
Uber is designed so that for one employee to get ahead, another must fail - amyjess
https://qz.com/918582/uber-is-designed-so-that-for-one-employee-to-succeed-another-must-fail/
======
rconti
"“The world isn’t really on an annual cycle anymore,” GE head of human
resources Susan Peters said at the time, explaining that millennial workers in
particular wanted faster, more frequent, mobile-enabled feedback."

Literally nobody, not even a millennial, has said they want mobile-enabled
feedback on their job performance.

~~~
sandworm101
It doesn't say that millennial workers want mobile feedback about _their_
performance. This is millennial-aged managers or other team members wanting to
instantaneously issue feedback about others. This is AmericanIdol's voting
system manifest in the workplace. The most socially-connected worker wins.
That's what millennials seem to want.

~~~
zitterbewegung
So when has being socially connected/disconnected in a company hasn't
benefited / or hurt an employee ?

~~~
sandworm101
It's a fashion, a management style. It isn't logical. They want to work as
they socialize. Constantly and publicly voting for people/things you like or
of which you approve is normal. It's what highschool kids do these days. So it
is completely natural for them to bring that scheme into the workplace.

------
openmosix
I have been working in HRTech for ~8+ years. "Most" of the tech companies
operate that way - regardless if they are explicit about it or not. 9-Blocks,
360 degrees, etc are all exercises that have to fit a pre-defined distribution
- i.e. "we expect at least 20% of the employees to be low performer". All the
exercises of "team and department calibrations" are about to make sure the
distribution fits the pre-defined/expected shape. Then some companies "act" on
their low performers (stack ranking + policy of getting rid of the bottom 10%
every year), some companies use perfomance-plans/other to "talent manage"

~~~
rconti
Do the employees know it? As far as I know, I've never worked at a company
anything like this. But then it occurred to me maybe I just have no idea why I
get whatever level of raise I get.

~~~
mikekchar
Small companies often work differently, but this has been like this for as
long as I can remember in larger companies (and I'm very nearly 50). Usually
there is a budget allocation for raises. Managers rank their workers in
ordinal fashion. It's often set in quartiles, lowest quarter is placed on the
"must improve" list, second lowest gets no raise. Third lowest gets moderate
increase (unless they are hitting the top of their band). Highest gets large
increase/band increase. Often these sorted D level groups are mixed up in the
C level and at the margins D levels can argue that their employees deserve to
be bumped up to the next level (which is why it pays to document all your
progress for the year -- it gives your manager ammunition when they compare
you to other groups). Finally there are X spots for band increases/exceptional
performers (which get paid above their band rate, but do not increase in band
because their current function is essential to the team).

Like I said, in large corporations it literally pays to have a politically
savy manager and to have documented every single thing you've done during the
year. Bonus points if you've condensed it down in a presentable fashion.

I had a friend who made it into management in a large corporation. He decided
to do things differently. He told his entire team, "Tell me how much money you
want. I will tell you what you need to accomplish to get it." He documented
the hell out of what his workers did. His team _killed_ all the other teams --
just steamrolled them in terms of productivity, so he got everything he asked
for. Made a _lot_ of enemies, though ;-)

~~~
dikdik
>He told his entire team, "Tell me how much money you want. I will tell you
what you need to accomplish to get it."

This is my dream manager. I've never had a manager ask what they could do for
me and actually mean it.

~~~
shostack
Because often, despite their wishes, it just isn't realistic. For example, if
you are a support employee the answer to what you need to do to earn more may
very well be "get a new job because support is only valued at X and so we'll
never be able to justify paying you more."

~~~
mikekchar
That is literally what he would say. If someone would wander over and say, "I
want $500K per year", he would tell them "Well, the CTO makes that. So you're
going to have to get into management. The best way to do that is to do some
technical work that makes you stand out and also show that you can do the
management work. I'll give you a technical project to do and it will be up to
you to make sure that it is successful. After that we can talk about what
parts of my job I can hand over to you so that you can show that you are
capable of doing them. Once you show that you are capable of doing everything
that I do, I'll recommend you for a promotion. I warn you that you will
probably have to put in a lot of unpaid overtime in the mean time."

(Apologies to him if I have misrepresented his ideas -- taken from a
discussion I had with him where I asked him exactly this). Anyway, he told me
that many people often were quite happy with a lower salary expectation once
they understood what was required of the higher salary expectation. Also "I'll
tell you what you have to do" doesn't necessarily mean that the person will
succeed. If you want the bigger salary you are going to have to choose the
harder projects. So it might be "Take this failing project and turn it around.
Hmm... yes I know it's a piece of crap legacy app that nobody else wants to
touch. Find a way to make it work and I will find a way to get your raise." A
lot of people will say, "Oh. No thanks. I'd rather work with the new shiny
greenfield project. It's a lot easier and a lot more fun." His approach was to
let people self select for their level of performance. And if someone took the
gnarly legacy problem and failed miserably, then he would gently (?) suggest
that they focus on easier problems until they have built up their skills.

~~~
shostack
Yep, and the other piece of this is the stress and expectations. At certain
levels literally all that matters is results. To some extent a CEO doesn't
care how the sausage gets made by a given team because he has people that are
paid to worry about that. And so the actual "you need to do X, Y and Z" might
not be specific things like "overhaul this legacy thingamajig" or something
similar, but rather "find a way to grow revenue 20% YoY with a budget that is
10% lower than last year's."

The other flip side is the risk--if you want to step up to the plate, at a
certain level you need to understand that the stakes are such that if you
fail, you likely need to leave or you'll be fired/asked to leave.

Not everyone wants that level of responsibility or risk. In my job I oversee
one of the biggest sources of spend in the company (ad spend) and am
responsible for driving a large part of our growth. If I don't do my job well
that has company-wide implications that are present in my mind literally every
day. That's a level of ever-present stress that many people don't want.

------
ones_and_zeros
If your company does 360 reviews or has a "rating" system (smart companies
refuse to call it a ranking), it's the same thing. It's in the corporate
america HR handbook. If you are ranked highly, someone had to be ranked lowly.

~~~
aetherson
I'm a manager at my company. We have a rating system, and there is no need for
someone else to be ranked lowly for you to be ranked highly.

What that DOES mean, though, is that someone has to keep pressure on people
not to rank everyone as awesome. Because, look:

a. Managers are, contrary to rumor, people too. We don't enjoy the awkward,
painful meetings in which we deliver negative feedback. We don't enjoy telling
people that they aren't getting a raise, or that they need to improve or be
terminated. That sucks. Personally, it keeps me up nights, and I've heard the
same from many other managers.

b. Managers are also graded themselves on how effective their employees are.
Like, if your employees are persistently rated below average, well, what's the
common factor across your employees? Vice versa if they're all high
performers.

So if you just tell managers "rate your employees, follow your conscience,"
then there is a grade inflation incentive. Even if you're super-disciplined
and make painfully realistic assessments of your employees' abilities, Bob one
team over may give everyone fives, and then you end up looking like a bad
manager and also maybe you get to go and put someone on a PIP.

The company needs some way to stop this. Stack ranking is one such way. I
don't like it, I think it's overall a bad way, but it's a mechanistic way,
which is more valuable the larger your company. Small companies can have a
powerful manager or small group of managers who "keep people honest." That
doesn't scale.

You can use another mechanic to keep people honest, but all mechanics are
exploitable.

~~~
dv_dt
So one manager is below average at hiring and randomly hires people, ending up
with a nicely fit bell curve range of high and low performers. Another manager
is great at hiring highly performing people, but now if they rank correctly,
you look at their assessments with your cheat metric, the good manager is
'inflating' their ratings. In other words, looking at the rankings alone
doesn't do anything for actually enforcing quality.

~~~
aetherson
Sure. There is no single silver bullet that actually enforces quality
everywhere.

But look, inflation is bad. If grades aren't inflated, and I rate someone a 3,
then we say, "This person is a solid employee. We're happy they're here, we're
giving them an average raise, everything's cool. Do we have a little
constructive feedback that says, 'Hey, here's how you could take it to the
next level?' Sure. But we're happy with them."

If grades are inflated and I give someone a 3, then oh shit, maybe they're in
trouble! Because some asshole had to give everyone in his team a 4 or 5, and
now my solid employee looks like he's underperforming the company average.

The fact is, a solid 4+ rating means you're a really great employee. Teams
that are _all_ high performing are super rare, and tend to be really, really,
really obvious within a company.

Now, is it a valid criticism of stack ranking that it makes it not just
difficult but impossible to describe a team that's solidly above average? Yes,
absolutely. Stack ranking is kind of dumb. But understand that despite
interesting and compelling stories about people being unfairly rated lower
than they deserve, that's not the big problem that companies face. In general,
the incentives for everyone is to rate people higher than they deserve, not
lower (with toxic exceptions like what Fowler faced). And if you set up your
whole system to make really sure that it embraces the idea of everyone being
super awesome, you _probably_ don't get a highly functional rating system out
the other side. It's probably better to set one up that embraces the idea of
average teams (average for your company) and let people override the system
when you say, "Oh my god, this entire team is just killing it this review
cycle."

~~~
sheepmullet
> Teams that are all high performing are super rare, and tend to be really,
> really, really obvious within a company.

Teams that don't fit a normal distribution are incredibly common.

And I think the bigger problem is money allocated for pay increases.

If the average 3 rating employee in your team can get a 10% annualised return
each time they change jobs then the company should be budgeting 10% for a
grade of 3. In practice this doesn't happen.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
> Teams that don't fit a normal distribution are incredibly common.

This doesn't make a team of high performing folks any less rare because
extremes tend to be rare. It just means that reality doesn't always look like
the average. You might have no high performers but 5 average ones, or 2 high
performers and 3 below average (maybe they are just learning?).

One team out of many being high performers might just be luck or a good
manager, for sure, but it definitely warrants checking things out because of
the rarity. The same would go for an entire team that is below par without
obvious reason. It might not even be an issue with the supervising manager
themselves, but with the way the company scores that sort of team.

------
pjdemers
My stack ranking story: I was a manager. I was asked to build a team top
performers. More than asked: My bonus would be based on the quality of the
team. Now, the team is in place, and it's time for for the first set of
reviews. The average is 9/10\. Of course they really are that good - I
followed orders and built a team of top performers. But... we have stack
ranking. My meta-manager told me that the average had to be 5. My response:
What? You're telling me to lower my own bonus! Yes, exactly, he explained, you
just figured out why we have stack ranking.

~~~
yourapostasy
I would like to hear proponents of stack ranking explain how stack ranking and
any "we only want A players"-style policies are _NOT_ mutually exclusive.
Because if no good case can be made for both co-existing within the same
organization, then seeing both can be a good signal to detect for an
organization that uses stack ranking as a compensation attenuation mechanism.

There may be sound organizational behavior reasons to hide the compensation
attenuation in this manner, but I'm hard-pressed to find empirically-based
evidence for such reasoning.

------
mikestew
Summary: Uber took that stack rank system that Microsoft gave up on ten years
ago.

I wonder if their interviews involve the question "how would you move Mt.
Fuji?", another thing Microsoft gave up on many years ago.

~~~
a3n
I like to call it "stank racking."

As for Mt Fuji. I was asked some stupid question about burning ropes at an
interview. My answer was "I don't know, what's the answer?" The company hired
me. I was talking to the guy later, and he said he liked to ask questions like
that "to see how I think." So I asked him "How do I think?"

...

~~~
Thirdegree
The answer, by the way, is to light one of the ropes on fire on both ends, the
other on a single end. When the first is done, the second has half the time
left and you can time whatever contrived thing you're timing with rope.

------
a3n
> Kalanick told the audience that he and chief product officer Jeff Holden, an
> Amazon vet, had spent hundreds of hours conceiving the new “philosophy of
> work.”

I thought we knew by now that you involve the people that will live with the
new "philosophy" when "conceiving."

~~~
mikestew
"Hundreds of hours"? I'll bet I've got a twenty year old copy of Microsoft's
performance review docs lying around a hard drive somewhere, could have saved
them a week of reinventing the wheel.

~~~
rhizome
You don't even have to go back that far:

[http://minimsft.blogspot.com/](http://minimsft.blogspot.com/)

The Encyclopedia of Stack Ranking, and IIRC this blog was one of the
motivators for MSFT to drop stack ranking. The original Michael O. Church, if
you will.

------
imh
>As the most highly valued startup in the world, at $68 billion, Uber ...

At what point is it just a plain old company? Is Facebook still a startup? Is
it just because Uber's #disrupting things or some cultural BS?

~~~
gregmac
Probably when their operations are at least able to break-even, instead of
burning through VC..

------
norikki
I'm perfectly happy if my profit-motive multinational corporation doesn't
feign having 'corporate values' on its website.

------
elmar
How can Travis Kalanick fail so much with company culture?

~~~
fullshark
He turned an app into a company worth 70 billion and never saw any reason to
change course until now (hopefully).

------
ChuckMcM
On the plus side it makes for a sociopathic paradise, winners, losers, a score
visible to everyone and voila.

/s

------
daemin
The most amusing thing about stack ranking is that companies expect their
teams to be average (at best). If a company really wanted to hire the best and
only have top performers, then they should not expect their employees to fit
nicely on a bell curve.

------
geogra4
1980s company culture... yuck

------
1337biz
An up-or-out consulting based model seems to fit to their corporate culture.

------
yuhong
Don't forget PIPs. The fun things is that the laws for firing varies by state.
I think California is one of the more strict ones.

------
paulddraper
Bonuses tied to company performance are popular, yes?

That's the epitome of every employee getting ahead (or failing).

------
yanilkr
It is impossible to keep everyone happy at a company at all times. The
difference between a company which seems to have happy employees and the one
that doesn't seems to be the amount of PR spending. It is an advertising
problem. Some companies managed to build that image by selective targeting.
Otherwise how do you explain the churn rate of employees in the valley?

~~~
__jal
Have you worked at more than one company in the valley? There are vast
differences in general happiness in different places.

Churn rate has a ton of other reasons, unless you want to pack so many
different variables under 'happiness' that the term is meaningless.

But I guess if you're right, we have a test case: Uber will soon be perceived
as Disneyland, because they have a massive hairball of a company happiness
problem to deal with.

~~~
yanilkr
Actually time will solve this problem very easily. Uber does not have to do
any thing differently. (Its not a recommendation).

Every successful company has these problems. Success attracts ambitious people
and many of these high achievers accomplish their goals ruthlessly. In this
process some other people who have different priorities feel left behind. Its
just the way of life.

Take all the ambitious people and throw a challenging problem at them that can
humble them other than that there is PR. PR expert will come out and tell you
that not all teams in uber are bad, some of them are really good and the
routine stuff we hear about any other big company.

~~~
__jal
Not every successful company has the constant stream of horrible behavior
emanating from it over the course of years.

Trying to normalize this as growing pains or bored ambitious people(?!?) or
whatever is simply false. I don't work there, but know people who have, and
left, because it was such a toxic place. The point of my comment was that this
was emphatically not a PR problem - it is a culture problem that obviously
comes from the top of the firm.

~~~
mikekchar
Not sure I agree with the premise, but I think there is a point to be made.
When was the last time people griped about the absolutely horrible culture of
Amazon and Facebook? It wasn't that long ago, but I don't hear _anything_ any
more. I don't even know what it's like to work at Amazon of Facebook (I had
one friend who worked at Amazon years ago and loved it -- data point of one),
but last year the general consensus around here was that you'd have to be an
idiot to work in either of those places. 2 years before that it was Netflix. I
heard they just chew you up and spit you out. Now? Not a heard a word for
_ages_. Today it's Uber. Tomorrow it will be someone else and everyone will
forget about Uber. If they are smart they will capitalise on our poor
memories.

Were these horrible places to work (as commonly reported)? Are they horrible
places now? Who knows (certainly not me).

