You do know even the Military uses an eval system where you may start with high marks but as it’s passed through the chain of command it’s expected that you get marked down to lower marks. Mainly because there is no such thing as a unicorn, no one deserves perfect marks or even near it really. But many start out that way out of either self-evaluation markings or direct supervisor and friend being very nice or wanting to give them the best chance for promotion.
as a free market capitalist i think this is great 
He was asked to inaccurately review people he rated above that line as below that line. Doesn’t matter any other way. The system they use requires there be low performing employees, when there aren’t any or enough to allow the system to function then the manager has to essentially lie and falsify their review to fit the system. I’m not a business ethics expert but from layman’s view, this is borderline unethical or at least disgusting use of a tool to justify the bottom line over actual employee performance.
The general idea being if more people do their jobs better and improve their performance from even an already above average aspect, then they should be paid more. By adjusting aka lying on the reviews this means the company can justify not paying people who may deserve it, what they are worth in reality.
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As someone who has hired/employed people for well over 30 years, they aren’t. Contrary to what some people have taught not everyone cuts the grade… Nor does everyone merit and outstanding review. Those should only be given to people who seriously earn them. Most employees are average.
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Only because theyre not immediately and completely ripped apart and shut down for being toxic.
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All because said tech companies saw a big boom during covid and they needed more people to keep up with their projects
Surface Duo wasn’t hyped as people claimed to be
HoloLens isn’t grabbing peoples attention just like Zuckerbergs meta project
Big tech companies thought this AR crap was gonna boom and it didn’t
So said teams needed to be axed
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It’s another L for Blizzard. How many of these can they tank?
@Blizzard
Dragonflight is pretty good. I’m trying to like you. Why do you try your absolute best to make us hate you?
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Every company does this
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Well, these included positions at 343 and Bethesda.
FF14s team doesnt. They go out of their way to be socially and seemingly morally good people.
I worked at a company for five years with this type of mandatory bell curve grading system for employee evaluations. And it did nothing but create problems for the employees and utterly fail to actually motivate anyone to change how they worked or to improve their performance.
First of all, it did not do what senior management expected by forcing people to perform better, because even if everyone did improve performance and was either at or above expectations, requiring X% to receive the lowest evaluation/grade meant giving people lower evaluations than they actually deserved. People aren’t stupid, and they know when they are being treated unfairly, particularly when their performance evaluations are artificially lowered to meet the curve.
Second, if you got the lowest evaluation mark two years in a row, you got fired. So my department’s management basically cycled the bottom 20% of people in two groups, giving half the lowest ratings one year and then the other half the lowest ratings the next year, so no one got that rating two years in a row. In the end, no one got fired, even though that was one of the stated goals of the system, to weed out the dead wood.
Third, at the other end of the curve, people had to receive the highest rating to get promoted in a given year. That meant that people who deserved the highest evaluations were often downgraded and others had their evaluations increased over what they deserved, all so that they get those limited highest marks to ensure that the HR department would push through promotions to those that deserved them. Otherwise, if people couldn’t get promoted in a timely, regular manner every few years, they would quit, and we would lose good people and have excessive turnover, which is bad for everyone.
In the end, very few people were actually getting the evaluation rating that they actually deserved, to either keep people from being fired who didn’t deserve that or to ensure others who deserved promotions got them. Thus, the motivational part of this executive mandated curve was properly seen by the rank and file employees for what it was: an arbitrary, stupid, meaningless game, thereby removing it’s effectiveness at actually motivating people to perform better.
This was a sad yet classical example of executive thinking where they think of these things in an abstract, almost theoretical context without considering how it works in the every day of real world workplace practice. After a few years thereI was at a lunch with an executive who was a big proponent of this system, and I explained to him how it actually worked in practice. He adamantly refused to believe a word of what I was saying, insisting that I just wasn’t smart enough to be able to grasp the “genius” of this approach that they has used so successfully year after year.
One of my co-workers often remarked, “This company is run by morons.” And he was definitely right about that. I quit working at that company less than a year later. Within five years, nearly everyone I worked with had left. So much for their “genius” evaluation system.
/moo 
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Stop dragging everyone down to Blizzard’s level.
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They aren’t any better
Just because someone else does something bad, does not mean that it’s ok when you do something bad.
This is like… basic morality.
A kindergartener could explain this.
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Thats not the same team. Same company tho 
Microsoft does not in fact use this system. So he should have just held his horses for a little bit.
That whole system is super stupid, and it infuriates me that it is tied to the employees’ extra pay! What the heck!
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Or it can very well be blizzard increasing the standards and expectations from employees given what the company has gone through recently.
what im trying to say is, this employee in question was not some outperforming employee that the lead had to bring down. The whole reason he was forced to choose this employee in particular was because they are average and was on the line between the companys standard of developing or suceeding
Not saying its a good system for workplace dynamics. He is right that this brews toxic competition in his team, but I can understand why a company would adapt this and lets not pretend this is something only evil bad blizzard does. Its quite common in every work place
People are free to work wherever they want. If Blizz is so terrible they can leave whenever they like.
Tbh, if a bogus review is the worst part of your job, count yourself lucky.
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Heck, I come work for Blizzard, let them hire me. I just want to work for Washington State and not have to move to California.
No, but if they did it to you its absolutely justified to give it right back. Basic playground rules.