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29athrowaway

Rank and yank

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

1. Rank everyone

2. Layoff bottom 10% or so

3. Reward the top

4. Keep it secret or the workforce will adapt by hiring bad people and sabotaging good people

Used at most companies with performance evaluations. Taught at MBA schools.

Trivia: MBAs have accomplished nothing throughout human history. Only creating overpaid executives that avoid taxes, corrupt the government, ruin the environment, make people poor, sick and make other countries richer. If all MBAs retired tomorrow 90% of obesity, pollution and corruption would stop.

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The company that first applied that strategy, GE, ran themselves into all sorts of problems with that approach. Microsoft’s era of doing fairly poorly was also at a timeframe when they were doing rank and cut strongly.

Yep, and these rankings are less about performance and more about politics. You actually have a very high chance of getting an organization made out of talkers and not-doers.

That's putting it mildly, re GE. When both Fortune and WSJ ("hardly bastions of anti-corporate sentiment", with apologies to _The Insider_) are criticizing your approach and leadership style, then you have an issue.

Not to mention Jack Welch's very "Let Them Eat Cake" attitude to the middle and working classes and executive compensation.

> Used at most companies with performance evaluations.

I suspect this is not true. Evals are far more common that stacking.

Btw when you do do this, 4 pretty much never works, and generate a political layer around it.

Perversely, at the group level it raises the value of lower performers, mostly as "chips".

[at a FAANG] Just the other day my director chastised his directs for "letting low performers leave without getting fired," which is something I had yet to hear get broadcasted to a full room of people. The company's leaders would rather get credit for a URA target than do what's best for the company (in this case, not paying out severance). Tech is so polluted with this kind of thinking that I really can't wait to leave it.

After surviving what feels like a dozen rounds of layoffs over the past year, morale is already non-existent. You can go weeks and sometimes months without even hearing a peep from the people you once thought were the brightest and hardest working. The whole thing just feels in need of a reboot. Is this consistent across all companies at the moment or is it just time for me to leave?

URA = unwanted attention rate

Neither this round of layoffs at Google nor the last had any association with performance as far as anyone can tell.

Strong performers from the teams around have been laid off, and people who really need to be gone have not.

Ratings aren't even finalized at Google for another week to be used for a layoff decision.

There are always rankings....

Using last year's grad ratings as the input for this when this year's ratings will be final in literally a week seems ludicrous.

Stack ranking people has got to be one of the most soul crushing tasks imaginable. You don't know what if any of the bottom will be cut.

> Stack ranking people has got to be one of the most soul crushing tasks imaginable.

So don’t play a part in it. Is doing it more or less crushing than being sacked?

At least the stack rankers will be able to “prove” they provide value every year by way of creating stacks.

Sucks to be on any team that delivers cyclical/lumpy value (with arbitrary windowing/snapshots).

Just about all companies have performance evaluations. This is not an explicit tactic in most companies.

It is.

Because of bad math and pseudoscience.

If it’s a tactic in a company, at some level it is explicit.

Someone makes the choice.

Performance evaluations are not evaluating your performance, the evaluations are the performance. “Performance” evaluations. They’re intended to be a method to easily fire people in a litigious world.

Yeah, manager’s duty is to always find something that could be improved.

Same with interviews: gotta keep things qualitative lest someone sues you for not being the successful candidate.

This isn't an eval. It's typically "you need X poor performers, Y average performers, and Z top performers. Can't fit your folks into these buckets? Too bad!"

Correct, this isn't an eval it is "stack ranking" which was made famous by GE. Some companies still do it. But not most.

You are talking about stack ranking. While yes, it does happen, the outcome of it isn't dictated in a single "x% people are now fired" event. There are multiple rounds of performance reviews, employees at the bottom are identified, they go through PIPs or some other similar process, and it may eventually lead to their firing or resignation. What we are seeing right now isn't that.

> There are multiple rounds of performance reviews, employees at the bottom are identified, they go through PIPs

I think this is a little hand-wavy. I bet the number of people identified for PIPs by stack ranking who survive the process is likely to be in the low single digit percentage, if that.

Stacked ranking is a more subtle name that obfuscates the truth. Rank and yank better represents what it is.

> 4. Keep it secret or the workforce will adapt by hiring bad people and sabotaging good people

AWS isn't even hiding it anymore ...

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