Blizzard manager departs in protest of employee ranking system
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It resulted in a strategy where some teams have hired puffer people with the only purpose to have poor performance ratings assigned to them and let them go when the demand for such inevitably rose for such from HR. This shielded the core team allowing them to focus solely on actual business requirements.
There were people in the office taking decent salary, doing barely anything with kind of no expectations of their performance whatsoever. Some were doing their masters, some hit the gym very hard, some were just chilling out.
This was my first lesson on how focus on tactical goals and metrics can fundamentally screw up the long term vision.
My anecdote - at a former big tech company, we had a long hiring freeze, and they even decided that when someone leaves or gets fired, their headcount goes back up to senior leadership who decide where that headcount should be (so as a manager, if you fire someone - you might lose the position entirely).
So, naturally, even since then there have been zero people fired, even if they are low performers, since managers want to keep their headcount. But talented people obviously still get offers and leave, and when they leave, their headcount disappears.
So after a year or so of this great policy, the average level of talent across the company is steadily dropping, which also means it'll be much harder to recruit top talent even after this policy is over - because most talented people want to join a team where they can still learn and evolve, collaborate with other smart folks, etc.
For example, I explained that if it takes a foot-high pile of paperwork to obtain an internal use SSL certificate, then the highly predictable outcome of that policy is not "greater security", but unencrypted HTTP everywhere.
The inevitable response to such feedback is that "people ought to do the right thing", which is laughable on its face. Nobody, and I mean nobody in their right mind will subject themselves to months of paperwork, procedure, and pleading for something that they consider to be optional.
"But, but, the right thing is for them to jump through those hoops anyway!" is the typical response to such logic.
This kind of argument is just futile. Someone up high has decided that they know better, that human nature will bend to their will, and will forge ahead despite being told they are wrong.
Compare that to other companies that practically gave out no-limit credit cards and full access: imagine which companies attracted the best talent.
But, it amazes me just how long a company can survive being just mediocre and siloed. You often don't see the long-term effects until after those who implemented the policies have left or been promoted. I often look up those companies to see how they're doing. And, they're still chugging along, being barely profitable.
This really annoys me about politics. They seems to reason as: We have problem A, so let's do solution B to solve this. And then the reasoning ends.
What should happen is to evaluate all the consequences of solution B. And sometimes those consequences work in such a way that they make problem A even bigger.
Reasoning about an interconnected system is crucial here. And as developers we are very well aware of systems and the impact changes can have. But it seems a lot of people are not able to reason about systems.
If there's one thing we should be teaching in schools, this is it. You can leave school and have no clue that everything is connected to everything else, and that if you're not focused on that reality your actions can have completely unexpected and counterintuitive (to you...) consequences.
I’m so tired of this advice. Maybe metrics are bad, but the only thing worse than metrics is no metrics.
Discouraging an action just because it doesn’t work 100% of the time doesn’t seem efficient either.
The argument really should be that certain metrics are bad. Sure, propose a better one, but saying that leaders don’t think hard enough just because a metric turns out to have ill effects seems useless advice. How can you be certain in advance when you have thought hard enough?
A better approach is probably to recognize that metrics are hard. Keep an eye on them, iterate, and be willing to make mistakes as that’s the only way to improve.
A good rule of thumb is when you find yourself making "obviously bad decisions" because you know as a result the metric will go up, not because a generally favorable outcome for the business is expected to be the result, then you might be a redneck middle manager driving the metrics.
No one should generally exercise tunnel vision and you should not be completely focused on metrics. (Although it might be OK to have one person in the business whose job is to maintain the tunnel vision, if you're telling the whole company to do this then you are likely creating blind spots that will come back to haunt you.)
If you focus on driving up the metrics it can be at the expense of the vision. The business is not the metrics, and the vision is not fully defined by the metrics.
Add autonomy and judgement for the managers, along with a battery of metrics that aren't binding.
Everyone will see that it doesn't help to sign up loads of customers while having loads of complaints coming through the helpdesk, or having loads of extra helpdesk staff with no sales. Where the balance goes is judgement.
Success is one of those nebulous things that can't be described sharply, but people often have an idea of how things are going anyway.
I think it's the same issue politicians have. No one of those in power ever thinks of unintended consequences. My guess: it takes a special kind of anal person to actually want to get into power (and thus to eventually get into power) - and they just can't imagine people acting not according to their great master plan.
This sounds like a former professor of mine who would order phones and tables for everyone from the spare money on the end of the fiscal year for "research purposes" since otherwise the department would lose the budget.
It’s the employees who don’t know that they’be been hired as the designated sacrificial goat I feel sorry for: That’s a potentially awful position to be in.
My first job was in an old newspaper printing business (this was back when newspapers were highly profitable and a respected medium). We had a few old people in our department who were basically kept there doing nothing because they didn't want to retrain on new technology but they were friends with management so they weren't let go before retirement. Which sounds super humane and socially sensitive. Except there were a few of us new hires that couldn't get permanent contracts because the departments were "fully staffed", we were busting our ass and making 1/2 of what these guys were for doing nothing. And this "fair treatment" wasn't there for everyone - just the people who were friends with upper management - basically if you paid tribute by inviting a few people up to the management offices now and then, bring a bottle of nice booze and locking the door for a few hours, doing out of work favors, etc. There were people who were laid off and who had to retrain to remain.
It was a sobering experience after my rosy childhood world views about fairness in society.
When they are on the clock, people generally want to be at least a little bit useful, at least do something that will be of value to someone. Sitting there doing nothing is not fun.
Being friends with management is doing something though. It’s messed up but if I had the resources there’s definitely people I know who I’d pay to have around just cos socializing with them helps me work better with no requirements on their own output.
If the “lifers” actually did something, you would not have been hired at all, right? So, in a way, their slacking actually created a job for you.
These guys are puffers at big investment banks getting well over 6 figures while they pump iron and work on a masters degree. No comparison, or sympathy.
What he did argue was that if you put people to work and pay them for it that's better for the economy as a whole than if they did nothing and earned nothing, even if the work they do is of low (perceived) value. Digging holes and filling them back in is simply an extreme example to emphasize the point.
The reasoning is of course a pretty standard demand-side argument: giving more people more money causes more money to be spent, which boosts the economy.
According to OP's description it is neither universal nor basic.
Spoiler: it didn't end well.
Having grown up under communism, I think UBI might amazingly be a worse idea still. Because while yes, socialist economies did not work out and people were standing around a lot doing nothing (because they had nothing to motivate them to), there was undeniably a communal aspect to it which wasn't all negative. UBI doesn't even have that, it's pure populist perfection. Give monies!
Would be awesome to get a 6 figure salary on the side while I work on my startup.
(I'm very good at leetcode-interview BS so will have no problem passing your interview and will be happy to take the severance when you need to fire me)
Edit: And don't worry about any bidding war with other managers. I'll just put you in my queue and rotate through you all as needed.
So ... how do I apply for such a puffer position?
I am pretty sure I am this person right now. Got the job but mostly not qualified for it, though I'll concede it's a niche field and they probably have to train people regardless. But it feels square-peg round-hole.
What do?
"This was my first lesson on how focus on tactical goals and metrics can fundamentally screw up the long term vision."
I don't get how you take that away from this - this is a lesson in how bad managers who refuse to do what is asked, and apparently have no accountability, can screw up the system.
Stack ranking may be good or bad, but if your managers are working around the system, and nobody is holding them accountable for it, that's a separate, and honestly bigger, problem.
If they actually did what was really being asked (instead of trying to work around it), either
1. it would work, and the company would be better off.
2. it would fail miserably, and the company would either stop doing that (and be better off) or go bankrupt (and we'd all be better off because it would be an object lesson).
The reason this went badly is precisely because of a lack of real accountability, not because of stack ranking itself.
Who watches the watchmen? In a large-enough organization, the stack ranking system is set by some executive high up the mountain. The low-level line managers and group managers are incentivized to work together to get the budget (for puffer employees) to help them keep their proven performers. Finance doesn't care as long as (a) the bottom-line improvements from firing puffers keep getting realized and (b) management keeps being able to pay puffers below-market salaries. Puffers themselves shouldn't care in this day and age, taking the opportunity to take the puffer paycheck as a 100% remote position with no actual responsibility, while working full-time somewhere else that actually appreciates them, so puffers basically get a free paycheck out of it for nothing.
It doesn't matter if it's a good system in theory. It only matters if it works in practice. There's an old joke about economists - they treat the real world as a special case.
So it doesn't even fail your first test of "the system can't tell". The system can tell. It's just not doing anything about it. That's the failure i'm describing.
Beyond that: If people work around the system, it will never work, regardless of the system. Any system can be worked around, good or not. There are no magically good systems that can't be worked around, or don't even incentivize people to work around them.
All good systems try to deal with bad actors in some way. If they don't, they fail. Plain and simple.
Saying that any system that doesn't work because it has bad actors is a bad system is silly. You will no-true-scotsman your way into having no systems at all.
And think about the corollary: how much additional effort would have to go into monitoring managers to make sure they weren't circumventing the "spirit" of the given bullshit metric? A company like that would resemble a dystopian regime.
"how much additional effort would have to go into monitoring managers to make sure they weren't circumventing the "spirit" of the given bullshit metric?'
Zero - Everyone already knows when it is bullshit. They all sit in a room, knowing someone else is saying bullshit, but avoid saying anything about it because they want to say bullshit too.
Rational actors do act rationally all the time - the system has to deal with that, and isn't here. That's the point - none of the bad behavior was dealt with.
It's rational to do lots of things. Kill your competitors in the drug game before they kill you, embezzle and rip people off who are vulnerable who can't fight back, etc. Rational is a silly bar, and definitely does not lead to viable systems. It has no moral component. It has no business component. It is only logic.
No system works if it doesn't hold people accountable, even if they are acting rational.
Those people are known as "sacrificial lambs." I ran across the term in a previous position. More than one person specifically included this concept in their planning.
There is the one where the company wants to reward top performers. I think this one is most common, and I have never worked at a company that doesn't so some form of bonus budgeting that tries to capture a group of employees who are performing well and give them a bonus. The budget itself dictates how many employees can fit into that group, so ultimately what happens is a natural bell curve of the biggest rewards going to the perceived top performers, as agreed upon by managers usually at the organization level.
The other more insidious stack ranking involves a punitive element, whereby a group must necessarily be singled out for performance improvement reasons. This is the type of thing where managers, no matter what the team members actually accomplished, have to put someone on a performance improvement plan or start performance managing them to "get them up the bar" because someone naturally has to fall into the "bottom performer" bucket of stack ranking.
I think the former is common and pretty unavoidable unless a company has an unusually large bonus budget pool available. The latter approach is what causes problems with companies, because all of a sudden team mates become competitors and cultures can go downhill rapidly. Think Amazon, Microsoft under Ballmer, and GE under Walsh.
It's kind of interesting how many companies who are doing the former bonus budget pooling eventually get seduced into doing the latter and destroying their culture.
The more obvious way is very obvious: we had a professor who told us he'll be grading us by first tallying up the answers, and then applying a bell curve to the scores, so that X% of the students get an A, Y% get a B, etc., and some Z% of the students will fail. As you can imagine, everyone was up in arms about how obviously unfair this is.
The less obvious case, but close to what you describe, was scolarships. For almost every "track"[0], scolarships were awarded for top X% of students. In the "track" I was in, and another one in our faculty, the scolarships were instead given to anyone who crossed a certain absolute grade threshold, in (IIRC three) tiers. The higher the tier you reached, the more money you got, independent of how other students fared (probably subject to budget constraints, though).
Now, I can't prove it, but there was one other notable difference between our "track" and that other one with same scolarship model, and every other "track" at the university I was aware of: ours were famously cooperative, everyone else was fiercely competitive. I don't think it's a coincidence. My university experience was that of everyone helping each other out, because it was always a win-win both socially sometimes financially. Everywhere else, this was unthinkable - helping other students created a risk of them getting ahead of you and taking your scolarship.
I'm dismayed to see the same thing repeating in companies too.
--
[0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.
[0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.
It worked the same way at my University with the same outcome as yours. 7 years after graduation we still maintain regular contact as a group with my classmates.
The term I'm looking for, though, is the set of batches abstracted over time. That is, all students who take CS at particular faculty of particular university, regardless of the year they started. A sequence of "batches". Such students will share curriculum and specific teaching staff. This is in contrast to another such group that e.g. does Applied CS at the same faculty, or Theoretical Physics at different faculty.
EDIT: perhaps a picture is in order. Imagine an university tallying up how many students started a given class on a given year, per class, across entire university. They could create a spreadsheet that looks like:
| University of Example |
|----------+---------------+-----------------------+-----------------|
| | Division of | Division of | Division of |
| | Telecoms & EE | Robotics & Bio | Social sciences |
|----------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------|---------|
| Class of | Appld | Tele | Biomd | Appld | Auto | Social| ... |
| ↓ | CS | comm | eng | CS | matics| media | ... |
| 2022 | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ... |
| 2021 | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ... |
| 2020 | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ... |
| 2019 | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ### | ... |
| ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
> For almost every major, scholarships were awarded to the top X% of students of that major.
Although that usually refers to former students, and doesn’t include current students.
The problem with this is not the size of the bonus pool.
The immediate problem is the thresholding. Due to the sharp threshold, the bonus will practically never stand in proportion to performance. An employee that is judged to perform at a level of 6.1/7 gets nothing, but the one at 6.3/7 gets a lot. This makes the scheme anti-collaborative.
The less obvious problem is the ridiculousness of the idea that you can assign accurate individual performance numbers to people. These things are insanely noisy to the point of being meaningless. It ends up effectively a lottery. That would be fine if you called it a lottery, but by pretending it's not you create perverse incentives.
There are only two ways to do bonuses well:
- either forego individual bonuses and reward the entire company equally (or maybe scaled by salary) based on company performance, or
- hand out individual bonuses only to true (statistically verified) outperformers -- in this case you might end up not handing out any bonuses most years.
Goldstein and Spiegelhalter did a paper on league tables for organisations (e.g. schools and hospitals) along the lines that noise in the data made the results questionable.[1]
Perhaps the idea transfers to individuals within an organisation that uses stack ranking?
[1] https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmm/migrated/d...
Good managers recognize the value of role players. Not everyone can be a top performer. It's an absurd expectation to have for any organization.
There are no boni for top performers in my company at all. If business is good everyone gets a bonus. The only exception here is sales. Here people are more competitive. I guess I would get martyred if I even suggested it for other departments. And I believe it would be pretty bad for morale and teamwork overall. It is good that people don't use energy to present themselves in a good light and instead solve the problems we have. I still believe there is a lot of incentive for employees to see the company performing well. As you said, I have the impression that this becomes a background issue if employees compete with each other.
There was a time I would love to have worked at Blizzard, even while being aware of the volatility and risk of the industry. I wouldn't want that today regardless of compensation. Still, I don't believe it is either or. Both systems you suggest probably have an overall net negative effect for development. There are other forms for employees to participate on company success. Administration for employee boni is wasteful overhead for the most part.
If it is true what the article reports, I believe the manager did the correct thing. On that metric he might be a high performer among his peers.
It can be difficult for line managers to fire their entire team.
Couple iterations of that and you'll have people who are hired and/or paid extra for the purpose of being a "fuse" that protects the high performers during layoffs by being first to get fired.
1: https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
For many junior employees, far more likely to be predesignated as H2F, you onboard as a hire to fire employee.
Then immediately begin networking for an adjacent team to join.
It's never about what you can do.
Always about who you know.
--
What would you give for that performance? I cannot see anything that would benefit the company. Not even employment costs, because employees certainly price that in.
Seen this happen for teams where the manager loves everyone on their team.
Most of the response is the usual PR speak, but "differentiated compensation" seems like a new level of back-bending to avoid saying "less pay."
The real issue is that stack rankings compel managers to meet a quota for low performers. Even if the team is full of top tier engineers, one or more get dealt the short straw every review period.
While I'm just a developer, my wife is a director at the same company.
I multiple years, she's turned in her evaluations and had the director and VP above her tell her to lower several employees ranking.
One example was an engineer who didn't get along with the people on his team for a pretty high profile project. They know the guy's brilliant and don't want to fire him, so they move him to a lower profile project to decommission several server farms they had been struggling to get done. Dude goes in and absolutely kills it. They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars by the tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned and renegotiated several large contracts the company was on the hook for.
My wife ranked him in the upper tier. He wrinkled a few feathers, but once they reallocated him, he absolutely thrived and saved the company literally a ton of money.
Nope.
He pissed too many people off, her boss and bosses boss mandated she give him a low ranking with a miniscule pay increase and minimum bonus in order to punish him for his behavior early in the year. Nothing he did after that mattered to them. Nothing.
When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.
Sounds a little far-fetched. Slack, Airbnb and Netflix spend about 6M, 17M and 28M on AWS monthly; to SAVE "hundreds of millions" the company would need to be ridiculously large and inefficient.
Fortunately for me a director from another group who knew my work, took me under his wing and I was finally able to thrive.
Does not matter the exceptional work you do, its always about listening to your "superiors". Ofc this depends on the organization. Not every place will be like this
Your ability to get on well with others, and work effectively as a part of a team is a component of your _actual performance_. It’s probably the most important component. The only real mistake here seems like this guy should have been fired instead.
Engineers don't negotiate contracts at large companies. The legal department does. Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.
I can see this guy exaggerating the work he actually did, and taking credit for the work of others, which would explain the low rating and why everyone else dislikes him.
This would make some sense if employees were like cells or fruit flies. But in most companies, employees are like organs. You can't improve a body by cutting out 5% of its organs and waiting for them to reappear. At best, you'll degrade the body's performance. At worst, the body will die.
The only viable exception to this I’ve seen is in organizations like sales where there’s some reasonable, objective criteria to evaluate an entire workforce on. Nothing good exists like this for software engineers though.
And now you have the additional issue that evaluations need to be objective, which is hard, while a manager never wants to lose member of their team, so they're naturally pushed to overrate their people to protect them from ending up at the bottom.
> "ensure employees who don't meet performance expectations receive more honest feedback, differentiated compensation, and a plan on how best to improve their own performance."
Honest feedback? Great! A plan for how to improve my performance? Sure, sounds good [if you don't know what the social realities of a PIP are]. Differentiated compensation? Wait a second...
The only place I know were this does not seem to be the case are government employees were everybody is paid according to a fixed grid and were salary increases are purely time gated. My experience with working with people compensated on a such a model has been… interesting.
Half of my jobs didn’t rewarded people on performance.
Hell, I got demoted during a reorganization and was told my current performance merited my previous title but because I didn’t perform at that level 9 months ago, I was demoted. And they promoted someone older than me into my previous position purely because of his age. He did not meet any of the requirements for it.
The entire point of stack ranking is that it does not do this. The article is about a lead who resigned/got fired because the system wanted to penalise someone who was meetings expectations.
Doesn't a normal distribution typically arise during random sampling? I.e., if there's some statistic you calculate based on a sample, then when you take a bunch of independent population samples, that statistic will tend to be normally distributed over those samples.
If that's the only reason we'd typically expect to see a normal distribution, then I don't understand why we'd expect employee ratings to be normally distributed.
But of course it isn't randomly distributed because you hope you recruitment process isn't just picking up random people from the street.
So yeah, it makes no sense - it's just cargo cult business school science.
But you can make a plausible argument against the performance metric being normally distributed among your employees because that would mean the way you hired your employees was completely random with respect to that performance metric.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that employee scores (out of 100, say) should be normally distributed.
Yet somehow, management/HR can classify these 16 with enough certainty to decide that 8 deserve good compensation/promotions, and the other 8 should be PIP'd?
In some teams I work with, every single employee is what I consider an 8 through 10. Yet the 8's should be RIF'd/PIP'd?
Evaluating and compensating employees is tough enough without using voodoo like Stack Ranking.
If Blizzard was just hiring people off the street then yeah, sure I'd expect a bell curve.
But given the whole recruitment process, it's not necessarily going to form a bell curve.
Plus, the implementation is usually at the manager level - so each manager has to meet a quota of x% good, y% okay, z% bad etc., and each manager doesn't have 10k employees.
That would be neat, but probably bad for a variety of other reasons. Like, why is all of sales getting fired? Well, they unfortunately all ranked poorly...
It's more like, a manager has 7 employees and he has to stack rank them 1 to 7 and manage #7 out and rehire a replacement. Was #7 a bad employee? Why would any system of management assume that they are? Such as system assumes that the sea is full of employees of rank #1 to #6 and that the difference between 6 and 7 was so great as to warrant the costs associated with termination, hiring, training, on-boarding, and ramping up a new #7. Will they be better enough to warrant doing it all again?
W. Edwards Deming is rolling in his grave.
(sarcasm) shouldn't you have all good people because your leetcode hiring process only produces "the best" (/sarcasm)
Add to the fact that "rankings" are often largely political. There's a "minimum talent" aspect and then the last 1-2 points is most often political and representative of machiavellian power levels in the corporate dominance hierarchy.
Also, the article headline should explicitly call out Stack Ranking.
Stack Ranking basically admits one of two things:
1) your recruiting sucks
2) your work culture sucks
Well, and #3: corporate culture doesn't value balance or having any "bad times" in your life.
...companies still use it ? Thought microsoft taught industry a lesson here
The process itself was flawed because people had a tendency to stay in the rank where they were submitted because frankly managers didn't have the time, energy or interest in really talking through every employee. It was just easier to rubber-stamp the whole process and move on. Also it was nearly impossible to get rid of the process because of course people who had succeeded in it didn't want change. I couldn't in good conscience continue like that, so I took over rankings for my location. It went from one day to a week-long process and I made people vote anonymously and incorporated a ranked choice system and then aggregated the results. It was a far more time consuming process but IMHO fairer. I still hate forced ranking despite succeeding in it. It becomes part of your job - managing to the metric.
Vestiges of it remain because people still don't know how to distribute compensation without ranking people, particularly for employees that have the same review rating.
But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.
I don't know how many people the lead in the article managed. If it was a team of 15, he has a legitimate gripe. If it was a team of 200, not so much.
Yes, managers are supposed to keep that from happening but this policy tells them that a) you don’t trust them to do their job, b) their job now focuses on protecting their people from the system, and c) being busy playing the same game on their own personal behalf.
I mean, below average performers will be around 40-60% just because how averages work.
The problem is that the question is "is their performance low compared to team", while the question you should be answering is "is their performance low compared to the market.
If team's management is on point with hiring the "worst" won't be that much worse than average anyway, so if you want to replace the bottom few % you essentially waste time as new hires might be at same productivity level.
On other side if you recruiting sucks and 20% of the dept does the 80% of the job, it isn't going to help either.
If your team leads could be trusted to measure appropriately, you wouldn't need stack rankings because they'd correctly identify those under-performing. Stack ranking is conceding that your managers can't properly measure performance. Shouldn't that reflect more on management?
so whatever psychopath games they are playing, its not working.
So managers everywhere who only saw lots of headlines thought it must be cool just like Scrum and microservices and decided to adopt it.
I didn't know this existed until now. The problem with this (among others) is that I can never personally know where I stand. If I'm doing well, but being excelled by others, I still get penalized. There's no guarantee, it's almost random.
Also, I now have a new question to ask in interviews, and if it does exist in a hiring company, I can negotiate by declining bonus pay performance reviews and in lieu of ask for higher wages (not that any company would go for this).
But if times are good and everyone is performing well enough and contributing, why get rid of them? If they're not performing well enough, then you shouldn't need stack ranking to figure that out, and you don't need to arbitrarily set a percentage of employees to put on performance improvement plans or fire.
Yep, Currently working for an absolute horror show of an employer who proudly uses stack ranking during yearly and half yearly reviews.
Cant wait to move on from this place.
In fact 5% is quite a low estimate in my opinion. I would estimate it 20%, easily 1 in 5
Maybe there is a bigfoot out there but I will refuse to believe until I see one
Stack ranking seems to be a solution for managers that are not doing their job. Either because they are trying to be nice or oblivious or just don't care. Since this guy quited to me it sounds like the first.
Oh, really? I haven't followed this kind of stuff in a while. So they're good now?
How would they rank for software development, in general? Game studios are notoriously subpar when you start comparing them to FAANG, big enterprise sotware development shops, etc.
I don't think this has changed substantially. It's supply and demand: lots of people want to build games for the sake of building games. At least in theory it sounds more exciting than maintaining whatever microservice for a FAANG. So, because there's a lot more supply than demand, they get paid less.
Further, stack ranking mostly ignores the existence of human psychology. As soon as metric is chosen to be a benchmark for the measurement of performance, it almost immediately because useless as a benchmark for performance, because people are people. People will find out how the game works, and they will play the game. Employees will sabotage other's work to make themselves look relatively better, managers will hire whipping boys for the specific purpose of giving a low rating so they can take the sword. Sure this happens with any performance rating system, but the worse behaviors are accentuated with fundamentally broken rating systems.
How should employee evaluation be done then? It's straight forward:
* Set clear expectations.
* Get peer feedback
* Manager decides how the employee performed in comparison to the expectations that were clearly communicated to the employee based on the manager's personal knowledge of their reports work, and from that of peer feedback.
No zero sum hunger game bullshit required.
This is the fundamental flaw with stack ranking that really irks me. Stack ranking force fits people to a normal distribution but that's backwards. With normal distributions you're supposed to measure the phenomena then use statistical formulas to see if the data fits a normal distribution. Maybe it does. Maybe it's bi-modal, or tri-modal. Maybe the data is evenly distributed.
But no, companies butcher the concept of a bell curve and end up doing serious damage to the culture of the company as everyone starts optimizing their behavior to succeed in an utterly irrational system.
absolutely, it may work (possibly) if you could apply that 5% over an entire large department
but each line manager only has visibility over their (hopefully) small number of reports
so if you have 3 excellent reports on a high performing team: who do you dump in it?
the usual answer is the person with the least leverage/ability to resign, which is grossly unfair
1 of 3 things will happen:
- The world will be populated with enlightened companies structured in pro-worker models that are wonderful for everyone involved
- You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful
- You will balance option 1 and 2 in some better fashion that moves the needle closer to your idealized vision
Isn't that better than just hating your life, punching a card, and waiting for the axe to fall on your head?
As a business owner, who doesn’t have to worry about being stack ranked, I’ll say: continuous annual stack ranking to ensure a specific percentage of employees are put onto a pip or terminated is a terrible idea, and the people who institute it are bad at their jobs.
I’m not convinced that stack ranking is a good solution to this problem. A good organization and HR team knows how to terminate someone who is not performing well without incurring legal liability.
It can be a somewhat drawn out process, but a stack ranking system doesn’t seem like it would make it a lot faster to me.
My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is), and if you could continually prune the worst performing 3% of the org you could continually improve the quality of the remaining workers.
I don’t see an issue with employees protesting or trying to sabotage a system they see as unjust.
If the company cannot convince you that its policies are efficient and moral, then that is their mistake for hiring somebody who sees the world fundamentally differently. If they don't want people to do that, they should tell every new manager in the hiring interview "Part of working here as a manager involves stack ranking people as low, even if they are doing great work, and not telling them they are under stack ranking, and if you cannot do that you won't want to work here"
i think a healthy working relationship involves employer & employee collaborating according to a set of mutually beneficial rules, which prevents either party from taking advantage of the other.
this is (at least idealistically) what employment contracts are for, even if they have a natural tendency to favor the employer in most situations.
besides that, i think there are plenty of examples from recent history which demonstrate that it's not healthy for the rules under which an employee operates to be solely outlined by the owner of the business (e.g. because that owner may attempt to take advantage of the employee).
May as well ask family to stop having opinions on my cooking.
Employees in tech have a lot of power. It’s much better than the alternative.
You should see something wrong with someone actively sabotaging a system. It's fine and maybe encouraged to protest or move on to a better opportunity, but sabotage just means they're making the whole world a little bit worse off.
I say, great! Sounds like you could do it better, so please go for it.
in my experience, the framing and rhetorical style that you're using is often used to make excuses or apologies for business practices that diminish the power employees have in the workplace.
we'e not talking about some nebulous "they" that "always wants more", we're talking about the specific case of Blizzard utilizing stack ranking and then firing a manager who is unwilling to be opaque about the capricious evaluation they are being asked to do to their direct reports.
"Well, start your own company and don't kill people if you don't think it's right."
And are you currently running for national office?
Hmm.
Their response: Yes, we did it and we did it better than everyone else including the crooks.
There are a lot of activist investors out there. Even Musk is being targeted because of his absent leadership at Tesla.
No one [0] denies this. The problem with stack ranking is that you are forced to find problematic employees even when there are none.
I do agree with the overall point you are making, but I think that option two could be formulated in a less inciting way. Sometimes it might make sense for a company to do worker-hostile actions, but stack ranking just seems like a generally bad idea and not really related to getting rid of antagonistic employees; at worst, it probably helps making them.
[0] Figuratively, not literally.
Could you share some insights on how you organise an hiring process and a company to reach a point were despite having several hundreds employees and adding/replacing few dozens per month, there are no problematic individuals. I have never seen, anywhere, ever.
If you can offer some evidence that you can replicate that consistently, please open some consulting business, you’ll make millions and help so many organisations.
It's quite easy to see this, actually. If you let the bottom 5% go, stack ranking now dictates that you still have 5% problematic people. Repeat this cycle a few times and people previously considered perfectly average are now problematic. This obviously doesn't make any sense.
In reality, some companies might be super lean and only have 1% bad performers (as in negative business value), while some companies might be 90% overhead. For some companies the bad employees might be spread over all teams, while in others some teams are incredibly efficient and others are completely worthless. Coming in with a 5% brute-force hammer just doesn't make much sense in general and comes with all the morale and infighting drawbacks mentioned sufficiently in this discussion.
If one wants to escape a corporate hellhole no sense in starting another one.
Additionally no need to start from scratch. Just joining an existing worker cooperative would be a radical improvement over non-equity employment.
"Be the change you seek" rather than looking for someone else to do the work.
CEOs manage that just fine. Their greatest challenge is building a culture of empathy; something psychopaths generally would find difficult. Call of Duty, The System, sells itself; a distributed self-healing machine like those found at Microsoft, Salesforce, Nestle, Pfizer, and every other giga-organization, nine-thousand eight-hundred neurons aligned toward the goal of deleting or absorbing competition.
Encouraging more kind-hearted people to start businesses is a magnitude of naivete which begets an unrealistic level of faith in the system which created the companies that rip our economy apart. Sure, you can go start Slack; and eventually be faced with the impossible choice of submitting to one overlord or being annihilated by another. You grew your business beautifully. Your customers and employees love your organization. You made mistakes, though not a tenth the number your competition did. But, they have Unlimited Capital, and were willing to cross the lines you wouldn't because the lines don't even exist in their morally-depraved worldview.
But; you're right; you'd discover that you can balance one and two, if you get lucky and stay small; like hiding from a hungry bear in the woods. This doesn't minify readers' dissatisfaction and frustration with a system that allows bullshit like this to happen, nor does it justify an out-of-touch ultra-Republicanized soundbyte about pulling up your bootstraps and getting to work fixing a system that loads fifty trillion dollars into a cocked gun and points it at anyone who respects the human condition just a bit too much.
- You'll realize that building an organization not built on exploitation is not viable in an exploitative economic system. You'll always be undercut by companies treating their employees shittier, that's what capitalism optimizes for.
If something isn't right, go change it.
If you can't, break free until you can.
Else it's a bigger problem than you might realise
Then talking about it or protesting may be the way. When the climate where we all can start our business and make a significant change in this landscape will come that will be the best solution. But right now it’ll barely do a dent, if that. I sense that what we are facing are systemic problems
- Nobody knows they are being ranked.
- Employees are ranked, some % at the bottom is terminated, some % at the top is promoted or rewarded.
- The theory behind stacked ranking seems to work.
nth round:
- A strong candidates comes to an interview. The interviewer thinks: "If we hire this candidate, my ranking will lower and I'll be closer to the bottom. Better pass on this guy!" (sabotage)
- A weak candidate comes to an interview. The interviewer thinks: "If we hire this candidate, my ranking will go up and I'll be farther from the bottom. We need to hire this guy!" (sabotage)
- Someone asks for help with documentation. The team mate think "Uhm, I should work on my tasks instead of helping others, that will boost my rank"
- The employees that choose not to sabotage the company will be punished.
- The theory behind stacked ranking is proven wrong.
So:
1) a company that implements stacked ranking is performing self-sabotage.
2) MBAs are based on pseudoscience and cargo cult. True business thinking is beyond them. https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/human-resources-h...
3) ~10% layoff = strong signal your company is using stacked ranking.
Google, widely mocked for the douchiness of its hiring process (which it admitted to years ago and claimed that it was trying to reduce), forces employees to rank their fellows using a graphical tool that presents their pictures on screen and demands that you move them up or down to rank them in reference to each other. The application makes it impossible to align colleagues on the same horizontal line.
I mean... who the fuck expends the engineering time to create such an offensive tool? Google; that's who.
I have this first-hand from a colleague who worked there, and he is definitely not one to make things up. Plus... this would be an oddly specific lie, don't you think?
To be fair, I should have used past tense in my comment, since this was a few years ago. But, given interview experiences at Google reported by other immediate colleagues, I would find the story believable even without knowing the credibility of the source.
Here's another one: My friend (not the one who saw the "ranking" system) had an interview at Google, where he was given a programming exercise and told he could solve the problem in any language he wanted. The interviewer left the room, and my friend correctly solved the problem in Objective-C. The interviewer came back, looked at it, and said, "Oh, not THAT language."
A few years later, Google publicly admitted that its interview process sucked and said it was making it better. I have declined to interview with them, however, not only because of friends' experiences but also the company's behavior on the whole.
So your information is false.
Google does/did have an elaborate "calibration" process which seems to eat all of management's time. But that's more of a committee, manual, meeting process and isn't really stack ranking.
Anyways, it's all bullshit, just like school grades and IQ tests and leetcode interviews: ranking and measuring humans is inhumane.
I know why it happens, but I also instinctively run away from any organizationally large enough to "need" it.
Stack ranking seems to bring in the assumption that any company can be reduced to a single employee on a performance improvement plan ;-)
Case in point, I had an Indian engineering manager report that had his staff PiPs entirely down racial lines.
Thankfully, jira and our GitHub repo proved otherwise. I gave the Indian dev lead his own PiP.
By the next year he wised up but I had a long enough list to can him for other reasons. Meanwhile, a whole year had to go by before we could can this pain in the rear.
This type of BS is why companies like Microsoft lost to companies like google or apple. I'm not surprised blizzard is going down the same rabbit hole.
It's as hard to make a Google nowadays. It's hard to get those people who know how to do it out of Google!
https://www.pcgamer.com/netease-smashes-up-world-of-warcraft...
it will likely be months (if not years) before they are permitted to operate again, likely killing the habit for a large percentage of their player base
I wonder how the droid that initiated that contract re-negotiation was ranked?
real truth? if you're privy to the exact details of the NetEase' negotiation would you mind sharing?
(personally I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard wanted an increase in their cut, mistakingly believing that they had leverage in the negotiation)
"Chinese gaming giant Tencent recently unveiled its new MMORPG Tarisland, and it wasn't long before fans noticed it bears more than a passing resemblance to Blizzard's own World of Warcraft. Like WoW, Tarisland looks to be a fantasy MMO with an exaggerated, more cartoonish art style. There are paladins, mages, dragons, elves with an affinity for the color purple that live in a giant tree, and more. That, of course, wouldn't be enough to justify the clone label, but taking a closer look reveals that many of the game's characters and environments look to have borrowed liberally from WoW. The designs of the game's elementals, dragons, airships, and even some of the game's playable classes and races, in particular, all appear to be heavily inspired by Blizzard's signature style. The game's announcement trailer even features a dragon that looks incredibly similar to WoW's Deathwing landing atop the ramparts of a city, in a scene that is extremely reminiscent of the WoW: Cataclysm cinematic."
Given gp’s post history I doubt they are privy to details, more likely a knee jerk shot given the chance.
NetEase seemed to have an extraordinary influence in making modern Blizzard as financially extractive as possible of its player base. And surely, there are other relations that have made modern Blizzard into what it is, but you can see the NetEase fingerprints on every title released since 2008.
Why would you want that?
Companies don't make games. People make games. All the people at Blizzard who made the games that you remember fondly have moved on. There's nothing left but an empty shell of a brand running on the fumes of inertia.
It's sad to watch because the figureheads go off to start their own companies, and the games just aren't as good. Blizzard spent way more money on game design (mythology, iteration after iteration of characters before release) than any startup could ever afford to, and they really reaped the rewards. Then Activision buys them, decides they should focus on Candy Crush, the employees all sexually harass each other, and it's over! (To be fair, I think a lot of people left because they made more than enough money over their career. Who wouldn't leave when you have enough to retire.) It's sad because it will be a long time before we see a similar game studio appear again. If you like their games, pray and take up a hobby like fishing. It will be a while before we're having the same kind of fun that we used to have.
I know WoW in china operated under a completely different business model where you pay by the hour instead of a expansion packs and a monthly subscription
(no idea about their other games)
No.
WOW and it's planetary popularity killed Blizzard not some deal with CCP backed company.
If you want a lot of short term goal people to make money pumping stock, this is a great way to go.
If you want to build long term value for shareholders it's absolutely one of the dumbest things you can possibly do.
It's totally repulsive to me. But as this guy's firing clearly indicates, part of the point is repulsing people who care about staff and want to actually get things done. If an organization focused primarily on being effective, that would be a huge disadvantage to the ladder-climbers and intrigue-lovers that have clawed their way to the top.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Rather than an attempt to create fall guys and internal competition, I think executives are doing it sincerely to find and weed out low performers, but fail to understand that works well for 100 employees at a retail store doesn't work well for 6 employees on a SWE team, or even 40 employees under a large heterogeneous tech org.
It doesn't. Ever.
I'll give you two examples.
I currently work at a company that does stack ranking. The first year I started at the company, I started in the middle of the year. I was told because of that, I wasn't eligible for a bonus or salary increase. I later found out this was total BS.
Second year? I work my ass off. Stay late, develop new tools for the team which are then used on other teams. I got some visibility with those tools with several managers. I consistently take on extra work, present to project leaders, go to any and all conferences, make reports, and suggest new technologies my manager and other managers. I feel like I hit it out of the park. Nope. Two project managers didn't like me and rated me low. My manager ranked me in the lower tier. I got a pittance for a bonus and no salary increase.
Third year? I'm a bitter, frustrated developer. I decided, "Well fuck it, I gave you a great effort and got nothing in return. This year, the company gets fuck all." I barely worked. I did the absolute minimum. I was "quiet quitting" before it was cool. I'd log off early every day. I refused to take on more work. I missed or ignored meetings that weren't absolutely required. I worked on several side projects instead. I was getting paid a high six figure salary to do as little as possible. It was completely glorious. We get to the end of the year, I get the same low ranking. Same pittance of a bonus, and because it was my third year, I got a small raise in my salary.
That was the end result of stack ranking. It didn't matter what YOU did, it only mattered what your co-workers did and how they felt about you. You could have the best year of your life, be totally plugged in and kicking ass, but if someone didn't like you? It was all for not which I soon realized very quickly.
Its incredibly hard to try and be your best when you're constantly looking over your shoulder. Its impossible to be "all in" when you absolutely know your effort will be for nothing.
Even Microsoft famously gave up on it when they realized it cost their company a decade of progress because stank ranking encouraged managers to sabotage their co-workers projects in order to look good on their own year-end reviews.
https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/stack-ranking-steve-bal...
Its absolutely staggering to think there are companies still out there using this to measure employees performance. Its beyond toxic and will suck the life out of your team, your managers and your employees.
Yea, that'd last about a day.
"Senior engineering lead resigns in protest of corporate directive", on the other hand, seems like a call to arms for the conscience-driven; a thorn in corporate's side. Better to squash it and deal with the one-off "firing". Especially if it's for "cause"—then they can give nothing as severance, and quote a violation of the "employee agreement" as the reason.
"And to wrap up I want to again clarify that I was surprised to see the Bloomberg article below. I did NOT provide them the email they're quoting from, but I believe the quotes are accurate. They have neither spoken to me nor reached out to me in any way."
source: https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688562148978690
And that's exactly the reason for the downfall of the company. No vision, no passion, no leadership, no quality - just quantity and money.
Indeed, these stack ranking schemes need a Freakonomics or Moneyball style critical analysis applied to them, they’re likely at least as harmful as helpful.
Honestly stack ranking can only be described as a fetish, it offers no gain and really only exists because certain people really love it in a very creepy way.
"Man makes a stand against more Blizzard bullshit, mistakenly assuming that someone in management has a soul, gets fired"
The managers of widgets are sad widgets. To be a person as a manager, you have to manage people.
Unfortunately, all of us cannot claim this. There certainly are engineers who need to be let go.
They have bastardized every single game franchise and turned it into an unregulated online casino of loot boxes. They defiled Diablo by making a mobile version. They defiled World of Warcraft. There was never a Starcraft 3. They don't give two shits about anyone's opinion. They will keep pushing shitty products and exploiting their workers until they have sucked everybody's soul. If you are a Blizzard North fan, refrain from buying anything from the money-sucking parasite that Activision/Blizzard has become.
MBAs programs are a ritual of cargo cult indoctrination that that reinforces beliefs based on pseudoscience and irrationality.
Not only they're completely clueless about how to generate value for a customer, they have taken every revenue generating activity in America, applied some fucked up short-term thinking, and ruined them.
For every Steve Jobs (value generating individual) there's a John Sculley (MBA), ready to milk every cash cow dry. The best thing that occurred to Apple was to undo the entire legacy of John Sculley and send him home.
Contrary to popular belief: nobody fucking needs MBAs. MBAs are a mistake. The US had a much better economy before MBAs were invented.
What's the contribution of US MBAs? making China the #1 country by GDP, and normalizing clown-like botox faces. Truly the most idiotic cargo cult ever created.
It's not MBAs that are the problem you hate, it's capitalism stretched to it's _naturally_ anti-competitive pinnacle.
Personally I try to support smaller creators wherever I can. Not to say they're always perfect either, but the rate of controversy there is significantly lower, and honestly there are a lot of great games coming from the indie space.
I encourage anyone who is similarly saddened by this recent news to consider doing the same.
Accurate summary.
A lot of other comments are saying, this doesn't make sense, there'll always be someone getting ranked low, this doesn't make sense, it's arbitrarily punishing teams full of high performers, this doesn't make sense, no matter how hard you work, the only thing that matters is whether or not you're in the bottom 5%, applying a bell curve to a small population doesn't work, etc etc. Correct, those are all great reasons why this is silly from an objective standpoint concerned with worker's wellbeing or just sheer rationality, but from a corporate profit standpoint, it doesn't matter (sort of, see below). All that matters is there are mechanisms in place to extract more labor for less money.
Where they failed is to account for an uptick in societal concern for worker's wellbeing. Now this guy get fired and there's a story, that's bad PR. There's a binary demographic in the USA right now, those that will care about this guy and worker's rights, and those that will arbitrarily defend the business' right to do whatever it pleases (and be opposed to things like unions on ideological grounds). From my observations it seems the former group has more buying power because companies seem to cater their actions more towards that group in general, although it is hilarious and frustrating how bone-headed corporations continue to be when it comes to worker's rights, fighting tooth and nail and spending millions to crush unionization efforts.
I write poorly, to summarize what I mean to say is it was a mistake from all angles, capitalist or otherwise, to treat this guy the way they did. Now they blew up a story and now we have Yet Another Data Point for blizzard being shit to their employees. Now a bunch of people are learning about stack ranking and how stupid it is and that blizzard is still doing it. If they wanted to be effective extractors of labor value they should have found more subtle ways of doing it, like swapping out guaranteed vacation time for "unlimited" policies and then implementing a "dynamic work ethic" culture that made people take less vacation time and continue to work remote while on vacation.
Or, you know, they could just be really smart and give their employees shared ownership in the company, making it more profitable in general, more stable, and creating a more positive work environment. That would of course mean less share of profit for the shareholders which is why this will of course never happen.
I write authoritatively because I don't know how to hedge well, I'm actually very curious what others here think about how this reflects in general on the overall push in the usa for more unionization, particularly of software engineers and especially for the games industry. What other solution here is there, given that blizzard can't be trusted to do well by its employees? Someone else here wrote "start a competing company!" but I don't think we need to do much to agree that starting a blizzard competitor from your garage is a kind of silly idea (though I do much prefer indie games, what I mean is that an MMO or blizzard-scale games are simply out of scope for these kinds of companies).
Stack Ranking is designed to give companies a lever to exit poor performing employees, with the thought of making room for more new ones... new ones who won't statistically, be as bad as the ones that were let go.
Your manager is tasked with finding people they don't like and putting them on performance plans. And let's be honest, a performance plan is not to help you improve. It's to make your life miserable so you start shopping for a new job.
You haven't done anything they can outright fire you over, but they just don't like you. So HR gives them this lever to pull. And it's set up as a cautionary tale to others, "If you aren't good, you'll get cut... just like Joe!"
Anyway I'm torn on Stack Ranking. I mean, it does exactly what it'd designed to do. It helps cull a small percentage of the employees every year. But is it fair? Or done in a way that isn't totally subjective? Not in my experience. And have you ever met anyone who was on a performance plan, but got off and went on to be successful? I haven't. 25+ years in tech.
But you can't just outright fire people. Everyone would hate you, and I'm sure it's not legal in every state. So you slowly build your case, through Stack Ranking, and after a few months you can just say, "Gosh, Joe didn't work out... not my fault, he didn't follow the improvement plan HR set down for him."
There are always those people who just... look, your team will work better without them. Think of the annoying guy who always puts his boss in an awkward position with questions, or think about the guy who cooks fish in the microwave, or the guy who is just a little too into [fill in the subject] and won't shut up about it... Stack Ranking helps get rid of those people from your office.
As a manager, I've participated in this. I've benefited from this. But I don't see any value in hiding the fact that you Stack Rank, I think that's the real flaw in Blizzard's plan. They should make it public. Tell all the employees, "Guess what, we're going to get rid of 1 in 20 of you to make room for fresh blood."
Is it shitty? Meh, I guess. But also do you really think that there aren't at least 1 in 20 of your peers you wouldn't relish the opportunity to replace? Put another way, do you really think that if rolled a D20, and had a 1 that you wouldn't get a higher number if you re-rolled? I mean, the odds are in your favor. If the 13 was obnoxious enough, or constantly biked to work and left his stinky bike gear to dry in the break room... I'd be tempted to re-roll a 13 too. =P
So me personally... years ago, when I was working at a bigger company, I used Stack Ranking to get rid of some people who were overly political in the office. Like... I just put them on a performance plan, and it worked. Give them busy work, give them a bunch of self-evaluations to use, and micromanage them until they quit. I guess it was shady, but the end result was a positive thing for my my team -- at least I felt that at the time.
If you trust your manager, Stack Ranking isn't a bad thing. If you don't trust your manager... well let's just say you have bigger issues. And really, if you don't like your boss you should find a new job... before you get Stack Ranked! (=
The idea that someone would spend 6 months managing an employee out instead of having a one minute conversation about not microwaving fish sounds just realistic enough to have actually happened. :-)
Names clearly changed. =P
HR is the real enemy here and their fear-based power derives from risk management action against Federal/State mandates and potential employee legal action, i.e. "Make sure we don't get sued and that we have a strong defense if we do."
Without a documented methodology for weeding out 'poor performers' and a history of doing so, the company's risk from an individual dismissal increases.
Hence the HR team locked in the basement where nobody accounts for the differential cost from all these schemes and programs.
Like vaccinations, thousands of lives are vaccinated in the hopes of preventing one, high-cost event with a damaging outcome.
Managers feel safer, executives don't care, and you play the game
IME stack ranking (esp between several teams) can be very helpful and improve fairness.
Just don’t impose a distribution on ratings
So essentially the same method used as in Stalin's Great Purge, rat out your colleagues even though they did nothing wrong just to fulfill a made up quota. That will be really great for morale and the public image of the company /s