

Sacked Google worker awarded €110,000 for unfair dismissal - rmchugh
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/sacked-google-worker-awarded-110-000-for-unfair-dismissal-1.1802900

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noobface
This is actually pretty big. If I'm interpreting this correctly, Google
arbitrarily stack ranked employees then dropped the lowest ranked one. Courts
thought that process was unfair, opening up the door for every single ex-
Googler in Ireland.

I'd love to have a protections like this in the US. I've had the same thing
happen to me at a large company. Political ranking rather than performance
leads to some incredibly insular work places.

~~~
bsbechtel
It never feels like it at the time, but you're better off winding up at a
workplace that values your contributions over your political connections.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
I honestly have not seen a company larger than ~25 people where that was true.
Can you give an example?

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azth
Valve? :)

~~~
DerpDerpDerp
I've heard tale that because of the lack of formal structure at Valve, you
need political connections to actually get anything done.

Perhaps even more so than places with a formal structure.

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mercer
It's quite likely that some kind of hidden structure emerged.

However, could you explain what you mean with 'political' in this context?
Because 'political connections', in my mind, also includes reputation and
knowledge of competence. And that doesn't seem like a bad thing.

~~~
DerpDerpDerp
Things that would normally qualify as "soft power", eg, being friends with the
right people, trading favors, reputation management, etc.

Even the example you give requires reputation management, as opposed to merely
raising a good technical argument at the time (as a new person on the staff).

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tsycho
The article is very vague on the actual specifics of this termination, and I
don't claim to know any more details. However, to at least play devil's
advocate to this one sided story, what incentive does Google have to fire
someone "arbitrarily" if they have been performing satisfactorily, especially
considering that Google has been on a continuous hiring spree for a while?
Doesn't it seem plausible that the said employee wasn't doing a great job in
the first place?

If Google fired the lowest stack ranked member in each team every year, we
would have heard about 100s of stories or lawsuits by now. I don't know if
Google is clean in this particular case, but something smells fishy from the
story as it is currently portrayed in this article.

~~~
steven2012
Jack Welch popularized this decades ago, where every year he would force
departments to cull 5-10% of their employees. He stated that this was well-
received for the first few years, but after that it got harder, because
managers were starting to let go people who were actually decent. But Welch
insisted on this because it kept things from stagnating, as well as keeping
open reqs when you found very good people. He also said that managers would
start to try to game the system where they would hire poorly performing people
just so that they could be culled.

I think there is some value to occasionally culling your worst performers, but
having it as a practice every year the way Welch did, and presumably Google
does, makes it tough on everyone because it could lead to situations where
good but not outstanding employees are let go for no apparently reason.

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UweSchmidt
Basically with stack ranking, if I see a colleague doing well, that's bad for
me?

Sounds horrible.

~~~
rmchugh
There was an interesting article about Microsoft's use of a similar mechanism
written by one of their developers. He wrote that it encouraged people to seek
out incompetent teams to work with as within these teams they were guaranteed
to shine. Thus, clever people did not want to work with clever people, as it
would reflect poorly on their evaluations, regardless of the team's actual
performance. As I understand it, Microsoft have dropped the use of these
mechanisms, for this and other reasons.

~~~
UweSchmidt
More fundamentally, what led to such a system in the first place?

"People are fundamentally lazy and we need to do X to make them work"

vs.

"People are fundamentally awesome and will work hard if we can remove
obstacles and demotivators."

~~~
xcntktn
You just described this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y)

~~~
UweSchmidt
Exactly, thanks!

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anigbrowl
_Because of this, she said staff were ranked from one to five and someone at
Google always had to get a low score “of 2.9”, so the unit could match the
bell curve. She said senior staff “calibrated” the ratings supplied by line
managers to ensure conformity with the template and these calibrations could
reduce a line manager’s assessment of an employee, in effect giving them the
poisoned score of less than three._

Being from Ireland myself, it amazes me that Americans tolerate stack ranking,
grading on a curve, and t-scores - tools whose statistical utility has been
obviated by the abandonment of all other contexts.

~~~
rmchugh
I'm not sure how much it is a case of Americans tolerating it, rather than
Americans lacking decent labour legislation to challenge this sort of
nonsense. Luckily in Ireland we have pretty good labour law that gives us
better protection than our colleagues in the US.

~~~
pdknsk
I think by labor law you mean socialism, maybe communism.

~~~
rmchugh
No, I don't. I mean laws governing the relationship between workers and
employees.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_law)
Do you think that placing legal reins on employers' ability to do whatever
they want with their employees is akin to socialism?

~~~
pdknsk
I had hoped that adding communism made the intention of my maybe too subtle
post more obvious.

~~~
nitid_name
Regardless of whether you're mocking the American Political Right or you're a
member, the post is at best a weak firebrand. I still don't think I understand
what were you attempting to add to the discussion.

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century19
When I worked for a consultancy in about my second year I got a great review.
A few days later my manager called me into a meeting and apologised and said
the grading had to be reviewed as the country manager wanted it to be lowered.
This person didn't know me and didn't know what I was doing. And so it was
lowered. This did affect my pay rise I believe, that was all. It did annoy the
hell out of me at the time though.

I think my manager made a mistake in letting me know the rating before someone
who didn't know me approved it. This probably happens a lot, ratings getting
downgraded, and people don't know.

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Splendor
Interesting. I was unaware that Google used stacked rankings.

~~~
DannyBee
They really don't (at least for performance). The article gets several things
wrong. For example, the purpose of calibration is not to stack rank, but to
ensure consistency (IE 3.5 means the same thing across different orgs), etc.
Managers don't sit in a room and try to force fit a curve.

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vfxGer
More details in an earlier article [http://www.independent.ie/irish-
news/courts/sacked-google-ma...](http://www.independent.ie/irish-
news/courts/sacked-google-manager-got-30pc-pay-rise-previous-year-tribunal-
told-29394243.html)

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brudgers
Another article on stack ranking system? We get it. Stack ranking is evil.
What more could we expect from a horrible company when the best thing that
could happen is that they fail. We hateses nasty lying Mic...

Nevermind sorry gollum gollum.

~~~
hga
An article that makes a potentially credible claim---testimony under oath, I
presume, that a judge found credible---that Google's acknowledged stack
ranking system is now being used to fire people is a very big thing.

