Sacked Google worker awarded €110,000 for unfair dismissal | Hacker News Reader

Sacked Google worker awarded €110,000 for unfair dismissal

irishtimes.com

87 pointsrmchugh48 comments

This is actually pretty big. If I'm interpreting this correctly, Google arbitrarily stack ranked employees then dropped the lowest ranked one. Courts thought that process was unfair, opening up the door for every single ex-Googler in Ireland.

I'd love to have a protections like this in the US. I've had the same thing happen to me at a large company. Political ranking rather than performance leads to some incredibly insular work places.

It never feels like it at the time, but you're better off winding up at a workplace that values your contributions over your political connections.

I honestly have not seen a company larger than ~25 people where that was true. Can you give an example?

Valve? :)

I've heard tale that because of the lack of formal structure at Valve, you need political connections to actually get anything done.

Perhaps even more so than places with a formal structure.

It's quite likely that some kind of hidden structure emerged.

However, could you explain what you mean with 'political' in this context? Because 'political connections', in my mind, also includes reputation and knowledge of competence. And that doesn't seem like a bad thing.

Things that would normally qualify as "soft power", eg, being friends with the right people, trading favors, reputation management, etc.

Even the example you give requires reputation management, as opposed to merely raising a good technical argument at the time (as a new person on the staff).

Sure, but you're leaving "competence" unspecified. Political connections are based upon competence at what? Therein lies the rub.

There's a famous essay about exactly that called "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". We discussed it about two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611

Someone already made a variation of Greenspun's Tenth Rule about this--in the absence of formal management, your company will contain an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of management.

Solo! Solo! Too Nakma Noya Solo!

The article is very vague on the actual specifics of this termination, and I don't claim to know any more details. However, to at least play devil's advocate to this one sided story, what incentive does Google have to fire someone "arbitrarily" if they have been performing satisfactorily, especially considering that Google has been on a continuous hiring spree for a while? Doesn't it seem plausible that the said employee wasn't doing a great job in the first place?

If Google fired the lowest stack ranked member in each team every year, we would have heard about 100s of stories or lawsuits by now. I don't know if Google is clean in this particular case, but something smells fishy from the story as it is currently portrayed in this article.

> Doesn't it seem plausible that the said employee wasn't doing a great job in the first place?

Playing ong with your devil's advocacy: there are ways to fire someone who is not performing well. Europe makes it harder, but not impossible, to fire under-performing employees.

Certainly in England it's pretty easy to fire people, especially in their first two years of employment. (Just avoid any hint of discrimination against the protected statuses).

Also: I'm curious. Don't you trust the Irish courts?

Jack Welch popularized this decades ago, where every year he would force departments to cull 5-10% of their employees. He stated that this was well-received for the first few years, but after that it got harder, because managers were starting to let go people who were actually decent. But Welch insisted on this because it kept things from stagnating, as well as keeping open reqs when you found very good people. He also said that managers would start to try to game the system where they would hire poorly performing people just so that they could be culled.

I think there is some value to occasionally culling your worst performers, but having it as a practice every year the way Welch did, and presumably Google does, makes it tough on everyone because it could lead to situations where good but not outstanding employees are let go for no apparently reason.

What lawsuits would you have seen? I don't see how it would be illegal to do that in the US in any way.

Basically with stack ranking, if I see a colleague doing well, that's bad for me?

Sounds horrible.

There was an interesting article about Microsoft's use of a similar mechanism written by one of their developers. He wrote that it encouraged people to seek out incompetent teams to work with as within these teams they were guaranteed to shine. Thus, clever people did not want to work with clever people, as it would reflect poorly on their evaluations, regardless of the team's actual performance. As I understand it, Microsoft have dropped the use of these mechanisms, for this and other reasons.

More fundamentally, what led to such a system in the first place?

"People are fundamentally lazy and we need to do X to make them work"

vs.

"People are fundamentally awesome and will work hard if we can remove obstacles and demotivators."

You just described this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y

Exactly, thanks!

Of course many middle-management types assume everyone is fundamentally intellectually lazy, just like a thief assumes everyone wants to steal his stuff.

There was an entire blog more or less oriented around the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Microsoft

It could hardly avoid doing that, per at least a couple of Vanity Fair articles, the first one of which I know is very good:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-dow...

"“Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” [Kurt] Eichenwald writes."

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mo...

I don't believe I've read the second one, but it expands on the corporate culture that required someone's official failure for you to survive:

"In those years [when it failed] Microsoft had stepped up its efforts to cripple competitors, but—because of a series of astonishingly foolish management decisions—the competitors being crippled were often co-workers at Microsoft, instead of other companies. Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses—such as e-book and smartphone technology—were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays.

It could hardly avoid doing that, per at least a couple of Vanity Fair articles

The blog appeared 8 years before those articles.

My point is that if the first Vanity Fair article is correct, that "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft...", then Mini-Microsoft could not help but to discuss it a lot. As he and his commentators did, in chilling detail.

Yep, and you don't want to be on the same team as high performers. You want to be on a crudy team so you can stand out.

I think any management practice that would have ensured something like the original Macintosh team couldn't be assembled is bad.

Because of this, she said staff were ranked from one to five and someone at Google always had to get a low score “of 2.9”, so the unit could match the bell curve. She said senior staff “calibrated” the ratings supplied by line managers to ensure conformity with the template and these calibrations could reduce a line manager’s assessment of an employee, in effect giving them the poisoned score of less than three.

Being from Ireland myself, it amazes me that Americans tolerate stack ranking, grading on a curve, and t-scores - tools whose statistical utility has been obviated by the abandonment of all other contexts.

Most of us don't. The practice is largely confined to Silicon Valley, and there are plenty of other places for any variety of technologist to work. Why anyone wants to work for Google is beyond me.

I don't know about "largely", but it certainly is also highly dependent on the management in place. One place I worked one of the managers basically implemented an unofficial "stack ranking" within his group of 4-6 employees so that he could always have a scapegoat.

It's not at all largely confined to Silicon Valley - GE and Microsoft were the places that really popularized stack ranking, back in the 80s, and it's all over Wall Street and consulting. It may be largely confined to the United States - I don't have enough international work experience to know whether other countries do it, but just judging by cultural differences, it seems somewhat unlikely.

As for why anyone works for Google - as a recently ex-Googler, I can answer that. Most of us don't think about it at all. The calibration scores are hidden from us, and they only have observable effects once a year when bonuses and raises come out. And most Googlers are paid ridiculously well anyway (don't we have an article on HN about Bay Area gentrification every few days?), and typically would be working in finance if they cared about maximizing financial payout. So people work for Google because they want the other things Google can provide - challenging technical problems, smart coworkers, the chance to impact millions of users even in a tiny way - and it doesn't particularly matter what management thinks of us.

Compensation was a small part of my decision to leave. I left because I felt that I had learned everything I could learn at Google, and the stuff that I did want to explore and learn about could only be done outside of the company.

I'm not sure how much it is a case of Americans tolerating it, rather than Americans lacking decent labour legislation to challenge this sort of nonsense. Luckily in Ireland we have pretty good labour law that gives us better protection than our colleagues in the US.

I think by labor law you mean socialism, maybe communism.

No, I don't. I mean laws governing the relationship between workers and employees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_law Do you think that placing legal reins on employers' ability to do whatever they want with their employees is akin to socialism?

I had hoped that adding communism made the intention of my maybe too subtle post more obvious.

Regardless of whether you're mocking the American Political Right or you're a member, the post is at best a weak firebrand. I still don't think I understand what were you attempting to add to the discussion.

It is, of course, not communism unless there are communes involved. But I suspect you don't actually know what either "socialism" or "communism" means.

Edit: Unless you're being sarcastic, in which case I remind you of Poe's Law.

> I'm not sure how much it is a case of Americans tolerating it, rather than Americans lacking decent labour legislation to challenge this sort of nonsense.

Not having "decent labour legislation" is a result of "Americans tolerating it". If Americans didn't tolerate it, they'd have legal protection against it.

Because we're afraid of having something like the post office in the private sector.

It is really hard to fire federal employees, even if they are drunk on the job, make racist comments about customers, call their supervisors degenerates, refuse to sell stamps that are in-stock, or just hang out in the corner chatting while a line of people stretches out the door.

It has been my experience that, whenever labour laws that are favourable to the employees/designed to protect the employees, someone will protest it because it can be abused by employees. Of course, laws that protect people can be abused; I don't doubt that there are people who are out to game the system for all it's worth. But how come they never consider the flip side of employee protection laws; that the employer has more opportunity to screw the employee over when there are little to no laws protecting the employee. Aren't employers just as corruptible as employees? And they're in a position of power, to boot. An example? One of the replies you got.

I suspect such attitudes are part of the whole mindset; corporations first, then the rest of us mooching, non-job-creators.

I suspect executives like it because it produces data that looks like an example from an MBA textbook and is easy to act on. It's also easy to defend for the same reasons. In the same way that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, nobody ever got fired for stack ranking.

Well, there's the theory it clears out deadwood.

Of course, its intensely and inextricably political nature means it's doing something else, and the true insanity comes when it's done indefinitely and fundamentally changes the corporate culture.

Hard to imagine Google staying competitive if it really takes hold....

(As for the "nobody ever got fired, Steve Ballmer or more likely the board that fired him might disagree....)

AFAIK, that's not really how Google's system works. Yes, managers will give numeric performance scores to people on their team. And yes, those raw scores will almost certainly be adjusted. But it's not as crude as simply normalizing the scores to fit a given curve. Instead there's a process to try to make sure that one manager's 3.5 is the same as a 3.5 of the other managers in the same area and the same office, by looking at what they actually accomplished. Then the scores would be calibrated across progressively bigger and bigger units, until everyone is more or less on the same scale.

If it turns out that one manager is giving consistently higher scores than another and can't support it, then it seems quite reasonable and fair for there to be an adjustment down.

This is just my understanding of the process, based on comments by people involved in various stages of it, many years ago. Maybe I misunderstood, or maybe things have changed. It wasn't a perfect system either, people with a bad manager who can't argue their case could still get screwed. But despite all that, the calibration scores never felt like an adversarial process. Certainly nothing like some of the MS stack ranking horror stories.

When I worked for a consultancy in about my second year I got a great review. A few days later my manager called me into a meeting and apologised and said the grading had to be reviewed as the country manager wanted it to be lowered. This person didn't know me and didn't know what I was doing. And so it was lowered. This did affect my pay rise I believe, that was all. It did annoy the hell out of me at the time though.

I think my manager made a mistake in letting me know the rating before someone who didn't know me approved it. This probably happens a lot, ratings getting downgraded, and people don't know.

Interesting. I was unaware that Google used stacked rankings.

They really don't (at least for performance). The article gets several things wrong. For example, the purpose of calibration is not to stack rank, but to ensure consistency (IE 3.5 means the same thing across different orgs), etc. Managers don't sit in a room and try to force fit a curve.

More details in an earlier article http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/sacked-google-ma...

Another article on stack ranking system? We get it. Stack ranking is evil. What more could we expect from a horrible company when the best thing that could happen is that they fail. We hateses nasty lying Mic...

Nevermind sorry gollum gollum.

An article that makes a potentially credible claim---testimony under oath, I presume, that a judge found credible---that Google's acknowledged stack ranking system is now being used to fire people is a very big thing.

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