Comments on: Dead Man’s Curve

By: It’s your career, lead it! « Testastic

It’s your career, lead it! « Testastic — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:56:06 +0000

[...] Dead Man’s Curve [...]

By: James McCaffrey

James McCaffrey — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 17:06:41 +0000

Very nicely written post Alan. I absolutely agree with your main theme (if I can paraphrase you): stack ranking is bad for employee morale, discourages collaboration, and inhibits innovation, but it’s a price MS employees pay.

One side effect of stack ranking that I haven’t seen mentioned at all is the policy’s possible effect on bringing in top new talent to MS. I heard the following story and I am confident it actually happened. At an event a few weeks ago with 28 Microsoft technical people (developers, testers, program managers, and a couple of other categories), an impromptu straw poll asked, “If the son or daughter of a close friend just graduated from college with a degree in computer science, would you recommend that they apply to Microsoft for a job?”

The results were stunning to me — zero of the 28 MS technical employees would recommend applying to MS. Follow-up conversations revealed that in all 28 cases, the MS stack-ranking policy was the reason for the no vote.

I’ve worked with HR people for many years. In general most don’t understand technical talent and don’t truly understand how any technical company’s success depends on the talent of the technical employees. I think the reason for this is that the difference between the best and worst HR employee is nowhere near as large as the delta between average and good-to-great technical talent (there is quite a bit of research on this).

So, if stack-ranking at a company waters down the quality level of the pool of job applicants, then the stack-ranking policy has a very serious, very negative, long-term side effect.

I hope that Microsoft HR has carefully weighed the benefits of using stack-ranking against all the negative side effects.

By: Oren Reshef

Oren Reshef — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 15:40:48 +0000

I have to review my employees twice a year, and having the same complaints. But I still couldn’t think of a better way to decide on bonuses and compensation while keeping them more-or-less uniform across a company of 10′s of thousands, it can work though if the company has a few 100′s employees so one HR team can manage everyone personally.
The same applies for promotions, and expected performance to title matching

By: BrentMJensen

BrentMJensen — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:18:45 +0000

In general, the review model appears to be defined by a classical economic theorist. It’s assuming it will be participated in by purely rational beings consistently out for their own self-interest. It overvalues the role of competition and undervalues the irrational emotional behavior people make.

The problem I see with the “distribute talent around the company” theory is that there is massive friction in your way if you score in the low buckets in the curve. There is an implicit assumption in the model (which has consistently held to be false in my experience) that scoring low on one team means you will score
low on another.

People seem to prefer to follow the path with least friction.

So, if you score high, you are motivated to stay. The team loves you, right?
If you score low, you are also motivated to stay (new teams don’t want you and/or you are forced to stay (or leave the company))

That leaves the middle bucket, the 3. If you view yourself as a superstar and got this message, you might choose to leave. However, the bigger bet is that you’ll stay. Most people like the folks they are working with and I think most nowadays prefer collaboration as does Alan.

People do move around a lot, but I find it not due to review. It’s usually the people that individual is working with that’s incenting them.

By: Alan Page

Alan Page — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 02:22:29 +0000

Good point – I’d list that under positives (although the theory doesn’t work 100% of the time – but what theory does).

By: Prasanna

Prasanna — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 02:03:39 +0000

I have always thought that the curve and the internal interview policy was designed to distribute talent across the company and not end up with pockets of ‘superstar’ teams and ‘dysfunctional’ teams. From the company’s perspective, it is probably better to have the superstars spread across different parts of the organization so the company ends up with multiple good teams rather than a single great team.

Of course, we can question the wisdom of such thinking but at least I tend to rationalize the curve to myself this way