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Comment by steven2012 | Hacker News Reader

steven2012

I worked at Yahoo, and quite frankly, Yahoo needs to go through a few years of culling the bottom 10% like this. After several iterations of this, it could be a great company again.

What Mayer is saying is that she is willing to sacrifice those employees that are at the lower boundaries of acceptable, in order to make more room for the top 85%

And quite frankly, the managers that are complaining about having to put people at the lower boundaries are highly likely to be underperforming as well. When I was there, it was mostly filled with bloated and lazy employees.

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There are two problems here:

1. if the company moves to stack ranking rather than just does a cull, it's a bad move

2. stack ranking works at the team level, not at the company level. If a team is full of morons and the next one is full of awesome developers, stack ranking will keep 90% of the morons and cull 10% of the good devs.

"stack ranking works at the team level, not at the company level. If a team is full of morons and the next one is full of awesome developers, stack ranking will keep 90% of the morons and cull 10% of the good devs."

That may be a risk they are willing to take. They are probably firing some good people. If a team is doing great and they fire someone from that team because SOMEONE has to get fired, then that's poisonous. But if someone isn't right for the job, but because the job is badly defined, or poorly managed, or the goals are unreasonable, or whatever... it does definitely suck for the person being fired, but losing that employee is a reasonable cost for Yahoo.

That may be a risk they are willing to take

Yup. They are in kind of a "bet-the-company" stage right now. They've got a problem, they've got no perfect solutions, and if they sit about just twiddling their thumbs they will go under.

> in order to make more room for the top 85%

And nothing attracts top developers to an organization like news that they've got a great stack-ranking system!

Yahoo isn't exactly an attractive company to many developers now, IMHO.

Yeah I'd tend to agree. Given the press about the company, I can't say legions of talented developers are beating down the Yahoo's door to get in.

I doubt it affects recruiting very much because most people will be convinced that they'll be in the top 10%, or that they're being hired specifically to replace someone in the bottom 10%.

I am probably not in the top 10 percent of developers at this point, but I consider myself a good developer, and definitely a great problem solver and an all-round asset to any team. It is most unlikely I will even consider a company that uses stacked ranking, and this is perhaps the primary criterion I will look at. For me it is an important indicator that there will be a dysfunctional, damaged culture, and subtle or overt politics.

I think you overestimate the number of prospective employees who make their ultimate decision whether or not to work at a company based off of stack-ranking.

I turned down an offer from Microsoft, in substantial part, due to their evaluation system and the resulting "competitiveness" of the teams. (The competitiveness was self-admitted during the interview when I asked about the team culture)

I'm not a "star" developer by any means (although I consider myself competent), and I was frankly very concerned that they might be bringing me on to be the "scapegoat" that could be rated underperforming to save the rest of the team.

That's a good point.

I'm not sure how stack ranking can be good for any company:

1) It seems likely to deter prospective employees.

2) There's the incentive for the hiring teams to hire weak employees to use as "scapegoats"

Seems like a death spiral.

Exactly. It was like ending work-from-home arrangements: probably a negative move for a generic company in a vacuum, but a reasonable risk for a company in trouble with Yahoo's specific issues.

If the company is performing well in a couple of years, they can revisit their policies and loosen up on things like this, because if the company is performing well, or probably means they've fixed most of their workforce issues anyway.

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