
My Microsoft Experience (2013) - luu
http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2013/12/17/my-microsoft-experience-13/
======
antics
One important thing to remember about MSFT is that more than half of the
company is "the field" \-- sales, evangelism, operations, and so on.

The stack ranking system is and was hugely popular with this org. It is
popular nowhere else.

MSFT still likes to think of itself as an engineering company, but it is hard
to have a tail that big and not sometimes accidentally wag the dog. Stack
ranking is probably the best example of how true this is.

EDIT: To add some color to this tale, a Technical Fellow once told me that
during the "rank and yank" period (when everyone was ranked and the bottom 10%
were effectively fired) he was continually on the verge of quitting. If you
are doing something like inventing the CLR, and you hired 5 of your favorite
engineers, how are you supposed to react when someone tells you that it is
imperative to fire one of them per year? What could the point of that possibly
be? This is more or less a common sentiment among extremely senior engineers
who ran important orgs at that time.

~~~
somedangedname
Manage around it - hire a team of your _four_ favourite engineers, plus one
sacrificial goat. Every year the goat gets it and you hire a new one :P

~~~
melted
That's exactly how Microsoft managers used to do it. They would hire (and
keep) deadwood on the teams specifically for this purpose. Honestly, that's
the trick any reasonably bright manager learns after having to let go of
someone who's really good. Another trick they would do is tweak rewards so
that some people get more cash raise than normal and less stock, and some
would get more stock than normal and less cash. Then they'd make up all these
lies about "potential" etc, instead of just telling you "dude, I had a finite
budget, and this is how the dice fell this time around".

------
melted
To give you some perspective from an ex-softie (been on the outside for 7
years now, so my experience is not recent). PMs are the hated super-political,
credit grabbing ruling class of Microsoft. She was a junior PM. It's not clear
what most of them actually do. When I was there, they pretended to "design"
features, where in reality the specs were written by devs, they just took
credit for them. Then they sat around in meetings and "managed the schedule"
and "reported status" to one another. Since there are (or at least were) so
many of them at Microsoft, the whole "reporting status" thing can self-
perpetuate, because at some point the communication overhead begins to
dominate. As a result, most PMs just interfere with work and slow things down,
sometimes dramatically so.

This was the result of someone deciding, some 20-25 years ago, that developers
couldn't handle talking to one another, and they couldn't test software
themselves. I sort of agree with the latter point, but only when it comes to
manual and end-to-end testing. Developers have an overriding priority: to get
stuff out the door, whether it's ready or not. That's what they get promoted
for. Any kind of deep testing beyond unit tests is considered, by and large, a
waste of time, especially by junior devs who haven't been through support hell
yet.

PMs though? You could easily have one or two of them per team of 20 devs if
they do their work well, not 1:1 as it sometimes is at Microsoft. Shit, for
the past 7 years I haven't worked with any PMs at all, and my productivity is
at all time high.

So when I found out recently that Microsoft is getting rid of the formal test
discipline (a mistake, IMO, for reasons outlined above, should have merely
reduced their scope to high value work), I thought about PMs as well. Bite the
pillow, my PM brethren, Satya is going in dry. I imagine once the second shoe
falls, Microsoft will once again be a pretty decent place to work.

~~~
crandycodes
I'm a PM at Microsoft and this post hits close to home. I think there are a
good number of PMs that you're talking about. It's easy for the PM role to
evolve into pure politics because our job is to represent the customer. Just
like our government's politicians sometimes claim to represent the people and
end up making selfish decisions, PMs aren't immune from that weakness. The
role attracts people who are good at politics, so you tend to see a high
concentration there.

Why do I still do the role? Well, it kind of fits what I wanted to do for a
living. I always enjoyed doing lots of diversity in my job and trying all
kinds of new technologies out. I get to be a customer for a living. I try out
our product and think about where I want it to go. I can be annoying (a real
customer would probably be a bit annoying sometimes too, they challenge your
product and your hard worked design). I get to care for a living. As an
engineer, I could see myself needing to let things go because it's gotta get
out the door. As a PM, I know a customer is going to hit that issue and I need
to get it in front of people so we can fix it. I'm building applications using
our technology and competitors and technology not obviously related just to
see if could be relevant.

The problems with PMs vs Engineers is that it is super hard to tell a good PM
from a bad PM who is good at politics; but I'm still super happy the role
exists. I'd likely have to become an evangelist to do the things I do everyday
still, but I'd have less influence with the engineers and it'd often be
reactive if I wasn't on the product team. To any people considering a job as a
PM, do me and your other future customers a favor and ask if you can care more
about your customer than having your job or being promoted? I've held fast to
the notion that customers are why I'm here and my career hasn't been too bad
so far, management still recognizes good work with customers. But if it all
goes to hell, I can always find some other job and be happy with myself.

~~~
ghettoCoder
I'm sorry but everything you just described is not a PM's job. The PM does NOT
represent the customer. The PM is responsible for delivering an agreed upon
set of functionality within time and budget.

You're describing a product owner.

edit: typo

~~~
crandycodes
Program Managers are not Project Managers nor Product Managers. We perform the
roles of one or both depending on the Org (which is kind of annoying that that
isn't more predictable). Our primary role is customer advocate. You can see
Steven Sinofsky's blog post from 2005 [1] about it. Ignoring what Sinofsky has
or hasn't done, it's a very good post and fits what I try to do with my very
open ended position. There is an article "Zen of PM" [2] that is a more recent
description that I like a lot as well. You'll notice they disagree with each
other a bit. :) It's never boring as a PM at Microsoft. If you're ever in a
lull on a project, you can always pontificate about your reason for existing
in the company.

[1]
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.a...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.aspx)
[2] [http://microsoftjobsblog.com/zen-of-
pm/](http://microsoftjobsblog.com/zen-of-pm/)

------
0987612345
Another ex-softie, from UX background, senior level. I never understood why
PMs are given the task of designing (user flow, interactions) features. They
are never trained for that in their academics, at the time of hiring they are
never quizzed on that (if they are then its on the whims of individual
interviewer). And absolute worst is some of them are not even very passionate
about it but they end up doing because their manager expects them to. Most of
the time they come in the way of designers - that is the good part. The bad
part is when they take ownership of UX design and the design team has to
constantly struggle to get their inputs in. Universally at Microsoft PMs are
seen as the ‘owner’ for the UX design, since they write the ‘specs’. The
‘Spec’ (specification document) is compilation of screenshots from design team
in a word documents with a narration of the flow. In places like Office there
are so many PMs that many a times there will be a spec documents for dialog
boxes.

A notorious team in Office (where E. Chisa worked) is the OneNote, that team
used to take pride till couple of years back that they don’t have any
designers, all UX design is done by PMs. No wonder EverNote came out of no
where and steamrolled them (I’m personally a big fan of OneNote for its
feature set, but hate the User Experience).

To me Microsoft’s biggest bane is the PM discipline, they are holding back MS
on taking up Apple, Google to new startups (whenever MS engg team was design
driven - Ex. Windows Phone - it came out with great products). The PM
discipline used to make sense 20 years back, but not now to the extent that
one would have 10-12 PMs for a dev team of 40-50.

~~~
edgyswingset
As someone who's about to start as a PM at MSFT soon...

> I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing

This is my biggest concern going forward. My background is developing backend
services, not building good UIs. I'm confident in my ability to build
something somewhat sensible (I have some Android and other UI experience), but
fundamentally my strengths have always been in designing and piecing together
abstractions with code.

I feel like the largest roles of a PM should be in resolving ambiguity and
enabling people who have good ideas. My current boss, while he could certainly
code circles around me, doesn't actually write much code aside from a few unit
tests. Instead, any time I wonder _why_ something should be done a certain
way, he can give me a reason and convince me it makes sense. When I have a
good idea about how something should be done, he gets out of my way, checks up
every few days, and removes any non-technical barriers so that it's as
painless as possible for me. I believe that the system we work on would be in
a horrible state very fast if he were to suddenly up and leave.

~~~
melted
PMs at Microsoft by definition do not build anything. Nor do they really
"design" anything. You can't design a piece of software unless you're an
engineer. At best, they will give you some user scenarios to handle, and half
of those will be complete bullshit that customers don't actually need and
never actually asked for (this, my friends, is how you got Metro UX in
Windows; for the record, I like it _as a phone UI_).

If you want to build and design stuff, you need to be an engineer, not a
bureaucrat. That's what engineers do.

Here's what a typical PM does at Microsoft:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV7u1VBhWCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV7u1VBhWCE)

~~~
edgyswingset
This doesn't add anything to the discussion of PMs designing the UI for a
feature. There are plenty of other wonderful places where bitching about PMs
is a relevant contribution.

~~~
melted
Funny, I'd rather "the UI for a feature" was designed by actual designers if
I'm paying for it.

------
jbapple
This is part one of a three part series. Part 2 is here:

[http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2013/12/23/challenges-with-a-
stac...](http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2013/12/23/challenges-with-a-stack-
rank-23/)

Part 3 is here:

[http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/01/21/effective-
performance-...](http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/01/21/effective-performance-
reviews-33/)

------
dareobasanjo
It's interesting that the author of the article primarily blames stack ranking
for her challenges.

From her post she came in with extremely high expectations of how well she'd
do at Microsoft (promoted within 6 months), she got a new manager and
immediately assumed they'd play favorites with their existing employees then
once given a project she couldn't handle instead of asking for help waited too
long so "she wouldn't seem clueless".

Then she gets a performance review that says she didn't do well and blames the
system & her manager. This seems to expose a significant lack of introspection
and self awareness.

Is there a company in the world that gives a good performance review when
someone spends months on a project, doesn't make progress and doesn't ask for
help until it's too late?

That said there are two places where Microsoft's former performance review
methodology hurts here

1\. Microsoft used to give people a score in the misguided belief that knowing
"you suck" or "you're awesome" relative to your peers is motivational. In some
cases, it does but in many cases it has the opposite effect where it causes
someone to be so discouraged that they quit. Which is what the blog author
did.

2\. The requirement to have people who are flagged as "underperforming" in
stack rank based models discourages managers from helping people who are
struggling. As a manager it is actually somewhat of a relief to have someone
who you can clearly award the "sucks" label without the strain of having to
decide which of your team of good performers needs to draw the short straw(s).
This to me was one of the biggest problems with the model as a manager at
Microsoft since your reward for turning around a poor performer is to find
someone else to mark as a poor performer.

------
hyperliner
There are a few other things people almost don't talk about because these
blogs seem to always be from people in level 60 (junior people).

\- There is really no 20% rule that applies to teams. The calibration process
is across bands / levels across a given product area. So it is not that you
are supposed to give a score of 5 (deadwood) to a member in your 5-people
team. It means all people across the division who are at level X are looked at
and "sorted" to do that assignment. People level 64-65 and above typically
have these "cards" that they use to sort people. That is the meeting where
your manager or his manager is supposed to support you. But the other managers
don't really know who you are for real. In the best case, they may know of
you. So it is really hard to have a conversation because only one or two
people have context about every person. So just to summarize, there are these
cards that people drop on a table where they do the classification, and people
don't really know who they are ranking.

\- the second point is that moving into new teams is in many cases a really
bad idea because the new manager now inherits a new person that cannot be
defended as well as the existing team for the simple reason that the new
person is not known as well. Many people have been in the same division for 15
years or more. You know they are not going to be an unknown and they coast on
the legacy reviews. The new guy / gal is an easy victim unless she is some
sort of Bill Gates right off the bat.

\- one thing that was crazy in that review is that they not only let go of
people with bad scores. They also let go of people with good scores but who
are deemed to have reached their plateau level. So you may still be a great
director or GPM but if the system decides the director is not going to make GM
or the GPM is not going to make director, then they also see you as a
candidate to get rid of.

\- the most important problem for the industry I believe is that the system
perpetuates the need to create NEW stuff. So for example, why would somebody
create Powershell instead of using a perfectly fine alternative from the Linux
/ Unix world? Well, because that way you are the person who created a NEW
thing and not who simply PORTED a solution! Can you imagine the world today if
we could use the same commands or patterns of commands in Windows as we do in
Linux? Clearly the OS are too different for that to be practical but we cannot
argue that the syntax and paradigm could have been more similar.

~~~
MichaelGG
Powershell's object pipeline far outshines the Unix style "pass around strings
and dick with parsing everywhere". It also handles quoting in a much more sane
manner, eliminating security holes or just plain bugs you get in, say, bash.
The included editor and command line completion for arguments is really slick.
Painting PS as just NIH is simply incorrect.

MS bringing back Services for Unix for real is a somewhat orthogonal issue
than coming up with a superior shell.

~~~
melted
It doesn't matter what Powershell does and doesn't do. People aren't going to
learn yet another shell scripting language just because someone at Microsoft
wanted to get promoted and rolled a new one. I want Windows shell to look like
UNIX, to be scriptable exactly the same, and to have a proper SSH remote
login. Apple managed to do this with OS X. Microsoft is denying the reality
and substituting it with their own.

~~~
chris_wot
_It doesn 't matter what Powershell does and doesn't do. People aren't going
to learn yet another shell scripting language just because someone at
Microsoft wanted to get promoted and rolled a new one._

I'm a bit of a bash scripting nut, but I've recently had to do some Windows
administration via Powershell and actually it's pretty awesome!

 _I want Windows shell to look like UNIX, to be scriptable exactly the same,
and to have a proper SSH remote login._

So install Cygwin.

 _Apple managed to do this with OS X._

OS X uses a Unix shell. Most of it is based on Unix principles. It wasn't that
hard!

 _Microsoft is denying the reality and substituting it with their own._

Really? It still uses pipes and redirection, has command history and tab
completion. You can alias commands, but Powershell has functions which allow
for parameters.

The thing is - Powershell is, somewhat surprisingly, more powerful in many
ways than bash, especially around variable handling. I'd be pretty happy if it
was ported to Linux, which I'm actually rather surprised about!

~~~
melted
Cygwin is not a valid replacement for a shell, sorry. It's a crutch. If you
want a proper scripting language, literally dozens are available on *NIX-like
OSs, and some are preinstalled with most distributions. Tens of thousands of
libraries to solve every conceivable task with minimal, if any, work. Package
systems to make installation/removal easy. Microsoft has excluded itself from
this by once again by rolling its own.

~~~
ralish
What are you talking about? Cygwin provides packages for bash, dash, fish,
tcsh, zsh, and others. It's not a crutch, these are the exact same shells you
run on Unix(-like) systems. The source is the same, albeit with some Cygwin
specific patches, but that's no different than any other Unix-like
distribution that applies patches to upstream packages (e.g. Debian, FreeBSD,
Gentoo, etc...).

Your NiH assertion doesn't even remotely make sense. PowerShell is
fundamentally different from traditional Unix shells and has many interesting,
unique & innovative features. Not liking them or agreeing with the philosophy
is entirely valid, but suggesting they've just refused to use an existing
shell because of NiH isn't born out by the facts.

Honestly, I'd suggest trying to adapt an existing Unix style shell to Windows
as the "official" shell would be an inherently bad idea at worst and extremely
difficult at best. Apart from the numerous issues that traditional shells have
which PowerShell seeks to address (reliance on string parsing, lack of
consistency in commands/parameterss, etc...), traditional Unix shells are very
much built around a Unix operating system philosophy, especially wrt. exposing
operating system internals, devices, etc... via the file system. That's a
great thing, but it's not so much applicable to Windows.

You'd either need to radically re-design large chunks of the system to conform
to the Unix philosophy of exposing much of the system via the file system,
which let's face it, is unlikely to happen, much less any time soon, or
augment the shell with a lot of extra support for Windows specific
functionality (e.g. the Registry, WMI, etc...). Things as simple as ACLs on
Unix won't even map nicely. Better to have a shell that works well for Windows
and fits its administrative model than trying to shoe-horn in a shell designed
with a completely different administrative philosophy in mind.

You mention OS X, and yes, they did get it to work. As other commenters have
mentioned though, OS X is UNIX. As in, UNIX(R). The userland API exposed by
the kernel is based off BSD, as are large chunks of the operating system
(although, Apple seems to be replacing them one by one). It's pretty easy to
use a nix shell when your operating system is largely based on Unix (at least,
from the perspective of userland applications).

~~~
melted
You've misunderstood. I'm not talking about bolting on a UNIX-like abomination
on the side. I'm saying Microsoft needs to replace Windows userland with UNIX
userland, much like Apple did well over a decade ago. That's what Microsoft
would need to do for Windows to become a decent dev platform again.

~~~
douche
It'll never happen. Backwards compatibility is too important for Windows to
burn the ships like that. I don't even want to think how many millions of
lines of code would need to be rewritten.

~~~
melted
Backwards compatibility could easily be maintained. _.bat /_.cmd files could
be executed by an interpreter called from this shell. It's just another
userland, and compared to Windows userland, a very small one.

------
gumby
The disturbing thing about her mention of "promotion velocity" is that it
dovetails painfully with what my kid is exposed to with high school/college.

There's a (seemingly) clearly defined road to drive down: do tons of AP
classes, extracurriculars etc. Someone set some rules, so people follow them
(and game them) with a cargo-cult belief that they will "succeed" (definition
unspecified). So now we have kids starting college prep in the sixth grade and
taking AP tests in the eighth.

We end up with the kid I gave a First Aid test to a couple of weeks ago. He
had memorized the entire first aid field manual. But I described a situation
and some symptoms (me having a heart attack) and frankly, if that kid had been
around I would have died. I asked him why he didn't look for symptoms of the
"hurry cases" and he said, "well you start with the first ones in the book." I
asked them why they are called "Hurry cases" and it hadn't occurred to him
that they word "hurry" was more than a label. Sadly, probably a third of the
kids I test are like this, but now our rules say I have to pass them because
they can answer any question in the book.

But the kids who learned to weld at the age of 10 or who take things apart and
can't get them back together again or who are argumentative and have deep
knowledge on weird topics -- there's no "road" for them.

At least some of them can get to go start companies!

------
wpietri
> There’s a metric in the career-tracking website called “promotion velocity”

I can believe that one person was dumb enough to put a metric like that
somewhere. But how could an organization be filled with people unable to
recognize the systemic effect of highlighting that, the perverse incentives it
gives?

~~~
judk
It's horrible but it plays into the myth of the elite rock star.

Marisa Mayer at Google famously had a gaggle of special junior PMs that she
shepherded into high ranking roles.

~~~
Rainymood
>Marisa Mayer at Google famously had a gaggle of special junior PMs that she
shepherded into high ranking roles.

Got some source on that? I'm curious now ...

~~~
jpatokal
judk is presumably referring to the APM program:

[http://www.quora.com/What-is-Googles-APM-program](http://www.quora.com/What-
is-Googles-APM-program)

------
randomfool
Primary issue here seems more like a manager who was not trying to help her
grow.

I see this end horribly much too often in large companies- focus of the
project shifts and manager assigns task which is a bad fit. Employee struggles
for 6 months or more (probably within the 1yr 'no transfer' period many
companies have). Manager doesn't try to find a better project, reviews slip,
employee is warned that perf must improve but by then the manager has it in
for them and because of low perf they cannot transfer.

------
fsk
tl;dr paraphrasing

The OP started out with a good manager and a good team.

Then the OP was moved to a bad manager on a bad team.

Stack ranking and "promotion velocity". Therefore, time to leave Microsoft.

It's almost impossible to survive in any job when your direct boss decides he
doesn't want you around.

~~~
qt7
Out of that post I got the feeling of an unhealthy obsession with being
promoted, being promoted quickly, being recognised as excellent, nothing less-
than-excellent on his review, complaining burn-out (really?).

I probably would have had a hard time dealing with what seems to be a youth
with a big ego, with a needing behaviour, no idea of how to behave himself and
how to balance life and work.

I get it, he was young, still, not the type of person I'd ever want to hire.

~~~
pjc50
_unhealthy obsession with being promoted, being promoted quickly, being
recognised as excellent, nothing less-than-excellent on his review_

That is the mentality the Microsoft metrics-driven management is supposed to
encourage. You have to get promoted to be recognised. You have to be seen as
better than those around you to avoid being cut in the stack ranking.

~~~
hamburglar
Yes, absolutely. Once you stop getting promoted at Microsoft, management is
conditioned to look at you as dead wood. I was there for nearly 10 years and
had good coaching through 5 promotions. One of the things that was kind of
nice about the system is that my managers were always really good at spelling
out exactly what was going to be expected of me in order to reach the next
level. Unfortunately, the requirements just keep ratcheting up, and I got to
the point where what my manager laid out as the next set of requirements was
simply never going to happen. I wasn't interested in putting in ever-
increasing effort and taking on ever-increasing responsibilities. This is when
he explained to me that if you just decide to be happy where you are,
Microsoft basically starts to lose interest in you and you get the shaft in
the stack-ranking. So I left.

------
douche
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.

~~~
undertow

      > 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.

~~~
douche
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.

~~~
bbcbasic
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.

~~~
GeneralMayhem
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.

~~~
hibikir
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.

------
jmspring
The first full fiscal review cycle where stack ranking took effect was in June
of 2014. The announcement was in late 2013, but well, Microsoft fiscal cycle
runs July -> end of June.

I really don't see how the announcement of doing away with stack ranking (an
abomination) dove tails in with something in 2013.

Note that the news articles of it's demise were in _late_ 2013, and at large
companies announcement -> implementation take time.

I doubt the half cycle reviews (late fall/winter) of 2013 fell under the non-
stack rank rules, hell, year end is when most of the formal stuff takes place.

Another edit -- stack rank elimination was announced end of 2013,
realistically the next review cycle (may/june 2014) it took effect. If I look
at the poster of the blog's LinkedIn profile, she lists her leaving in Sept of
2012. So this is a valid comment on the stack rank system -- it was certainly
a cancer. That said, the timing and lack of detail makes it a bit confusing as
to the fact that stack ranking went away basically in mid 2014.

(edit some more detail)

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frik
The article mentions different teams. What's their roles in the development of
Microsoft products?

Redmond (MS headquarter), Finland (Nokia headquarter), Cambridge (research ?)
and India (outsourcing ?)

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0987612345
Finland is not 'Nokia headquarter', Cambridge is not 'research', and India is
not 'outsourcing'. All have product building teams (with all the disciplines
involved - Dev, PM, Design). Some places are small (lesser people) Ex.
Cambridge, some places are large (India - with complete end to end ownership
of product building). And there are Japan, China & Israel R&D divisions too
and same applies to those places as well (all disciplines are involved in
making of whatever products they are creating).

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smegel
I either here really good stories about working at MSFT, or really bad ones.
And the really bad ones almost always seem to raise the performance evaluation
system there.

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sudioStudio64
Wasn't stack ranking one of the first things that went after Ballmer announced
he was leaving?

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devsquid
I imagine the culture still lingers however, stuff like that tends to stick
even decades later.

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melted
From what I heard, there really IS no stack rank or numeric ratings this time.
Managers do get discretion wrt pay and equity, but not much of it. The only
score you can give to someone consists of a checkbox that basically says "this
person sucks and we need to let him/her go". TBH, I have to say I like this
system. Google, for instance, has both the curve and the stack rank, as well
as promotion by committee who have no first hand knowledge of your work.

