Comment by brackenbury | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brackenbury | Hacker News Reader

"Microsoft uses bad performance reviews (“The How”) as a tool to eliminate the elder (40+) and senior ranked employees."

Current Microsoft employee here. A few years ago my manager at that time did exactly the above. The review process in use at that time rated employees on "What" you accomplished and "How" you accomplished it. I had done really well on the "What" and the manager still gave me a low rating because supposedly I did poorly on "The How". The "How" gave managers tremendous flexibility to rate employees however they want regardless of actual performance. So why did my manager do it? I believe he discriminated against me for age reasons. There is evidence to support this: This manager rewrote ("reinterpreted" according to him) the HR-supplied expectations for SDEs (Software Development Engineers) at each level, and he raised expectations for those at higher level, while leaving expectations for lower level employees the same.

While I believe this manager discriminated against me for age reasons, I don't believe there is Microsoft-wide, corporate-sanctioned, age discrimination going on. It might be happening at the level of individual managers, however.

This is how big company middle management works across the board regardless of profession. You think it was age, but it could simply be your manager didn't like you or was threatened by you.

When I worked at big companies I was fortunate to have great managers, but I was able to see how bad ones worked from the outside. I got tired of rolling the manager dice and have since decided to only work at smaller companies. At smaller companies it is a lot easier to see how things will go during the interview.

So, how'd it all work out? I mean, obviously you still work for MS, but what happened with the manager? Did he move or did you?

This is actually part of classic corporate behavior: * Company starts small, based on people who want to get things done (and get rich)

* Small company succeeds, discovers need to expand

* Small company becomes big company

* At some point a threshold is passed: behaviors (such as are typical in middle management) begin to appear, and are tolerated, because the company is successful.

* But, the mid management behaviors are lethal in the long term. The reason its long term instead of short term is because the company success is a kind of inertia -- it takes a while before the "decelerating" behavior of mid management affects the company.

* By the time the success inertia has been countered, those mid managers have moved on, either through making a fortune, or being able to parlay their "success" into other positions in other companies.

Pessimistic, but I've observed it in many circumstances, up close and personal in one or two (including my current position).

I moved to another group immediately and doing well in the new group. The manager got demoted during a reorg several months later, likely because there was a lot of negative feedback from his direct reports. That's one thing I like about Microsoft. Microsoft collects anonymous feedback about managers from their direct reports during an annual survey, and if there is a lot of negative feedback about a manager that manager is not going to do well. Other companies should adopt this.

Good move on your part.

Lets hope Nadella works out well for you and MS.

I've made my career on MS technologies, and it's been painful over the past decade or so to gradually turn away from it as the big corporation management power plays run their course.

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