Company identifies its best performers and then pays them more than others. Why is this controversial?
Is this the “everyone gets a trophy” generation shocked by how the world really works?
Is this the “everyone gets a trophy” generation shocked by how the world really works?
No one I know raised on "everyone gets an award" has done anything but mock it.
Every peer review calls out someone’s “superpower” and the Leadership Principle they excel at. (It also has some suggestions for improvement.)
There’s really very little to complain about in Amazon’s process except for the curve fitting.
If you're the worst of the best, you might be paid the same as the best of the worst in a different team, even if you're way better then them.
I think a lot of people would prefer an absolute measure, like did you deliver what people expected you to do deliver for the role and position you were hired for, aka, are you doing the job they need.
If it was an absolute scale, then ideally someone that's the worst of the best would still be paid more than someone that's the best of the worst.
But, like with interviews, I think it's just a hard problem. Evaluating performance is not something anyone has found a good way to do it. Wanting to do it seems reasonable, but being accurate at it isn't easily achievable, there'll always be injustice due to the innacuracies of the process.
I’m not aware of any very high performing organization that doesn’t have some form of cycling out low performers. And places that don’t do this, or promote based on silly metrics like years of service, consistently are places plagued with poor standards and performance overall.
High performing individuals also loathe the underperformers and want them gone. They drag down standards, create more work for others, impact morale. I’ve seen too many orgs that don’t chase out poorly performing people. What happens? The good performers flee.
Amazon's attrition goal is an open secret everybody knows. Once everybody knows that someone else's success is your failure, people start backstabbing eachother. They stop helping eachother.
The problem is that the attrition target is a quota that all of us had to fill.
Does this sound like a healthy environment? It creates perverse incentives where folks become more concerned about outperforming the next person than actually working toward the primary goal of shipping a product.
If your goal is to whittle a group of people down to one, then stacked ranking is the right tool. However most, if not all, organizations are created to achieve larger tasks. And this requires the cohesion of a team. If you think of only individuals, then you'll miss the forest for the trees.
2. Does your system actually correctly identify the lowest performers? If you believe that, you have more faith in metrics than I do.
3. Does every team have lowest performers that should be fired? I think that is the real toxic component here. I'm sure that all of us have occasionally met an underperformer that the company would have been better off without. But an automatism that every year, a blood tribute of N% shall be paid leads to all sorts of perverse incentives.
Tbh, I'm a millennial, but always thought "everyone gets a trophy" was a crock, as did many of my peers.
What's also a crock though is the world we've been left with, but that's also become just a cheap low hanging generational quib that is counterproductive. Then again, it does actually provide some sense of foresight
In my experience, it was the boomers who did this sort of shit to us millenials. I remember the 2nd grade softball games that we just wanted to have fun, and the younger boomers (our parents) then got all of us participation trophies for.. reasons. I know at least 3 in my team that intentionally left the worthless trophies underneath the benches. They were nothing to us.
We 2nd graders just wanted to play ball. Sure, do points (we weren't "allowed to"), and play quick, mix up teams. But no, it must be structured. My generation was also the start of that crap too.
And speaking of participation trophies, schools tried to do that crap too with "gold stickers" on perfect homework. I mean, who cares? I just wanted it done. Fellow students did similar with rolling eyes, like whatever.