure that up-leveled calibration conversations are happening and that next-level managers are informed about their people.
It's a delicate balance and, as a director myself, I don't claim to always get it right. But the goal I aim for is: if we have a good manager hiring great people and a mediocre manager hiring mediocre people that we calibrate correctly across those managers rather than claim that one is inflating their rankings.
At review time, get all of the group in a room, including the manager, and vote on who should leave. Because in a toxic environment, people are discussing that privately anyway, so let's be open and transparent.
The person voted isn't necessarily made to leave. It's an opportunity for them to focus on improving themselves personally, possibly in a program.
No, I suppose it doesn't. But neither does secret stack ranking. I once asked exactly where I was on the stack, and was told that's proprietary information.
The only way to get team cohesion is positive-sum priorities. If I spend more time helping you improve long-term and less time delivering on my own responsibilities, that needs to improve my next evaluation, otherwise I'm pretty much compelled to stop doing it.
> At review time, get all of the group in a room, including the manager, and vote on who should leave. Because in a toxic environment, people are discussing that privately anyway, so let's be open and transparent.
This a genius idea. That way you push the liability of discrimination from the company to the employees at an individual level. It's like mob rule but for companies.
> The person voted isn't necessarily made to leave. It's an opportunity for them to focus on improving themselves personally, possibly in a program.
I can't begin to imagine how awkward it would be to be voted off the island and stick around anyway.
An absolute scale of ranks for each discipline, and some clarity on what types of performance result in increases or decreases in that scale. AFAIK Google uses this now, and many traditional or government software companies use this (e.g. Software Engineer III, Systems Engineer IV, etc).
Why would a manager be graded on how they grade their own people? Also, stack ranking "solves" the problem only because it makes the idea obviously ridiculous, because all managers would be graded equally.
If I read correctly, they rank yet do not have quotas. Someone performing well doesn't mean someone got scored low. In this system, a low performing person can become average by improving skills.
With this in mind, it makes sense to grade the manager. If a manager has a lot of poor performers, they might not be giving staff the training, support, and feedback that is necessary to improve. If they all get high scores, they might be grading too easily. I'm guessing they have controls to help lessen this.
I don't really like "systems" for ranking and scoring people in general, but just as an exercise in systems design here, what about this for a strategy?
1. Each manager gives their people an absolute score
2. A meta-manager checks in with all managers over the course of the year and keeps tabs on performance of a randomly selected group of people (some scalable fraction of the total workforce. As this number goes up you could hire a few more people to do this job).
3. Each meta-manager looks for obvious goofy scoring discrepancies (how can person A have a lower rating than person B?).
4. Each manager is on the hook to defend those ratings in the face of scrutiny to justify why they rated Tony Terrible better than Andy Awesome. This expectation of accountability prevents them from inflating their scores too much.
> If your company does 360 reviews or has a "rating" system (smart companies refuse to call it a ranking), it's the same thing. It's in the corporate america HR handbook. If you are ranked highly, someone had to be ranked lowly.
Damn straight and that's a natural side effect of having a pool of limited resources (i.e. bonus money and promotions) to offer.
Stack ranking is not a rating system. In a normal rating system, fi you have a team of all-star engineers you can give everyone 4/5 or 5/5. In a stack ranking system, you have (for example) two slots for 5/5, two slots for 1/5, etc. This means that even if you have the ten best engineers in the company on your team, two of them are going to get the lowest possible rating (and thus be unable to leave the team). They won't get promotions, they won't get bonuses, and they won't be appreciated.
The problem with stack ranking isn't that employees can be ranked higher or lower than one another (as in any normal rating system), it's that you absolutely have to give someone a failing mark, even if no one actually failed.
This means that if you get transferred to a team where everyone is highly skilled, then you run a real chance of being the person who gets ranked terrible and can never get a raise or promotion unless your other teammates leave – or unless you sabotage their progress or refuse to help them in an effort to try to lower their performance.
360 reviews underpin the hit CBS show Survivor. I'm sure some eager type can take that premise and run with it to form a critique of corporate America.
Also note that MBAs and other business types have learnt to game the system by providing 5 star all around. Why? Your average tenure at a company is low (2-3 years). You need your peers for your next job. Why denigrate each other.
In my company moving up the ranks is pretty difficult in tech whereas other departments are very generous with titles (and the salaries that come with them).
It seems engineers are not smart enough to game the system and actually rank each other honestly. Whereas the business and law guys know better.
The rational response from employees to stack ranking is immediately (or ASAP) quit upon receiving a low-ranking slot. Company is (ostensibly) happy to get rid of a "low performer", employee finds their market value, everyone is theoretically happy. Ironically, if your hiring process (arguably a difficult aspect of management and leadership) is firing on all cylinders, stack ranking is blind to that, and thus strongly disincentivizes improving your hiring practices in the first place.
It's a perverse form of letting bugs slip through careful coding and design practices when they are far cheaper to fix, and letting them loose into production facing customers when they are way more expensive (monetarily and soft factors) to resolve, but in the hiring and retention realm.
I learned about stack ranking the hard way. When I quit, it caused all sorts of commotion, culminating in the CEO personally calling me to nicely and politely ask me to stay, far contrary to my worst-slot ranking would suggest. That opened my eyes to its drawbacks. I can see a use case for stack ranking as a leadership tool in situations with clear featherbedding, but when used as a permanent policy it's management cargo-culting at best, Jack Welch fetishization at worst.
Politely declined; burned no bridges. I already accepted an offer by the time I quit that added 50% to my base pay, with bonuses on top and lots of career development benefits (pay to send me to speaking engagements at conferences, for example), and with a direct manager who was eager for my contributions. In that particular instance, stack ranking's practical effect served to severely depress my skill base's value and my compensation plan, as there were several fast similar offers, and the frantic response from the stack rank-using company's management layers highlighted they had a good idea of the value I was delivering. The CEO understood both the surface and subtext, after some very good salesmanship got nowhere.
If any readers ever find themselves in a similar situation, do not explain the details of why you refuse to stay on, as that only cracks opens a door to high-pressure negotiation. Easiest way out is simply state you already accepted a very attractive offer, if pressed for details respond the other company swore you to not disclose the terms to anyone, and stay polite.
Like a proper diet and working out where there is no substitute for doing the work, stack ranking rarely if ever substitutes for accomplished, attentive leadership (as contrasted with tactical aspects of management, a core prerequisite to said leadership). It is a useful scalpel if/when wielded properly, and is best left in the toolbox otherwise.
One thing I don't recall seeing mentioned in these discussions is validity checking based on the different sources of ratings.
If you're seeing widely varying ratings of a single person that seems like it'd be a big red flag - if the boss says 1 or 2 but coworkers or reports average 3.5+ that's a situation that seems to cry out for further investigation. Similarly, if the boss says "4" but coworkers and reports average 1.5, there's probably also a serious problem.
I'm sure investigating involves costs that companies don't want to incur, but if you have that kind of disconnect going on it may be cheaper to investigate and resolve it than to deal with the eventual fallout.
I've seen the personal aftermath of bad bosses and work environments on people in the past, and it's really not pretty. If you're talking with someone about work and say "Mean Girls" and get a response of "Oh my god yes!" that's a pretty good indicator of a toxic work environment.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, a 360 review doesn't require this kind of ranking. A 360 review just indicates that you're getting feedback/reviews from all directions relative to the org chart (manager, reports, peers, etc). What you do with that feedback and if you stack rank or something similar is what creates the zero-sum game.
rocket fueled success makes waaaay too many people overlook egregious problems with company culture.
Just look at Theranos and Zenefits for examples. If it wasn't this situation, we wouldn't have heard anything till something disastrous happened to Uber. Thats just the way it works.
It is impossible to keep everyone happy at a company at all times. The difference between a company which seems to have happy employees and the one that doesn't seems to be the amount of PR spending. It is an advertising problem. Some companies managed to build that image by selective targeting. Otherwise how do you explain the churn rate of employees in the valley?
What a coincidence, my company is also is full of happy employees with remarkably low churn (most employees here have been here for 3+ years, many for ~10), and it's in the Valley! ...and it's not a big company like Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc.
Ditto. I read some of these stories and wonder in what foreign land these companies are based. It's not like anywhere I've worked, or where any of my friends work. Yes, in the valley.
This seems like overgrown and irrelevant cynicism. Of course people are unhappy at any company; however, it's clear that some back better cultures and some are more toxic than others due to bad practices and conditions. The idea that it's all about PR is sophomoric.
How do you explain the amount of money/effort spent by the big companies in trying to attract young kids out of college and the cultish attraction for these companies from young people who know nothing about the industry?
Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.
How do you explain the amount of money/effort spent by the big companies in trying to attract young kids out of college and the cultish attraction for these companies from young people who know nothing about the industry?
Because in the long run, they believe it to be cheaper because they can hire in college grads at a lower rate and think they are profiting because they should be versed in the newest stuff. In addition, this stuff (with larger companies) is good for business. This article is an example: Uber is getting bad publicity for treating workers badly, but other companies? Not so much because they promote a better image.
Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.
For the recruitment thing? The best thing I can think of is by making sure people are educated. Beyond that, strong labor laws and separating health care from employment will help, but won't solve the issue.
As far as solving the "most folks are unhappy at work" - strong labor laws and health care. Outside of that, it is more up to the employer. While not everyone will be happy, you can make the majority of folks that stay there a while content - some places do this now.
OK, color me not surprised to see that you're defending Uber elsewhere on sibling posts.
The point is that yes, there is PR involved. However, not having a toxic workplace is another. It is an idiotic suggestion that the perception of how good it is to work at one company or another is purely a matter of PR. Engineers talk to each other and do very frank "what it was like to work for BigCo X" all over the place. I think you probably understand this but it doesn't really fit well with your agenda here.
Honestly, work at a lot of companies is a drag, for a lot of people. Big deal. However, stories like the ones coming out of Uber are far outside the norm, even if you think that the endless publicity about shiny happy people working at same of the other companies is a product of PR.
Are you calling me a shill? Look at my profile, 3268 days on this site.
You are not able to handle a disagreement and called me all kinds of names. You should talk to your colleagues and see if they think you might be one of those overbearing colleagues who is contributing to a toxic culture by throwing a fit at everyone who disagrees with you.
I am not taking a side on this issue. Uber is a victim here. No one plans to have a toxic culture at work. I am just trying to put down the mob mentality by pointing out the obvious challenges.
You are repeatedly raising a non sequitur ("ooo, look, companies use PR to make it sound like they are good places to work") and using it to gloss over the fact that the stories emerging from Uber are bizarre and out of the norm. I'm beyond caring whether or not you are just simulating stupidity here.
Toxicity at workplace comes from attitude like you are showing. You just called me stupid for holding a different point of view. I bet you are not such a great colleague either.
I do not think the stories out of Uber are any out of ordinary. These are same stories that came out from finance industry and Hollywood. Success attracts problems like this. There is nothing you can do about it other than wait it out.
Have you worked at more than one company in the valley? There are vast differences in general happiness in different places.
Churn rate has a ton of other reasons, unless you want to pack so many different variables under 'happiness' that the term is meaningless.
But I guess if you're right, we have a test case: Uber will soon be perceived as Disneyland, because they have a massive hairball of a company happiness problem to deal with.
Actually time will solve this problem very easily. Uber does not have to do any thing differently. (Its not a recommendation).
Every successful company has these problems. Success attracts ambitious people and many of these high achievers accomplish their goals ruthlessly. In this process some other people who have different priorities feel left behind. Its just the way of life.
Take all the ambitious people and throw a challenging problem at them that can humble them other than that there is PR. PR expert will come out and tell you that not all teams in uber are bad, some of them are really good and the routine stuff we hear about any other big company.
Not every successful company has the constant stream of horrible behavior emanating from it over the course of years.
Trying to normalize this as growing pains or bored ambitious people(?!?) or whatever is simply false. I don't work there, but know people who have, and left, because it was such a toxic place. The point of my comment was that this was emphatically not a PR problem - it is a culture problem that obviously comes from the top of the firm.
It is a PR problem because all the other people who did not have problems do not come out and say they like it there. If people come out and say I think uber is good to me they will look insensitive given the context of two women with bad experiences. PR will create a place where other people can speak out.
Over all churn rate in the valley is pretty bad, uber cannot doing any worse than the other companies there.
Not sure I agree with the premise, but I think there is a point to be made. When was the last time people griped about the absolutely horrible culture of Amazon and Facebook? It wasn't that long ago, but I don't hear anything any more. I don't even know what it's like to work at Amazon of Facebook (I had one friend who worked at Amazon years ago and loved it -- data point of one), but last year the general consensus around here was that you'd have to be an idiot to work in either of those places. 2 years before that it was Netflix. I heard they just chew you up and spit you out. Now? Not a heard a word for ages. Today it's Uber. Tomorrow it will be someone else and everyone will forget about Uber. If they are smart they will capitalise on our poor memories.
Were these horrible places to work (as commonly reported)? Are they horrible places now? Who knows (certainly not me).
None of the stories coming out of Uber sounds remotely like high achievers making lesser beings feel left behind. It sounds like a toxic culture with lousy management.
We do not know what the truth is. We can only speculate. If those allegations were true, I wish uber will come out and address them.
Uber itself is a victim here. They are going after some other big monopolies in the industry. It could be as simple as their mistakes are blown out of proportion to smear them by their competition. We see similar big co is bad stories once a while its not like Uber has a monopoly in treating employees badly.
> Kalanick told the audience that he and chief product officer Jeff Holden, an Amazon vet, had spent hundreds of hours conceiving the new “philosophy of work.”
I thought we knew by now that you involve the people that will live with the new "philosophy" when "conceiving."
"Hundreds of hours"? I'll bet I've got a twenty year old copy of Microsoft's performance review docs lying around a hard drive somewhere, could have saved them a week of reinventing the wheel.
The Encyclopedia of Stack Ranking, and IIRC this blog was one of the motivators for MSFT to drop stack ranking. The original Michael O. Church, if you will.
I have been working in HRTech for ~8+ years. "Most" of the tech companies operate that way - regardless if they are explicit about it or not. 9-Blocks, 360 degrees, etc are all exercises that have to fit a pre-defined distribution - i.e. "we expect at least 20% of the employees to be low performer". All the exercises of "team and department calibrations" are about to make sure the distribution fits the pre-defined/expected shape. Then some companies "act" on their low performers (stack ranking + policy of getting rid of the bottom 10% every year), some companies use perfomance-plans/other to "talent manage"
Even the ones that don't operate that way seem to be filled with people who are convinced that it's all a zero-sum game... leading to the same essential result. The problem mainly seems to be that far from making any attempt to limit or corral that kind of behavior (and far worse) Uber either tacitly encouraged it, or almost psychotically ignored it.
Do the employees know it? As far as I know, I've never worked at a company anything like this. But then it occurred to me maybe I just have no idea why I get whatever level of raise I get.
It depends on the company. The head of the department is aware. In some cases, the hiring manager might or might not be aware of the entire process ("HR told me to stack rank my direct reports / HR told me to put my team in these 9-blocks"). In large, large company that is typically a headline "Cisco has announced will lay off 500 people next Monday".
There is (almost) always stack ranking for the purposes of equity and bonus distributions, implicit or explicit. But there is also bottom xx% rule for people that must be given bad reviews and placed on PIP. In Microsoft 2000s it was mandatory rule to axe 10% of bottom performers within a team.
My company has 360s and ranking by different levels. the only thing they don't is to lay off the bottom 10%. They stay around. A team of purely top performers is not possible because they still have to fit on the curve.
That means that a team that on average has higher performers than another one is punishing their members where they could be top performers in another team?
That doesn't make sense from an organizational point of view, you end up with teams that are on average worse than others but still treat the top 10% of team A the same as the top performers of the worse team B?
In my view, the answer is yes. Today's employees are well connected, and we are no longer dependent on management for information. We might get our information from friends in management, peers who were once managers somewhere else, networking, and even HN. We can broaden our base of knowledge by assuming that most companies are managed in similar ways, due to shared training, culture, and networking among managers.
I'm a former manager and now a regular employee. I understand the mechanics and politics of stack ranking from experience.
At any given moment, the employees may understand the process better than their direct supervisors, because the employees have no limitations on how they gather information, whereas the managers are busy memorizing corporate talking points.
Small companies often work differently, but this has been like this for as long as I can remember in larger companies (and I'm very nearly 50). Usually there is a budget allocation for raises. Managers rank their workers in ordinal fashion. It's often set in quartiles, lowest quarter is placed on the "must improve" list, second lowest gets no raise. Third lowest gets moderate increase (unless they are hitting the top of their band). Highest gets large increase/band increase. Often these sorted D level groups are mixed up in the C level and at the margins D levels can argue that their employees deserve to be bumped up to the next level (which is why it pays to document all your progress for the year -- it gives your manager ammunition when they compare you to other groups). Finally there are X spots for band increases/exceptional performers (which get paid above their band rate, but do not increase in band because their current function is essential to the team).
Like I said, in large corporations it literally pays to have a politically savy manager and to have documented every single thing you've done during the year. Bonus points if you've condensed it down in a presentable fashion.
I had a friend who made it into management in a large corporation. He decided to do things differently. He told his entire team, "Tell me how much money you want. I will tell you what you need to accomplish to get it." He documented the hell out of what his workers did. His team killed all the other teams -- just steamrolled them in terms of productivity, so he got everything he asked for. Made a lot of enemies, though ;-)
Because often, despite their wishes, it just isn't realistic. For example, if you are a support employee the answer to what you need to do to earn more may very well be "get a new job because support is only valued at X and so we'll never be able to justify paying you more."
That is literally what he would say. If someone would wander over and say, "I want $500K per year", he would tell them "Well, the CTO makes that. So you're going to have to get into management. The best way to do that is to do some technical work that makes you stand out and also show that you can do the management work. I'll give you a technical project to do and it will be up to you to make sure that it is successful. After that we can talk about what parts of my job I can hand over to you so that you can show that you are capable of doing them. Once you show that you are capable of doing everything that I do, I'll recommend you for a promotion. I warn you that you will probably have to put in a lot of unpaid overtime in the mean time."
(Apologies to him if I have misrepresented his ideas -- taken from a discussion I had with him where I asked him exactly this). Anyway, he told me that many people often were quite happy with a lower salary expectation once they understood what was required of the higher salary expectation. Also "I'll tell you what you have to do" doesn't necessarily mean that the person will succeed. If you want the bigger salary you are going to have to choose the harder projects. So it might be "Take this failing project and turn it around. Hmm... yes I know it's a piece of crap legacy app that nobody else wants to touch. Find a way to make it work and I will find a way to get your raise." A lot of people will say, "Oh. No thanks. I'd rather work with the new shiny greenfield project. It's a lot easier and a lot more fun." His approach was to let people self select for their level of performance. And if someone took the gnarly legacy problem and failed miserably, then he would gently (?) suggest that they focus on easier problems until they have built up their skills.
Yep, and the other piece of this is the stress and expectations. At certain levels literally all that matters is results. To some extent a CEO doesn't care how the sausage gets made by a given team because he has people that are paid to worry about that. And so the actual "you need to do X, Y and Z" might not be specific things like "overhaul this legacy thingamajig" or something similar, but rather "find a way to grow revenue 20% YoY with a budget that is 10% lower than last year's."
The other flip side is the risk--if you want to step up to the plate, at a certain level you need to understand that the stakes are such that if you fail, you likely need to leave or you'll be fired/asked to leave.
Not everyone wants that level of responsibility or risk. In my job I oversee one of the biggest sources of spend in the company (ad spend) and am responsible for driving a large part of our growth. If I don't do my job well that has company-wide implications that are present in my mind literally every day. That's a level of ever-present stress that many people don't want.
"“The world isn’t really on an annual cycle anymore,” GE head of human resources Susan Peters said at the time, explaining that millennial workers in particular wanted faster, more frequent, mobile-enabled feedback."
Literally nobody, not even a millennial, has said they want mobile-enabled feedback on their job performance.
It doesn't say that millennial workers want mobile feedback about their performance. This is millennial-aged managers or other team members wanting to instantaneously issue feedback about others. This is AmericanIdol's voting system manifest in the workplace. The most socially-connected worker wins. That's what millennials seem to want.
It's a fashion, a management style. It isn't logical. They want to work as they socialize. Constantly and publicly voting for people/things you like or of which you approve is normal. It's what highschool kids do these days. So it is completely natural for them to bring that scheme into the workplace.
The only feedback I really care about is my compensation package and a tactful way to say "money me, money now. Me a money needing a lot now" is to initiate a discussion on job performance. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that millennials are doing this more than older generations. Whenever someone has expressed some form of "work hard, keep your head down and wait" strategy to salary increase to me it's been an older person.
What I have expressed is that any system I must use at work (HR, expense reporting, JIRA/Teamcity) should be usable on mobile. But the state of the art in many areas is applications that are barely usable on desktop: Workday's app was Flex for a long time, and is now HTML5, but either way the recommendation is still "just keep reloading until it doesn't hang".
We had a perf review system that seemed to have build a buggy PDF editor with a browser native plugin (flash maybe? long ago) that was impossible to use except on an old version of IE on Windows, and most of us had Macs: what you wrote would scroll off the page in one direction and scrolling was one-direction-only with no scrolling back. It was absurd.
So my guess is that Susan Peters is poorly summarizing the idea that millennials have higher standards for the apps they have to use (which I find intuitive at first glance), and 'on mobile' is a proxy for that desire, mangled by a game of telephone.
My stack ranking story:
I was a manager. I was asked to build a team top performers. More than asked: My bonus would be based on the quality of the team.
Now, the team is in place, and it's time for for the first set of reviews. The average is 9/10. Of course they really are that good - I followed orders and built a team of top performers.
But... we have stack ranking. My meta-manager told me that the average had to be 5. My response: What? You're telling me to lower my own bonus! Yes, exactly, he explained, you just figured out why we have stack ranking.
I would like to hear proponents of stack ranking explain how stack ranking and any "we only want A players"-style policies are NOT mutually exclusive. Because if no good case can be made for both co-existing within the same organization, then seeing both can be a good signal to detect for an organization that uses stack ranking as a compensation attenuation mechanism.
There may be sound organizational behavior reasons to hide the compensation attenuation in this manner, but I'm hard-pressed to find empirically-based evidence for such reasoning.
The most amusing thing about stack ranking is that companies expect their teams to be average (at best). If a company really wanted to hire the best and only have top performers, then they should not expect their employees to fit nicely on a bell curve.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadI wonder if their interviews involve the question "how would you move Mt. Fuji?", another thing Microsoft gave up on many years ago.
I ended up accepting an offer from another company, but I'd say the entire experience was pleasant. I liked the engineers I talked to (of whom over half were women) and it seemed like they genuinely enjoyed what they did.
I guess all isn't as it seems.
It's sad that a good portion of the hn community would rather looking for good stories that play with confirmation bias.
As for Mt Fuji. I was asked some stupid question about burning ropes at an interview. My answer was "I don't know, what's the answer?" The company hired me. I was talking to the guy later, and he said he liked to ask questions like that "to see how I think." So I asked him "How do I think?"
...
What that DOES mean, though, is that someone has to keep pressure on people not to rank everyone as awesome. Because, look:
a. Managers are, contrary to rumor, people too. We don't enjoy the awkward, painful meetings in which we deliver negative feedback. We don't enjoy telling people that they aren't getting a raise, or that they need to improve or be terminated. That sucks. Personally, it keeps me up nights, and I've heard the same from many other managers.
b. Managers are also graded themselves on how effective their employees are. Like, if your employees are persistently rated below average, well, what's the common factor across your employees? Vice versa if they're all high performers.
So if you just tell managers "rate your employees, follow your conscience," then there is a grade inflation incentive. Even if you're super-disciplined and make painfully realistic assessments of your employees' abilities, Bob one team over may give everyone fives, and then you end up looking like a bad manager and also maybe you get to go and put someone on a PIP.
The company needs some way to stop this. Stack ranking is one such way. I don't like it, I think it's overall a bad way, but it's a mechanistic way, which is more valuable the larger your company. Small companies can have a powerful manager or small group of managers who "keep people honest." That doesn't scale.
You can use another mechanic to keep people honest, but all mechanics are exploitable.
But look, inflation is bad. If grades aren't inflated, and I rate someone a 3, then we say, "This person is a solid employee. We're happy they're here, we're giving them an average raise, everything's cool. Do we have a little constructive feedback that says, 'Hey, here's how you could take it to the next level?' Sure. But we're happy with them."
If grades are inflated and I give someone a 3, then oh shit, maybe they're in trouble! Because some asshole had to give everyone in his team a 4 or 5, and now my solid employee looks like he's underperforming the company average.
The fact is, a solid 4+ rating means you're a really great employee. Teams that are all high performing are super rare, and tend to be really, really, really obvious within a company.
Now, is it a valid criticism of stack ranking that it makes it not just difficult but impossible to describe a team that's solidly above average? Yes, absolutely. Stack ranking is kind of dumb. But understand that despite interesting and compelling stories about people being unfairly rated lower than they deserve, that's not the big problem that companies face. In general, the incentives for everyone is to rate people higher than they deserve, not lower (with toxic exceptions like what Fowler faced). And if you set up your whole system to make really sure that it embraces the idea of everyone being super awesome, you probably don't get a highly functional rating system out the other side. It's probably better to set one up that embraces the idea of average teams (average for your company) and let people override the system when you say, "Oh my god, this entire team is just killing it this review cycle."
Teams that don't fit a normal distribution are incredibly common.
And I think the bigger problem is money allocated for pay increases.
If the average 3 rating employee in your team can get a 10% annualised return each time they change jobs then the company should be budgeting 10% for a grade of 3. In practice this doesn't happen.
Yet it will get you maybe 2-5% more pay.
I see lots of new devs working at way under capacity because it's just not worthwhile for them to work harder for a company.
This doesn't make a team of high performing folks any less rare because extremes tend to be rare. It just means that reality doesn't always look like the average. You might have no high performers but 5 average ones, or 2 high performers and 3 below average (maybe they are just learning?).
One team out of many being high performers might just be luck or a good manager, for sure, but it definitely warrants checking things out because of the rarity. The same would go for an entire team that is below par without obvious reason. It might not even be an issue with the supervising manager themselves, but with the way the company scores that sort of team.
> > Now, is it a valid criticism of stack ranking that it makes it not just difficult but impossible to describe a team that's solidly above average? Yes, absolutely. Stack ranking is kind of dumb.
The ranking of people requires either one of two things:
1. fitting your group of people to a bell curve regardless of their proper distribution in reality
2. ranking inflation or deflation
Seems like a broken system designed either to generate make-work for managers and HR or to give the illusion of personnel manipulations to improve performance.
Like, say your team didn't hit its OKRs. Should that mean that your manager has to make the average of your team's ratings be below 3? Certainly, one reason why your team failed to hit its numbers might be because most or all members of the team are poor performers. But it might also be that your manager didn't organize your work well, or it might have been that your numbers were unrealistic.
It's a delicate balance and, as a director myself, I don't claim to always get it right. But the goal I aim for is: if we have a good manager hiring great people and a mediocre manager hiring mediocre people that we calibrate correctly across those managers rather than claim that one is inflating their rankings.
The person voted isn't necessarily made to leave. It's an opportunity for them to focus on improving themselves personally, possibly in a program.
This isn't the worst idea ever, for that you'd have to include knives or acid.
This a genius idea. That way you push the liability of discrimination from the company to the employees at an individual level. It's like mob rule but for companies.
> The person voted isn't necessarily made to leave. It's an opportunity for them to focus on improving themselves personally, possibly in a program.
I can't begin to imagine how awkward it would be to be voted off the island and stick around anyway.
If you did this to me or made me participate in this I would definitely tell you off and walk out of the room, clean out my desk, and leave.
With this in mind, it makes sense to grade the manager. If a manager has a lot of poor performers, they might not be giving staff the training, support, and feedback that is necessary to improve. If they all get high scores, they might be grading too easily. I'm guessing they have controls to help lessen this.
1. Each manager gives their people an absolute score
2. A meta-manager checks in with all managers over the course of the year and keeps tabs on performance of a randomly selected group of people (some scalable fraction of the total workforce. As this number goes up you could hire a few more people to do this job).
3. Each meta-manager looks for obvious goofy scoring discrepancies (how can person A have a lower rating than person B?).
4. Each manager is on the hook to defend those ratings in the face of scrutiny to justify why they rated Tony Terrible better than Andy Awesome. This expectation of accountability prevents them from inflating their scores too much.
Sort of like QA for management assessments.
Damn straight and that's a natural side effect of having a pool of limited resources (i.e. bonus money and promotions) to offer.
The problem with stack ranking isn't that employees can be ranked higher or lower than one another (as in any normal rating system), it's that you absolutely have to give someone a failing mark, even if no one actually failed.
This means that if you get transferred to a team where everyone is highly skilled, then you run a real chance of being the person who gets ranked terrible and can never get a raise or promotion unless your other teammates leave – or unless you sabotage their progress or refuse to help them in an effort to try to lower their performance.
Also note that MBAs and other business types have learnt to game the system by providing 5 star all around. Why? Your average tenure at a company is low (2-3 years). You need your peers for your next job. Why denigrate each other.
It seems engineers are not smart enough to game the system and actually rank each other honestly. Whereas the business and law guys know better.
It's a perverse form of letting bugs slip through careful coding and design practices when they are far cheaper to fix, and letting them loose into production facing customers when they are way more expensive (monetarily and soft factors) to resolve, but in the hiring and retention realm.
I learned about stack ranking the hard way. When I quit, it caused all sorts of commotion, culminating in the CEO personally calling me to nicely and politely ask me to stay, far contrary to my worst-slot ranking would suggest. That opened my eyes to its drawbacks. I can see a use case for stack ranking as a leadership tool in situations with clear featherbedding, but when used as a permanent policy it's management cargo-culting at best, Jack Welch fetishization at worst.
If any readers ever find themselves in a similar situation, do not explain the details of why you refuse to stay on, as that only cracks opens a door to high-pressure negotiation. Easiest way out is simply state you already accepted a very attractive offer, if pressed for details respond the other company swore you to not disclose the terms to anyone, and stay polite.
Like a proper diet and working out where there is no substitute for doing the work, stack ranking rarely if ever substitutes for accomplished, attentive leadership (as contrasted with tactical aspects of management, a core prerequisite to said leadership). It is a useful scalpel if/when wielded properly, and is best left in the toolbox otherwise.
If you're seeing widely varying ratings of a single person that seems like it'd be a big red flag - if the boss says 1 or 2 but coworkers or reports average 3.5+ that's a situation that seems to cry out for further investigation. Similarly, if the boss says "4" but coworkers and reports average 1.5, there's probably also a serious problem.
I'm sure investigating involves costs that companies don't want to incur, but if you have that kind of disconnect going on it may be cheaper to investigate and resolve it than to deal with the eventual fallout.
I've seen the personal aftermath of bad bosses and work environments on people in the past, and it's really not pretty. If you're talking with someone about work and say "Mean Girls" and get a response of "Oh my god yes!" that's a pretty good indicator of a toxic work environment.
Just look at Theranos and Zenefits for examples. If it wasn't this situation, we wouldn't have heard anything till something disastrous happened to Uber. Thats just the way it works.
I work at a company, and I think generally, most people who work here are happy. And there's not much churn.
Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.
Because in the long run, they believe it to be cheaper because they can hire in college grads at a lower rate and think they are profiting because they should be versed in the newest stuff. In addition, this stuff (with larger companies) is good for business. This article is an example: Uber is getting bad publicity for treating workers badly, but other companies? Not so much because they promote a better image.
Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.
For the recruitment thing? The best thing I can think of is by making sure people are educated. Beyond that, strong labor laws and separating health care from employment will help, but won't solve the issue.
As far as solving the "most folks are unhappy at work" - strong labor laws and health care. Outside of that, it is more up to the employer. While not everyone will be happy, you can make the majority of folks that stay there a while content - some places do this now.
The point is that yes, there is PR involved. However, not having a toxic workplace is another. It is an idiotic suggestion that the perception of how good it is to work at one company or another is purely a matter of PR. Engineers talk to each other and do very frank "what it was like to work for BigCo X" all over the place. I think you probably understand this but it doesn't really fit well with your agenda here.
Honestly, work at a lot of companies is a drag, for a lot of people. Big deal. However, stories like the ones coming out of Uber are far outside the norm, even if you think that the endless publicity about shiny happy people working at same of the other companies is a product of PR.
You are not able to handle a disagreement and called me all kinds of names. You should talk to your colleagues and see if they think you might be one of those overbearing colleagues who is contributing to a toxic culture by throwing a fit at everyone who disagrees with you.
I am not taking a side on this issue. Uber is a victim here. No one plans to have a toxic culture at work. I am just trying to put down the mob mentality by pointing out the obvious challenges.
I do not think the stories out of Uber are any out of ordinary. These are same stories that came out from finance industry and Hollywood. Success attracts problems like this. There is nothing you can do about it other than wait it out.
Churn rate has a ton of other reasons, unless you want to pack so many different variables under 'happiness' that the term is meaningless.
But I guess if you're right, we have a test case: Uber will soon be perceived as Disneyland, because they have a massive hairball of a company happiness problem to deal with.
Every successful company has these problems. Success attracts ambitious people and many of these high achievers accomplish their goals ruthlessly. In this process some other people who have different priorities feel left behind. Its just the way of life.
Take all the ambitious people and throw a challenging problem at them that can humble them other than that there is PR. PR expert will come out and tell you that not all teams in uber are bad, some of them are really good and the routine stuff we hear about any other big company.
Trying to normalize this as growing pains or bored ambitious people(?!?) or whatever is simply false. I don't work there, but know people who have, and left, because it was such a toxic place. The point of my comment was that this was emphatically not a PR problem - it is a culture problem that obviously comes from the top of the firm.
Over all churn rate in the valley is pretty bad, uber cannot doing any worse than the other companies there.
Were these horrible places to work (as commonly reported)? Are they horrible places now? Who knows (certainly not me).
Uber itself is a victim here. They are going after some other big monopolies in the industry. It could be as simple as their mistakes are blown out of proportion to smear them by their competition. We see similar big co is bad stories once a while its not like Uber has a monopoly in treating employees badly.
I thought we knew by now that you involve the people that will live with the new "philosophy" when "conceiving."
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/
The Encyclopedia of Stack Ranking, and IIRC this blog was one of the motivators for MSFT to drop stack ranking. The original Michael O. Church, if you will.
* Stack ranking at Cisco http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/networking/300075791/5-things... * Stack ranking at Google https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-stack-rank-its-employe... * Stack ranking at Microsoft http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-old-employee-revie... * Stack ranking at Amazon http://insights.dice.com/2016/11/15/amazon-may-end-stack-ran...
That doesn't make sense from an organizational point of view, you end up with teams that are on average worse than others but still treat the top 10% of team A the same as the top performers of the worse team B?
In my view, the answer is yes. Today's employees are well connected, and we are no longer dependent on management for information. We might get our information from friends in management, peers who were once managers somewhere else, networking, and even HN. We can broaden our base of knowledge by assuming that most companies are managed in similar ways, due to shared training, culture, and networking among managers.
I'm a former manager and now a regular employee. I understand the mechanics and politics of stack ranking from experience.
At any given moment, the employees may understand the process better than their direct supervisors, because the employees have no limitations on how they gather information, whereas the managers are busy memorizing corporate talking points.
Like I said, in large corporations it literally pays to have a politically savy manager and to have documented every single thing you've done during the year. Bonus points if you've condensed it down in a presentable fashion.
I had a friend who made it into management in a large corporation. He decided to do things differently. He told his entire team, "Tell me how much money you want. I will tell you what you need to accomplish to get it." He documented the hell out of what his workers did. His team killed all the other teams -- just steamrolled them in terms of productivity, so he got everything he asked for. Made a lot of enemies, though ;-)
This is my dream manager. I've never had a manager ask what they could do for me and actually mean it.
(Apologies to him if I have misrepresented his ideas -- taken from a discussion I had with him where I asked him exactly this). Anyway, he told me that many people often were quite happy with a lower salary expectation once they understood what was required of the higher salary expectation. Also "I'll tell you what you have to do" doesn't necessarily mean that the person will succeed. If you want the bigger salary you are going to have to choose the harder projects. So it might be "Take this failing project and turn it around. Hmm... yes I know it's a piece of crap legacy app that nobody else wants to touch. Find a way to make it work and I will find a way to get your raise." A lot of people will say, "Oh. No thanks. I'd rather work with the new shiny greenfield project. It's a lot easier and a lot more fun." His approach was to let people self select for their level of performance. And if someone took the gnarly legacy problem and failed miserably, then he would gently (?) suggest that they focus on easier problems until they have built up their skills.
The other flip side is the risk--if you want to step up to the plate, at a certain level you need to understand that the stakes are such that if you fail, you likely need to leave or you'll be fired/asked to leave.
Not everyone wants that level of responsibility or risk. In my job I oversee one of the biggest sources of spend in the company (ad spend) and am responsible for driving a large part of our growth. If I don't do my job well that has company-wide implications that are present in my mind literally every day. That's a level of ever-present stress that many people don't want.
Literally nobody, not even a millennial, has said they want mobile-enabled feedback on their job performance.
We had a perf review system that seemed to have build a buggy PDF editor with a browser native plugin (flash maybe? long ago) that was impossible to use except on an old version of IE on Windows, and most of us had Macs: what you wrote would scroll off the page in one direction and scrolling was one-direction-only with no scrolling back. It was absurd.
So my guess is that Susan Peters is poorly summarizing the idea that millennials have higher standards for the apps they have to use (which I find intuitive at first glance), and 'on mobile' is a proxy for that desire, mangled by a game of telephone.
/s
That's the epitome of every employee getting ahead (or failing).
At what point is it just a plain old company? Is Facebook still a startup? Is it just because Uber's #disrupting things or some cultural BS?
There may be sound organizational behavior reasons to hide the compensation attenuation in this manner, but I'm hard-pressed to find empirically-based evidence for such reasoning.