Hacker News Reader

Comment by dobbsbob | Hacker News Reader

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com