-
Employee stack ranking can be a bad system because it assumes that not everyone can be competent at their jobs.
-
Blizzard had a stack ranking system for years, but was not enforcing it until recently.
-
Many people called out Blizzard for using this system to evaluate lower performing employees.
-
Many people have called out Blizz for questionable developer decisions and creating lower quality content over the last ~5 years.
Does the quality of content indicate that everyone at Blizzard has been competent at their job?
2 Likes
No, but that does not contradict:
Say the lower cutoff is the 5th percentile. It could be the case that everyone above the 2nd percentile is doing a good job. It could also be the case that everyone below the 40th percentile is doing a poor job.
In either case, the lower cutoff is inappropriate. The stack ranking is useful for comparing performance between employees, and should not be used to assess the quality of an individualâs performance in a vacuum.
7 Likes
Thereâs characteristics of quality in some areas and lack of quality in others.
IMO, their responsive pivot to shift drastically away from a lot of BfA/SL crap is good quality whereas the story in both of those expansions are bad quality.
I donât know about software development goals nor over- shooting expectations at Blizzard, but in my manufacturing space I overshadow my colleges output on a daily basis through creativity and tangible results.
Thatâs the way Iâve managed to break the 6 figure barrier and stay there. I found my nitch in life, and I encourage anyone else to do the same.
1 Like
the people being ranked are grunts, the majority of problems can be associated with those that are in charge most the time, in other words the people who are responsible for the content quality donât get ranked.
The lower percentile cutoff for finding incompetence doesnât have to be exactly accurate, but it should be set at a conservative underestimate below the amount of actual incompetence. So if you set the threshold of incompetence at the 5th percentile, while in reality everyone below the 40th percentile is incompetent, then you end up removing the bottom 1/8 of those people who are incompetent. In this case the company is better off for it even if there remains incompetent people.
If everyone above the 2nd percentile is doing a good job, then you likely have a great company with a fantastic product and thereâs no need to implement this system in the first place. We know thatâs not the case if we concede the quality of content has diminished.
They should use ranking like Arena.
1 Like
Forced rankings are used purely for a company to save money on bonuses, merit rewards and raises. They have absolute dick to do with job performance.
4 Likes
I agree with all except the first statement. It should be as accurate as possible, otherwise it is simply bad business. It would be inefficient or unethical. Unethical because if the cutoff is too high, people who are doing a good enough job lose bonuses they deserve. Inefficient if the cutoff is too low because people (more than 36.8% of the company in our example) will keep jobs they shouldnât have.
If you are spending the time and money to evaluate each personâs performance anyway (which you are, if youâre making the stack ranking), itâs not a big expenditure to consider readjusting the cutoff after the stack is done. It could be a larger expenditure to ensure the validity of your metrics each year, but it should be done because peopleâs livelihoods are at stake.
I think the traditional method of reviewing performance is far superior. Itâs more personal and more humanizing. The stack ranking system is problematic for the same reason a composite IQ is problematic: dynamically weighted, multivariate functions should not be projected onto one dimension.
Itâs not a percentile, itâs a percent. If a manager has 10 employees, and his quota for good reviews is 9 of them, then one gets a bad ranking even if they all were equally competent and met their goals.
1 Like
Dear OP,
If a manager is properly doing their job, there is no need for stack ranking because the manager would rate poor performing employees properly and weed them out.
What happens most often with stacked ranking is that often the manager will rate people based on popularity vs job performance.
1 Like
Instead of doing your job and reviewing your teams work.
Itâs a quota of sorts, and there is a good chance the one who draws the proverbial short straw despite great performance may be outed unfairly.
Biasâ come into play, employee morale drops and ultimately the only upside comes for the top brass who thin the number of employees, get less people working harder in fear of the rating - losing job - and said top brass save $$. At the end of the day, the top dawgs want more $$ no matter what.
Itâs worse than that. Many companies will use a scale of 1 to 5 to score varies aspects of an employeeâs performance but do not allow managers to use a â5â under any circumstance. That means an employee that performs exemplary can only score as high as a 4. This gives the corp justification for limiting or ignoring raises. Not sure if it is this way outside the US, but inside employees are treated like crap.
Itâs not about âa managerâ. Itâs about a big corporation that sets rules for all managers to follow based on whatever criteria top managers decide on.
Itâs bad for productivity, because helping the guy next to you means he may come out ahead of you on reviews because you took the time to help him get his job done. It gives employees incentives to sabotage each otherâs work.
Stacked ranking only serves to get employees to sabotage each other and be at each others throats. This hurts productivity.
It is about a manager. Too often managers do not want to deal with the conflict of properly rating employees, so the leadership of the company steps in with policies such as this thinking that it will solve the problem. However, it does not because the manager will still not have the difficult discussions with those who need them.
What does happen is that employees will often figure out ways to pad their numbers or do things to make it appear they are going above and beyond when in fact they are not.
I spent years in a corporation who used this type of review system. I have seen poor performers do all sorts of things in order to appear like they were actual good productive employees and it always amazed me that the bosses fell for it.
1 Like
Blizzard is a corporation.
Maybe it was fun back in the 90s and early â00. But it is now a full fledged corporation.
And corporations are messed up. They are unfair, ruthless, soulless and choking with evil/angry losers who go out of their way to ruin peopleâs lives.
Blizzard doesnât exist to make you happy - Blizzard exists to make itself money. And it will do so by gutting internal fixed expenses to keep as much of that $15 as possible.
Most of you donât seem to understand. And I donât think it has to do with lack of experienceâŚ
1 Like
This is very accurate.
The corporation doesnât care about anything more than profit margins.
Most donât.
The company Iâve worked with for 10 years was bought out by a corporation last year. They went over our annual finances and are preparing to cut people to increase their profit from our company. Nevermind that this company has been in business and making money since the 80âs and even before that under a different name.
Corporations are greedy soulless machines, no doubt about that.
2 Likes
The problem with the stacked ranking was they decided to punish the lowest performers. What they should be doing is rewarding the top performers, to motivate everyone to work harder. By punishing the bottom 5%, they are just motivating people to work just hard enough to not get fired or hassled.
Stack ranking means that someone is always at the bottom. Even if that person is as productive or valuable to the company as the next person up. Itâs just the nature of a ranking system.
Thatâs a problem though because people are people and not scores.
