I'm honestly wondering why we value management so much. It might be my lack of corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they're a hindrance most often than not).
Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?
Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management.
Valve does that:
How could a 300-person company not have any formal
management? My observation is that it takes new hires
about six months before they fully accept that no one is
going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going
to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a
promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although
there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to
the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their
responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most
valuable resource in the company – their time – by
figuring out what it is that they can do that is most
valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if
they decide that they should be doing something
different, there’s no manager to convince to let them
go; they just move their desk to the new group (the
desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start
in on the new thing. (Obviously they should choose a
good point at which to do this, and coordinate with both
groups, but that’s common sense, not a rule, and isn’t
enforced in any way.) That everyone on a project team is
an individual contributor, doing coding, artwork, level
design, music, and so on, including the leads; there is
no such thing as a pure management or architect or
designer role. That any part of the company can change
direction instantly at any time, because there are no
managers to cling to their people and their territory,
no reorgs to plan, no budgets to work around. That there
are things that Gabe badly wants the company to do that
aren’t happening, because no one has signed up to do
them.
It's hilarious to see the exact opposite happen: an 80 person company with a multi-page visio org chart, six departments, seven VPs, five pages of expense report rules and regulations, meetings scheduled to plan when to schedule other meetings, and nobody listens to the people who know what to do next because the visionary VC-installed-CEO is Touched By God and can't be questioned even as the company nose dives into obsolescence.
Yup, I worked somewhere like that. All the top folks had come from the finance world and were so eager to duplicate the perfect organizational structure of a multinational financial corporation.
Valve has an amazing culture, but I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company. Valve seems to operate as a tribe and there's a limit on how huge those can get.
> Valve has an amazing culture, but I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company
This reminds me of just a few years ago when I was arguing with someone about this, when 37signals was in their infancy and were kinda trucking along with the same 'bossless' philosophy. I was trying to show that it could be successful and the person hacked me off at the knees by saying "come talk to me when they get to 100 employees" ... well Github and Valve seems to be doing just fine with that philosophy ... but now the goalposts have suddenly shifted.
I wonder if they get to 50,000 people (how many companies even have this many people anyway?) if somebody isn't going to pop up and go "50k people? pffffft ... come get me when they have 200,000 employees!"
I think if you're very picky about having just the right people at the "bottom", and just the right people/person at the "top" (because even in Valve's supposedly flat hierarchy there's still someone on top: Gabe) then it can go up quite aways. But yes, it's probably inevitable that it eventually fails and devolves into department, fiefdoms, politics, etc. You can push it out but can't put if off forever. But you know what? That's not necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of companies that can be viable and successful with 5-100 employees. Not everything has to be a megacorp.
> I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company.
Split the company into a bunch of mini-companies, don't get beyond "the limit".
Microsoft used to be a pretty flat organization back in the days, depth of the management layer is one of the things MS employees mocked at IBM in the 80s and 90s. It was already a pretty big company back then.
BTW, MS's headcount is closer to 90k than 50k these days.
"Among many 'radical' policies, Semler let his employees set their own hours, design their workplace, choose their own IT, share all information and have no secrets. Every six months bosses are evaluated by their subordinates and the results are posted. Semco has a policy of complete internal financial openness, even teaching factory workers how to read accounts so they can understand the company's books. Salaries are public information unless the employee requests they not be published. In addition, all employees can set their own salary."
As of 2003, they had 3000 employees and was growing at 40% a year. No idea how they're doing now.
I've often thought this was a good idea. The "interfaces" between the smaller companies would be far more strict and simple then interfaces between departments in a single large company. It's like the difference between buying a hamburger from a fast food chain which is extremely easy and asking a co-worker to sell you a burger which gets complicated very quickly.
Overhead in terms of office space etc would increase. However the simplicity of the necessary interactions between the smaller companies could turn the entire arrangement into a net gain for the parent company.
Yeah, they are already bouncing around above their Dunbar number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number). Methinks changes are afoot (either no longer growing or no longer operating the same way).
Even ignoring that there just are going to be a lot more 300 person companies than 50,000 person companies, I'm not sure we actually need that many 50,000 person companies.
I personally think we're better off if businesses are large enough to operate reasonably efficiently at a single or small set of tasks/products, and no bigger. For one, you begin having weird things happen like a product being canceled or retired not because it was unprofitable to make, but because the company thought there were more profitable products they could be making. (Anyone remember HP's decision to stop making desktop computers?)
For another, you end up with a single point of failure with respect to management. With a hundred companies with a hundred CEOs, some of them of them will prosper and some of them will fail. If those hundred companies merge into a single company with a single CEO, the consequences of terrible management are now a hundred times worse.
Yep, I knew about Valve and they are an inspiration, truly.
I think Gabe and the other people in charge realized a quite important fact: it's not because they're in charge that their opinions and beliefs are automatically worth more than those of the people who work for them.
A good manager will get you what you need (computers, the right chair, a good desk, etc.) An engineer (or admin, etc.) who has everything required is a powerful thing.
A good manager will act as an umbrella and abstraction layer protecting you from metaphorical objects falling from above and give you time and space to work without interruption. It's hard to overstate what this can do for both your work and mental health.
A good manager will be looking out for your interests /as well as/ their own. That means compensation, vacations, work rules, etc. Some companies make this impossible, but where it is possible it is amazingly helpful.
A good manager will make sure you stay focused, provide useful feedback (both positive and negative), and make sure you are staying on target without getting in your way or hurting your morale.
A bad manager, of course, can ruin your day, week, and possibly year.
> "act as an umbrella", really means protect you from other managers
Eh, not only. Other non-management employees can mess up your time quite effectively, as can people you're working with outside your company (clients, vendors). Sure you can shield yourself from it if you try... or you could exploit division of labour and get someone to do it for you so you can concentrate on what you do best.
Experienced well-rounded employees can mostly take care of themselves (and know when to say "no"). It's the new-hires and rough-around-the-edges people that require more hand holding and can benefit more greatly from a manager.
Yes, they can. But that distracts us from our core job: writing code.
A good manager can get others off your back much quicker and shield you from the political fallout that can occur - essentially being the bad guy for you.
Yeah. There are numerous quotes on differentials in programmer productivity being an order of magnitude or more between a bad one and a good one, but the reality is — at least in software — it often seems the same holds true for managers, except they can sink or save their whole sub-tree.
A good manager is a powerful thing, especially a good manager who knows his limits, but too often (especially in continental Europe) "management" seems to be a "reward and natural evolution", to the exclusion of other evolutionary paths and hinging as much (if not more) on the ability to brown-nose and play politics as management skills.
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
I'm pretty sure almost every big contemporary tech company tries this when the big company is small and growing, but it almost never works. Joel Spolsky wrote it about the management problem here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper....
Actually, politics happen everywhere that more than two people congregate. It’s just natural. By “no politics” I really mean “no dysfunctional politics.”
Funnily enough, he uses an example from Microsoft—but the Microsoft of the early 1990s.
No formal management doesn't appear to scale above some number of employees / workers. I can't tell what that number is, but I would guess that it's somewhere around 125 – 150 people—that is, the Dunbar number.[1] Maybe it could be as high as 1,000, but I'm pretty damn skeptical it could be higher than 2,000.
Managers are "meta-employees". Their job is not to do any particular work exactly, but to coordinate the work of others and to get the actual employees focused on doing the boring dreck work that nobody really would do by choice.
Think about it this way, there are long standing issues in many leaderless Open Source projects because people more or less just work on what they want and boring crap like writing drivers, or making button graphics or whatever. That's why the ones that tend to be successful tend to be the ones that have strong leadership structures.
Problems crop up in a couple different cases:
1) The size of the group the manager has to coordinate is larger than the manager can actually handle. This results in all kinds of obvious problems I don't think I need to get into.
2) More subtly, and this is where large corporations end up stagnating and dying. It's when the "meta" aspect gets out of control and there are managers of managers of managers.
In this case what happens is that in order to communicate information up the managerial structure, the data necessarily has to become more and more abstract until it often loses so much meaning as to be almost entirely divorced from reality. The side effect of this is that somebody has to produce the abstractions which ends up being the lower levels of the management hierarchy...which of course means that they're no longer functioning in a coordination role as their data reporting role ends up consuming more and more of their time.
3) In large management chains, decision and vision authority tends to move up the hierarchy towards the top, which of course is the part of the hierarchy operating with the least amount (most abstract) of data...and the issues highly abstract "vision statements" that then must be resolved down through the management chain and end up turning in unmotivated "orders" that the lower level coordinators have no real buy in on -- ending up with unmotivated and uncreative solutions to ensure that the "boxes are checked" and satisfy their fraction of the "vision statement". Success in this area is then reported back up the chain as more and more abstract data.
#3 is why large companies usually end up stagnating and ending up uncreative.
Yup, Management IS of utmost importance to a working company. What most managers, companies and universities don't get though is that management isn't really about controlling and reviewing work, but about enabling people and giving them a vision. That's only possible in an atmosphere of humility, gratitude and a total refusal to play the blame game though. It's where companies don't get "managers" from Ivy League but give responsibilities to the best natural leaders and coaches from the team, so they've got their full respect. It's rare to get to this state, but if you've got a company that really gets "management", try to stay. You don't have to work at Trademob (shameless self-plug), there are a lot of meritoctratic startups like this out there - but this spirit usually fades with size. I'm still trying to understand why...
All in all, look at these signs:
- Bosses have no different equipment or attitude than you do
- Your Interview is done by the most senior personnel available and not some clueless HR guy
- People don't take themselves too serious but their competitors should ;-)
- high freedom, high responsibility atmosphere
- You get responsibility for outcomes, not for implementation details.
As for me, I'm still trying to find out how to be a better team leader every day - I'll tell you how when I find out ;-)
It might be my lack of corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they're a hindrance most often than not).
It is your lack of experience. Historically no company has ever gotten to be the size of MSFT, or AAPL or any other multibillion dollar company without management. I don't know for sure the reason, but would guess that someone has to answer to shareholders and they must organize various people with conflicting opinions, ideas and motivations to accomplish a single goal.
Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?
I don’t think so, but I would guess that much of the effort to measure etc. is put in place by HR consultants in at least some part to avoid discrimination lawsuits and to make sure employees are being treated at least somewhat fairly.
Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?
I can confidently say yes to this. Not just engineers, but everyone. If there was no structure, but you had to get a lot done, people would avoid work, work on their own side projects etc. (side projects are not good for the company if they are a new startup that won’t include the company).
[] Someone mentioned valve below, they have a system, it just looks flat. []
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
It would probably work for a while, except you would have to answer to shareholders (investors) and you would have to organize your team. Eventually you would either become a full time manager or you would hire professional management so that you could work on coding.
Don't confuse human management with project management. In my opinion, you should have two separate people doing those jobs. Your manager should be managing interpersonal issues, team communication, and making sure that tasks don't get dropped, but deciding what direction to go in should be up to someone else - perhaps the team as a whole deciding through consensus, perhaps an outside editor.
Management isn't the only approach to solving that problem. F.ex Simco or Valve have self-organising teams with high degrees of democracy, which cause roughly the same effect.
But in the end (shareholders aside, which if you have any I guess you have to please), a company without management would only have engineers to please, making this kind of a circular problem.
Once you have a large enough boat, good management becomes one of the most significant ways you can distinguish yourself from your competitors.
If you think about it, once you get past a certain size, what is remarkable about your company is that you are past that size and it still operates as a single entity. Individual differences matter a lot less than anything you can accomplish across the entire organization.
We over-value management because we over-emphasize approval seeking behavior. I find that people who reject the "do your work and get a treat" mentality place a lower value on management and a higher value on cooperation, creativity and so on.
A good manager can make a big difference in productivity. Most software shops, though, don't have good managers - it's too easy to get promoted into it without any experience, or to just flit from company to company without ever learning how to do it well.
If I had my own company, I'd work a lot harder to get the best managers possible.
I agree with you, I think engineers should also take care of the trash, watch out for the car park and the accounting, check the budget, talk to customers and handle paper work for taxes.
I think it's important to note that management is a human creation - it is more like a television set - than an element of nature, like a tree. We could live without television sets. Trees, we need to breathe.
What's your evidence for that? And what do you mean by management? Groups of apes form themselves into hierarchies, and if you read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, you'll find that his romantic notions of a life of poverty free of hierarchy was disabused pretty rapidly.
> I think it's important to note that management is a human creation - it is more like a television set - than an element of nature, like a tree.
Yes, management is much the same as engineers, teachers, masons, textile workers, etc. in this regard... Nature mostly creates consumers, hunters, and possibly prostitutes....
I've spent six years experiencing all sides of the MSFT review system. I think the articles blaming the curve/stack ranking are wrong - the root problem is that MSFT doesn't have much momentum and the stock isn't doing well.
When everyone isn't getting rich, everyone gets to fight with each other for the limited rewards that are handed down.
I see the same thing happening at Google where the internal systems that worked so well in 2005 are causing political strife with a stagnating stock in 2012.
I'd have to agree, I honestly never saw the stack ranking system screw anyone over the way it is being made out to seem.
It is true that ultimately your manager has to make a case for what bonus/raise/promotion you deserve, and rankings will figure into that. If your manager sucks and/or hates you, he isn't going to fight for you. But if you have a sucky manager, you are in trouble no matter which company you're at.
But if you have a sucky manager, you are in trouble no matter which company you're at.
This is sadly true only most of the time. Occasionally companies are organized so that a bad manager affects his people very little before everyone realizes they are a bad manager and gets rid of them.
Sadly not every company is striving for that kind of organization.
Yea I'd agree the ideal is to get rid of sucky managers before they can crush too many people's careers. Microsoft isn't so good at actively firing bad people though, and that probably compounds the injustices of the stack rank system.
It's deeper than that. What matters in management ranks is subservience. A bad manager is someone who is not subservient or exhibits individualistic behavior. Direct reports leaving has no bearing on this at all, so it doesn't matter. in fact companies predict how long rank and file employees will stay on average for a number of reasons such as estimating recruiting expenses. I think what Bezos meant was that rank and file are not of the power structure, would never be able to influence the power structure, and are expected to leave after a time. The power structure would be protected at all costs even if every last non-administrative employee was driven out.
Realy I know a team member at a previous employer who where grateful lthat thier team had two peopel with terminal cancer so they ehere given the crap position on the stack rank to hit the teams quota for poor performers
> When everyone isn't getting rich, everyone gets to fight with each other
I like proverbs, they often distil penetrating wisdom. Over here, there's this saying: "Casa onde não há pão, todos ralham, ninguém tem razão" - literally translated, that's: in a home without bread, everybody nags/fights, no one is right.
Does that mean that the same will happen in any company whose stock starts to plateau? Because that would be a pretty scary thought. Can you really say that it's hopeless to change the reward system to prevent infighting and boost innovation again?
Maybe something's changed in the four-and-a-half years since I left, but people were pretty ok with Lisa Brummel when I was at Microsoft. People gently made fun of the fact that she always wears shorts, but there was never anything mean-spirited in that.
She was seen as a huge step up from the guy she replaced, who was rumored to have been having an affair with an underling[1] at the same time that he recorded a video admonishing us to never have inappropriate relations with subordinates. He was also responsible for the infamous towel debacle, which came to define the worst aspects of penny-wise, pound-foolish cost-cutting at the company.
Edit: Thx to, uh, moron for pointing out the new Mini-MSFT post that includes this:
Is she really the most universally hated executive?
I don't know about that, but she certainly slipped away from being loved.
Thousands of employees used to cheer for her. Now?
No. If that wasn't bad enough, that same system requires managers to rate a certain number of worker as sub-standard each year even if they already fired all their sub-standard workers during that same year.
And that gets to the rub of the problem: A good manager will recognize and get rid of bad employees.
A rigid system that codifies the assumption that managers are doing a bad job will force them to do a bad job. For example, by having to choose between putting good employees on the chopping block, or always keeping around a pool of bad employees (as a buffer to keep the good ones off the chopping block).
Wow that's hilarious and depressing at the same time. Intentionally maintaining a buffer of bad employees to keep your good employees around is the pinnacle of big company crap culture. If I ever have a company large enough for this type of problem I'll make sure that every manager can anonymously warn me if they start thinking like this.
Minimsft's post today seems to suggest feelings toward her have changed:
"Is she really the most universally hated executive? I don't know about that, but she certainly slipped away from being loved. Thousands of employees used to cheer for her. Now?"
As a former Software Development Lead @ Microsoft who went through calibration multiple times and no longer works there or has skin in the game, the article is just plain old factually incorrect.
Yes there is a 20/70/10 curve with both the old/new systems, but managers aren't held to the curve until the org size is around 30-50 people so exceptions can be made in either direction for strong/weak teams. Also the claim that only 1/2's can transfer is bogus, plenty of managers are happy to take 3's and 4's can move in most situations (I know of a person who got multiple U-10/5's and he still found a job). Finally the claim that calibration takes a ton of time is way over hyped, I probably spent less than a week on year end calibration (bit more than that including writing reviews, which is hugely important).
As a Software Development Manager at Amazon I can also attest to the fact that calibration isn't unique to Microsoft, Amazon just calls it OLR's. It's not a perfect system, but I have yet to hear great suggestions on how to improve it. I'm also not advocating the Microsoft system, but the facts in the article are just out of whack.
"Productivity at Microsoft has skidded to a brief halt thanks to the Vanity Fair article, which employees are reading on tablets and Nooks and Kindles because no one dares bring in the actual magazine."
Seriously? When was the last time you've seen anyone with a physical Vanity Fair magazine? To the extent that this claim is true -- and I have to say that no one in my circle of friends at the company seems to care about this article -- it's because surprise tech people largely consume text through electronic devices.
Vanity Fair is one of six to ten magazines I regularly see at supermarket lines. I don't know how many people actually buy it but it is one of the few publications these days whose headlines can actually intrude on the world of non-subscribers.
Well, the ole "X% of programmers are rocker stars" position gets a lot of play here (alone with the Steve Jobs quote etc).
I would say that unless a company of some size has the luxury of choosing absolutely who they want from the start, the "rock star" ideology is going to be as corrosive as it sounds like it is at MS.
Stack ranking has to be, by far, one of the stupidest management methodologies that I have ever heard of.
It indicates 4 things:
1: Your hiring isn't up to scratch such that this needs to be done (i.e. rank and yank). Raise the hiring bar and reduce firings.
2: You don't trust your employees to do the work you hired them too - this breeds mistrust and increases the level of politics used in the work force. You need to let creative employees freely do what you pay them to do.
3: You don't give projects enough time to mature.
4: You allow randomeness and false causation to determine employee outcomes. For example AIG Finance was completely ripping the other departments during the bubble run up. But come the crash - they almost took the entire firm down.
Anyone who gets upset at stack ranking has never heard about how management consulting works. They advertise stack ranking in order to RECRUIT.
Life as a management consultant is a perpetual job search, networking internally to get placed on the best projects to get the best performance metrics to get the best bonus. It makes sense, because your job is to give advice to large bureaucracies. If you can't figure out how to navigate corporate politics, you aren't qualified to serve your clients.
And should we expect this system which seems to work so great for management consultants to be the best system for organizing tens of thousands of employees developing software products composed of tens of millions of lines of code shipping to billions of customers?
I am not sure why M$ is singled out for this "Stack Ranking" practice. While in reality every big company has implemented some or other variation of this system.
G# and particularly Jack Welch was the one who first introduced this system en masse. Even he, IIRC, did say that, this Forced Ranking (as it was called), system should be more of a short term thing where in you clean the system of the non-performers (how can someone identify justly and accurately is a question) and do not enforce this once it has run its course (3-5 years). Everyone attributed the success of the G#'s northward share prices during his reign to this "performance culture". If there was any truth in that approach, only it has not sustained after Immelt took over.
Even I>M follows this so called "bell curve" based assessment. Every manager should strictly adhere to the skew in his department, down to the smallest of teams.
With this being essentially a HR question for decades to solve, with so many people graduating with MBA HRs and Ph.Ds, I am surprised at the lack of progress or do not know of any alternative system being implemented in a big company successfully.
The normalization which is done at these companies make a mockery of sound statistical principles. A bell curve is forced on even the smallest of teams rather than letting a pattern emerge with very large populations where the distribution is in a shape of a bell curve.
e.g., In a particularly bad year, in a sales team of 10 people the guy/ girl who sold a 50 mill USD as opposed to a top ranker who has done a 150 million is rated bad and equated with some body who wrote 1000 lines of code and his project got cancelled (Note: Project could have got cancelled for any reason, not necessarily and least likely because of the code he wrote). A person who wrote 1000 loc and showed off (read:built visibility with managers who decide his fate on the rating discussions) could easily get a better rating. The whole system goes around a) building perception b) taking credit for success c) pushing responsibility for failure onto someone else. People become paranoid. Nobody shares information with any one else which would help the other guy get a better rating. The organization suffers as a result.
Despite all this and despite Edward Deming's call decades ago to abolish this rating system as one of his 14 principles, I have not seen a successfully implemented system which replaces this Darwinistic one. Does anybody have any examples of better systems or better implementations in organizations?
With this being essentially a HR question for decades to solve, with so many people graduating with MBA HRs and Ph.Ds, I am surprised at the lack of progress or do not know of any alternative system being implemented in a big company successfully.
Because the current system benefits the managers, the MBAs, and HR consultants just fine.
The more energy you have to put into such a competition, the more you'll get out of it. Managers spend more time learning and playing the game, by definition. Since it's engineered as a zero-sum game, compounding benefits accrue to those in inverse proportion to the time they actually spend creating externally-meaningful value for the organization.
No sorry all those companies don't practice Welch's stack ranking methods.
As per the Welch system, if each manager cuts down 10% of his under performing team. The managers themselves get stack ranked in their managers staff all the way up to the CEO. There fore managers themselves get ranked and cut. But that is not what we see most companies. In many of those companies the axe falls only on people working on grass root levels. And the managerial layers get thicker and thicker and years pass by.
Also for this you need a very good leader at the very top who can drive this. Jack Welch could do it because its his system. Other just do it because they have to.
I worked for G# before and it did not happen that way. Managers did not get stack ranked. Every manager had a mandate to push 10% or 5% of their team as bottom 10 or 5. And, I should add that this was may be because, it was in the IT side and they did not have the luxury of letting go of people. So the bottom 5/ 10% was not moved out. They were handed a rating and the performance improvement plan that goes along with that.
Microsoft's review system sounds like an even more vicious variety of what Google has, which is more than bad enough to fell a great company.
Google has a bicameral system consisting of (a) manager-assigned "calibration scores" that are the outcome of stack-ranking nonsense and (b) annual peer reviews. It seems like a bicameral review system would be a good thing, by removing career SPOFs. If a bi- or multicameral system is well-designed, that's exactly what you get: multiple paths to success.
Where Google fails it is by making it an AND-gate rather than an OR-gate, even for lateral transfers, much less promotions. (Without good calibration scores, transfer is impossible.) At Google, people need managerial support AND peer support to advance, which means there's endless jockeying for visibility in addition to manager-as-SPOF. It really is the worst of both systems.
In a properly-run company, you have several review signals: peer review, extra-hierarchical work, demonstrated curiosity and will to self-improve, and managerial review. For firing (excluding people who do something outright wrong) the decision should be based an AND-gate. If someone does poorly by his manager AND can't get peer support AND can't find a transfer, then it's time to fire him. Not before. That's how decent companies do it. On the other hand, for title upgrades and pay raises and better projects, decent companies use an OR-gate. If he gets good managerial reviews OR good peer reviews OR has other managers interested in taking him, then treat the employee as successful: give him a decent raise and let him transfer as he wishes.
Now, managerial positions are a bit different. There, you actually want to see strength in several signals before you give someone power over other people. So there's justification for making selection into management be based on an AND-gate. You just really need to be sure that the person can lead. That's different. But title upgrades, pay raises, project allocation, autonomy and transfer opportunities should be based on an OR-gate; if one signal indicates potential for success, move forward. If you can't see this, then you're FAL and you should not be allowed to leave the house without assistance, much less make decisions that affect other people.
Google fucked up its bicameral system by making it an AND-gate for promotions and transfers and an OR-gate for adversity. That's the destruction of what was once a great company. It has cost the software industry billions of dollars worth of value. It sounds like a similar billion-dollar immolation occurred at Microsoft.
Microsoft's system, advanced half a decade or more further in necrosis, seems much the same but worse. It seems like these types of systems get worse over time because more people want to tack on their own shitty ideas as more people develop the system. They're not happy enough with other peoples' pre-existing shitty ideas; they need to make a personal mark on a shitty system by making it noticeably shittier, enough that they hear people complaining about their changes in the cafeteria (which they justify as a good thing because "those people are obviously no good, because good people have nothing to worry about come review time.")
I am glad the Vanity Fair article got published. I have no strong feeling about Microsoft either way, and I have a lot of respect for the great work coming out of Microsoft Research, but it's about time that we see bad HR policies leading to outright exposure and frank humiliation.
There was a joke some years back: what's the difference between Enron and Qwest? Six months.
Now I think it's time for an update. What's the difference between Microsoft and Google? Six years.
Having seen far too much inside the latter (as you did), it seems inevitable. The path has already been blazed, and they are barreling down it just as fast as they can.
FYI: He didn't see much at all inside the latter. His tenure was order of single digit months and he appeared to have his mind made up within a matter of weeks.
Google has one advantage, which is that they have a history of being mediocre at the business game but make great products. Microsoft was great in its heyday at the business game but makes mediocre products. This is an era of technology when a lot of the best things really are free (e.g. PostgreSQL, the best relational database, is open source) and Google is way better adapted to that environment.
It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb.
You are not going to convince anyone by making such a generalized comment about a huge company like MS. Moreover, the comment is just false Microsoft makes good products. C#, Windows 7, Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft SQL, etc.. Even Zune was a decent product that merely failed to find an audience Google makes bad products too; they just vanish when Goog starts cleaning up, while Windows Vista lingers in my CD spindle, like a bad code smell in code I wrote 5 years ago.
Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't been looking at it lately)
I don't use Microsoft's products (100% Linux, Android, iOS and OSX), but I'm not blind to their charms.
I like Postgres, but when I see the tools people use with MSQL, not to mention Oracle, I feel jealous.
> Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't been looking at it lately)
Things like Google apps and other web based mail and calendering services. Employees can accessed them from their Android and iOS devices. And IT people don't have to manage it all.
If you do a feature comparison between Gmail and a 1998 version of Outlook Express, OE wins handily. I've never used Outlook, but I imagine since it was developed by the same company with much of the same needs and it's a much bigger application that a Gmail comparison with Outlook would have the same result.
"It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb."
That's a retarded comment.
Don Syme invented F# while at MSR. When he first created it, it was basically OCaml.NET (well, a very small OCaml subset), just as a proof of concept.
Now (last I checked, which was well over a year ago) it's one of four first-class languages with a full team behind it in DevDiv, enjoying equal support in VS.NET and other dev tools as C#, VC++, and VB.NET.
F# isn't under anyone's thumb; it's a Microsoft product through-and-through.
I'm sure this comment will fall on deaf ears, but please, Michael, try to restrict your comments to things you know something about.
At every company, and in fact in every village, there is both a formal, extraverted, hierarchical organization, and an informal, social, graph-like organization. Much is made of "networking", but I wonder how many understand that the social network is where the real power is.
The hierarchy gets things done that need doing. The social network transcends, not only moving people between divisions and teams within the company, but also between companies. One might even see this as a principle behind the ascendancy of the likes of Facebook, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
Make no mistake, there are people at Microsoft operating to make things better, and the competition, both internal and external, plays a part. We who like to read, like to practice reading the writing on the wall, as we did while focusing on the chalkboard from our desks, now replaced by the whiteboard from our bouncy balls and standing desks. But we also know that a company lives until the last person turns out the light.
How bad HR practices can screw a company is a well known fact.
What isn't so well known is how to run a large, knowlege worker driven company well.
That's why it is so hard to cast Microsoft and Google aside as easily as people seem to. Yes, they are doing all kinds of things wrong. What's amazing is how much they are getting right, given the odds. That's the insight the author of this article seems to lack.
My problem with Jack Welch's "vitality curve" is that it assumes a certain distribution of performance is immutable. It assumes a static world in which 20% deserve to be promoted and rewarded, 10% deserve to be fired, 70% are good where they are.
Now, a large company in 1981 (when Welch became CEO of GE) would have a reasonable amount of deadweight. Why? Because from 1945 to 1981, people were still (culturally, at least) in shell shock from the Great Depression and (a) firing was rare, and (b) people didn't leave stable jobs, even after they'd checked out, and even if there were great opportunities elsewhere. So, as much as I dislike the "greed is good" attitude of the 1980s and the rampant "cost-cutting", I have to admit that most companies circa 1980 could use a bit of cutting, because they'd become pretty bloated and risk-averse.
Firing the bottom 10% of a large, sprawling company in 1981 was probably a good idea. You could do this maybe twice (i.e. two years in a row) and improve the company. The first time, you get a major effect, because the worst people aren't just costing money, but sucking away time and morale: they're dividers rather than mere subtractors. Every divider gone is a good step for a company. Subtractors tend to be just less competent than expected, and they should be improved and given more chances; but don't ever think twice about firing a divider.
But once you've gotten rid of your deadweight, now you're firing half-decent people who just haven't "clicked" yet. After the obvious underperformers (1 to 30% depending on the organization) are gone, the next targets are junior members of underperforming teams (and this is perverse, because the newest people are least responsible for the team problem). This, however, exacerbates the discrepancy between the good and bad teams: before, the differences were of prestige and where one sits in the cafeteria, but now being on the wrong team means getting fired. So, the careerist scramble to get on the right projects and under bosses who can protect their underlings gets a lot more heated. Soon you have the careerism and "warring departments" dynamic that Microsoft is getting raked over the coals for. Google, which has a less severe rank-and-yank (5% get PIP'd, which doesn't usually lead to firing, but only because most Googlers can get jobs anywhere they want with "Google" on their resume) has the careerism but not the warring departments (yet) but the internal mismanangement of Google+ sociology is definitely a step in the wrong direction.
> My problem with Jack Welch's "vitality curve" is that it assumes a certain distribution of performance is immutable. It assumes a static world in which 20% deserve to be promoted and rewarded, 10% deserve to be fired, 70% are good where they are.
Once your organization is large enough, a pretty reasonable case can be made that this distribution remains constant (although in fairness, the argument isn't that 10% deserved to be fired, it's that 10% are underperforming, and you need to quickly determine if that is going to change). It's undoubtedly NOT precise or immutable, but it is probably closer to "correct" than what happens without such practices in place.
> But once you've gotten rid of your deadweight, now you're firing half-decent people who just haven't "clicked" yet.
You are assuming no hiring, acquisitions, and changes in your business that change the value of employee work. That is the typical image of a large, lumbering conglomerate, and part of the point of codifying the practice is to force the organization to step out of the myth.
Michael;
As a correspondent on your many internal rants at Google, I am not surprised, although sad to see that you have progressed to being a disgruntled ex-employee with an axe to grind.
You were not here long enough to experience the situations you claim to have suffered; you did not fit in, in many aspects, and were unwilling to adapt or in any way change your stance or expectations; and the assertions you make are warped to maintain your own position as being "right" and whatever else needed as being "wrong" to fit.
Real Games was a huge missed opportunity. If they'd engaged indie developers to get quality games instead of mainstream Zynga dreck into Google+, they'd have a real singular (non-copyable) draw instead of competing in the red ocean with Facebook as a "Me, too" product.
Which part? While I can't speak to the overall population statistics, there were many people upset about healthcare and the new stack ranking. Think devs and testers with cancer in the family. They attributed -- rightly or wrongly -- both decisions to LisaB, and they were not happy.
The title may be hyperbole, but the content of the blogpost seems spot on.
Personally, the new stack ranking bit doesn't bother me much, as it doesn't seem a whole lot different than before (transposed system of assigning numbers 1-5 and different sized buckets).
The healthcare changes are most upsetting to myself and my wife, especially since we always looked at healthcare as an amazing benefit and competitive advantage to Microsoft. For anyone who doesn't know, there is currently a healthcare plan available that basically covers everything, all the time, with no out-of-pocket costs ever. No copays, no prescription costs, nothing. Of course there are limits, but for many typically cases, like myself, I never pay anything. This plan is going away in 2013 and being replaced by a more typically, less comprehensive option.
I work for Microsoft so I don't think I can go into too much detail but..
>"If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,"
that is not true.
Stack ranking really isn't as bad as it has been made out to be in the past few weeks.
While stack ranking sounds terrible on paper the actual implementation might soften the blow. Managers probably bend the rules a bit when it comes to the actual distribution in their groups.
For example consider two managers that both report to a VP. Each manager has 10 direct reports. If the managers and VP are all friends then the actual ranking distributions could vary a bit: one manager really has a strong team and the VP knows this. The VP also knows the other manager has a weaker team. As long as the VP's stack ranks are approximately correct in aggregate the individual managers probably have some wiggle room.
The point is politics in large organizations usually trumps strict rules. This can work both for and against someone hence some people don't view stack ranking in such a harsh light.
Forgive me, but holy crap that sounds even worse! Not only does everybody seem to know the system can't work in practice, they actually have to conspire behind the scenes to prevent the worst outcomes? And the assertion that politics trump rules anytime isn't in any way reassuring either. We all know the kinds of people who excel at office politics and they're usually the most destructive, corrupt and unproductive members of the team!
So to summarize what I heard so far: stack ranking is a terrible system based on flawed assumptions, everybody involved knows it, it doesn't actually measure performance but charisma, and for a company to work with this thing they have to sidestep it anyway?
I think our main problem is the layer and layers of internal systems that we are required to use but that are painfully out of date versus whats available on the open market.
Well, it can be true at the beginning of the process, but only if your team has everyone within a given set of levels. But I don't think that's normal.
This year's review process was the worst I've seen, though, and really showed that only manager feedback is considered, at least in my area.
A lot of it. The stack ranking system (the one the article mentioned is old), the fact that people are reading the Vanity Fair article secretively, etc... Most of this article is trying to paint an immensely negative picture that simply isn't true.
I don't think Ballmer is hated. People think he is inefficient. And upto some extent, rightly so. But in no way he deserves what's dished out at him in all those grudgingly written blogs by people who couldn't make anything out of themselves.
It's Ballmer. I have been downvoted for the comment, but no one ever has given a strong reason as to why Ballmer is a bad CEO. He is not a very good one, that I agree, but he doesn't deserve hatred, does he?
Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?
Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.