> A Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg that the evaluation process is designed to [...] "ensure employees who don't meet performance expectations receive [...] differentiated compensation.
Most of the response is the usual PR speak, but "differentiated compensation" seems like a new level of back-bending to avoid saying "less pay."
This blurs the real issue. You can still have different compensation and PIPs and everything else without stack rankings.
The real issue is that stack rankings compel managers to meet a quota for low performers. Even if the team is full of top tier engineers, one or more get dealt the short straw every review period.
While I'm just a developer, my wife is a director at the same company.
I multiple years, she's turned in her evaluations and had the director and VP above her tell her to lower several employees ranking.
One example was an engineer who didn't get along with the people on his team for a pretty high profile project. They know the guy's brilliant and don't want to fire him, so they move him to a lower profile project to decommission several server farms they had been struggling to get done. Dude goes in and absolutely kills it. They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars by the tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned and renegotiated several large contracts the company was on the hook for.
My wife ranked him in the upper tier. He wrinkled a few feathers, but once they reallocated him, he absolutely thrived and saved the company literally a ton of money.
Nope.
He pissed too many people off, her boss and bosses boss mandated she give him a low ranking with a miniscule pay increase and minimum bonus in order to punish him for his behavior early in the year. Nothing he did after that mattered to them. Nothing.
When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.
>> They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars... tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned
Sounds a little far-fetched. Slack, Airbnb and Netflix spend about 6M, 17M and 28M on AWS monthly; to SAVE "hundreds of millions" the company would need to be ridiculously large and inefficient.
GP didn't provide a denominator. Assuming a year, which is typical for such calculations, your example figures become: Slack: 72M, 204M, 336M. Two out of the three are already in "hundreds of millions of dollars", per year.
GP could also be talking about savings over expected life time of the servers if they were not decommissioned, which could easily be 5+ years.
At the beginning of my career, I had faced the same issue. This was at a casino gaming company. During the first year I was the top performer, but due to the GFC (2008) i got peanuts. The next year, the director got his old report as a manager for us. This manager created interference between me and the director, i got multiple people coming and telling me to listen to the manager and submit to him.
I was entirely sidelined, given miniscule raises and bonuses. other people who deferred to the manager and followed his words were promoted.
Fortunately for me a director from another group who knew my work, took me under his wing and I was finally able to thrive.
Does not matter the exceptional work you do, its always about listening to your "superiors". Ofc this depends on the organization. Not every place will be like this
> When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.
Your ability to get on well with others, and work effectively as a part of a team is a component of your _actual performance_. It’s probably the most important component. The only real mistake here seems like this guy should have been fired instead.
This isn’t true at all. Unless you are the only person who consumes the work you produce, and you produce it without the input of anybody else, then you work on a team, and how you get along with the other people in that team is the most important factor in your success.
When the code doesn't work you can let the customer know that the team bond has never been stronger. The most important thing is delivering the product, working on a team is often critical for that but sometimes you need a few skilled individuals over a army of collaborators to get a product over the finish line.
So you are not assigned work by anybody? You do not rely on any other person to provide an input to the work you are doing? You do not deliver the work that you complete to anybody? And it is not subsequently used by anybody else for any purpose? Because if you do any of those things, then congratulations, you have to cooperate with other people to do your work.
I did have such a job, yes. No customers, no clients, no end users.
But that is not what I’m saying; I’m saying you can be a disagreeable person on average, but because you work on a team of you, you only need to get along with your boss, who will leave you alone most of the time.
If you disincentivize (constructive) conflict, then you end up with a team stuck in groupthink that can't critically evaluate problems. It can be unpopular to present differing opinions, but it can also make the team stronger.
You filled in gaps in GP's post with a lot of assumptions. I read it as someone that can work effectively in a team. But also had conflicts with coworkers. If those were those healthy conflicts or unhealthy conflicts wasn't even discussed. That your first conclusion is to fire based on the absence of info is absurd. You jumped onto bandwagon of others opinions and acted recklessly. Maybe you should be fired instead?
Whether conflict is constructive or toxic depends on personality traits, not the topic of the conflict. The person described in the parent post doesn’t seem to have a personality capable of constructive conflict, otherwise they wouldn’t have “pissed off” the large number of people the poster alluded to.
I disagree. You can piss people off without doing anything wrong too. Complaints should be investigated, not taken at face value. This kind of ranking creates cliques and in-groups which can result in brigading. If someone is pissed off at another coworker, first question should be why.
The management is the one holding a grudge for something he did in the past. Not a lot of "turning the other cheek" for someone who you can bury into tasks and come back with reward.
Good management can de-escalate the situation and exploit his personality to work the system better. Not a lot of management Chess going on here, just people valuing feelings over making money. Not paying the guy the fair market worth for the work he did, isn't going to make him any more nice to work with.
The person described in the parent post was so difficult to get on with that they had to be moved to another project, and they are described has having pissed off a large number of people, including more than one level of management. The two possible explanations are, the majority of the company is highly toxic, this particular IC is highly toxic. So unless the posters wife is a remarkably toxic manager, the most likely explanation is that the IC is. Definitely sounds like the company would benefit from sacking them.
Engineers don't negotiate contracts at large companies. The legal department does. Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.
I can see this guy exaggerating the work he actually did, and taking credit for the work of others, which would explain the low rating and why everyone else dislikes him.
The legal department doesn't do discovery and evaluation. Its job is to ensure the contract is good for all relevant parties and stakeholders - not to pick the brand of the turbo encabulator you need for your IoT Web3 crane welder controller dashboard project.
I imagine you need to cross a certain combination of company size and project profile/visibility before legal & procurement aren't just sanity-checking and rubber-stamping whatever purchase orders the engineering teams send their way.
It's entirely normal to see engineers negotiating contracts at large companies. Large companies are, after all, mostly a collection of smaller teams that self-manage to a large degree.
> Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.
That's what the sales people want you to believe - to ensure they don't have to deal with anyone who understands the problem space of the product/service they're selling.
Engineers will participate in selecting contract features; it's the equivalent of telling a car dealer you want a car with Android Auto and a sunroof. Engineers absolutely do not negotiate contracts.
It's pretty clear from the replies to my comment that you guys don't actually know what is involved in negotiating a B2B contract. The stuff the engineers are allowed to participate in is the layer of snow covering the tip of the iceberg.
I suppose we have a different perspective (and experience) about what is the snow, and what is the iceberg.
Last time I dealt with this as an engineer, I picked a vendor, procured a quote, discussed how license applies to our usage (which was somewhat of a corner case for the license), and forwarded it to procurement - few days later, we got the exact thing I asked for, on the conditions and for the price I agreed to with the vendor. Were there extra negotiations I'm not aware of done to close that deal? I don't know. If they were, they didn't have any impact I could observe from where I was sitting.
Yeah, as far as contract negotiations went, you picked the color of the car and got the quote from the dealer.
The real negotiating happened when you handed it off to procurement. Their job was to secure the contract with the terms and features you wanted, and it sounds like they did that. I think that's part of why so many programmers de-value the work of the back office (Legal, Finance, HR, etc). Good back-offices work in the background to get important shit done with minimal, if any, interference to the revenue-generating operations of the business.
Not true. I negotiated a major software license at a large company over twenty years ago - when I wasn't even a permanent employee, (I was working on contract).
It was for around £120,000 per year, probably the equivalent of about a quarter of a million pounds sterling today.
I wonder if people pushing for stack ranking are justifying this in terms of natural selection. That is, even if the company is all top performers, periodically cutting bottom 1% or 5% or whatever is going to improve average performance even further over time.
This would make some sense if employees were like cells or fruit flies. But in most companies, employees are like organs. You can't improve a body by cutting out 5% of its organs and waiting for them to reappear. At best, you'll degrade the body's performance. At worst, the body will die.
All companies with stack ranking do some sort of merge sort to achieve this, typically called “calibration”. You have to rate employees at the team level because as you go up the chain, managers stop knowing how individuals more than one level of management below them perform.
The only viable exception to this I’ve seen is in organizations like sales where there’s some reasonable, objective criteria to evaluate an entire workforce on. Nothing good exists like this for software engineers though.
Common misunderstanding. Good sales is far more than closing big contracts. Good sales is about finding low cost customers, good fits, and prospects that challenge the expertise in the company in the right ways.
If you measure just total contract size and think this is all there is to evaluate sales on, you incentivise bad sales.
I contracted on a bespoke project that was in desperate straits, huge extension with no way of delivering anywhere near the sale price. We had some beers with the buyer's representative when he came to inspect progress, and asked him what they were really wanting. "Oh we didn't originally want such a system, but your sales guys named a price that we just couldn't walk away from!"
Turned out it wasn't really the sales guys fault: the CEO was trying to get acquired and figured that a well-stuffed order book looked better, just so long as the cheque cleared before the chickens landed.
I’m not saying it’s the right way to do sales. Only that some companies can skip calibrating employees in sales organizations by using objective criteria for evaluation.
It would be less obviously bad, but the same issue applies: say the company has three teams of ten people and they are all good: one gets fired/lower salary anyway each round.
And now you have the additional issue that evaluations need to be objective, which is hard, while a manager never wants to lose member of their team, so they're naturally pushed to overrate their people to protect them from ending up at the bottom.
It's also funny how they try to wrap it so that it almost sounds like they're doing it for the benefit of the employee:
> "ensure employees who don't meet performance expectations receive more honest feedback, differentiated compensation, and a plan on how best to improve their own performance."
Honest feedback? Great! A plan for how to improve my performance? Sure, sounds good [if you don't know what the social realities of a PIP are]. Differentiated compensation? Wait a second...
I don’t know about you but far before I showed up for the very first day of my career my expectations were that if I performed better than my peers I would be paid more and if I underperformed I would be paid less. And generally that has proven to be roughly true, with the occasional weird stuff here and there.
The only place I know were this does not seem to be the case are government employees were everybody is paid according to a fixed grid and were salary increases are purely time gated. My experience with working with people compensated on a such a model has been… interesting.
My experience in this industry, and as I've been learning not uncommon in office jobs outside software, is that relative performance is at best noise. The primary factor determining your compensation is your job interview - you get whatever you negotiate when being hired. As a consequence, the compensation is strongly correlated with how recently were you hired - new employees usually start with higher salaries than seasoned employees couple levels higher on the career ladder.
Sounds reasonable, but in practice (at least in Belgium), practice seems otherwise.
If you want to make a big jump money wise, you have to switch jobs. That's what I see in practice.
My theory is that people are reluctant to switch jobs and so companies count on that fact and pay less. And so to motivate someone to switch they need extra money.
Most companies prefer some attrition to keeping everybody up to date with the crazy run that the software eng market has been in the past 10+ years. Reality is, if your company is good place to work at otherwise, most people won't start looking for a new job only because it could pay 20-30% more. And, at the same time, in many companies payroll is the biggest cost, so if you can keep it lower by that 20-30%, it will have huge effect on the bottom line.
It really depends what company you work in. There are a lot of places where how much people like you determines how you are compensated. You can appear productive while you’re the one who is constantly creating the problems that you swoop in and fix to save the day.
Half of my jobs didn’t rewarded people on performance.
Hell, I got demoted during a reorganization and was told my current performance merited my previous title but because I didn’t perform at that level 9 months ago, I was demoted. And they promoted someone older than me into my previous position purely because of his age. He did not meet any of the requirements for it.
> There are a lot of places where how much people like you determines how you are compensated.
I think this is true literally everywhere. Another factor may be competence, but of similar people, the one whom is liked will probably earn more than the other.
If your compensation consists of base pay plus a bonus, that is usually tied to performance, then why should you get the bonus payout if you don't meet expectations?
There are employee evaluation tools that try to measure if employees are meeting expectations.
The entire point of stack ranking is that it does not do this. The article is about a lead who resigned/got fired because the system wanted to penalise someone who was meetings expectations.
There's nothing wrong with getting paid less if you don't meet performance expectations. I'm just impressed with the term they made up ("differentiated compensation") to try to make that sound nicer.
Most of the response is the usual PR speak, but "differentiated compensation" seems like a new level of back-bending to avoid saying "less pay."