Sometime before my career is over (35+ years now) I hope to actually manage a team with no poorly-performing people.

--Greg

The suggestion of sending your people to represent you in meetings is an excellent one. Note, however, that there are probably only two or three people in your team (assuming 6 to 8) whom you would trust to do that. Every manager already has a ranking of his/her team, even if they don't like to talk about it.

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

I worked at Microsoft for 14 years (up to 2008) and was a manager for most of that period. The Vanity-Fair article doesn't really describe the system accurately, so I'll offer my own view. Given that I participated in it 25+ times, that ought to be worth something. :-)

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

We really do need fewer (but higher-quality) patents, and we need a more predictable system. With any luck, this will deliver that. And I speak as the inventor of 20+ US Patents. (Corporate ones; an individual inventor might feel otherwise.) :-)

--Greg

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what happened here, but my impression was that if you quit before the company went public, then they could buy back any of your shares at par. That actually seems pretty reasonable to me. I worked for a place once where a couple of guys who were there for the first year got lumps of stock they in no way deserved, yet they ended up with a nice payout when the company was acquired almost ten years later. A rule that says "you only keep the stock if you're with us when we go public or get acquired" seems very reasonable to me.

What's bad is to have such a rule but hide it from people.

--Greg

Yep, UW's compling program is really, really good. Someone who's into bioinformatics and hates languages probably wouldn't enjoy it much, though.

--Greg

Compiler errors can't be bugs, since the program won't run at all! Or are we talking about bugs *in the compiler?* :-) --Greg

Not that anyone besides us ever got to see those numbers. Anyway, as time went by, it became clear that bot-generated queries often outnumbered real ones anyway. (Another reason not to put too much stock in the query logs.) --Greg

Yeah, there's a reason why we didn't immediately figure it out.

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

I think "internet explorer" typed out in full should have been the best clue. Turned out it was generated by (if I recall correctly) an MSN application of some kind.

I worked on MSN Search (later "Live Search") so I can answer a few of these for you: 1) There was very little collaboration with the MSN teams. MSN is generally despised at Microsoft, and to get people to come to Search we had to reassure them that it wasn't "really" part of MSN. For their part, the MSN people seemed to try really hard to live up to their "it can't be done" reputation. For example, the MSN team controlled the UI, and even though a top customer complaint was that there wasn't enough space for users to type their queries, no force in the Universe was powerful enough to make the MSN guys widen it. (Their design rules required it be usable by people whose display was a TV set.) 2) Yeah, the MSN data was worthless. First, there wasn't that much of it; rather than saving the raw data, they had a process for computing digests of it, and that's all we could get. Also, that digest process was full of bugs. For example, for years it told us the top queries were "google," "internet explorer" and "yahoo"; it was obvious this was a bug, but our management couldn't get the MSN team to do anything about it. 3) As Yusuf suggests in his article, the cumuative Search and Click data is NOT what you need to produce a good search engine. One of the most frustrating things about working on Search at Microsoft was Management's obsession with head queries. They had several articles of faith that didn't accord with reality, but this was one of the worst. Good news for Microsoft if they've finally figured this out. Of course, almost all the people responsible for the original mess are long gone now. 4) The Google-worship was nauseating. We wasted all kinds of effort trying to duplicate features that obviously didn't work even for Google (news being an obvious example) whereas new features that might have been helpful consistently got killed with "Google doesn't do that." In many cases, this argument was used for technologies where no one had any reasonable clue what Google actually did. --Greg

Often the upper-management guys are non-technical and they're loath to get involved in any sort of dispute over a technical issue. When the dispute is between someone technical and someone non-technical, I'll at least say that I don't think they generally favor the non-technical guy; they just don't do anything.

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

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