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Comment by czep | Hacker News Reader

Managers are structurally disincented to help underperformers because they serve a more effective role as a scapegoat. Stack ranking culture has created a system in which every team must have at least one person who can be justifiably allocated to the lower end of the bell curve.

During review season, every manager's worst nightmare is to not have any evidence that they can label someone a low performer. Once one is identified, it's in the manager's interest to keep them in that low performer state for as long as possible. This makes it easier to reward high performers when raises and promotions are zero sum within a team. It also signals to upper management how keenly they can assess talent. In short, having an underperformer on the team is a wonderful asset for a manager.

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this is painfully true. at a previous company we went from forced-curve ranking, to a manager-driven model where EOY rankings were completely at manager discretion (though pay incentive was pre-allocated to be distributed at manager discretion). Within a year new directives were provided on how the manager-driven ratings had to be distributed.

its a sickness

I worked at a big UK company that had a APR process but after all the scores for the year where worked out - there where levelling meetings where more senior mangers / hr fiddled the figures to hit the desired pay quanta.

OH and to get a cat 1 rating (the best) the suggested level was world expert several patents in own name etc

"there where levelling meetings where more senior mangers / hr fiddled the figures to hit the desired pay quanta" That's just business. They need to make the budget. There's not an indeterminate amount of money available so it needs to level out among all the employees.

And yes, achieving "Significantly exceeds expectations" implies some level of walking on water, and is the top 1-2% of the company. This isn't the same as school grades where anything less than an A means you're doing something wrong.

Annual reviews are some of the worst time to get pay raises because of these constraints. Finding ways to get "out of cycle" raises/promotions is much better.

Out of cycle promotions/raises did not exist and as we had Martlesham aka the British version of bell labs where we had you know one of the Inventors of ethernet working a cat 1 was realistically out of reach for the ordinary plebes

The best way, and probably the only way, to get a 25% pay raise, is to jump ship.

Not the only way. Out of cycle promotion (8-10% base + 5% bonus increase) followed by standard cycle raise (4.5%) and then added stock comp (+15% effective) resulted in this for me in one year.

This was the result of very direct conversions with my manager about “I’m at $x, I’d like to be at $y” and he used all the tools he had to get me there.

But yes, normally that’s the only way.

Nice! Congrats to you! It seems like you hit the startup stock option lottery.

That seems to be a very generous and reasonable sharing of income from the company and your manager.

As well as to have a manager that wasn’t a self-serving jerk, whose intention is to manage you down, instead of managing you up.

Most people are not so lucky.

And most managers are self-serving, despite whatever platitudes they say.

But I think for most people, they must take their destiny into their own hands. And negotiate what is best for themselves.

In a sense, you’re only worth what you can negotiate.

Yup. There has to be an underperformer, and managers need to decide who it is. This becomes a negative feedback loop. If you find yourself in this situation, you are best off switching teams within your company.

Switch company may be better, because record of you being an underperformer gets shared between teams.

It shouldn’t be a manager’s worst nightmare to have someone underperforming on the team. It’s just inevitable once you are managing enough people! If you clearly communicate to someone that they are underperforming and honestly try to help them to improve, you’re doing them a favor in the long term.

Ugh, I only worked on one project with a stack-ranking system, it was a joke in many ways.

this is so anti-social and screwed up. but it's the reality of capitalism.

This sort of finger-pointing is actually endemic to communist and socialist economies - the only thing you can trade on is your reputation. Capitalism tempers it somewhat because at the end of the day you do still need to make money.

It's the reality of bureaucracies, not capitalism. You really think this couldn't happen outside of capitalism?

Nothing to do specifically with capitalism. Most bureaucratic politics can be boiled down to game theory, and it doesn't take much imagination to conceive how this same phenomenon can occur in an identical way in a command structure absent of financial incentives.

it's to do with competition at the root and capitalism provides an inflated incentive for increased competition.

Consider oil extraction, for example: Under more strict capitalism access is reserved for those with large, existing resources, e.g. existing oil producers. But in some contexts, e.g. Alaska under Palin, it's viewed as a natural resource, benefiting every resident.

Why does company X get to keep all the oil that was just there naturally? One can say, 'they did the work,' but others were denied the opportunity to do the work bc it requires loans from the government.

In a nation better set up to respond to its committments to its citizens to enable them to pursue equality, opportunity, happiness, etc., internal competition isn't as ruthless bc all will benefit from its extraction more equally. There's no fight for the precious resources, so we don't have to pretend that certain people suck at their jobs so we can fire them.

Having read some stories about the intelligence services of the former USSR, I cannot agree. While there wasn't jockeying for monetary comp, there was just as strong effects felt in terms of pure political power in those org structures.

If anything, the competition sounded even worse, because losing often meant privation or even death.

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