Don't Call It Stack Rank: Yahoo's QPR System For Culling Non-Performers 177
An anonymous reader writes "Employees don't like to be graded on the bell curve (or any other curve except for Lake Wobegon's) — we know that from the Microsoft experience. But Yahoo is struggling with what some say is vastly bloated headcount, and CEO Marissa Mayer has implemented a 'quarterly performance review' system that requires, or strongly recommends, that managers place a certain quota of their charges in the less-than-stellar categories. That sounds a lot like the infamous GE-Microsoft stack rank system. But according to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, who (as usual) broke the latest story about life inside Mayer's Yahoo, Mayer's curve may more similar to the elaborate evaluation system used by her old employer, Google."
A real leader inspires (Score:4, Informative)
A coward instills fear. In the long run, fear is a destructive force in a company. In the short run, it can boost profits. I am sure that Marissa will be long gone, after collecting an enormous bonus for that short term boost, to see the real results of her actions.
Re:Done at Google (Score:4, Informative)
I know a few people who encountered this at Google. They found that it was absolutely lethal to team morale, because by definition it was actively harmful to you to help other people who report to the same manager; people worked around this at least some by forming teams of people reporting to different managers. But basically, of the people I know who work at Google, roughly 0% think the HR and staffing policies are reasonable, and I know more than one person who is being massively underemployed because of an arbitrary checklist of things that they have to do before they can be moved into a role that would use their stellar skills.
This will be a bit garbled, because my memory is vague and I want to shuffle details to keep people from being identified, but basically, imagine that you have a usual progression of programming roles from entry-level to senior, say. And similarly for sysadmin, and so on. And you have someone who is currently working as a relatively entry-level sysadmin, who would be an excellent senior programmer. You can't move that person to the programmer job because they haven't met the checklist of items for mid-level sysadmin yet, therefore they can't be evaluated for a possible change in job responsibilities. So your options are (1) acquire some meaningless credentials to do with obsolete operating systems no one still cares about or (2) look for work elsewhere, but not (3) move to a job inside Google where you'd be incredibly valuable to the company.
Re:Both good and bad (Score:4, Informative)
HR should be about compliance, benefits etc. They have (as a group) proven themselves incompetent to hires techs or engineers and should not even be involved with the hiring process.
I had the same job for many years, read a lot of resumes to fill many positions. Then I got laid off. One of my severance benefits was advice on resume building and such, which I had not done in decades. I was pretty surprised to find that the modern scientific resume has to pass an HR filter before a scientist even sees it.
Re:Main effect: The good ones will leave (Score:5, Informative)
Another argument is that performance bonuses don't work at all (basic repetitive labour excepted).
You're paying people to do a job. If they won't do the job unless you pay them extra to do it, why are you even giving them a salary? And if their game is the bonus, they will be sure to do the least possible for the bonus, rather than the most possible for the job. This is especially significant in the absence of employer loyalty.
A quick search for studies on performance related pay may be enlightening.