LOLOLLLOLOLOL
Y’all go ahead and take his word at face value for everything. LOLOLOLOLOLOL
“Everyone on my team is mediocre, and they performed exactly average over the entire spectrum of this evaluation.” or better yet, “Everyone on my team is the paragon of code writing, has never pushed a bug, or had QA find a single, solitary thing wrong with the product.”
What he needs is to find a standard, when he as a leader has a standard that must be met then it is quite simple to find people above, below, and at the standard. No team in the history of teams has ever had every single person perform the same, there will always be high, medium, and low.
That might sound cruel but it isn’t, it’s just life. And while I know absolutely diddly squat about writing code, I do know that they have standards to putting out product, and who here has experienced a truly finished product?
I would strive to get as far away from that “manager” and that “team” as possible. And would strive to never work for a lot of the “managers” in this garbage thread. Holy Jesus.
Bwahahahahahaha
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Employee scoring systems are common, but are mainly ways to discourage employees from asking / demanding higher pay.
A good system is one where your review consists of “what are you doing well” and “what you could do better at”. No arbitrary “score” that is used against you when you ask for a raise.
Limiting how many “good scores” a manager can hand out is just a way to manage payroll expenses. Even if your entire team is stellar and all deserving of 5/5 ratings, if you are forced to give some people 3/5 or lower who are busting their butts… you can pretty much guarantee those employees will be looking elsewhere for employment.
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And that is part of the problem. 
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I had a manager tell me in an evaluation that I scored perfectly but he wasn’t going to give me a perfect score because “I don’t believe anyone deserves a perfect score even if they earned it”. How hard do you think I bothered to work moving forward after that crap? Yeah.
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WoW servers offline every other day, with Azure Span lagging for over a month after release.
“Development team doing an outstanding job, everyone is great!”
Yeah, no 
good riddance to Brian Bringemton, 2 in the thoughts 1 in the prayers wherever he is.
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This is a “manager” that doesn’t keep up with his “team” and has to scramble two weeks before reviews are due. Then when he can’t remember what a single soul has done over the past year he makes up some crap about how great they all are.
He is probably friends with all of them and can’t be objective.
This is what middle management has become, no one has a spine, no one wants to hurt anybody’s feefees.
Good riddance and good luck explaining to your next boss why you don’t keep up with your teams individual performance over the year.
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Which is all well and good until you can’t feed your family because you stood up against a company policy you didn’t believe in.
Meh, still gonna play wow and diablo 4.
The dev team is probably doing the best they can with the staff they have.
I don’t think that anyone will argue that the mentality of Blizz has shifted from having passion for their games to figuring out how to squeeze every last penny from consumers. Staffing has reflected that and so have the departures. People who are/were passionate about the games have left, leaving an imbalance between people who care about the game, and people who only care about the dollar signs.
What I think we are seeing with the numerous bugs is a team that is presented with a “ToDo” list consisting of major features. Getting those major features done is all that matters and whoever accomplishes the most, gets rewarded. Crap code / hack jobs are frequently utilized so that the dev team can get through their main list and get that pizza party. Bugs are given lower priority, unless they are proven to be game breaking and not just annoyances.
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It is inherently a fair system. If you don’t have a bell curve, you don’t have an accurate measurement baseline. It is not to companies benefit to give everyone 5 stars. Indeed, if you based their job performance by their job position and stated expectations you could have that, but what that really shows is your baselines are likely too low if “everyone” is 5 starring it.
The reality is people are average and within that context will be people above and below it. It doesn’t mean that those under it are inherently bad, but it does mean that, relative to their peers, they aren’t on the same level.
Is this fair? Not really. Job performance SHOULD have a minimum and performing exactly at that minimum should be perfectly reasonable because it isn’t like jobs are going out of their way to over pay/reward you. Even under the guise of these bonuses, it’s likely the base salary/pay could rise…like paying “tips” instead of “wages”. Tips are optional and can be withheld…reversing their use to make them expected puts the onus on the weaker party and not the company where it belongs.
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Its not as much as a Blizzard issue, as much as a corporate issue. Tbh, stack ranking doesnt work well in a tech environment that requires creativity and cohesion in teams. It works well in other companies who still ardently defend it.
Stack ranking should have been more widely scrutinized when GE, the company who started the process, stopped using it after the creator left leadership.
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What needs normalized is acceptable performance and truly above and beyond performance. You can kind of think of it like a RIO score. Not everyone is going to be 3k+ rated but that doesn’t mean one needs a 3k+ rating to do a +10 or +12. People crap on people in the ~1200 range applying to +10’s and don’t realize that, scorewise, that is where they realistically should be. Expecting a 3k+ player for a ~1k dungeon offering that tier of reward is what is unreasonable.
Stop normalizing and glorifying overperformers who are raising the minimum bar. The people willing to give 40 hours on the dot and stick to doing exactly the job they were hired to do ends up looking like underperformers when corporate bootlicking simps willingly work 60+ hours and do 1.5-2+ jobs for 75% of the money just to try and come off as a hard and dedicated worker that deserves an eventual ticket to the gravy train.
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You’ve quit about a dozen times though…
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Why companies do this:
- Imagine a budget of $100,000/year to increase employee pay.
- Imagine you have 100 employees, meaning a $1,000 yearly increase for each.
- Imagine that all of the employees perform adequately, but 10 perform exceptionally.
- Imagine wanting an increase bigger than $1,000 for your 10 exceptional employees (in part to incentivize excellence), but are unable to because of your budget.
You’d need to reallocate your budget. In an example where you want to pay the excellent employees $1,100, you could:
- Pay 90 employees $988 instead of $1,000.
- Pay 10 employees (targeting under-performers) $900 instead of $1,000.
- Give no pay increase to 1 employee (targeting the most significant under-performer).
The optics could be “fixed” by pretending the budget is only $90,000/year instead (when it’s really $100,000), and the “extra” $10,000 is set aside for exceptional performers. If nobody is performing exceptionally, then the $10,000 “extra” can be set aside for the following year (though most business tax law requires you to “spend it or lose it”).
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although it is wrong they do this…it pales in comparison to Activision Blizzard agreeing to an $18 million gender discrimination settlement…like what a sickening company or what!
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Awesome of that guy.
Way to go mate! I love ppl standing up to bad situations.
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Businesses don’t want people who only do their job even if they do it well. They want and expect you to go above and beyond. That expectation needs to end. You’re not paying me to go above and beyond.
As for me, I did my 40hrs only, did my job only, but I did it flawlessly according to the manager but he still wasn’t going to rate me as such. So, I stopped trying to be flawless and did just what would get by and not get me fired because it took a lot less effort, and if I wasn’t going to be rewarded for that effort then I saw no reason to give it.
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Aren’t people just wonderful? So selfless, not always about the chedda or climbing over others? Lol
Humanity rocks.
Stack ranking sucks. It gets abused for politics as much as anything else. I don’t blame anyone for leaving a company that uses it.
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Yes, let’s all use our smartphones to cast shame at a video game company’s employment practices. It’s amazing how conveniently selective we all are about dying on hills. If we only patronized companies that were 100% on the up-and-up, we’d all have a lot less cool stuff.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t get upset about this. I’m saying it’s a slippery slope to do so if you’re being true to yourself.