
How Adobe keeps key employees from quitting - cpeterso
http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/adobe-employee-retention/
======
Galanwe
Been at Microsoft at the time they made the exact same transition (from "bell
curve" to "goal/commitments"). Anyway most of these big companies just follow
one another on subjects like compensation and review system.

Frankly, both systems are just a stupid loss of time... It always end up the
same: you don't want/are not interested to fill in those lengthy and boring
papers, so you just write pretty much bullshit in there. Your manager
(usually) being a good guy will help you rewrite part of it so that it's
"corporate". And that's it. Nobody really cares.

For those who did not had to write that kind of papers, it's just always more
or less the same. You have to answer 5/10 lines on questions like: "What did
you do this last quarter?" "What are your commitments for the upcoming
quarter?".

90% of all the "commitments" of the department at MS looked like that kind of
BS: 1\. Describe your project and mention you're happy with it. 2\. Say that
you plan to work hard to reducing the technical debt (every single MS project
has 20 years of debt) 3\. Say that you will try to improve the overall quality
of the project and work with QAs 4\. Find some trait in your personality or
skills that you will improve for next quarter. e.g. "I will try to spend more
time studying component X so that I can help on that matter".

After some time you don't even pay attention to these reviews. Just copy/paste
what was written for the last quarter, change the commitments as
accomplishments, and create some new commitments depending on the trending
problems in the team.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It's not just bullshit, it's actively harmful. It encourages people to game
the system, often by playing political games. Secondary to that it encourages
work on short-term, easily measurable projects, which tends to be the least
valuable work. If you spend a year cleaning up garbage code you won't get
nearly as many gold stars as if you just built some useless shiny bolt-on
feature that nobody will actually use in the future. Now you understand a lot
of what's been wrong with software development at places like MS over the last
decade and more.

Perhaps even worse than that, this sort of bureaucratic BS tends to be
extremely off putting to talented engineers who are intrinsically motivated to
do good work. So they leave. Because they have the most talent and experience
and are thus the most able to find work elsewhere easily. Bad corporate
culture has a tendency to cause talent to evaporate out of a company. It's
been happening at MS for decades and has seriously damaged them, it's
happening at a lot of other places too. The problem is that when the people in
charge look at what's wrong they don't see these things because it's
practically invisible on a macro scale. Individual people on specific teams
could run you a laundry list of former heavy hitters in their part of the
company who left for greener pastures because they got fed up. But at the
highest levels the only evidence that tends to show up is that for some reason
it's become more and more difficult to execute on challenging projects, which
is easy to attribute to any one or multiple of the countless other changing
variables.

~~~
crdb
What is in your experience a better way to subtract the effect of personal
feelings from performance reviews? How can you scale, and make it fair? Is it
even desirable, as an unpleasant but productive person may have an impact on
the morale of a team?

~~~
rebeccaskinner
I've never had to manage "at scale", but I've spent the last several years of
my career with one foot in management and the other doing actual development.
I've been the person reporting to the people who lack introspection.

Ultimately, in my opinion, I think that trying to create the perfect algorithm
for evaluating performance is futile. You can't really remove the effect of
personal feelings because they play a huge part in group dynamics and in the
end you are not trying to optimize for a single person, you want to optimize
your team (or organization).

My experience has been that if you just listen to your team and watch them
it'll be very obvious who is adding value, who is neutral, and who is a net
negative. So long as your team size isn't larger than a dozen or so people,
the team will seem to naturally coalesce around people who get stuff done, and
they will tell you (sometimes with honest words and a tone that implies
sarcasm or joking to remove the feeling of guilt) when someone isn't doing
their part. The entire thing can be very opaque- I know of cases where one
person seemed to get far less done than everyone else on the team (completed
fewer projects, committed less code), and yet was very highly regarded. One
might think that she was simply well liked if unproductive, but after she left
for a different position the productivity of the team declined significantly.
She turned out to have been so well respected because while she didn't create
a lot of code she had a knack for spotting problems early on (things that were
never seen outside the team because they were fixed early) and coordinating
decision making between different people and projects. After she left there
was a brief surge in productivity, followed by a disastrous slog as
development was mired in bugs and component rework because of poor
communication of specifications. In the same team, much later, there was an
analogous incident where a developer appeared to be one of the most productive
developers on the team. He was well liked as well and often participated in
team activities, etc. but there was a constant undertone of joking about how
much difficulty and complexity the person introduced into the code base. When
I stepped in and did a thorough code review and looked at his parts of the
project I realized all the joking had been really telling of a very real
problem. The code was nightmarish. After that person was moved away from
development and back into devops the productivity of the team had a short
slump as everyone worked to refactor or replace his parts of the project, and
then eventually ended up being much higher even with one less person.

None of the anecdotes are really new to anyone whose done development before,
we know about net-negative producing programmers and people who catalyze work
more than actually doing it themselves. I really just bring it up as a
reminder of why it's so hard to have any objective measure, but also looking
at how the other team members react to a person is very telling.

~~~
crdb
Well, that works when you manage a small team, but if you were in charge of
say, Google Search or Microsoft Excel how would you go about managing hundreds
or thousands of developers? Knowing you can't even be around the several
hundred team leaders, let alone every developer, so managing by feel becomes
impossible. You have thousands of new, and leaving engineers, you need some
kind of order to the chaos...

Personally, I only tackle problems where I know I can keep the team small and
in constant contact. We work remotely, and prefer Haskell, both of which self-
select for people who are capable of managing themselves and working in such a
setup. But it wouldn't scale to Google or Facebook scale, I don't think. Maybe
Whatsapp.

------
z3t4
To set a salary:

Look at what they have done previously. If you hire a coder: Look at the
quality of their code and the problems they have solved. Then figure out
exactly what they will do in your company. And make an agreement what that
might be worth, considering the quality of their previously work.

For me it takes less then five minutes of reading someone's code for me to
decide if I want to hire them or not. I also already know what I need and what
that will be worth.

You can repeat this every year or six month because of the constantly changing
requirements of what needs to be done. And then it will be even easier, as you
have access of everything the employee has done.

To keep them: Constantly give them attention when they do something good, like
solving a problem, suitable for their skill level and competence. Remember
that you can praise different ppl for different things. You will get away
praising junior developers for doing things at their level while at the same
time praising senior developers for solving serious hard problems.

Remember that praising, celebrating and thanking people do not cost any
money!!

Some people just want to come to work and do exactly what they have done the
last ten years, while others get bored if they do not face any challenges. The
later category will need management, but they will also be valuable as they
will be able to adapt to changes and advance your company.

For those that want to, let them go to conferences and learn new stuff. The
stuff they learn will add value to your company.

Identify every individual's skill and good traits, then take advantage of
them!

Never, ever fire anyone unless there is a very serious problem, like stealing
or fist fighting.

Do not allow ass kissing, bullying or politics in general. Encourage a
professional attitude, but keep in mind that "everything is personal", so try
to be fair.

It's only when people feel safe and at ease they can go outside their comfort
zones and achieve great things!

~~~
holychiz
you seems like a great manager! everything you said makes sense, except for
"Never, ever fire anyone...". Really? what about those who are highly paid but
very disruptive to the team, ie. destructive to both budget and team outputs?
And can't be move to different areas. Surely that would be the exception to
your rule?

~~~
z3t4
It's probably your own fault. Small things might have built up over the years,
because you did not confront right away the first time you experienced the bad
behavior.

Maybe you can use the disruptive energy to your advantage!? If there are bad
influences, maybe you can turn it into good influences.

There's an exception though, if you are dealing with a true sociopath or
psychopath, you need to get rid of them asap. You will know you are dealing
with such a person if they constantly "destroy" people despite you've told
them that it's not acceptable.

------
gjm11
I cannot imagine any situation in which I would think "Man, I hate my job. I'd
quit right now if it weren't for the enlightened way they do performance
review and goal-setting."

Of course that's a little unfair. Maybe doing this stuff well means that
employees are less likely to find themselves with nothing important to do, or
something. Still, it seems like it's focusing on the wrong things.

If you want to keep good employees, surely you actually want to do things like
these: Give them interesting work to do. Give them work that has actual value
for the world. Pay them well. Make sure they have good tools. Give them a
sense of responsibility for the company's success (which means (1) shares or
options and (2) as much clarity as possible about how their work relates to
the company's higher-level goals). Make sure there are opportunities for
progress.

If tinkering with performance-management makes a big difference, I think that
can only be because either before or after the tinkering it was
catastrophically broken.

~~~
redwood
Google's system was intolerable. You put yourself up for competitive
promotion. Draining, rewards those who pay the optics game. Worst of all it
left the great people who don't know how to play politics behind and left a
lot of terrible people promoted who did

------
lucb1e
> It’s also about boosting Adobe’s (ADBE -0.18%) stock price.

I know it's about the larger trend, but I couldn't help grinning.

~~~
sandstrom
These inline quotes in some newspapers feel so out of place and irrelevant.
They are only good when they are funny, as in this case.

------
columbo
> Adobe’s stock price has increased from about $30 to over $80 since Check In
> began.

I don't want to be overly negative but COME ON. Changing their goals program
didn't nearly triple their stock price. I'm surprised Fortune included that at
the end. If it truly had that much of an impact that should be the title of
the article.

------
Yhippa
On the underperformer side this is an interesting strategy. By having frequent
conversations about underperformance that alone causes people to leave.

If what they're doing is true I think this is one of the more innovative
talent management strategies out there. I hope this leads to more honest
conversations and less politics due to doing whatever it takes to make sure
you come out on the top end of a distribution.

As a consultant I've had many projects where we came in to fix a process where
we were really fighting their performance management and incentives system.

------
willvarfar
I'm a bit skeptical. I've been through different companies with both
strategies, and the 'goal setting' is a lesser evil than once-per-year but its
hardly a reason for _staying_. All formal review processes are just time
sinks.

The only review system I kinda liked was Symbian's. I have no idea if it was a
mainstream idea, but they assigned you a level based on how you and your boss
perceived a third party would describe your influence.

Edit to add: this is an excellent old article I was reminded of and recommend:
[http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-
hr](http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-hr)

------
mturmon
The reason I was told about the elimination of a yearly written report card,
and replacing by regular conversation, is that employees have no trail of
documents saying their performance is good.

This gives greater freedom to lay people off, in the sense that there is no
documentary basis for a lawsuit of wrongful termination.

~~~
exacube
I would actually think otherwise -- with no formal documentation of poor
performance, they'll have a much harder time justifying a layoff/firing if
they are sued for discrimination or something.

~~~
mturmon
I see where you're going, but the constraints don't work out that way.

In an at-will state like California, you can be laid off for any business
reason, such as "the work in this area is closing up." So, justifying a layoff
(to the satisfaction of a court) is not a major constraint.

But if there is documentation stating that the employee's work is great, that
future opportunities abound, etc., then that justification begins to look
suspect.

On the other hand, in the absence of documentation, the at-will rules give
great freedom to the employer.

------
DanielBMarkham
Large companies have three somewhat conflicting goals:

1) Find and retain key people

2) Make improvements in the culture and the people that work there over time

3) Have some kind of system that allows you to let people go when sales go
downhill. (And sales will go downhill at some point. Bringing a group of
managers into your office and telling them to get rid of 20% of the workforce
within the next 4 weeks -- without the affected employes having any indication
at all that they are at the bottom of the list -- makes a bad situation even
worse)

I think perhaps it's best to separate these goals instead of trying to do it
all at once. You don't necessarily want to find people that look like the ones
you have. Improvements in people, culture, and environment is something that
should always be done with a focus on how the employees personal goals (which
should be part of this conversation) fit into the larger enterprise goals, not
the other way around. And as long as employees are getting to work in various
teams over the course of the year, having each team force-rank folks according
to whether they would keep them on their team if the budget was cut in half
seems reasonable, because that's just what might happen. Notice that managers
do not appear on the vote-them-off-the-island system.

It's a very tough situation and there are no easy answers. I think identifying
the various parts and how they might conflict with each other is the first
step in moving to the next local optimization.

~~~
eitally
I agree with you. One of the very simplest ways companies could help
themselves is through transparent communication of corporate strategy &
performance, particularly if line managers map that to individual & team
objectives. I have never been at any company that did a good job of this. It
seems much more common that strategic obfuscation, keeping employees in the
shadows (if not entirely in the dark) is something taught in management
school.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
(My day job is helping organizations change.)

Many years ago, I worked with a client once that was very small, like <50
people, but was staffed with people who used to hold very senior positions in
large companies.

We had some really kick-ass guys, don't get me wrong, but overall the entire
thing was a cluster fuck. Why? Because succeeding in a selfless way in a small
team and succeeding in an ambitious way in a large organization are
diametrically-opposed things.

These guys could _talk_ a good game about how things were supposed to be --
they had taken all the leadership courses and been coached and mentored like
hell. They were self-starters and highly-motivated overachievers. There's no
doubt in my mind that giving them a clear objectives and sufficient resources
would result in the objectives being met. But getting a clear idea of
organizational strategy communicated from point A to point B in this place was
impossible.

People hold on to knowledge in a large organization. Knowledge is power. It
was not unusual -- and remember this was an extremely small org -- to be part
of a meeting with 4 or 5 folks where everybody in the room had a different
idea of what the endgame was. The CEO told different people different things.
Mid-level managers were encouraged to compete with one another. I told my wife
that it was the first place I had worked where each person I met had a secret
strategy for "once the board gets rid of all those other yahoos, I'll be the
one left standing"

Sharing a vision/strategy and living your values is something that cannot be
overstated. In fact, executives have to over-communicate and demonstrate it
almost as melodrama in order for the rank-and-file to really grok it.

------
SapphireSun
So, essentially they changed the names of various meetings and then gave a
budget to managers because stack ranking with mandatory firing causes
political infighting.

Now let's see how they deal with deadwood in a few years... I imagine there
will be a pendulum.

~~~
lucian1900
"Dead wood" is a myth. Few employees are useless and it's always obvious if it
is the case.

~~~
dagw
In what way is it a myth? I've definitely worked with people who where without
a doubt dead wood, but I agree that it's absolutely obvious to everyone who
they are.

~~~
lordnacho
I don't agree that it's obvious. Smart people who aren't motivated can be
pretty good at pretending to be productive. I've worked with a guy who hand
waves everything even slightly technical, doesn't know what version control
is, and generally has no real insights.

But it seems I'm in minority. He has a phd and is presented as the brains of
the company. Due to historical chance he's also held important sounding
titles. He acts friendly, too.

------
cinbun8
> Ditching annual performance reviews has paid unexpected dividends.

> At an annual “rewards check-in,”...

It looks to me like this is old wine in a new bottle. Instead of calling it a
bell curve you give it a new name. For a corporation to change a system like
this where performance reviews are tied to fixed budgets is next to
impossible.

Most feedback that I give my employees are during a lunch conversation or a
code review. Trickle feedback works quite well. I'm against annual performance
reviews too. Adjustments in compensation are not mapped to fixed goals for a
year or 8 week reviews. Whoever gets more shit done in the interest of the
company gets a pay hike when we can accommodate it. Simple.

------
lordnacho
Sounds like it can be summarized as "shorter feedback cycles".

Doesn't sound too dumb, but IMO you the real issue is that you can't get
people to talk candidly unless you have some good man management. Sure,
allowing people to talk more often is good, but what happens if they don't
feel they can say what they want? It doesn't always seem like a good idea to
blurt out your real feelings about work.

------
lostcolony
This seems like the kind of system you'd have if you just didn't mandate
anything, but had a culture of giving a damn, and one time a year to suggest
raises. I.e., I'm pretty sure this is the default, and grading according to a
bell curve and letting people go who fall below a certain percentage,
regardless of actual performance, is the weird exception (in the sense of
taking effort to implement, not exception in the sense that few people do it).

If I am a manager, and I care about those under me doing a good job (both to
reflect well on me, and to continue to perform well), I will, of course, check
in periodically. Ask how things are going, suggest areas that could use
improving, and commending them for areas they're doing well in. The response
to that would color how I recommend people for raises, and if someone didn't
seem to respond ~at all~ to that, and was underperforming, would lead me to
recommend their transfer to another team or being let go.

------
AdrianRossouw
so they invented 1on1s?

~~~
te
... and renamed the annual review as a "rewards check-in".

~~~
derefr
I think the actually-interesting thing that changed is that there's no longer
a fan-in of review data, followed by some sort of central number-crunching.
Instead, it's effectively a feudal system: every "lord" is empowered to give
their "vassals" whatever raises/promotions/bonuses they like.

This is a system that actually works well, if you've got good and generous
"lords" that want to keep their "vassals" happy and productive and generally
use "do it yourself" as an opportunity to do away with bureaucracy, rather
than make more. Whatever benefit Adobe is seeing from the change is probably
because they managed to hire some really good managers (somehow), and are
finally letting them loose to do their jobs.

Of course, a bad feudal lord is a lot worse than an impersonal rank-and-yank
system. At least rank-and-yank is predictable enough to be gamed.

~~~
willvarfar
Very nicely put between-the-lines interpretation :)

One small nitpick:

> a bad feudal lord is a lot worse than an impersonal rank-and-yank system. At
> least rank-and-yank is predictable enough to be gamed.

If you have a bad lord (eh, manager) and your company uses a rank-and-yank
system, then it'll be your boss gaming it not you.

-Reviews- eh 'working' in general - only works well if you have a good well-meaning boss?

~~~
walshemj
Except when behind closed doors they fiddle the figures

------
Dirlewanger
Don't see this mentioned:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback)

Instead of 1 on 1s, employees review a handful of their peers + their
superiors. What do people think about this?

~~~
sageabilly
In the times that I've worked places that did this, it always completely
exacerbated any underlying petty feuds that were going on between co-workers
and lambasted managers for doing things like actually managing instead of
being totally cool with someone playing WOW all day.

Your peers are _not_ the best judges of your overall positive contributions to
the company. Peer feedback can be important, as evidenced by some of the posts
upstream, and I think it's good for a manager to get an overall feel for the
team dynamic and if there's unanimous rumblings about one member that might
need to be addressed. But ultimately your manager is the only person who's
going to understand what positive contributions to the company that you're
making, because your manager sees a bigger picture than your peers.

Reviewing a manager can be a good thing or it can be a double edged sword-
truly anonymous reviews are pretty much impossible so it's inevitable that
you're going to be tied to your review somehow. In a perfect world managers
would be adults and you'd be able to have conversations about management
styles and communication styles and both parties would come to have mutual
respect and understanding, but in my 15 years in the working world this has
only happened to me _once_ so I don't hold my breath for it happening again.

------
flapjaxx
Actually they have been loosing a lot of their top talent. This is just a PR
Fluff piece.

~~~
stfnfhrmnn
I was wondering that. There is more to retaining talent than just fixing the
review system. If the company changes their product strategy dramatically and
engineers aren't happy with that, money won't help. Surely the whole idea how
Adobe implements CC is flawed. It'll discourage product innovation (customers
already locked in anyway), dripfeeding features does suffice. Buying other
products and companies to increase potential market and customers is the only
way left to increase revenue. Which engineer wants that?

Just looking at Lightroom (because I'm a customer), there appears to have been
a lot of change over the years. Highly visible engineers and managers lost to
do their own thing, Spotify and other companies.

The about screen lists engineers involved, that has changed dramatically as
well. I don't know how engineering is set up at Adobe, but it certainly looks
like they have outsourced quite a bit of that product.

It will probably take several years for Adobe to realise that their license
rental scheme was a shot in the foot...

------
flapjaxx
they didn't keep me and a few of my boys from quitting

------
logn
"involuntary, non-regrettable attrition"

What does that even mean?

~~~
o_nate
Firing people.

------
johansch
Seems like a key piece of this is to give HR less power.

------
comrade1
I usually say that one shouldn't feel loyalty to a corporation because the
corporation has no loyalty to you, but Adobe is different. It did feel like
they looked out for you - the corporate culture is good and the workers are
happy (at least the people I worked with).

I don't think they've closed a single office of the companies that they've
bought over the years even if the product has since disappeared.

~~~
derefr
How does that work? Is e.g. the Fireworks team just an isolated-to-their-own-
office subteam of the Photoshop team now?

~~~
comrade1
I only know what happened in my case. I worked for a Swiss company that was
bought by Adobe. They pretty quickly expanded our office and we became an rnd
center - the other in Europe being Hamburg.

Other examples, macromedia became their san francisco offices, navisware or
some other purchase became an office in north carolina....

They must eventually close some down though - they've bought a ton of
companies in the last 10 years.

------
taki1
They allow them 3-month vacation in India once a year?

