- There is really no 20% rule that applies to teams. The calibration process is across bands / levels across a given product area. So it is not that you are supposed to give a score of 5 (deadwood) to a member in your 5-people team. It means all people across the division who are at level X are looked at and "sorted" to do that assignment. People level 64-65 and above typically have these "cards" that they use to sort people. That is the meeting where your manager or his manager is supposed to support you. But the other managers don't really know who you are for real. In the best case, they may know of you. So it is really hard to have a conversation because only one or two people have context about every person. So just to summarize, there are these cards that people drop on a table where they do the classification, and people don't really know who they are ranking.
- the second point is that moving into new teams is in many cases a really bad idea because the new manager now inherits a new person that cannot be defended as well as the existing team for the simple reason that the new person is not known as well. Many people have been in the same division for 15 years or more. You know they are not going to be an unknown and they coast on the legacy reviews. The new guy / gal is an easy victim unless she is some sort of Bill Gates right off the bat.
- one thing that was crazy in that review is that they not only let go of people with bad scores. They also let go of people with good scores but who are deemed to have reached their plateau level. So you may still be a great director or GPM but if the system decides the director is not going to make GM or the GPM is not going to make director, then they also see you as a candidate to get rid of.
- the most important problem for the industry I believe is that the system perpetuates the need to create NEW stuff. So for example, why would somebody create Powershell instead of using a perfectly fine alternative from the Linux / Unix world? Well, because that way you are the person who created a NEW thing and not who simply PORTED a solution! Can you imagine the world today if we could use the same commands or patterns of commands in Windows as we do in Linux? Clearly the OS are too different for that to be practical but we cannot argue that the syntax and paradigm could have been more similar.