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This is the system Bill Gates' foundation is currently trying to peddle to the US government for school reform.

If that is true, then good luck to you all in the USA.

One of the pleasures of teaching is working in a (loosely coupled) team of good teachers with complementary strengths and weaknesses. Teachers are 'loosely coupled' because they spend most of their time with students rather than other teachers or managers, but being able to compare notes, get support and give support is really important to the role.

Source?

I assume dobbsbob is talking about this, which appears in several forms on the top Google page for "Gates", "Teachers" and "Stack Ranking":

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/05/1106417/-Gates-s-Ca...

Here's the Gates quote the whole article is built around. You can judge for yourself how much it reflects a desire for a "Cannibalistic Culture" or its general merit as an approach to education reform:

"What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a 2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) The rest of the savings could go toward improving teacher support and evaluation systems, to help more teachers become great."

The crucial difference is that teachers don't work in groups i.e. you would rank them against all other teachers in a given school.

People say stack ranking is bad within Microsoft because you're not ranked against all 50k+ employees but against 10+ people that report to the same manager.

If 2 out of 10 people are guaranteed low ranking, then it's better to be a mediocre programmer in a team of poor programmers than to be a very good programmer in a team of even better programmers.

It also means that it makes sense to sabotage the performance of your 9 colleagues because you only care about looking better than them, not about doing best possible job for the company or your team.

A global stack ranking, if it was actually possible, would be great. You do want to get rid of low performers (and hire better replacements) and in a large enough pool the bottom 20% will really be worth replacing with better people.

I agree, I guess that I would do my best to get the easiest tasks so my performance would be up, and the hardest tasks would either never get done or in a really dirty way.

But how do you implement a global stack ranking in such a diverse company like Microsoft? There is no good criteria for comparing the kernel developers to the frontend programmers, for example. I doubt you could even find 100 employees working on the same kind of task.

I think michaelochurch has talked about "concave" vs "convex" work a lot.

Can you explain in greater detail please? Are you using the terms "concave" and "convex" in the same way that NNT does in his recent book Antifragile?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177851

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle...

An earlier poster, who works at Microsoft, said that the ranking is done in large groups. So I imagine it would be grouped something like developers reporting to a particular PC. . .so it wouldn't be as granular as you describe. . .and the criteria wouldn't be granular either. . .Or I guess the criteria/objectives could be fairly high-level, but any benchmarks used could be more granular and specific.

People may say that, but as I understand it that's a misrepresentation of the situation at Microsoft: the curve is only enforced in much larger units.

Disclosure: I recently started in a full time position at Microsoft.

> A global stack ranking, if it was actually possible, would be great. You do want to get rid of low performers (and hire better replacements)

This is really wrong, to get rid of the 20% low performers, you install a system that destroy everyone's confidence and promote short term decision making.

In the end, you get rid of 20% of people that just don't play the game AND you decrease the overall performance the group of people.

I remember reading a good article showing how rewards affect people performance by changing their goal, but I can't find it. Anyone?

Not as a long term system, but doing stack rankings for a couple years would do a lot for American schools. Thinking back to my school experiences, things would have gone a lot better if the bottom 20% of my teachers were fired.

Merit bonuses for teachers from high pupil test scores would be a disaster. As children from poor homes get lower scores due to more stressful living conditions, the system would try to steer good teachers away from poor neighborhood schools, i.e. the reforms' goal is to make the rich families richer and the poor ones poorer.

Also, in my school system, the good teachers are steered/yanked towards the classes that have standardized testing. So electives, classes for enrichment, etc., don't necessarily have the best teachers. If all of the teachers in a given school are "good", that's not an issue. In schools where teachers are in short supply, that's a major problem.

When you tie my compensation to me having provably lousy coworkers, guess what happens.

I think you misread the op's post -- the suggestion was, "would you work with them again." If they're lousy the answer is obviously no.

Conversely, if you are graded on the curve, you want your coworkers to be provably lousier than you are.

But your compensation still depends on having some "provably lousy coworkers", or worse, if they're all gone some people who are good will perforce get labeled as lousy.

The quiet ones, the different ones disabled, gay, female etc who wont push back look for the ones who where bullied at school. If you team is lucky you might have some terminally ill people you can dump at the base of the stack - this sounds worse than it is as there was medical retirement available for these poor devils.

That isn't true all the time. Goldman Sachs uses an even "worse" review process. It's called a 360 review: your employees that report under you, co-workers at the same management level and your managers all rate you. The reviews are bell curved and the worst performers are asked to leave. It just so happens that Goldman Sachs has some of the smartest and people on Wall Street. I think it says a lot because a ton of "failed" Wall Streeters leave and completely destroy the perspective industry they go into afterwards. I don't think this type of system encourages crappy workers, but it does encourage a very ruthless company culture - which might not be the best to encourage collaboration.

I think it depends on the kind of worker you want to create. With engineering and development, it's an inherently creative process, and creativity needs collaboration to prosper. I don't know enough about Wall Street, but it seems to me that a ruthless employee works better there since you're competing with other companies at almost the same thing.

> guess what happens

Because intrinsic pleasures of the job are more important to you than your compensation package, you initially find dealing with "lousy coworkers" demotivating. But you endeavour to make the best of a bad situation by finding out how to help your coworkers become better at their jobs. You end up developing a far deeper satisfaction in your work than you'd previously thought possible.

Did I guess right?

If you are trying to channel Alfie Kohn, you should especially remember his advice that you cannot change other people.

I'm currently trying to get my workplace to change from the forced distribution model to a "membership model" of employee evaluations. I'm currently contracting with them on talent management policies and tools, so I'm in the position to do it.

In essence, it works as you describe: rather than trying to make managers give ratings using an arbitrary metric they don't understand (which can be avoided with behaviorally-anchored rating scales, but most companies don't spend the effort to create them), you basically ask them to decide whether they're in the club or not.

There is a bit more to it than that, such as training for and having managers justify their ratings, but it's simplicity is the draw.

Do you have any links to references on the "membership model?" I've always felt that rating/ranking scales are unworkable, and I'm interested in other approaches.

I like the idea of justifying ratings, but that can still be gamed, unless justifying ratings is one of their explicit performance objectives. At one of my jobs, managers had to provide more justification for the very highest and very highest ratings. So my boss told me that I deserved the highest rating, but he didn't want to provide the extra justification, so he gave me the next highest. And he confided - unprofessionally - that he knew (as we all did) that someone else in the group deserved the very lowest rating. But again, he didn't want to do the extra work, so he gave him the next to the lowest rating.

> The only thing that matters about your coworkers––the only thing––is if, after the year's over or the project's done, you'd work with them again.

I'd agree that's an important aspect, even a very important aspect, but hardly all that matters.

I could work with 10 of the nicest people on the planet, but if we all like each other & don't accomplish anything, is that really, well, good for the company?

Then again, that does explain most board of directors.

Well if you spent a year not accomplishing something and you'd like to accomplish something then presumably you wouldn't choose to work with people you accomplished nothing with.

And if you take it after the projects done then you must have done something so the hypothetical isn't relevant there.

Your argument is completely irrelevant. It's practically a straw man. That's not what he said at all.

He made a point about whether you'd work with a team again, and how this is all that matters.

You made a point about whether it'd be good for the company for you to work with people you think are nice and can hang out with.

That's not at all the same thing. You're not countering what he said. He's talking about actually working and getting things done, and how productive your team is as a functional unit. You're talking about how much you like your team.

It's implicit in "would I work with this team again" that you'd be trying to work with the team and not just hang out for a beer or five.

Some of the best people I've worked with, and people I'd work with again, are people I don't personally like. But if they're productive and we have good professional chemistry, I don't need them to think Aaron Rodgers is the best quaterback to work with me.

The takeaway is this: you can work with a team and be extremely productive together, but you don't have to desire working with them again because they're nice or you like them. You should desire to work with them again because they're awesome and complement you well professionally.

Short and sweet and actionable, love it.

Compliments the notions of Self Selecting Teams [1] and Roman Evaluation Interview Method [2].

[1] http://orgpatterns.wikispaces.com/SelfSelectingTeam

[2] Anything less than unanimous Yes is a No. h/t Luke Hohmann http://innovationgames.com/about/team/luke-hohmann/

A single "no" meaning "total no" makes people afraid to say "no."

I think everyone should say, at the end of a project, yes/no for wanting to work with other people. It's fine to not want to work with someone else, and that person doesn't feel discipline, unless a lot of people start refusing to work with him.

For evals and reviews, I agree. I was just trying to be clever by giving other examples of light weight organizational decision making strategies.