On the internet I’m a French Model… They are a business owner. Same diff.
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My workplace did this same crap as well, they told us no one can get 5 anymore, that 4 is the new 5. Our review score dictates our payrise, barely anyone got a payrise last year.
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For a small portion of the problem, it’s a BS policy that is illogical.
For the most part, people are biased and managers want to think that their team of grunts are better than any other teams, so try to rank accordingly. At some point that manager will believe everyone on their team is above average compared to the rest of the company and when it comes time for a RIF or attrition, no one wants to make the hard calls.
When you assign a point value (parsing) to all of the engineers in an organization, it makes it easier to identify and either weed-out or train-up those who aren’t near the top.
It’s illogical because a) you hire people you know you want to cut such as AMZN b) you do eventually weed-out slackers and wind up with a top-notch team given time and c) it’s not the manager’s job to facilitate leadership firing/removing slackers but to make sure their team has the best resources available to get the job done.
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Pretty much explains the rushed rollout of DF with bugs the size of buicks.
Cutting people just because they are not quite as good as others (when they were adequately performing in the first place) is risky business. Do you want to keep an adequate employee or test the waters with someone new that may end up being an underperformer just to save a few bucks? I AM KRUMTOILET!!!
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businesses often go with the latter route unfortunately.
20 years of middle management at UPS here. Never have I fired an adequate employee or rated then negatively. Yes there are some good and some bad, but I have never had to rate someone that is actually hitting their KPIs as an underperformer. I’d honestly be afraid about getting shot or something if I were to have to do that. I AM KRUMTOILET!!!
just do what my work did pay a third party to do performance reviews and then have plausible deniability. Tell the third party though confidentiality agreements that the less raises they approve the more they earn.
problem solved
We had KPI’s until people started cheating including management to meet them
I read this article earlier so now I feel like an expert and adding onto an already crazy amount of replies.
- It’s kind of amazing nobody has locked this thread
- I believe the article did state that MS adopted this approach but later abandoned it
- I believe I read a couple posts saying that “most” companies adopt this practice. While I can’t speak for most companies, I can speak to the ones I’ve experienced and this isn’t the standard. Not to say there aren’t equally awful metrics in rating an employee but this one is the most unfair to the person.
It’s unfair because people contribute in different ways. Depending on the size of the team you might have a couple code champions that knock out tasks quickly. You might also have someone who makes sure the docs are up-to-date and another that makes sure “some other areas are well kept”. Everything plays a vital part in shipping a product and none of them can be weighed equally by the metric outlined in the article.
At the end of the day Blizzard has been showing it leans more to profit than human. They are far from being the only company to do this but they do have a lot of public visibility which makes it easier to peek inside what happens inside the company. I have never worked at Blizzard because they honestly pay way less than EVERYONE but word gets around in tech and everyone that left company x to work for Blizzard all moved on to something else within a year or so.
probably because the thread is actually wow related. why would they lock a wow related thread?
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there was a study done that said, employees will meet management targets no matter what they are, It just may not be in the way management wants.
they gave an example a person working at a supermarket, they had to scan x items per Minuit, so employees started skipping the harder items
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They aren’t firing people rather not giving them higher than average scoring which then reduces the amount of bonuses and whatever else.
Thing is though that, strictly speaking, they ARE below average…the problem is that that the average is being artifically inflated by people over performing. If I got a team of 10 people of which 2 of them are working 60 hour weeks and are crushing any goals/objectives, 6 of them are more than exceeding those same goals and objectives and working 50 hours, 1 is working 45 hours and slightly exceeding expectations, and 1 is doing 40 hours on the dot and just meets requirements, then, by definition, the 1 guy at 40 hours is the underperformer in the group…he’s doing his job to the letter but all his peers are sacrificing and giving more.
The problem is that “minimum” is less and less “acceptable” today. It’s not enough to do just do your job and at a minimum and force employers to actually hire more bodies to keep workloads down, the expectations are just for people to step up and outperform each other.
It’s really no different than WoW. For most any given pug, it’s going to have overgeared and otherwise overqualified applicants because why would I bother taking someone at 350 ilvl for even a mythic +2 when I can take a 360 or 370? Businesses get away exploiting more and more out of workers using tactics like this to weed out and/or otherwise force people to try harder and give more
I don’t play WOTLK classic but I see a lot of people are so I can only assume they are doing a great job with it. Crapping on the developers who are making the game great is a great way to shove talent out the door so that you can bring talentless garbage in to fill your talentless garbage quota.
That’s the whole point, artificially justifying lower wages and layoffs. They literally do not care that human beings and their livelihoods are attached. Make sure everyone looks bad enough that we don’t have to pay them what their worth. Make sure everyone looks bad enough that we can say layoffs are justified. Honestly, it’s just sick.
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Like in military, you get 100%
“Could be better”
Crappy, but probably a decision made at the AKB level rather than Blizzard themselves.
It gets worse people. As more information comes out, all you can do is shake your head.
Bits and pieces of some of these reviews are getting out. For one employee, suggestions for how to improve their sub par performance was: Kill yourself. WTH?! Then detailed instructions on how to best do it?? What? This feels like we’re gaming in Ancient Rome.
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What?
That can’t be true - is it? Where did you see that?
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Completely falsified. Fiction.