
Microsoft employee on stack ranking and its 'most universally hated exec' - boopsie
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81017
======
pwny
I'm honestly wondering why we value management so much. It might be my lack of
corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management
positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they're a
hindrance most often than not).

Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure,
through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in
a field they don't even understand)?

Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have
a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they
are?

I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at
least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.

~~~
Dove
_pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it
without any sort of formal management._

Valve does that:

    
    
        How could a 300-person company not have any formal 
        management? My observation is that it takes new hires 
        about six months before they fully accept that no one is 
        going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going 
        to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a 
        promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although 
        there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to 
        the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their 
        responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most 
        valuable resource in the company – their time – by 
        figuring out what it is that they can do that is most 
        valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if 
        they decide that they should be doing something 
        different, there’s no manager to convince to let them 
        go; they just move their desk to the new group (the 
        desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start 
        in on the new thing. (Obviously they should choose a 
        good point at which to do this, and coordinate with both 
        groups, but that’s common sense, not a rule, and isn’t 
        enforced in any way.) That everyone on a project team is 
        an individual contributor, doing coding, artwork, level 
        design, music, and so on, including the leads; there is 
        no such thing as a pure management or architect or 
        designer role. That any part of the company can change 
        direction instantly at any time, because there are no 
        managers to cling to their people and their territory, 
        no reorgs to plan, no budgets to work around. That there 
        are things that Gabe badly wants the company to do that 
        aren’t happening, because no one has signed up to do 
        them.
    

[http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-
here-w...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-
its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/)

~~~
seiji
It's hilarious to see the exact opposite happen: an 80 person company with a
multi-page visio org chart, six departments, seven VPs, five pages of expense
report rules and regulations, meetings scheduled to plan when to schedule
other meetings, and nobody listens to the people who know what to do next
because the visionary VC-installed-CEO is Touched By God and can't be
questioned even as the company nose dives into obsolescence.

~~~
meepmorp
> an 80 person company with a multi-page visio org chart, six departments,
> seven VPs

Pfft. I once worked at a place with 77 employees and 14 VPs. How we didn't
wind up taking over the tech world still mystifies me.

------
sriramk
I've spent six years experiencing all sides of the MSFT review system. I think
the articles blaming the curve/stack ranking are wrong - the root problem is
that MSFT doesn't have much momentum and the stock isn't doing well.

When everyone isn't getting rich, everyone gets to fight with each other for
the limited rewards that are handed down.

I see the same thing happening at Google where the internal systems that
worked so well in 2005 are causing political strife with a stagnating stock in
2012.

~~~
mckilljoy
I'd have to agree, I honestly never saw the stack ranking system screw anyone
over the way it is being made out to seem.

It is true that ultimately your manager has to make a case for what
bonus/raise/promotion you deserve, and rankings will figure into that. If your
manager sucks and/or hates you, he isn't going to fight for you. But if you
have a sucky manager, you are in trouble no matter which company you're at.

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
_But if you have a sucky manager, you are in trouble no matter which company
you're at._

This is sadly true only most of the time. Occasionally companies are organized
so that a bad manager affects his people very little before everyone realizes
they are a bad manager and gets rid of them.

Sadly not every company is striving for that kind of organization.

~~~
mckilljoy
Yea I'd agree the ideal is to get rid of sucky managers before they can crush
too many people's careers. Microsoft isn't so good at actively firing bad
people though, and that probably compounds the injustices of the stack rank
system.

------
aaronbrethorst
Maybe something's changed in the four-and-a-half years since I left, but
people were pretty ok with Lisa Brummel when I was at Microsoft. People gently
made fun of the fact that she always wears shorts, but there was never
anything mean-spirited in that.

She was seen as a huge step up from the guy she replaced, who was rumored to
have been having an affair with an underling[1] at the same time that he
recorded a video admonishing us to never have inappropriate relations with
subordinates. He was also responsible for the infamous towel debacle, which
came to define the worst aspects of penny-wise, pound-foolish cost-cutting at
the company.

Edit: Thx to, uh, moron for pointing out the new Mini-MSFT post that includes
this:

    
    
        Is she really the most universally hated executive?
        I don't know about that, but she certainly slipped away from being loved.
        Thousands of employees used to cheer for her. Now? 
    

[http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2012/07/microsoft-
fy12q4-result...](http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2012/07/microsoft-
fy12q4-results-plus-that-lost.html)

[1] In the (admittedly anonymous) comments:
[http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/06/locked-doors-martin-
tay...](http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/06/locked-doors-martin-taylor-markz-
and.html)

[2] <http://www.scribd.com/doc/39324385/Towels-Talent>

~~~
henrikschroder
"Ms Brummel also said Microsoft would scrap asystem that had forced managers
to rate a certainnumber of workers as sub-standard each year"

Apparently that didn't happen?

~~~
jf
No. If that wasn't bad enough, that same system requires managers to rate a
certain number of worker as sub-standard each year _even if they already fired
all their sub-standard workers_ during that same year.

~~~
bunderbunder
And that gets to the rub of the problem: A good manager will recognize and get
rid of bad employees.

A rigid system that codifies the assumption that managers are doing a bad job
will force them to do a bad job. For example, by having to choose between
putting good employees on the chopping block, or always keeping around a pool
of bad employees (as a buffer to keep the good ones off the chopping block).

~~~
spaghetti
Wow that's hilarious and depressing at the same time. Intentionally
maintaining a buffer of bad employees to keep your good employees around is
the pinnacle of big company crap culture. If I ever have a company large
enough for this type of problem I'll make sure that every manager can
anonymously warn me if they start thinking like this.

------
tysont
As a former Software Development Lead @ Microsoft who went through calibration
multiple times and no longer works there or has skin in the game, the article
is just plain old factually incorrect.

Yes there is a 20/70/10 curve with both the old/new systems, but managers
aren't held to the curve until the org size is around 30-50 people so
exceptions can be made in either direction for strong/weak teams. Also the
claim that only 1/2's can transfer is bogus, plenty of managers are happy to
take 3's and 4's can move in most situations (I know of a person who got
multiple U-10/5's and he still found a job). Finally the claim that
calibration takes a ton of time is way over hyped, I probably spent less than
a week on year end calibration (bit more than that including writing reviews,
which is hugely important).

As a Software Development Manager at Amazon I can also attest to the fact that
calibration isn't unique to Microsoft, Amazon just calls it OLR's. It's not a
perfect system, but I have yet to hear great suggestions on how to improve it.
I'm also not advocating the Microsoft system, but the facts in the article are
just out of whack.

------
CurtHagenlocher
"Productivity at Microsoft has skidded to a brief halt thanks to the Vanity
Fair article, which employees are reading on tablets and Nooks and Kindles
because no one dares bring in the actual magazine."

Seriously? When was the last time you've seen anyone with a physical Vanity
Fair magazine? To the extent that this claim is true -- and I have to say that
no one in my circle of friends at the company seems to care about this article
-- it's because _surprise_ tech people largely consume text through electronic
devices.

~~~
joe_the_user
Vanity Fair is one of six to ten magazines I regularly see at supermarket
lines. I don't know how many people actually buy it but it is one of the few
publications these days whose headlines can actually intrude on the world of
non-subscribers.

------
comex
Valve has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I'd like to point out
that Valve also uses stack ranking, according to their handbook:

[http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

I guess it's the Microsoft influence. But things seem to work out well for
them...

------
joe_the_user
Well, the ole "X% of programmers are rocker stars" position gets a lot of play
here (alone with the Steve Jobs quote etc).

I would say that unless a company of some size has the luxury of choosing
absolutely who they want from the start, the "rock star" ideology is going to
be as corrosive as it sounds like it is at MS.

------
confluence
Stack ranking has to be, by far, one of the stupidest management methodologies
that I have ever heard of.

It indicates 4 things:

1: Your hiring isn't up to scratch such that this needs to be done (i.e. rank
and yank). Raise the hiring bar and reduce firings.

2: You don't trust your employees to do the work you hired them too - this
breeds mistrust and increases the level of politics used in the work force.
You need to let creative employees freely do what you pay them to do.

3: You don't give projects enough time to mature.

4: You allow randomeness and false causation to determine employee outcomes.
For example AIG Finance was completely ripping the other departments during
the bubble run up. But come the crash - they almost took the entire firm down.

------
msellout
Anyone who gets upset at stack ranking has never heard about how management
consulting works. They advertise stack ranking in order to RECRUIT.

Life as a management consultant is a perpetual job search, networking
internally to get placed on the best projects to get the best performance
metrics to get the best bonus. It makes sense, because your job is to give
advice to large bureaucracies. If you can't figure out how to navigate
corporate politics, you aren't qualified to serve your clients.

~~~
marshray
And should we expect this system which seems to work so great for management
consultants to be the best system for organizing tens of thousands of
employees developing software products composed of tens of millions of lines
of code shipping to billions of customers?

------
jkolko
For what it's worth, this was common practice in tech in 1999. It's called
Topgrading; it was started by Welch at GE. You can read all about it at
[http://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-Leading-Companies-
Coaching-...](http://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-Leading-Companies-Coaching-
Keeping/dp/1591840813/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342739083&sr=8-1&keywords=topgrading)

------
tmbsundar
I am not sure why M$ is singled out for this "Stack Ranking" practice. While
in reality every big company has implemented some or other variation of this
system.

G# and particularly Jack Welch was the one who first introduced this system en
masse. Even he, IIRC, did say that, this Forced Ranking (as it was called),
system should be more of a short term thing where in you clean the system of
the non-performers (how can someone identify justly and accurately is a
question) and do not enforce this once it has run its course (3-5 years).
Everyone attributed the success of the G#'s northward share prices during his
reign to this "performance culture". If there was any truth in that approach,
only it has not sustained after Immelt took over.

Even I>M follows this so called "bell curve" based assessment. Every manager
should strictly adhere to the skew in his department, down to the smallest of
teams.

With this being essentially a HR question for decades to solve, with so many
people graduating with MBA HRs and Ph.Ds, I am surprised at the lack of
progress or do not know of any alternative system being implemented in a big
company successfully.

The normalization which is done at these companies make a mockery of sound
statistical principles. A bell curve is forced on even the smallest of teams
rather than letting a pattern emerge with very large populations where the
distribution is in a shape of a bell curve.

e.g., In a particularly bad year, in a sales team of 10 people the guy/ girl
who sold a 50 mill USD as opposed to a top ranker who has done a 150 million
is rated bad and equated with some body who wrote 1000 lines of code and his
project got cancelled (Note: Project could have got cancelled for any reason,
not necessarily and least likely because of the code he wrote). A person who
wrote 1000 loc and showed off (read:built visibility with managers who decide
his fate on the rating discussions) could easily get a better rating. The
whole system goes around a) building perception b) taking credit for success
c) pushing responsibility for failure onto someone else. People become
paranoid. Nobody shares information with any one else which would help the
other guy get a better rating. The organization suffers as a result.

Despite all this and despite Edward Deming's call decades ago to abolish this
rating system as one of his 14 principles, I have not seen a successfully
implemented system which replaces this Darwinistic one. Does anybody have any
examples of better systems or better implementations in organizations?

~~~
kamaal
No sorry all those companies don't practice Welch's stack ranking methods.

As per the Welch system, if each manager cuts down 10% of his under performing
team. The managers themselves get stack ranked in their managers staff all the
way up to the CEO. There fore managers themselves get ranked and cut. But that
is not what we see most companies. In many of those companies the axe falls
only on people working on grass root levels. And the managerial layers get
thicker and thicker and years pass by.

Also for this you need a very good leader at the very top who can drive this.
Jack Welch could do it because its his system. Other just do it because they
have to.

~~~
tmbsundar
I worked for G# before and it did not happen that way. Managers did not get
stack ranked. Every manager had a mandate to push 10% or 5% of their team as
bottom 10 or 5. And, I should add that this was may be because, it was in the
IT side and they did not have the luxury of letting go of people. So the
bottom 5/ 10% was not moved out. They were handed a rating and the performance
improvement plan that goes along with that.

------
blackhole
I am truly amazed that I wanted to work for this company at one point.

------
hubb
_Stack-ranking is all that and worse, according to my mole._

this isn't a conspiracy, it's just a gossip source. that sort of exaggeration
makes the article harder to read.

------
keeptrying
Bloomberg does the same thing. Are there big companies that dont do this? In
some way or form everyone is ranked at some point.

------
michaelochurch
Microsoft's review system sounds like an even more vicious variety of what
Google has, which is more than bad enough to fell a great company.

Google has a bicameral system consisting of (a) manager-assigned "calibration
scores" that are the outcome of stack-ranking nonsense and (b) annual peer
reviews. It seems like a bicameral review system would be a _good_ thing, by
removing career SPOFs. If a bi- or multicameral system is well-designed,
that's exactly what you get: multiple paths to success.

Where Google fails it is by making it an AND-gate rather than an OR-gate, even
for lateral transfers, much less promotions. (Without good calibration scores,
transfer is impossible.) At Google, people need managerial support AND peer
support to advance, which means there's endless jockeying for visibility _in
addition to_ manager-as-SPOF. It really is the worst of both systems.

In a properly-run company, you have several review signals: peer review,
extra-hierarchical work, demonstrated curiosity and will to self-improve, and
managerial review. For firing (excluding people who do something outright
wrong) the decision should be based an AND-gate. If someone does poorly by his
manager AND can't get peer support AND can't find a transfer, then it's time
to fire him. Not before. That's how _decent_ companies do it. On the other
hand, for title upgrades and pay raises and better projects, _decent_
companies use an OR-gate. If he gets good managerial reviews OR good peer
reviews OR has other managers interested in taking him, then treat the
employee as successful: give him a decent raise and let him transfer as he
wishes.

Now, managerial positions are a bit different. There, you actually want to see
strength in several signals before you give someone power over other people.
So there's justification for making selection _into management_ be based on an
AND-gate. You just really need to be sure that the person can lead. That's
different. But title upgrades, pay raises, project allocation, autonomy and
transfer opportunities should be based on an OR-gate; if one signal indicates
potential for success, move forward. If you can't see this, then you're FAL
and you should not be allowed to leave the house without assistance, much less
make decisions that affect other people.

Google fucked up its bicameral system by making it an AND-gate for promotions
and transfers and an OR-gate for adversity. That's the destruction of what was
once a great company. It has cost the software industry billions of dollars
worth of value. It sounds like a similar billion-dollar immolation occurred at
Microsoft.

Microsoft's system, advanced half a decade or more further in necrosis, seems
much the same but worse. It seems like these types of systems get worse over
time because more people want to tack on their own shitty ideas as more people
develop the system. They're not happy enough with other peoples' pre-existing
shitty ideas; they need to make a personal mark on a shitty system by making
it noticeably shittier, enough that they hear people complaining about their
changes in the cafeteria (which they justify as a good thing because "those
people are obviously no good, because good people have nothing to worry about
come review time.")

I am glad the Vanity Fair article got published. I have no strong feeling
about Microsoft either way, and I have a lot of respect for the great work
coming out of Microsoft Research, but it's about time that we see bad HR
policies leading to outright exposure and frank humiliation.

~~~
rachelbythebay
There was a joke some years back: what's the difference between Enron and
Qwest? Six months.

Now I think it's time for an update. What's the difference between Microsoft
and Google? Six years.

Having seen far too much inside the latter (as you did), it seems inevitable.
The path has already been blazed, and they are barreling down it just as fast
as they can.

~~~
michaelochurch
Google has one advantage, which is that they have a history of being mediocre
at the business game but make great products. Microsoft was great in its
heyday at the business game but makes mediocre products. This is an era of
technology when a lot of the best things really _are_ free (e.g. PostgreSQL,
the best relational database, is open source) and Google is way better adapted
to that environment.

It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle
under Microsoft's thumb.

~~~
jbm
You are not going to convince anyone by making such a generalized comment
about a huge company like MS. Moreover, the comment is just false Microsoft
makes good products. C#, Windows 7, Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft SQL, etc..
Even Zune was a decent product that merely failed to find an audience Google
makes bad products too; they just vanish when Goog starts cleaning up, while
Windows Vista lingers in my CD spindle, like a bad code smell in code I wrote
5 years ago.

Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still
nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't
been looking at it lately)

I don't use Microsoft's products (100% Linux, Android, iOS and OSX), but I'm
not blind to their charms.

I like Postgres, but when I see the tools people use with MSQL, not to mention
Oracle, I feel jealous.

~~~
ajasmin
> Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still
> nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't
> been looking at it lately)

Things like Google apps and other web based mail and calendering services.
Employees can accessed them from their Android and iOS devices. And IT people
don't have to manage it all.

~~~
halefx
If you do a feature comparison between Gmail and a 1998 version of Outlook
Express, OE wins handily. I've never used Outlook, but I imagine since it was
developed by the same company with much of the same needs and it's a much
bigger application that a Gmail comparison with Outlook would have the same
result.

Gmail doesn't even support group-level filtering!

/full-time Gmail user of more than 8 years

------
chamanbuga
So... this article simply isn't true.

~~~
yajoe
Which part? While I can't speak to the overall population statistics, there
were many people upset about healthcare and the new stack ranking. Think devs
and testers with cancer in the family. They attributed -- rightly or wrongly
-- both decisions to LisaB, and they were not happy.

The title may be hyperbole, but the content of the blogpost seems spot on.

~~~
rlu
I work for Microsoft so I don't think I can go into too much detail but..

>"If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing
that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great
review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a
terrible review,"

that is not true.

Stack ranking really isn't as bad as it has been made out to be in the past
few weeks.

~~~
Udo
> Stack ranking really isn't as bad as it has been made out to be in the past
> few weeks.

I'm curious how it could possibly not be as bad as it sounds, considering the
simplicity of the concept and the obviousness of its implications.

~~~
spaghetti
While stack ranking sounds terrible on paper the actual implementation might
soften the blow. Managers probably bend the rules a bit when it comes to the
actual distribution in their groups.

For example consider two managers that both report to a VP. Each manager has
10 direct reports. If the managers and VP are all friends then the actual
ranking distributions could vary a bit: one manager really has a strong team
and the VP knows this. The VP also knows the other manager has a weaker team.
As long as the VP's stack ranks are approximately correct in aggregate the
individual managers probably have some wiggle room.

The point is politics in large organizations usually trumps strict rules. This
can work both for and against someone hence some people don't view stack
ranking in such a harsh light.

~~~
Udo
Forgive me, but holy crap that sounds even worse! Not only does everybody seem
to know the system can't work in practice, they actually have to conspire
behind the scenes to prevent the worst outcomes? And the assertion that
politics trump rules anytime isn't in any way reassuring either. We all know
the kinds of people who excel at office politics and they're usually the most
destructive, corrupt and unproductive members of the team!

So to summarize what I heard so far: stack ranking is a terrible system based
on flawed assumptions, everybody involved knows it, it doesn't actually
measure performance but charisma, and for a company to work with this thing
they have to sidestep it anyway?

~~~
spaghetti
Great summary. Welcome to big company life!

------
sidcool
I don't think Ballmer is hated. People think he is inefficient. And upto some
extent, rightly so. But in no way he deserves what's dished out at him in all
those grudgingly written blogs by people who couldn't make anything out of
themselves.

~~~
moron
That phrase refers to LisaB, not Ballmer.

~~~
sidcool
It's Ballmer. I have been downvoted for the comment, but no one ever has given
a strong reason as to why Ballmer is a bad CEO. He is not a very good one,
that I agree, but he doesn't deserve hatred, does he?

