Price’s Law tells us that most employees aren’t pulling their weight. The larger the company, the greater the percentage of non productive employees. Stack ranking just insures that at least some of the unproductive folks get weeded out.
Microsoft no longer does this, and hasn’t for close to a decade.
From a post above:
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Haha lol you’re defending Microsoft now?
Yeah it is. But having to fill a quota of bad review is kinda trash practice tough. Not saying everyone work well. But saying someone does just to fill a quote and make him work more for a promotion he probably already deserve just for X reason isnt really good practice to me
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I could care less. People care too much about stuff that has nothing to do with them. try fixing your own problems first
My old employer implemented this style of management about two years before going bankrupt.
It’s a system designed for factory assembly lines where everyone’s churning out widgets, not creative and problem-solving workplaces. In my (brief) experience, it destroys team cohesion and morale.
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By your logic it’s ok for blizzard to do what it’s doing because everyone else is.
So why isn’t it ok to speed if everyone else is
I know you’re going to split hairs here. What Blizzard is doing is morally wrong, the other is legally wrong.
just because what Blizzard is doing is legal that doesn’t make it right.
I worked for a gaming industry mega company for 10 years. Stacked ranking was business as usual practice. It meant that during bonus evaluation time, if all 5 of your team members were high performers with loads of extra, meaningful work, at least two of them were to receive below-expectation ratings and only get 5% out of the 20% limit they were eligible for. It’s a crap system and it makes people put in only the amount of effort they were praised for. 5% effort after that.
How is letting someone know they’re wrong about something ‘defending Microsoft’? I don’t like Microsoft, at all, but what he said about Microsoft was not accurate. What, am I just supposed to ignore that what he said isn’t accurate? Maybe say Microsoft also eats babies? The world has just gone crazy when facts mean nothing.
I was briefly a supervisor at a Best Buy and was written up for not giving more areas of improvements on my 5 team members. I asked the supervisor if he was aware that we were the #1 camera department (yes that was a thing) in the district, the region, and #3 in the country. I was told that didn’t matter and I had to find areas of improvement for employees. I asked him if he was only doing this because he had to find areas of improvement or he would be written up.
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You know this system requires managers to intentionally downgrade reviews right? As did the complaint Brian brought forward. This isn’t about “some people just don’t wanna work and get paid for it” this is legit predatory practices preventing people from moving up in their business through arbitrary means.
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Could you also care more?
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Then don’t expect quality to get any better when you let unethical practices propagate.
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Right? I mean, the story itself shows this is a great policy for losing good employees.
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Oh do they now?
How about you look at Glassdoor reviews, former employees will tell you
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/975942251366731799/1067245180710813756/Screenshot_20230123-185054.png
I know you won’t open it so I’ll copy this former employees review for you
October 11, 2021
Political, like no other place. Incompetent but popular people get awarded and promoted. Pseudo-diversity initiatives. Strong cancel culture. The old guard can do no wrong. Stack ranking? very much alive despite their protests. Favorite child one day, pariah the next. Nothing but bad memories. I have nothing but ill will. and they missed every opportunity to make their Search engine and contender. QBRs, snapshots 1:1s, all the fake diversity initiatives that change nothing. Wish I had time back.
Pretty sure a 10 year old article can’t save your argument
Empathy and compassion is a rare quality these days for sure.
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From what I read, they are required to rate 5% of the bottom employees as developing, which means this employee in question is right on that line.
Well, we are talking about a company that layed off 10,000 because they didn’t make a big enough increase in profit. They made money, they made more money, they wanted even more, so cut 10,000 people to make up for it.
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Late stage Americanism “Everyone can do whatever they want”.
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If, somehow, the Microsoft acquisition still happens, it’s nice to know this policy would be on the way out, since MS did away with this particular thing years ago.
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