> The process, called "stack ranking," requires managers to give about 5% of their employees a low performance evaluation to fit on a bell curve of relative performance.
...companies still use it ? Thought microsoft taught industry a lesson here
...companies still use it ? Thought microsoft taught industry a lesson here
The process itself was flawed because people had a tendency to stay in the rank where they were submitted because frankly managers didn't have the time, energy or interest in really talking through every employee. It was just easier to rubber-stamp the whole process and move on. Also it was nearly impossible to get rid of the process because of course people who had succeeded in it didn't want change. I couldn't in good conscience continue like that, so I took over rankings for my location. It went from one day to a week-long process and I made people vote anonymously and incorporated a ranked choice system and then aggregated the results. It was a far more time consuming process but IMHO fairer. I still hate forced ranking despite succeeding in it. It becomes part of your job - managing to the metric.
Vestiges of it remain because people still don't know how to distribute compensation without ranking people, particularly for employees that have the same review rating.
But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.
I don't know how many people the lead in the article managed. If it was a team of 15, he has a legitimate gripe. If it was a team of 200, not so much.
Yes, managers are supposed to keep that from happening but this policy tells them that a) you don’t trust them to do their job, b) their job now focuses on protecting their people from the system, and c) being busy playing the same game on their own personal behalf.
> Someone who closes out tons of tickets but is a complete asshole and hated by their teammates should get a worse performance review than someone who codes less but provides mentorship and guidance and is generally pleasant to work with.
They should get a talk with their manager about the attitude and if they don't fix it they should be fired; not wait for any ranking to cull them.
Keep in mind it was never a hard quota, though in my case at amzn I did have a few times where the GM (so manager of ~1500 org) pushed back and said not enough people were in LE for our department, in which case a few borderline people did unfortunately have to get put into LE.
Also seems to ignore these aren't replacement parts, these are your team mates or reports, actual humans with names and families attached. If they weren't coasting or not showing up for work, what you describe sounds like yet another alienating, dehumanizing process at work.
Unless it's a super small company or you're the owner of your company.
What's hellish is that the ranking is forced, you must put people on a PIP or rank them "low", which is absurd. Being told to meet a quota for low performers is bizarre.
> But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No.
I mean, below average performers will be around 40-60% just because how averages work.
The problem is that the question is "is their performance low compared to team", while the question you should be answering is "is their performance low compared to the market.
If team's management is on point with hiring the "worst" won't be that much worse than average anyway, so if you want to replace the bottom few % you essentially waste time as new hires might be at same productivity level.
On other side if you recruiting sucks and 20% of the dept does the 80% of the job, it isn't going to help either.
from my own experience, a bad hire rate of 15-20% is what I usually see accepted across the industry.
20% of the 4% rehired is 1/5th%, leaving 3 and 4/5ths of a percent of to come from the better performers.
If your team leads could be trusted to measure appropriately, you wouldn't need stack rankings because they'd correctly identify those under-performing. Stack ranking is conceding that your managers can't properly measure performance. Shouldn't that reflect more on management?
so whatever psychopath games they are playing, its not working.
So managers everywhere who only saw lots of headlines thought it must be cool just like Scrum and microservices and decided to adopt it.
I didn't know this existed until now. The problem with this (among others) is that I can never personally know where I stand. If I'm doing well, but being excelled by others, I still get penalized. There's no guarantee, it's almost random.
Also, I now have a new question to ask in interviews, and if it does exist in a hiring company, I can negotiate by declining bonus pay performance reviews and in lieu of ask for higher wages (not that any company would go for this).
But if times are good and everyone is performing well enough and contributing, why get rid of them? If they're not performing well enough, then you shouldn't need stack ranking to figure that out, and you don't need to arbitrarily set a percentage of employees to put on performance improvement plans or fire.
It depends. In medium and large (and even some small) organisations, the intention behind layoffs is not only to save on the salary bill, it's to cut those divisions, projects, groups initiatives and work units that are a net loss or that are not contributing to the bottom line.
IOW, the intention should be to get rid of certain positions; it's a side-effect that people are usually in those positions.
For example, at Amazon I would imagine that even the high performers in the Alexa team would be considered for layoffs over the low performers in the cash-cows.
It's positions that get laid off, not people.
There seems to be an assumption people will interview for their own job again at the end of the severance period.
But that's kind of irrelevant when layoffs are coz shareholders want more returns this yeah, not because company has problems...
Companies change product strategies all the time to pursue profit, trim unprofitable ventures, etc., and that's all fine. But it's dumb to lay off good employees when they can just be re-deployed somewhere else, assuming the company isn't having financial hardship that actually requires them to shed headcount.
Yep, Currently working for an absolute horror show of an employer who proudly uses stack ranking during yearly and half yearly reviews.
Cant wait to move on from this place.
In fact 5% is quite a low estimate in my opinion. I would estimate it 20%, easily 1 in 5
Maybe there is a bigfoot out there but I will refuse to believe until I see one
Stack ranking seems to be a solution for managers that are not doing their job. Either because they are trying to be nice or oblivious or just don't care. Since this guy quited to me it sounds like the first.