Comment Re:my company does this (Score 1) 525
--Greg
--Greg
I'm surprised you worked at a place that protected unproductive long-time employees. At Microsoft, we dumped them into the bottom bucket unceremoniously. That didn't get them fired, but it meant they didn't get raises or stock. (I suspect most of them didn't care.) But I sure can't remember anyone trying to defend one.
Likewise, if you had 8 people, you could get two in the top group without fighting and wouldn't be forced to put more than two in the bottom group. With good arguments, you might get three into the top group and limit the bottom group to just one. (I usually had one person I WANTED to put into the bottom group.) But the idea of having to fight for ALL of your good people is very strange to me.
--Greg
The first thing is that, as a manager of a small team, you do NOT have to meet a curve. That's only required at high levels with hundreds or thousands of employees in the pool. You DO have to rank your people in order and argue for them at a meeting with your peers. If you have a team of 6 or 8 people, I'll be very surprised if you don't know who your best person is--and who the worst one is. As a general rule, you ought to be able to rank your whole team in order from best to worst, with perhaps a few ties. (Generally, though, I didn't end up with ties.)
So together with your peers, you now try to slot 50 or so people into three rankings: 4.0 for the best 25%, 3.5 for the bulk of the people and 3.0 for the bottom 20%. (There is special handling for superstars at 4.5 and total losers at 2.5, but that's a post-process with no quotas.) The argument always revolves around strong 3.5 people who "ought" to be 4.0 and weak 3.5 people who "don't deserve" to be 3.0. Not a surprise; every manager overrates his/her own people. The pressure to meet a quota forces people to have hard arguments about how valuable each person's work really was. It can even help a manager see the importance of putting people on the highest-value tasks. At the end of it, there are typically two or three borderline individuals, but everyone else pretty much has the rating they actually earned. The General Manager takes the result up to the stack ranking at the next level, armed with appropriate arguments for the borderline folks.
One time, I worked on a project with high-visibility and lots of pressure. At review time, we told management we wanted to give about 50% 4.0 (instead of the usual 25%) and only one or two 3.0 reviews (out of a team of ~100). They pushed that up, and it was granted. We did exceptional work, so they let us blow out the curve. But it only happened once in 14 years.
What are the alternatives? Have a Union that gives everyone the same rewards regardless of the work he/she did? Doesn't seem like a winner to me.
So to answer the OP's question, how do you succeed in such a system, the answer is: work hard, do good work, help others who get stuck, and BE SEEN DOING IT. When your manager says "Jane is my best worker," you want all his/her peers to nod and say "yeah, Jane is great! She helps us out all the time!" When your manager says "Jack deserves a better rating," you don't want his/her peers to say "that lazy bum? He couldn't find his ass with both hands!" But most important of all is for your manager to actually see you as someone who gets stuff done. Whatever anyone tries to claim, most teams only have a few such people on them. They rarely go unrewarded.
--Greg
--Greg
What's bad is to have such a rule but hide it from people.
--Greg
--Greg
And, yes, people certainly do enter "yahoo" as a search query: it turns out that a lot of people depended on the fact that we'd return a whole pages of results from yahoo.com, and they'd use that as an easier way to navigate the site internals.
However, it's a long step from "people do that sometimes" to "5% of all queries are like that."
When we changed the engine so it only gave two results from a single site, we did get complaints from people who really did type "yahoo" as a query. But it continued to be the #3 result. Another really strong clue that something was rotten.
--Greg
Back at the beginning of the year, a group of Fundamentalist Christians started a Facebook group called we can find 1,000,000 people who don't believe in Evolution befor June And, yes, the typo is really in the name.
This doesn't happen all the time, and I can hardly speak for every group at Microsoft either. But it happens often enough in enough groups to be a problem. And it's my perception that it happens more and more.
--Greg
Personally I wouldn't be able to use signature verification because my signature is so inconsistent. . .
You'd be surprised how many people say that, and yet when the software gets to see their dynamic signature (as points in time, not just an image), it easily finds the things that make their signature unique and clearly distinguishes it from anyone else's. Or so it appeared, anyway. As I said, we never really got to do a proper evaluation, but we did do enough to determine that a lot of our intuitions about the problem were simply wrong.
--Greg
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton