Uber is designed so that for one employee to get ahead, another must fail
qz.com
qz.com
Literally nobody, not even a millennial, has said they want mobile-enabled feedback on their job performance.
We had a perf review system that seemed to have build a buggy PDF editor with a browser native plugin (flash maybe? long ago) that was impossible to use except on an old version of IE on Windows, and most of us had Macs: what you wrote would scroll off the page in one direction and scrolling was one-direction-only with no scrolling back. It was absurd.
So my guess is that Susan Peters is poorly summarizing the idea that millennials have higher standards for the apps they have to use (which I find intuitive at first glance), and 'on mobile' is a proxy for that desire, mangled by a game of telephone.
* Stack ranking at Cisco http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/networking/300075791/5-things... * Stack ranking at Google https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-stack-rank-its-employe... * Stack ranking at Microsoft http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-old-employee-revie... * Stack ranking at Amazon http://insights.dice.com/2016/11/15/amazon-may-end-stack-ran...
That doesn't make sense from an organizational point of view, you end up with teams that are on average worse than others but still treat the top 10% of team A the same as the top performers of the worse team B?
In my view, the answer is yes. Today's employees are well connected, and we are no longer dependent on management for information. We might get our information from friends in management, peers who were once managers somewhere else, networking, and even HN. We can broaden our base of knowledge by assuming that most companies are managed in similar ways, due to shared training, culture, and networking among managers.
I'm a former manager and now a regular employee. I understand the mechanics and politics of stack ranking from experience.
At any given moment, the employees may understand the process better than their direct supervisors, because the employees have no limitations on how they gather information, whereas the managers are busy memorizing corporate talking points.
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 ;-)
This is my dream manager. I've never had a manager ask what they could do for me and actually mean it.
(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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Yet it will get you maybe 2-5% more pay.
I see lots of new devs working at way under capacity because it's just not worthwhile for them to work harder for a company.
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.
> > 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.
The ranking of people requires either one of two things:
1. fitting your group of people to a bell curve regardless of their proper distribution in reality
2. ranking inflation or deflation
Seems like a broken system designed either to generate make-work for managers and HR or to give the illusion of personnel manipulations to improve performance.
Like, say your team didn't hit its OKRs. Should that mean that your manager has to make the average of your team's ratings be below 3? Certainly, one reason why your team failed to hit its numbers might be because most or all members of the team are poor performers. But it might also be that your manager didn't organize your work well, or it might have been that your numbers were unrealistic.
It's a delicate balance and, as a director myself, I don't claim to always get it right. But the goal I aim for is: if we have a good manager hiring great people and a mediocre manager hiring mediocre people that we calibrate correctly across those managers rather than claim that one is inflating their rankings.
The person voted isn't necessarily made to leave. It's an opportunity for them to focus on improving themselves personally, possibly in a program.
This isn't the worst idea ever, for that you'd have to include knives or acid.
This a genius idea. That way you push the liability of discrimination from the company to the employees at an individual level. It's like mob rule but for companies.
> The person voted isn't necessarily made to leave. It's an opportunity for them to focus on improving themselves personally, possibly in a program.
I can't begin to imagine how awkward it would be to be voted off the island and stick around anyway.
If you did this to me or made me participate in this I would definitely tell you off and walk out of the room, clean out my desk, and leave.
With this in mind, it makes sense to grade the manager. If a manager has a lot of poor performers, they might not be giving staff the training, support, and feedback that is necessary to improve. If they all get high scores, they might be grading too easily. I'm guessing they have controls to help lessen this.
1. Each manager gives their people an absolute score
2. A meta-manager checks in with all managers over the course of the year and keeps tabs on performance of a randomly selected group of people (some scalable fraction of the total workforce. As this number goes up you could hire a few more people to do this job).
3. Each meta-manager looks for obvious goofy scoring discrepancies (how can person A have a lower rating than person B?).
4. Each manager is on the hook to defend those ratings in the face of scrutiny to justify why they rated Tony Terrible better than Andy Awesome. This expectation of accountability prevents them from inflating their scores too much.
Sort of like QA for management assessments.
Damn straight and that's a natural side effect of having a pool of limited resources (i.e. bonus money and promotions) to offer.
The problem with stack ranking isn't that employees can be ranked higher or lower than one another (as in any normal rating system), it's that you absolutely have to give someone a failing mark, even if no one actually failed.
This means that if you get transferred to a team where everyone is highly skilled, then you run a real chance of being the person who gets ranked terrible and can never get a raise or promotion unless your other teammates leave – or unless you sabotage their progress or refuse to help them in an effort to try to lower their performance.
Also note that MBAs and other business types have learnt to game the system by providing 5 star all around. Why? Your average tenure at a company is low (2-3 years). You need your peers for your next job. Why denigrate each other.
It seems engineers are not smart enough to game the system and actually rank each other honestly. Whereas the business and law guys know better.
It's a perverse form of letting bugs slip through careful coding and design practices when they are far cheaper to fix, and letting them loose into production facing customers when they are way more expensive (monetarily and soft factors) to resolve, but in the hiring and retention realm.
I learned about stack ranking the hard way. When I quit, it caused all sorts of commotion, culminating in the CEO personally calling me to nicely and politely ask me to stay, far contrary to my worst-slot ranking would suggest. That opened my eyes to its drawbacks. I can see a use case for stack ranking as a leadership tool in situations with clear featherbedding, but when used as a permanent policy it's management cargo-culting at best, Jack Welch fetishization at worst.
If any readers ever find themselves in a similar situation, do not explain the details of why you refuse to stay on, as that only cracks opens a door to high-pressure negotiation. Easiest way out is simply state you already accepted a very attractive offer, if pressed for details respond the other company swore you to not disclose the terms to anyone, and stay polite.
Like a proper diet and working out where there is no substitute for doing the work, stack ranking rarely if ever substitutes for accomplished, attentive leadership (as contrasted with tactical aspects of management, a core prerequisite to said leadership). It is a useful scalpel if/when wielded properly, and is best left in the toolbox otherwise.
If you're seeing widely varying ratings of a single person that seems like it'd be a big red flag - if the boss says 1 or 2 but coworkers or reports average 3.5+ that's a situation that seems to cry out for further investigation. Similarly, if the boss says "4" but coworkers and reports average 1.5, there's probably also a serious problem.
I'm sure investigating involves costs that companies don't want to incur, but if you have that kind of disconnect going on it may be cheaper to investigate and resolve it than to deal with the eventual fallout.
I've seen the personal aftermath of bad bosses and work environments on people in the past, and it's really not pretty. If you're talking with someone about work and say "Mean Girls" and get a response of "Oh my god yes!" that's a pretty good indicator of a toxic work environment.
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.
I wonder if their interviews involve the question "how would you move Mt. Fuji?", another thing Microsoft gave up on many years ago.
I ended up accepting an offer from another company, but I'd say the entire experience was pleasant. I liked the engineers I talked to (of whom over half were women) and it seemed like they genuinely enjoyed what they did.
I guess all isn't as it seems.
It's sad that a good portion of the hn community would rather looking for good stories that play with confirmation bias.
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?"
...
I thought we knew by now that you involve the people that will live with the new "philosophy" when "conceiving."
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.
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?
Just look at Theranos and Zenefits for examples. If it wasn't this situation, we wouldn't have heard anything till something disastrous happened to Uber. Thats just the way it works.
/s
That's the epitome of every employee getting ahead (or failing).
I work at a company, and I think generally, most people who work here are happy. And there's not much churn.
Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.
Because in the long run, they believe it to be cheaper because they can hire in college grads at a lower rate and think they are profiting because they should be versed in the newest stuff. In addition, this stuff (with larger companies) is good for business. This article is an example: Uber is getting bad publicity for treating workers badly, but other companies? Not so much because they promote a better image.
Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.
For the recruitment thing? The best thing I can think of is by making sure people are educated. Beyond that, strong labor laws and separating health care from employment will help, but won't solve the issue.
As far as solving the "most folks are unhappy at work" - strong labor laws and health care. Outside of that, it is more up to the employer. While not everyone will be happy, you can make the majority of folks that stay there a while content - some places do this now.
The point is that yes, there is PR involved. However, not having a toxic workplace is another. It is an idiotic suggestion that the perception of how good it is to work at one company or another is purely a matter of PR. Engineers talk to each other and do very frank "what it was like to work for BigCo X" all over the place. I think you probably understand this but it doesn't really fit well with your agenda here.
Honestly, work at a lot of companies is a drag, for a lot of people. Big deal. However, stories like the ones coming out of Uber are far outside the norm, even if you think that the endless publicity about shiny happy people working at same of the other companies is a product of PR.
You are not able to handle a disagreement and called me all kinds of names. You should talk to your colleagues and see if they think you might be one of those overbearing colleagues who is contributing to a toxic culture by throwing a fit at everyone who disagrees with you.
I am not taking a side on this issue. Uber is a victim here. No one plans to have a toxic culture at work. I am just trying to put down the mob mentality by pointing out the obvious challenges.
I do not think the stories out of Uber are any out of ordinary. These are same stories that came out from finance industry and Hollywood. Success attracts problems like this. There is nothing you can do about it other than wait it out.
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.
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.
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.
Over all churn rate in the valley is pretty bad, uber cannot doing any worse than the other companies there.
Were these horrible places to work (as commonly reported)? Are they horrible places now? Who knows (certainly not me).
Uber itself is a victim here. They are going after some other big monopolies in the industry. It could be as simple as their mistakes are blown out of proportion to smear them by their competition. We see similar big co is bad stories once a while its not like Uber has a monopoly in treating employees badly.