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Comment by rhyperior | Hacker News Reader

I’ve worked through all 3 CEO eras of Microsoft. Satya’s biggest mistake will be breaking the internal culture that made Microsoft what it is, for better and worse. Classic “be careful what you wish for” or perhaps law of unintended consequences, imo.

And yes, part of that involves the way they’ve changed the hiring and retention objectives.

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I'm curious to hear more about your take on why the culture change could be a mistake. From speaking to a couple of long-timers at Microsoft, while they didn't seem to have complaints under Ballmer, they did seem to welcome some aspects of Satya's culture change, specifically how it had become much more collaborative internally. To me, that seemed like a fix for the internal dynamics at MSFT depicted in that popular comic about Big Tech org-charts: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.

Has stack ranking worked well anywhere? Genuine question.

edit: Not relevant for stack ranking thing but I will highly recommend the book Lights Out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(book)

More important question is: is there any big company that DOESN'T stack rank?

I don't know, anecdotally I never heard MSFT employees grumbling about stack ranking. The lack of internal collaboration seemed to be more top-down, stemming from powerful execs expanding and protecting their fiefdoms.

Compare that to, say, Amazon, where stack-ranking seems to be an unofficial yet actively enforced policy. I've worked and talked with a huge number of ex-Amazon people and each and every one of them had myriad horror stories about the dysfunctional corporate culture. On the other hand, MSFT employees seemed to have much more balanced experiences.

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