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Comment by gordaco | Hacker News Reader

> Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated.

This is disturbing and, I think, a twisted form of grade inflation, mixed with the usual suitspeak where words don't necessarily mean what they mean. If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why would you put it at risk of termination?

For the record, I also work in a big company with long product cycles, meaning that the product I'm working on started more than one year ago, and the first public release is planned for next December, so I feel your pain. Luckily our process is a bit more sane and our manager follows our work closely, so I'm getting good ratings (but I wonder if the grade inflation will continue in such a way that "exceeds expectations" now means "subpar employee"...).

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This is 100% caused by stack ranking, and the problem you identify is a very real one. Chopping off the bottom 5% of employees works if you have a LOT of dead weight, but realistically you can't really do it continuously or you start removing legitimate talent and, just as worse, fostering a toxic community that values playing politics over delivering value.

Not only that, but chopping off the bottom 5% typically makes room for more hiring; these emptied jobs are likely to be filled with less-than-stellar candidates. It take the new hires a few years before they too are dropped down into that lower 5% rank.

Stack ranking ensures that you have churn in your workforce, and not in a good way. You wonder why workers in the tech industry move around so much? Look at stack ranking as a significant contributing factor.

That’s by design. Keeps the workforce young and insurance cheap.

Why would companies prefer cheap insurance over productivity? If they want to pay less, they can just pay less. People would rather get paid less than get fired.

Is it about cost?

It’s often easier to get that pay raise by hopping companies. You’re then replaced with a new hire who is probably getting more than you did. And needs a few months to get up to speed.

Treating your proven employees well to retain them would cost less.

Big companies are driven by the mean and dollars. The short term numbers work out, and long term productivity issues are addressed by acquisition.

Productivity is hard to measure. Insurance cost is easy to measure.

Less cynically, it also increases the odds of finding good employees. A "bottom 5%" worker is statistically less likely to suddenly rise to the top of the pack than a new hire is to produce at that level initially. And, more cynically, that remains true even if there's significant measurement error in identifying that 5%.

That's true if the performance ratings are cost-free and fairly accurate. A company where firing is based on misconduct and promotion is based on achievement, rather than basing both on quarterly reviews, might actually have a better chance of finding good employees, and perhaps more importantly, retaining them.

I worked for a large global company and this matched exactly what I was seeing. I had projects with year or more development cycles before something was deliverable so "meets expectations" was difficult when you had nothing to show for your work as they only cares about final results. We even had an unwritten rule where everyone must have at a minimum two "needs improvement" because "everyone should be working on making themselves better." This lead to a dark rabbit hole and a lot of engineers leaving.

With such a messed up evaluation process engineering demanded direct, documented process for doing evaluations. Instead we had managers trying to gauge output based on defects fixed and lines of code committed. You could tell management had no clue.

This lead to a dark rabbit hole and a lot of engineers leaving.

But, I bet, a large and well-resourced HR department, which was the real goal. Who invented the system, after all.

Don't call it 'suitspeak' -- these suckers haven't ever had the decency to wear formal business wear; it's `golf shirt speak` at best

A previous employer had had that rampant feedback inflation for years, and reset it one year. The Big Boss - quite reasonably in my mind - said “our expectations are high and you should feel proud of meeting them”. But the company culture was still set up around “strong exceeds” being the norm and “meets expectations” being code for “massively underperforming” so that was an uphill battle. And many of those who had gotten used to “strong exceeds” really were massive underperformers. Really to make this work they should have deleted the entire history from the HR database.

If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why would you put it at risk of termination?

Because quality of the employee and the employee's work are not the only factors in hiring and firing decisions. Sometimes a smaller workforce is what makes sense, and if all your engineers are "meeting expectations", what are you going to do?

There are other factors but just one is under discussion: cutting the bottom five percent in performance reviews. And if consecutively "meeting expectations" puts you near the bottom, then the expectation must actually be to exceed expectations.

Nevermind that this policy necessarily means churn and undervaluing aspects of software like security or fault tolerance and a constant drain of institutional knowledge.

I'm not arguing for the policy. I wouldn't want to work at a place like that.

But I feel like this isn't very hard to understand and I don't know what you're not getting about it.

And if consecutively "meeting expectations" puts you near the bottom, then the expectation must actually be to exceed expectations.

Uh.. no.. you seem to think "meets expectations" necessarily means "will not get fired". This policy exists, as dumb as it may be. Imagine you're a manager at a company like this and you're tasked with giving a performance review. You have two choices: you could do what you seem to be implying they should go and fudge the ratings, so that the bottom 5% always get "does not meet expectations." Or you could say "fuck that stupid rule, I'm going to rate this person honestly, and if they still fire him that's their choice."

A performance rating and a company policy about firing are two completely separate things. I think you must have a naive understanding of how staffing decisions are made in the real world.

Eh, the language makes a bit more sense than that. It's a bit too euphemistic for my taste, but it's reasonable.

"Meets expectations" — which expectations? The expectations for the role of for the employee? If we're talking about the expectations for the employee, then obviously it makes no sense for meeting expectations to be a bad thing. But if instead we're talking about expectations for the role, it's perfectly consistent to say that an employee who perpetually merely meets the expectations for their role is subpar, if employees are expected to continually improve.

Now what's less clear is why companies care about the derivative of their employee productivity in a labor market where employees stay with a company for just a few years.

A bus driver that “meets expectations” is the perfect bus driver, I don’t want him to “continually improve” thinking that he’s the new Ayrton Senna, I don’t want to be driven around by drivers who think that they’re Formula 1 drivers. How are programmers different from bus drivers?

> A bus driver that “meets expectations” is the perfect bus driver

By what standards are Bus Drivers evaluated? Near accidents are OK as long as they're lucky enough to not be involved in a real accident? If so, I'd prefer they actually improve and decrease their odds of being in a future accident. Does efficiency matter? Maybe one that's on time more often is actually better? Maybe customer service matters, and they can get better at helping people who need to buy tickets for the first time?

> I don’t want to be driven around by drivers who think that they’re Formula 1 drivers

It seems like there are multiple dimensions that a bus driver can improve on that aren't "become a race car driver". Given that, it seems like the bus driver analogy already isn't a good one.

> How are programmers different from bus drivers?

It doesn't even seem like we need to answer this one. You started with the false assumption that there are no dimensions that a bus driver can improve on other than becoming a race car driver. One could argue that there are much wider ranges of value creation in programming between average and above average programmers, but that's irrelevant given your initial premise is obviously flawed.

No, I think this is a fine metaphor. If an engineer can understand a problem, identify a solution, and then implement, document, deploy, and support it in production for project after project, it’s completely legit to say they’re good engineers, and are not necessarily improving in any relevant way.

Similarly, a bus driver that consistent drives without causing accidents, doesn’t spill the passengers’ coffee, doesn’t burn too much gas or wear out the breaks too quickly is a good driver.

What you say to either of these people is “Great job, we love you, keep doing what you’re doing!”

Encouraging growth and improvement as an end in itself can be destructive: How many projects amount to rewriting something that works in some new language or framework because an engineer wants to pad their resume or just learn something new?

Craig Mod recently wrote Fast Software, the Best Software; I’m hoping he follows that up with Software That Already Exists and Works Fine Using an Unsexy Suite of Technologies, Software that Doesn’t Need to Be Rewritten.

> No, I think this is a fine metaphor. If an engineer can understand a problem, identify a solution, and then implement, document, deploy, and support it in production for project after project, it’s completely legit to say they’re good engineers, and are not necessarily improving in any relevant way.

We agree. If someone has maxed out all the relevant dimensions then there's no room for improvement. The problem is that there's a difference between that and average. The other problem is that there's continual room for being even better at identifying solutions.

> How many projects amount to rewriting something that works in some new language or framework because an engineer wants to pad their resume or just learn something new?

Unneeded re-writes and getting better are orthogonal concepts. That you're confusing them here underlines the logical fallacy that you're making. If there's legitimate room for improvement (and there generally is in bus driving and in software engineering), and if that improvement makes you substantially better at your job, then it's worth it. In neither of those areas is the "average" employee completely topped off in where they can grow.

>How are programmers different from bus drivers?

In that programmers are supposed to be creative, over-deliver, etc.

You'd worry if a bus driver got from A to B in half the time driving twice as fast suddenly.

But you'd be OK if a programmer you've asked to design system with features A, B, C and performance P, also delivers features D, E, F and performance 2*P without being asked!

> In that programmers are supposed to be creative, over-deliver, etc.

Like I said, I don't want the programmer in charge of the software that manages my financial or health records to be creative or over-deliver, quite the contrary. I'd add personal-data to the mix, and now I've covered a huge chunk of SV companies. I think that the era of "move fast and break things" should be over by now, unfortunately relatively paltry $5 billion fines won't stop the creativeness of some companies.

>Like I said, I don't want the programmer in charge of the software that manages my financial or health records to be creative or over-deliver, quite the contrary.

Sure, but most programmers don't program systems that manage financial or health records or write the software for the ISS.

For the majority working on enterprise backoffice stuff, CDUD, web services, mobile and desktop apps, websites, and so on, being creative and over-delivering is OK, and even encouraged.

You'd like your financial and health records to be managed by average-quality software? That is, software that's full of bugs, confuses its users into making lots of eyes, and is insecure? I'd rather have them managed by file clerks on paper if that's what's on offer on the software side.

Lots of errors, not lots of eyes. This error brought to you by my failure to successfully use well-above-average software written by Googlers.

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