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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

A better question is why did they stop giving low scores to 10-15% of staff? Everyone gets a gold star performance reviews?

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If everyone is doing their jobs, there's no reason for an arbitrary % of them to get low scores.

Giving low scores is, as called out in the twitter thread, stack and ranking managerial BS which is toxic to its employees. Low and high performing employees.

You can choose between one of two problems:

If you don't have strong incentives to fire low performers (aka stack ranking), end up with a slowly deteriorating engineering culture as more capable people end up carrying the weight of worse hires that don't get managed out. Those devs enjoy their jobs less and leave for better pastures (because they're options are good), while worse devs stick around longer (because their options aren't as good).

If you do have strong incentives to fire people, you end up breaking up high performance teams, and create a culture of hire-to-fire and "mercenary" devs. This impacts your culture and forces out "good enough" employees and causes higher recruiting costs.

I don't fully understand if either of those are right in this situation, but I understand how people who felt they were with one type of company can be upset if that company changes its "culture" without a lot of heads up.

There's a big difference between giving low scores to people who aren't performing up to some standard (whether than makes up 2% or 10% or 40% of your workforce), and always giving low scores to 15% of staff even if they're actually fine. 'Stack Ranking' is widely considered poor management.

I'd be willing to bet every manager in the company believes all their employees are in the top 60-70% in terms of performance and every employee believes similar.

Removing a mandate that 10-15% of staff receives a low rating is not the same as giving everyone a gold star.

You could presumably still give low ratings before when it was merited.

Most likely because of the pandemic -- that's what happened at other companies, e.g. Meta

Right? Also these companies probably hired a lot of folks during the pandemic, and also relaxed their performance criteria while everyone was adjusting to remote work... So this just sounds like some folks are being caught off guard by the fact that yes, there are real performance expectations and you might not be meeting them.

They have (had?) performance-based RSU bonuses so my guess is that the status quo was giving "meets expectations" to everyone but top performers so everyone was happy getting their bonus.

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