From my understanding this tactic was what lead to sears final downfall. They would pit the different departments against each other so they wound up sabotaging each other to get ahead and shit...
From my understanding this tactic was what lead to sears final downfall.
They would pit the different departments against each other so they wound up sabotaging each other to get ahead and shit hit the fan
Amazon still does this. Had I known, I never would have accepted a position there. I was a sacrificial hire (someone hired specifically to be culled so that the manager can keep the rest of their...
Amazon still does this. Had I known, I never would have accepted a position there. I was a sacrificial hire (someone hired specifically to be culled so that the manager can keep the rest of their team intact) and now have some pretty severe trust issues as a result.
Its really not unique to any country. It's tyranny of the spreadsheet caused by the problem of managing larger and larger groups of people. If its a 30 person company you can get to know everyone...
Its really not unique to any country. It's tyranny of the spreadsheet caused by the problem of managing larger and larger groups of people.
If its a 30 person company you can get to know everyone and make decisions on who's useful.
If its a 30,000 person company you're pretty much stuck using "metrics" and budgets, which are often gamed and a mess. When someone says "we need to cut 5000 jobs and save X" they aren't going to ask which team members are best, it's just an edict to hit a number, so you play the game and do your best to keep your team moving.
We really don't focus enough on just how bad we are at managing the VAST quantities of things we can generate. Be it the huge companies or things like youtube content.
Thing is, stack ranking is a known stupid idea. It's been a known stupid idea since the 90s, when a researcher tried it on chickens to increase egg-laying: cull the bottom x% of egg layers, breed...
Thing is, stack ranking is a known stupid idea. It's been a known stupid idea since the 90s, when a researcher tried it on chickens to increase egg-laying: cull the bottom x% of egg layers, breed the rest, and egg-laying should go up, right?
The result wasn't more eggs. Instead, the result was a bunch of really vicious, mean chickens that attacked all the chickens around them so they'd look better in comparison. Even if you're going by metrics, stack ranking is one of the dumbest fucking ideas ever.
The fact that it still exists in various corporations today only illustrates how moronic C-level management is.
Oh sure, but that's kinda my point. A single moron at the top (balmer) can wreck an entire company. The amount of money he probably cost MS in things like market share and lost tech can't be...
Oh sure, but that's kinda my point.
A single moron at the top (balmer) can wreck an entire company. The amount of money he probably cost MS in things like market share and lost tech can't be known, but its probably fucking huge, and vastly dwarfs any parachute he got from this nonsense.
This is an issue with you how you structure large companies and over focus on metrics and a few "real" decision makers. One bad one nukes everything, catastrophically.
I recall reading that something like this contributed to the Soviets losing the space race. I don't know how anyone would think this would work. You could maybe pull it off at a McDonalds or...
I recall reading that something like this contributed to the Soviets losing the space race.
I don't know how anyone would think this would work. You could maybe pull it off at a McDonalds or something. But of course people who's entire job is solving complicated problems, are going to do this.
I can’t imagine the stress of going into work and knowing that no matter how hard you tried, you were still on the chopping block. If you’re always firing 10% of groups, nobody will join the best...
I can’t imagine the stress of going into work and knowing that no matter how hard you tried, you were still on the chopping block.
If you’re always firing 10% of groups, nobody will join the best groups, because that’s almost a guaranteed firing. Just like the article said.
Yeah it's pretty fascinating to see the macro effects of this policy over the course of a decade at a place like Microsoft. I was familiar with Microsoft's "lost decade" but didn't realize the...
Yeah it's pretty fascinating to see the macro effects of this policy over the course of a decade at a place like Microsoft. I was familiar with Microsoft's "lost decade" but didn't realize the extent to which stack rankings played a role in the outcome.
And now Google is using stack ranking. They were already lost before it, but now? I can't count on Google anything to last longer than a fortnight. And the damage has been done: I will never...
And now Google is using stack ranking. They were already lost before it, but now? I can't count on Google anything to last longer than a fortnight. And the damage has been done: I will never evaluate Google for personal or corporate purchases ever again.
The problem is that if everyone is doing it, all you can do is try to get in and then hope for the best while playing the game the best that you can. That was my entire existence in the IT world....
If you’re always firing 10% of groups, nobody will join the best groups, because that’s almost a guaranteed firing. Just like the article said.
The problem is that if everyone is doing it, all you can do is try to get in and then hope for the best while playing the game the best that you can. That was my entire existence in the IT world. I'd get hired, work for a few years playing the game and avoiding the layoff metric the best I could, but eventually it would catch up to me an I'd be unemployed again. At one company, they literally just let go the last 2 people hired, of which I was one even though I had been there for 2 years. Another place, it was ticket age that was the metric. I had been playing the game and avoided the 2 previous layoffs (one was right after I first started and wasn't affected by the metric, the other was right after a "team building exercise" that split us into teams and the team with the worst performance was all let go). But this time, one account manager kept reopening the ticket and putting it back in my name. I had been arguing for months that this ticket had nothing to do with our software and by actually working on it I'd be violating our own software agreement with the customer. I even went as far as explaining it to the support director and still got nowhere. Then my boss started telling us it was extremely important to clean up old tickets for some reason. And then this ticket came back again, and then I was laid off a week later.
Sometimes you just can't avoid it. If you're lucky or smart enough to move to a management position, you can mitigate the risk a bit (but not much, since I've seen managers laid off for similar reasons). But if you're in the trenches of IT work, you're playing this game. And if you don't watch for the warning signs, you'll end up laid off often. It's just how IT operates. And that's why I'm now a mailman...
I have to manually process and sort huge volumes of mail, so the years of skimming through code looking for specific information markers came in really handy. I naturally memorize pretty much all...
I have to manually process and sort huge volumes of mail, so the years of skimming through code looking for specific information markers came in really handy. I naturally memorize pretty much all the names and addresses on my route, given that I worked with and memorized huge datasets in databases. When I'm out of the route, I'm free to do it however I want without anyone checking up on my or looking over my shoulder. There's some heavy lifting involved, and I'm standing up and leaning over and out the passenger window about 200 times a day, which has done wonders for my calves and core muscles. In the winter sucks because of the massive increase in parcels and mail combined with the weather, which my work ethic won't let me leave Christmas parcels and letters go undelivered. But the summers I'm working outside on my own in beautiful weather, and I'm usually done by 2PM, even on the bigger routes. And when I'm done...I'm done. There is no on call, there is no carrying a cell phone and answering emails at home. And then there's the pay. After 3 and a half years, I have a full time route that pays about the same as I was making when I left IT. In a few more years, I'm hoping to have a route that pays 6 figures. I don't think I'd have ever made that much in IT.
I don't know how long I have before my body betrays me and I can't do physical labour anymore, but I'm hoping to put in at least 20 more years. I should have a half decent or at least livable pension when I retire, which I would have never gotten in IT. Overall I'm happy with the career switch.
Well I’m glad to hear it, my friend had such a bad time in postal when he got into it years ago in Canada that I never even looked into it. But I’m happy in my career of fixing appliances, so it...
Well I’m glad to hear it, my friend had such a bad time in postal when he got into it years ago in Canada that I never even looked into it.
But I’m happy in my career of fixing appliances, so it all turned out great.
It all depends on office you start in. I got into a good office in a rural area. I've heard stories of other offices with incompetent postmasters that make life hell. I've also heard that bigger...
It all depends on office you start in. I got into a good office in a rural area. I've heard stories of other offices with incompetent postmasters that make life hell. I've also heard that bigger cities have a lot more stress due to the volume and the amount of abuse that some carriers get from the public. I'm trying to avoid all of that while heading to my last route with the really good salary. So far I've been lucky. But I'm still not stopping until I get my 6-figures, even if I do end up in a bad office.
Where I’m from it’s mostly because of how seniority works. The people who’ve been at the company the longest get the best routes, and new people are put through the ringer. Not really any way to...
Where I’m from it’s mostly because of how seniority works.
The people who’ve been at the company the longest get the best routes, and new people are put through the ringer.
Not really any way to work yourself up either, unless someone retires which they usually don’t.
Add on top of that people being promoted to management who don’t know how to manage. I’m sure yours is run much better if you’re happy there haha
Oh, yeah, there's all that which I'm dealing with. I worked my ass of for the first couple of years as an OCRE. And management is really hit or miss, but the union really makes up for any problems...
Oh, yeah, there's all that which I'm dealing with. I worked my ass of for the first couple of years as an OCRE. And management is really hit or miss, but the union really makes up for any problems with management. I've had serious problems dealing with management here, but it's because of the union that I've been able to resolve those problems. I will never take another job without one.
But the seniority thing isn't that much of a problem. From I've been seeing, yes people keep their big well paying routes for a long time. But people also retire regularly, so routes do come up. If you want a specific route, then you might be waiting a while. I'm looking within 45 minutes of my house for anything that pays well. I got lucky and my next route is 5 minutes away, but I'm not stopping until get my 6-figures because I've seen many people get theirs. I know it's possible in this job specifically because of the seniority, which I never had in IT.
I was made so many promises by IT managers that I'd be promoted if I hit certain metrics. Was told more than once, if I start in Support then I would be given a chance to move to Development. But no matter how hard I worked, I never got promoted. Ever. The only way my salary increased was by threatening to quit or changing jobs, and after the last few layoffs my wages stagnated for a decade. I don't have to worry about any of that anymore. I have a union that enforces promotions based on something more that the whims of a manager that see me as nothing but a number on a balance sheet. Sure, the managers here aren't much better than what I saw in IT, but having a union backing me up makes all the difference.
It always warms my heart to see coroporate greed completely backfire. Also it's illuminating to see how quickly supposedly sound management theories are accepted at face value, and how the messy...
It always warms my heart to see coroporate greed completely backfire.
Also it's illuminating to see how quickly supposedly sound management theories are accepted at face value, and how the messy real world complexities lead them to perform catastrophically in practice.
I'm, unfortunately, in a system which still uses stack ranking. We're civil service so we can't really easily fire anyone either which defeats the ostensible purpose of stack ranking in the first...
I'm, unfortunately, in a system which still uses stack ranking. We're civil service so we can't really easily fire anyone either which defeats the ostensible purpose of stack ranking in the first place.
Yup my company just decided this is a great idea. No firing (yet) but you have to be arbitrarily ranked in the top 20% to qualify for a shitty raise. Everyone else gets nothing. Dumbest shit ever,...
Yup my company just decided this is a great idea. No firing (yet) but you have to be arbitrarily ranked in the top 20% to qualify for a shitty raise. Everyone else gets nothing. Dumbest shit ever, my manager admitted he has no idea what to tell anyone because they can have stellar feedback and end up with fuckall because of the curve they mandated onto everyone.
I used to work at a place that did the same thing and it was always the managers friends that ended up with the good raises. The higher ups didn't care no one lasted more than 2 years. Terrible place to work.
Here it turns into a struggle where we end up trying to justify our reportees bonuses based on tiny tiny details because we somehow have to rank X over Y.
Here it turns into a struggle where we end up trying to justify our reportees bonuses based on tiny tiny details because we somehow have to rank X over Y.
One of my best jobs was with a company that did 360° reviews with rank-and-yank twice a year. We were aggressive, lightweight, with the top-notch tools, motivated teams and management, and...
One of my best jobs was with a company that did 360° reviews with rank-and-yank twice a year.
We were aggressive, lightweight, with the top-notch tools, motivated teams and management, and fast-moving projects, and it was some of the best work I've been a part of. Pay was great, too, because it's stressful. Lots of people don't like it, but I really did.
Thought the idea came from GE/Welch and promoted by McKinsey?
Rank and yank is a cancer. I worked at Paramount when they finally axed it for a mix of OKRs and 360 Reviews and things were surprisingly good! I don't know how it is now that money is getting...
Rank and yank is a cancer. I worked at Paramount when they finally axed it for a mix of OKRs and 360 Reviews and things were surprisingly good! I don't know how it is now that money is getting scarce.
Its worth pointing out the Jack Welch GE era was marked with a lot of fraud, so that's just proof rank and yank does not fucking work.
Sadly this is still in use in many companies globally, though most use annual rather than quarterly assessments. And yes - it is a very bad mechanism producing good results only for the beancounters.
Sadly this is still in use in many companies globally, though most use annual rather than quarterly assessments. And yes - it is a very bad mechanism producing good results only for the beancounters.
From my understanding this tactic was what lead to sears final downfall.
They would pit the different departments against each other so they wound up sabotaging each other to get ahead and shit hit the fan
Amazon still does this. Had I known, I never would have accepted a position there. I was a sacrificial hire (someone hired specifically to be culled so that the manager can keep the rest of their team intact) and now have some pretty severe trust issues as a result.
Well that seems pretty dumb.
Welcome to corporate fucking america.
Its really not unique to any country. It's tyranny of the spreadsheet caused by the problem of managing larger and larger groups of people.
If its a 30 person company you can get to know everyone and make decisions on who's useful.
If its a 30,000 person company you're pretty much stuck using "metrics" and budgets, which are often gamed and a mess. When someone says "we need to cut 5000 jobs and save X" they aren't going to ask which team members are best, it's just an edict to hit a number, so you play the game and do your best to keep your team moving.
We really don't focus enough on just how bad we are at managing the VAST quantities of things we can generate. Be it the huge companies or things like youtube content.
Thing is, stack ranking is a known stupid idea. It's been a known stupid idea since the 90s, when a researcher tried it on chickens to increase egg-laying: cull the bottom x% of egg layers, breed the rest, and egg-laying should go up, right?
The result wasn't more eggs. Instead, the result was a bunch of really vicious, mean chickens that attacked all the chickens around them so they'd look better in comparison. Even if you're going by metrics, stack ranking is one of the dumbest fucking ideas ever.
The fact that it still exists in various corporations today only illustrates how moronic C-level management is.
Oh sure, but that's kinda my point.
A single moron at the top (balmer) can wreck an entire company. The amount of money he probably cost MS in things like market share and lost tech can't be known, but its probably fucking huge, and vastly dwarfs any parachute he got from this nonsense.
This is an issue with you how you structure large companies and over focus on metrics and a few "real" decision makers. One bad one nukes everything, catastrophically.
I'm amused that you phrased your comment as if the chickens made a conscious decision to back stab.
It only took three generations -- the researcher wound up breeding mean chickens.
I recall reading that something like this contributed to the Soviets losing the space race.
I don't know how anyone would think this would work. You could maybe pull it off at a McDonalds or something. But of course people who's entire job is solving complicated problems, are going to do this.
I can’t imagine the stress of going into work and knowing that no matter how hard you tried, you were still on the chopping block.
If you’re always firing 10% of groups, nobody will join the best groups, because that’s almost a guaranteed firing. Just like the article said.
Yeah it's pretty fascinating to see the macro effects of this policy over the course of a decade at a place like Microsoft. I was familiar with Microsoft's "lost decade" but didn't realize the extent to which stack rankings played a role in the outcome.
And now Google is using stack ranking. They were already lost before it, but now? I can't count on Google anything to last longer than a fortnight. And the damage has been done: I will never evaluate Google for personal or corporate purchases ever again.
You’d have to buy from them quick anyways, since they shut down all their products so fast after release.
The problem is that if everyone is doing it, all you can do is try to get in and then hope for the best while playing the game the best that you can. That was my entire existence in the IT world. I'd get hired, work for a few years playing the game and avoiding the layoff metric the best I could, but eventually it would catch up to me an I'd be unemployed again. At one company, they literally just let go the last 2 people hired, of which I was one even though I had been there for 2 years. Another place, it was ticket age that was the metric. I had been playing the game and avoided the 2 previous layoffs (one was right after I first started and wasn't affected by the metric, the other was right after a "team building exercise" that split us into teams and the team with the worst performance was all let go). But this time, one account manager kept reopening the ticket and putting it back in my name. I had been arguing for months that this ticket had nothing to do with our software and by actually working on it I'd be violating our own software agreement with the customer. I even went as far as explaining it to the support director and still got nowhere. Then my boss started telling us it was extremely important to clean up old tickets for some reason. And then this ticket came back again, and then I was laid off a week later.
Sometimes you just can't avoid it. If you're lucky or smart enough to move to a management position, you can mitigate the risk a bit (but not much, since I've seen managers laid off for similar reasons). But if you're in the trenches of IT work, you're playing this game. And if you don't watch for the warning signs, you'll end up laid off often. It's just how IT operates. And that's why I'm now a mailman...
Well that sounds like a nightmare. How does being a mailman compare?
I have to manually process and sort huge volumes of mail, so the years of skimming through code looking for specific information markers came in really handy. I naturally memorize pretty much all the names and addresses on my route, given that I worked with and memorized huge datasets in databases. When I'm out of the route, I'm free to do it however I want without anyone checking up on my or looking over my shoulder. There's some heavy lifting involved, and I'm standing up and leaning over and out the passenger window about 200 times a day, which has done wonders for my calves and core muscles. In the winter sucks because of the massive increase in parcels and mail combined with the weather, which my work ethic won't let me leave Christmas parcels and letters go undelivered. But the summers I'm working outside on my own in beautiful weather, and I'm usually done by 2PM, even on the bigger routes. And when I'm done...I'm done. There is no on call, there is no carrying a cell phone and answering emails at home. And then there's the pay. After 3 and a half years, I have a full time route that pays about the same as I was making when I left IT. In a few more years, I'm hoping to have a route that pays 6 figures. I don't think I'd have ever made that much in IT.
I don't know how long I have before my body betrays me and I can't do physical labour anymore, but I'm hoping to put in at least 20 more years. I should have a half decent or at least livable pension when I retire, which I would have never gotten in IT. Overall I'm happy with the career switch.
Well I’m glad to hear it, my friend had such a bad time in postal when he got into it years ago in Canada that I never even looked into it.
But I’m happy in my career of fixing appliances, so it all turned out great.
Hope it goes well for you!
It all depends on office you start in. I got into a good office in a rural area. I've heard stories of other offices with incompetent postmasters that make life hell. I've also heard that bigger cities have a lot more stress due to the volume and the amount of abuse that some carriers get from the public. I'm trying to avoid all of that while heading to my last route with the really good salary. So far I've been lucky. But I'm still not stopping until I get my 6-figures, even if I do end up in a bad office.
Where I’m from it’s mostly because of how seniority works.
The people who’ve been at the company the longest get the best routes, and new people are put through the ringer.
Not really any way to work yourself up either, unless someone retires which they usually don’t.
Add on top of that people being promoted to management who don’t know how to manage. I’m sure yours is run much better if you’re happy there haha
Oh, yeah, there's all that which I'm dealing with. I worked my ass of for the first couple of years as an OCRE. And management is really hit or miss, but the union really makes up for any problems with management. I've had serious problems dealing with management here, but it's because of the union that I've been able to resolve those problems. I will never take another job without one.
But the seniority thing isn't that much of a problem. From I've been seeing, yes people keep their big well paying routes for a long time. But people also retire regularly, so routes do come up. If you want a specific route, then you might be waiting a while. I'm looking within 45 minutes of my house for anything that pays well. I got lucky and my next route is 5 minutes away, but I'm not stopping until get my 6-figures because I've seen many people get theirs. I know it's possible in this job specifically because of the seniority, which I never had in IT.
I was made so many promises by IT managers that I'd be promoted if I hit certain metrics. Was told more than once, if I start in Support then I would be given a chance to move to Development. But no matter how hard I worked, I never got promoted. Ever. The only way my salary increased was by threatening to quit or changing jobs, and after the last few layoffs my wages stagnated for a decade. I don't have to worry about any of that anymore. I have a union that enforces promotions based on something more that the whims of a manager that see me as nothing but a number on a balance sheet. Sure, the managers here aren't much better than what I saw in IT, but having a union backing me up makes all the difference.
It always warms my heart to see coroporate greed completely backfire.
Also it's illuminating to see how quickly supposedly sound management theories are accepted at face value, and how the messy real world complexities lead them to perform catastrophically in practice.
I'm, unfortunately, in a system which still uses stack ranking. We're civil service so we can't really easily fire anyone either which defeats the ostensible purpose of stack ranking in the first place.
Yup my company just decided this is a great idea. No firing (yet) but you have to be arbitrarily ranked in the top 20% to qualify for a shitty raise. Everyone else gets nothing. Dumbest shit ever, my manager admitted he has no idea what to tell anyone because they can have stellar feedback and end up with fuckall because of the curve they mandated onto everyone.
I used to work at a place that did the same thing and it was always the managers friends that ended up with the good raises. The higher ups didn't care no one lasted more than 2 years. Terrible place to work.
Here it turns into a struggle where we end up trying to justify our reportees bonuses based on tiny tiny details because we somehow have to rank X over Y.
Sounds like purgatory mate. Stay strong
The job is otherwise great, luckily.
One of my best jobs was with a company that did 360° reviews with rank-and-yank twice a year.
We were aggressive, lightweight, with the top-notch tools, motivated teams and management, and fast-moving projects, and it was some of the best work I've been a part of. Pay was great, too, because it's stressful. Lots of people don't like it, but I really did.
Thought the idea came from GE/Welch and promoted by McKinsey?
Rank and yank is a cancer. I worked at Paramount when they finally axed it for a mix of OKRs and 360 Reviews and things were surprisingly good! I don't know how it is now that money is getting scarce.
Its worth pointing out the Jack Welch GE era was marked with a lot of fraud, so that's just proof rank and yank does not fucking work.
Sadly this is still in use in many companies globally, though most use annual rather than quarterly assessments. And yes - it is a very bad mechanism producing good results only for the beancounters.