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Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested to hear more stories out of Microsoft about the actual engineers that are doing the real technical work. A lot of these grief pieces seem to come from people that are in the PM/lower-middle management space.

When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author did that actually provided significant value, particularly in that final stretch.

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  > When I RTFA, I'm not totally sure what the author 
    did that actually provided significant value, 
    particularly in that final stretch.

Yeah, and that's kind of the point. Human value is not intrinsically quantifiable. You can try and apply objective numbers to human behavior, but usually only with brutal results.

She nails that point in the second paragraph with the five step break-down.

Reviews often boil down to a game of "yeah, but what have you done for me lately?"

You generally get railroaded by systems like stack ranking, unless you totally depersonalize your relationship with your peers and directors, and play the numbers game, tallying up petty minutia which may or may not be completely disregarded by the ones who make the rules anyway.

This sort of relationship is biased in favor of firing, rather than maintaining and building loyalty. It's all about negative reinforcement, and keeping your subordinates at arms length, so you can easily replace the ones that burn out, once they've proven useless.

If that's the sort of atmosphere you crave, have fun. It's not the only way.

I wouldn't advocate stack ranking. I would advocate cleaning out or re-purposing deadwood that is not doing anything productive or dragging the rest of the team down. If you can find something else productive for them to do, then that is great, but sometimes people just need to go elsewhere. If things are going well, then firing the least best of your crack staff is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Stack ranking is analogous to amputating the worst performing 10% of your body, every year. Or 'breaking up' with the worst 10% of your friends. Or knocking down the worst 10% of your house. Etc.

Not to defend stack ranking, but those analogies don't support your point. Most Americans would be better off losing the worst-performing 10% of their body. I probably lose close to 10% of my friends in any given year as we drift apart. Knocking down part of your house is a good thing if you're remodeling, and not comparable otherwise, assuming the company is hiring at at least replacement rate.

There is some logic behind always hiring the best you can find and having a process to cull the low performers. It's not like the company's actually shrinking by 10% every year. The problem only shows up when you hit a point of actually having all high-performers, and you're only throwing people away to meet a quota that's become counterproductive.

Your second paragraph exactly matches the point your parent wanted to put across. Yet, you typed in the first paragraph. You want to show you got more insight, huh?

No, no, the problem is that skill distribution is not random in an organization. Let me give you a very real example: I am contracting for a big company that has its own form of stack ranking. I've spent this last month with a team where the very best member they have seems to be in the bottom 10%. In comparison, I've worked with other teams where their worst performer is very competent, and would be a developer king in the first, low performing team. But with their stack ranking, the worst player of a good team is ranked lower than people from the bottom 10% team.

Even if hires were assigned teams at random, attrition doesn't occur evenly. Bad teams lose good people very fast. Teams with bad managers will have huge rates of churn (people rarely quit their job, they quit their manager). So the end result is to naturally divide into multimodal distributions: Rich get richer, poor get poorer. Since ranking teams is, from an organizational perspective, extremely political, you'll rarely get management to point fingers to the bad teams.

Also, splitting a high performing team rarely works: A team is not a collection of individuals, but also a culture. Dump a great performer on a bad culture, and even if you put him in charge, you do not get a good culture: Instead, you get less out of that person.

If there's anything I've learned, is that we are better off ranking teams, not people. The one reason to look inside a team is for voting people off the island, and that is something that should be started from within a team.

Except it seems like in practice the cuts are spread around so you destroy the worst 10% of your kitchen and the worst 10% of your garage even though the kitchen was really nice and the garage needed knocking down completely.

But Stack Ranking only work if you have a large number of people doing exactly the same job - and then it really only works the once.

I didn't even understand what the.. problem? ... was. The author writes of some mysterious task she didn't understand and then quits. That's pretty much all the detail here.

I mean, yeah, that happens.

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