Microsoft Implements Stricter Performance Management System With Two-Year Rehire Ban (businessinsider.com) 52
Microsoft is intensifying performance scrutiny through new policies that target underperforming employees, according to an internal email from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman. The company has introduced a formalized Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) system that gives struggling employees two options: accept improvement targets or exit the company with a Global Voluntary Separation Agreement.
The policy establishes a two-year rehire blackout period for employees who leave with low performance ratings (zero to 60% in Microsoft's 0-200 scale) or during a PIP process. These employees are also barred from internal transfers while still at the company.
Coming months after Microsoft terminated 2,000 underperformers without severance, the company is also developing AI-supported tools to help managers "prepare for constructive or challenging conversations" through interactive practice environments. "Our focus remains on enabling high performance to achieve our priorities spanning security, quality, and leading AI," Coleman wrote, emphasizing that these changes aim to create "a globally consistent and transparent experience" while fostering "accountability and growth."
The policy establishes a two-year rehire blackout period for employees who leave with low performance ratings (zero to 60% in Microsoft's 0-200 scale) or during a PIP process. These employees are also barred from internal transfers while still at the company.
Coming months after Microsoft terminated 2,000 underperformers without severance, the company is also developing AI-supported tools to help managers "prepare for constructive or challenging conversations" through interactive practice environments. "Our focus remains on enabling high performance to achieve our priorities spanning security, quality, and leading AI," Coleman wrote, emphasizing that these changes aim to create "a globally consistent and transparent experience" while fostering "accountability and growth."
If it's 0 to 60 percent... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does the particular point range matter, regardless of whether it runs 0-200 or 513-90210?
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The motto used to be we're the humans, and in control.
Now the robots are in control, the AI a new taskmaster, evaluator, and the non-human element.
This won't end well.
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I wonder how long it'll be before the CEOs decide they don't need to pay a middle manager to review the AI's evaluations?
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Good luck to them running a company where nobody is around to load more computers into racks to feed the ever-hungry AI monster we have created.
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I knew Red Stapler Guy from Office Space was modeled on a real person. Won't be long before they fix the glitch that keeps your paycheck going.
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The ratio of people to cake is too big.
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"The machines themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."
-God Emperor Of Dune
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Re:If it's 0 to 60 percent... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a manager at Microsoft and I can clear this up a bit, because it sounds totally random.
Your performance review determines your 'rewards', which is your 'merit increase' (salary), bonus, and stock award. Let's say you make $200k a year, and your maximum bonus range is up to 20%. Your target/expected bonus is half of that, so 10%. If you get a "100", this is really "100%" of your expected bonus, so you get 10% of $200k, or $20k bonus. If you have a great performance year and your boss gives you a 140, then you get 140% of your expected bonus range. This means that your top bonus percentage is "200%" of your expected bonus, aka your max bonus. I think this is purely for psychological reasons - people hear that they got a 100% and think that's awesome, vs hearing they got a 50% and being disappointed.
The other thing is that you can't give someone a bonus of 107 or something. It's only in 20-point increments and there are certain ones that (at least in my experience) aren't available, so the options are: 0 [you're being managed out], 60 [you're being given a stern warning], 80 [slightly underperforming, but not a big deal], 100 [expected - this is probably 50% of all employees], 120 [overperformed], 140 [wowowow], 160, 180, 200. The higher numbers are reserved for exceptional circumstances OR lower level employees who are early in career, so giving them a 40% larger bonus isn't that expensive for the company.
There's also quite a lot of wiggle room on the final merit/bonus/stock calculation, where your manager might give you a 120 - but then the overall studio or group or org or the whole company get slightly adjusted along the way. If you're in Azure, you might get a larger bonus all other things being equal over someone working on HoloLens or Xbox.
Delete your data (Score:2)
Hit them with a data request and data deletion demand after leaving Microsoft, which also spells out that they must delete your employment data.
Re:Delete your data (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not "your" data, it's data about you.
There is a world of difference between the two.
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It's not "your" data, it's data about you.
There is a world of difference between the two.
I bet the EU has some obscure law or regulation or EU Court finding that would say uou are wrong.
FYI - I do not live in the EU.
Re: Delete your data (Score:4, Informative)
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It is not excempt. But it can be retained with a valid business reason, e.g. if the person can sue you. Once that is not true anymore, the data must be "irretrievably deleted" and that must be done without a request by the data owner (the person the data refers to).
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Not obscure at all. If it describes any of your characteristics that are enough to identify you, then you are the data owner, not them. It is really simple.
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Which might matter if I lived in the EU.
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Not under the GDPR and similar law. If it references you, the reference to you is _your_ data. The only excemptions are for law enforcement and the government. Yes, that is a problem. But the way around is that as long as somebody can sue you, you have a valid business reason to keep that data.
Two-Year Rehire Ban (Score:5, Interesting)
The company (large defense contractor) that I used to work for had a policy that people rehired within two years retained (at least) their previous seniority and benefits levels, like vacation accrual rate. Perhaps MS has something similar and this is a way to circumvent that -- other than changing the rules, which probably wouldn't go over well. Just guessing though...
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It's more likely a way to exclude a large portion of applicants so they can continue to justify their H-1B acquisitions, in spite of the pretty significant unemployment in the field.
Re: Two-Year Rehire Ban (Score:2)
Re: Two-Year Rehire Ban (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. Microsoft is a notoriously bad place to work ever since GE stack ranking. They don't care though since if US people don't want to work for them, they save money by hiring H1B1s.
That's pretty unlikely, I think. I know several people who are/were managers at Microsoft, and managed both H-1B employees and employees in other statuses (L-1, O-1, green card, citizen, etc.) and they all say that there are no significant pay differences between H-1Bs and the other statuses. That matches my own experience as a manager at Google. I think big corporations would have a hard time getting away with paying differently based on visa status... too much probability of being sued.
No, if big American corporations want to get away with paying less for H-1B labor, they can't hire them as employees. They have to hire them as contractors, and do it through contracting agencies. Those agencies don't have the unequal-pay problem because all of their employees are paid less. The big corps have to be careful not to treat them like regular employees in several ways, though, and they don't get the full savings, since the contracting agency takes a pretty big cut.
In practice, I think big tech companies tend only to use the cheap H-1Bs for lower tiers of employees. The H-1Bs who are really good are worth paying full price for, and it's better not to have to limit what they can work on. If you happen to find a cheap H-1B contractor who's really good, the best thing to do is to hire them as an FTE (taking care with all the contract terms, etc.). It'll cost a lot more, since as an FTE their pay will have to be competitive with the green card holders, citizens, etc., but it's worth it because you can get a lot more out of them.
But the article at hand is about low-performing FTEs, and MS might very well like to replace them with cheap H-1B contractors. They probably won't get much better output out of the cheap H-1Bs, but it'll cost less, so it's a win. But they're not going to try to replace good FTEs with cheap H-1Bs... that would be counterproductive.
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"replace good FTEs with cheap H-1Bs... that would be counterproductive" but profitable in the short term, however once you are a monopoly short term long term is kinda moot
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If your performance is so poor that you can't survive a PIP, then I'd rather have an H-1B applicant take the place of that person, than rehire the person.
PIPs are no fun for managers. They hate doing them, I know because I've had to do a few. There are a lot of people who _should_ be on a PIP that aren't, just because it's such a painful process. The ones that DO get on a PIP, usually should have been fired months earlier.
If company puts you in wrong job, don't redeploy (Score:2, Insightful)
I had a great career with a major company. Hired from school and put in first job that didn't fit. The company figured out that I was in the wrong job and gave me alternatives. The next job was a perfect fit. Had many great gigs there over the years as the technology and business changed.
Under Microsoft's new policy, if the company hires you and happens to put you in the wrong job, you cannot get a transfer to another job that suits your abilities - and cannot return for two years.
They are going to churn th
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if the company hires you and happens to put you in the wrong job, you cannot get a transfer
That part has always been that way. Don't want an employee who wants to transfer to leave your team? Give a bad review then they can't leave.
Re:If company puts you in wrong job, don't redeplo (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure they can. They can leave to go work for the competition....perhaps one with less shitty managers than ones who give good employees bad reviews.
I'm guessing its depressing (Score:2)
That seems like the sort of outcome that would, on the whole, emerge naturally unless your organization is blithely twitching in response to terribly poor quality data.
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Good thing we have ai to help us work less (Score:2)
Only problem: They are all underperforming (Score:2)
The crap MS produces these days is bad and getting worse.
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The crap MS produces these days is bad and getting worse.
That should be the subject of the next bestselling management-guru book -- "The Slipping Point : when individual high-performers fail as groups".
When are they planning this move? (Score:2)
"Our focus remains on enabling high performance to achieve our priorities spanning security, quality, and leading AI," Coleman wrote, emphasizing that these changes aim to create "a globally consistent and transparent experience" while fostering "accountability and growth."
And when are they planning to start prioritizing security and quality? I get that everybody in tech is focused on AI, because investment money and such, but security and quality at Microsoft? Wouldn't that be a completely new concept for them? I thought priority one was making software *just* acceptable enough, while remaining insecure and low enough quality to justify the next upgrade cycle.
y2k boom memories (Score:2)
I remember the boom around y2k where people would leave large corps like MS and come back in less than a year with a 50% raise, because that was the going rate. That of course killed morale for those who stayed and didn't get the fat raise. That in turn caused the corps to put these "2 year no rehire" rules in place to keep people from quitting and coming back for raises and damaging morale.
"Performance Management" vs "Performance Enhance" (Score:2)
I think the fact that Microsoft believes it has to manage - rather than enhance - their employees' performance says it all about the work environment. It implies that high performance is something to be managed, rather than celebrated or rewarded.
But, OTOH, it explains the quality of their software quite well.
'Low performers' stuck in soul killing jobs (Score:2)
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Upper management sees them as a cost center and starts trying to make them work faster with PIPs.
Spoken like someone who has never had to conduct a PIP.
I've had to conduct a few PIPs in my 20 years as a software development manager. They are NO fun. Most managers would rather just deal with the subpar team member, that go through the PIP process. Usually, they will try to move the person to a different department, or ANYTHING other than having to go through a PIP.
No, there's no way managers are trying to "make people work faster" by putting them through PIPs. At least, not unless their work is SO slow
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I don't think it's about a person's direct manager putting them through a PIP out of a desire to make them work faster? But my experience has been, the PIPs get dictated/mandated from the top. They're often triggered by some sort of metric, like "employee clocked in late more than twice in X period of time" or "employee wasn't following directions on proper process/procedure Z" and that happened Y number of times.
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No, PIPs don't come from the top. Yes, they can come from metrics. But in the end, it's always the direct manager that has to do the dirty work. When companies want to get rid of a bunch of people, the "higher ups" won't mess with PIPs, they just initiate a RIF.
There *is* a type of person that thrives on bug fixing, even of older software. It takes more brains to fix bugs, than to write new code, because you have to analyze the issue, understand context that nobody knows, and avoid land mines in the code. S