Hacker News Reader

Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

I implore the dissatisfied and frustrated people on HN (regarding layoffs and general direction of the industry) to start your own companies.

1 of 3 things will happen:

- The world will be populated with enlightened companies structured in pro-worker models that are wonderful for everyone involved

- You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful

- You will balance option 1 and 2 in some better fashion that moves the needle closer to your idealized vision

Isn't that better than just hating your life, punching a card, and waiting for the axe to fall on your head?

View on HN

If I’ve already done that, do I earn the right to complain about stack ranking?

As a business owner, who doesn’t have to worry about being stack ranked, I’ll say: continuous annual stack ranking to ensure a specific percentage of employees are put onto a pip or terminated is a terrible idea, and the people who institute it are bad at their jobs.

In a world where every single person except a heterosexual, healthy Caucasian male under 40 has a potential lawsuit against their former employer when they are terminated, be it age / sex / race / disability / and on and on, stack ranking can make rational sense when trying to improve efficiency across the board at scale while dodging lawsuits. This is, IMO, the reason it was originally instituted. I agree with you it isn't the best way and I think stack ranking is inefficient. But there is a logic to it.

This is pure mythology: very few people sue, because it’s expensive and stressful. Most who do have good reasons but if they didn’t, stack ranking wouldn’t help because the rankings are subjective and involve considerable managerial discretion - what projects you’re assigned to, the working environment, the standards used to assess quality, etc. are all going to come up no matter whether the corporate defense is that they were stack ranked or not.

You can do 100% of the legal ass covering that you need to do, with performance evaluations, pips, and careful documentation.

I’m not convinced that stack ranking is a good solution to this problem. A good organization and HR team knows how to terminate someone who is not performing well without incurring legal liability.

It can be a somewhat drawn out process, but a stack ranking system doesn’t seem like it would make it a lot faster to me.

My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is), and if you could continually prune the worst performing 3% of the org you could continually improve the quality of the remaining workers.

> My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is)

I’m fairly sure it really isn’t. Unless you hire random folks from the street it’s likely pareto or close. Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb because in the fat tail they’re all pretty close

> it’s likely pareto or close Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb

Sure, I'd agree with that. I was just trying to say I can see where the "on paper" logic comes from. But the on paper falls apart in the real world, where we're not dealing with "resources", but people.

But, yea, I think even the "on paper" case is weaker than it naively appears.

With a Pareto distribution you may as well fire the bottom 30-40%, but I suspect the remaining 60% of workers will redistribute their relative contributions again to go back to a roughly 80/20 split of relative contribution.

That’s right the 80/20 arises from hierarchy and associated bias in how the work is being assigned unless you happened to pick up highly uneven talent which is unlikely.

You seem to have strong opinions about the demographics of plaintiffs in employment-related lawsuits. Is that based on evidence? I’d be interested in seeing any relevant data. My impression of lawyers is that they can look at a prospective client of any color of the rainbow and see green.

Stack ranking is irrelevant to all that and doesn't solve that "problem". If you want to protect yourself from lawsuits, just have a documented policy for evaluation/incentives with a papertrail showing you adhere to it and your decisions. Stack Ranking can have a poor papertrail too. Consider how you would respond to: "This ranking board was all men, and all the women were ranked low. Why?" That's when you want something more substantive behind the ratings.

It’s not easy to start and build a business. Not everyone has the ability or luck required.

I don’t see an issue with employees protesting or trying to sabotage a system they see as unjust.

> trying to sabotage a system they see as unjust.

You should see something wrong with someone actively sabotaging a system. It's fine and maybe encouraged to protest or move on to a better opportunity, but sabotage just means they're making the whole world a little bit worse off.

The US government is more than happy to sabotage the rest of the world to retain just a bit longer their crumbling dominant position. (And those are closer to assasinations, coup d'etats, and economic warfare)

  sabotage just means they're making the whole world a little bit worse

So the German resistance were wrong to try to sabotage Hitler's war plans?

The idea is that this is a last-ditch situation where breaking windows leads to a long-term net positive.

Hard disagree. If a system has virtue, it needs to stand up to various kinds of scrutiny. Using housing as an analogy, pushing zoning, wealth, and development restrictions to their limit, people either leave their communities to find homes elsewhere, or they start setting up tents in backyards until the police can't do anything about it. The system should crumble at a certain point.

I think a lot of people simultaneously acknowledge that a business can be difficult to start for themselves, but fail to acknowledge that it wasn't any easier for their current employer to get started either. (Probably, in most cases; cue exceptions.) And that part of the tradeoff in working for someone else who actually did go out and achieve what you do have available to you but are not doing, is accepting that you work by their rules. And that you can negotiate and influence but at the end of the day it is their decision, just as you would want when running a business you've started.

That’a a lot to ask of folks who are spending a third of their waking lives on a shared endeavor.

May as well ask family to stop having opinions on my cooking.

> you can negotiate and influence but at the end of the day it is their decision

A family is more flat. Save for parents, a companies generally are more rigorously hierarchical.

> [...] part of the tradeoff in working for someone else [...] is accepting that you work by their rules.

i think a healthy working relationship involves employer & employee collaborating according to a set of mutually beneficial rules, which prevents either party from taking advantage of the other.

this is (at least idealistically) what employment contracts are for, even if they have a natural tendency to favor the employer in most situations.

besides that, i think there are plenty of examples from recent history which demonstrate that it's not healthy for the rules under which an employee operates to be solely outlined by the owner of the business (e.g. because that owner may attempt to take advantage of the employee).

No, when a company hires you, the company becomes part you. And you have every right to do whatever you want that you think is best for the company's future, even if it undermines what managers says -- be that whistleblowing, refusing to stack rank, refusing to hide the fact that a stack-rank policy exists.

If the company cannot convince you that its policies are efficient and moral, then that is their mistake for hiring somebody who sees the world fundamentally differently. If they don't want people to do that, they should tell every new manager in the hiring interview "Part of working here as a manager involves stack ranking people as low, even if they are doing great work, and not telling them they are under stack ranking, and if you cannot do that you won't want to work here"

It sounds like you joined the wrong company and/or they should fire you. You equally have the ability to vet the company before joining with sufficient questioning.

the issue is plainly that nobody is paying them to protest or sabotage the company

That attitude only works in Amazon warehouses. If a software developer at Amazon takes a long bathroom break the powers that be aren’t going to do a damn thing about it.

Employees in tech have a lot of power. It’s much better than the alternative.

I’ve been a software developer for years and nobody has ever paid me to do anything other than work. Nobody has ever paid me to leave a bad review about their company either so I’ve never done that. I draw a stark line between where my business ends and their business begins. I call this being a professional.

> Nobody has ever paid me to leave a bad review about their company either so I’ve never done that.

With that in mind, can I then assume that you're being paid by Blizzard to post here?

Lol nobody has ever paid me to write a good review either but there was a time years ago when I posted one just to help the average for a company I worked for, marketing and PR is always somewhat a group effort, whether people realize it or not, similar concept to an employee wearing a clean vs. sloppy uniform or being polite/helpful to customers

Winding up with "a bunch of antagonistic employees" sounds like a management problem, not evidence that lazy, worker-hostile policies are justified.

There are some employees that will never be satisfied no matter what management does - it's never enough, they always want more say, any amount of compensation for executives is "too much".

I say, great! Sounds like you could do it better, so please go for it.

Do you have strong opinions on national policy? I see.

And are you currently running for national office?

Hmm.

this is a bizarre straw man to stand up in response to GP, especially given the context of the post we're discussing.

in my experience, the framing and rhetorical style that you're using is often used to make excuses or apologies for business practices that diminish the power employees have in the workplace.

we'e not talking about some nebulous "they" that "always wants more", we're talking about the specific case of Blizzard utilizing stack ranking and then firing a manager who is unwilling to be opaque about the capricious evaluation they are being asked to do to their direct reports.

You could just as easily apply your statement to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

Their response: Yes, we did it and we did it better than everyone else including the crooks.

There are a lot of activist investors out there. Even Musk is being targeted because of his absent leadership at Tesla.

"My company kills employees that they don't like — actually shoots them and puts the corpses in a dumpster."

"Well, start your own company and don't kill people if you don't think it's right."

> You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful

No one [0] denies this. The problem with stack ranking is that you are forced to find problematic employees even when there are none.

I do agree with the overall point you are making, but I think that option two could be formulated in a less inciting way. Sometimes it might make sense for a company to do worker-hostile actions, but stack ranking just seems like a generally bad idea and not really related to getting rid of antagonistic employees; at worst, it probably helps making them.

[0] Figuratively, not literally.

> The problem with stack ranking is that you are forced to find problematic employees even when there are none.

Could you share some insights on how you organise an hiring process and a company to reach a point were despite having several hundreds employees and adding/replacing few dozens per month, there are no problematic individuals. I have never seen, anywhere, ever.

If you can offer some evidence that you can replicate that consistently, please open some consulting business, you’ll make millions and help so many organisations.

The thing isn't that you don't have a number of problematic employees, as you correctly pointed out you most likely have them in any sufficiently large organization. The problem is that you can't find a static number for them.

It's quite easy to see this, actually. If you let the bottom 5% go, stack ranking now dictates that you still have 5% problematic people. Repeat this cycle a few times and people previously considered perfectly average are now problematic. This obviously doesn't make any sense.

In reality, some companies might be super lean and only have 1% bad performers (as in negative business value), while some companies might be 90% overhead. For some companies the bad employees might be spread over all teams, while in others some teams are incredibly efficient and others are completely worthless. Coming in with a 5% brute-force hammer just doesn't make much sense in general and comes with all the morale and infighting drawbacks mentioned sufficiently in this discussion.

The context is stack ranking of _teams_ rather than _organisations_, isn’t it? The size of a team is not in the hundreds.

- You will lose your health insurance, someone in your family will have a medical emergency, you will have to declare bankruptcy and lose your house and your car, you will become homeless, get arrested by some broken windows policy wonk police directive, go to jail where they will ignore your pleas for your medicine for your chronic, treatable illness, and you will die on a concrete floor next to Bubba while he is shitting in front of you on a toilet telling you to stop shouting for the guards because they don't care.

Great advice. I'm sure people that are depressed should just be happy as well.

s/companies/worker cooperatives/

If one wants to escape a corporate hellhole no sense in starting another one.

Additionally no need to start from scratch. Just joining an existing worker cooperative would be a radical improvement over non-equity employment.

There aren't enough worker cooperatives.

"Be the change you seek" rather than looking for someone else to do the work.

Running a business is extremely hard; but no one is forcing these businesses to grow to be so fucking large that they are induced to justify all of their inhumanity on the impossible difficulty of operating at scale. THEIR EXECUTIVES CHOSE THE CHALLENGE. Kotick threatened to have his secretary killed, and we're still touting this MBA bullshit that the greatest challenge he faced in running Activision-Blizzard is how to sell the next Call of Duty?

CEOs manage that just fine. Their greatest challenge is building a culture of empathy; something psychopaths generally would find difficult. Call of Duty, The System, sells itself; a distributed self-healing machine like those found at Microsoft, Salesforce, Nestle, Pfizer, and every other giga-organization, nine-thousand eight-hundred neurons aligned toward the goal of deleting or absorbing competition.

Encouraging more kind-hearted people to start businesses is a magnitude of naivete which begets an unrealistic level of faith in the system which created the companies that rip our economy apart. Sure, you can go start Slack; and eventually be faced with the impossible choice of submitting to one overlord or being annihilated by another. You grew your business beautifully. Your customers and employees love your organization. You made mistakes, though not a tenth the number your competition did. But, they have Unlimited Capital, and were willing to cross the lines you wouldn't because the lines don't even exist in their morally-depraved worldview.

But; you're right; you'd discover that you can balance one and two, if you get lucky and stay small; like hiding from a hungry bear in the woods. This doesn't minify readers' dissatisfaction and frustration with a system that allows bullshit like this to happen, nor does it justify an out-of-touch ultra-Republicanized soundbyte about pulling up your bootstraps and getting to work fixing a system that loads fifty trillion dollars into a cocked gun and points it at anyone who respects the human condition just a bit too much.

Who starts a company thinking it won't be extremely hard?

Noone. But the ones whining here about their employers seem to think its not hard, without actually trying it.

What does this even mean? If you complain about a company's policy, you must think it's easy to run or start a company?

"Don't like it? Let's see you do better!" is almost always just a distraction or non-answer.

There's a fourth option:

- You'll realize that building an organization not built on exploitation is not viable in an exploitative economic system. You'll always be undercut by companies treating their employees shittier, that's what capitalism optimizes for.

Always my approach

If something isn't right, go change it.

If you can't, break free until you can.

Else it's a bigger problem than you might realise

> Else it's a bigger problem than you might realise

Then talking about it or protesting may be the way. When the climate where we all can start our business and make a significant change in this landscape will come that will be the best solution. But right now it’ll barely do a dent, if that. I sense that what we are facing are systemic problems

Reply on news.ycombinator.com