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Marchello_E t1_iws3ztx wrote

50% of all the employees perform below average (actually median).

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KWillets t1_iwsak06 wrote

50% have below average statistical knowledge.

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fpfx t1_iwt8szs wrote

7 out of 5 people have a problem with ratios

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redvelvetcake42 t1_iwtayli wrote

My god that's .2 in long division.

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Famous-Somewhere9191 t1_iwso125 wrote

less than 50%

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UnkindPotato t1_iwtbfbg wrote

Think of how dumb the average person is... roughly half of them are dumber than that

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baalyle t1_iwxmev0 wrote

49% do. Those at 50% have average.

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Tmdngs t1_iws4yrz wrote

Unless they all score average exactly lol

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Marchello_E t1_iwsibk0 wrote

Then there will be differences in the working commitment hours, minutes, seconds, perhaps milliseconds... if not then take from the logs the index of the login sequence. With the right metric one can always "find" a low performer ^((if it includes you then find another metric))

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Desperate_Resource38 t1_iwsybxd wrote

This is what people don't understand about cherry-picking data; with many things that don't have a direct and comparable representation (ie you get to choose what measurements make up the final results) there is almost always a combination of empirical measurements directly suited to the results you want to achieve.

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ShodoDeka t1_iwt8quj wrote

That is not the same as a low performer. Especially in a company that prides it self on only hiring the best of the best.

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saltyhasp t1_iwsx485 wrote

And any rating is by some arbitrary metric which is probably not very accurate.

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x-squared t1_iwu2nzc wrote

Average and median aren't the same. It's likely more than 50% are below average. If zero is the limit as far as how far down the scale you can go but there is no limit to how much you can excell, you'll likely see a distribution skewed to the left. This means that the median will fall to the left of the average.

Tldr; I completely miss the point and instead talk about how average is kind of a shit metric sometimes.

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SkyNetIsNow t1_iwuhd19 wrote

At one point my state ranked the bottom 10% of schools as failing. You would here some politicians talk reducing the number of failing school although that would be impossible.

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Oscarcharliezulu t1_iwu465n wrote

The bell curve seems to exist just to rank people without understanding their true value.

0

Marchello_E t1_iwv2lqc wrote

There is simply no way that people perform (or be) as average as anyone else. A bell curve is just a plot: a mathematical visualization.

An often overlooked thing is that one on the left side of the hill may brighten the day of the one on the right side of the hill. For a random image: maybe that "lefty" likes plants more than the actual work yet, as he walks around, is the perfect target to bounce of ideas (he has to have some work related talents) to see how they may get received even before doing some alpha/beta testing in the wild. As such this may informally connect different aspects of a group. Boot the "lefty" to boost "righties" and a new bell curve will arise. Likely on another curve showing more stress, more internal competition, and less solidarity.

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Oscarcharliezulu t1_ix2bzxe wrote

The bell curve is a perfectly good working model for a normal distribution but the evil comes when you decide what the variables are and then apply that curve to your population in order to get the result you want.

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miltonfriedman2028 t1_iwsuwqw wrote

As a executive director who has done quite a few performance reviews of juniors…despite the statistical impossibility, 100% of employees think they are above average, regardless of what the facts, feedback, and common sense may show.

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Soupkitchn89 t1_iwsv4m3 wrote

I mean if you got hired by Google you probably at least a little above average.

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miltonfriedman2028 t1_iwsvbx9 wrote

I work at a top investment bank and previously worked at a top strategy consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain,bcg), even at highly selective companies, people slip through the cracks.

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Soupkitchn89 t1_iwsvi9l wrote

I feel like those industries have a lot more nepotism then tech does though.

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Desperate_Resource38 t1_iwt3x64 wrote

Meh, past a certain base of technical understanding (enough to talk through solving a programming problem on the phone), it's all connections and soft skills. At Microsoft if you get an interview for an internship there's like a 50% chance you get the offer, but like 1% of the people who apply actually get the interview. And even though these companies have at-will employment, in reality it's INCREDIBLY difficult to get rid of people if they don't want to leave, and with big tech they often print enough money that it's either not worth the hassle of firing slight underperformers or it's not worth getting rid of proven engineers who have nothing to work on right now and having to find actually good new senior engineers to hire if and when the need for them arises. There's no industry that's really immune to nepotism/cronyism IMO.

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kingkeelay t1_iwtk3p3 wrote

If you have below average employees it says more about your hiring practices than anything. Don’t you take pride in hiring above average talent? Or do you hire bottom feeders for below average wages and get below average results?

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miltonfriedman2028 t1_iwu4ez6 wrote

We pay $200k+ at junior levels, so I don’t really think it’s bottom feeders.

There’s only so much information you can glean from 30-60 minute interviews, and some people are good BS’ers and just turn out to be lazy when they start. It’s unavoidable.

Plenty of people with top grades, from top schools, and relevant previous experience at a great company, who join and then how low quality of work and productivity, regardless of training / feedback.

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phdoofus t1_iws2yqd wrote

Nobody ever asks the workers which executives and senior managers are 'low performing'

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randomways t1_iwsc9qy wrote

It's weird. A professional team performs poorly and they fire the coach. Why doesn't this mentality expand to executives.

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DocPeacock t1_iwsh5w8 wrote

It kind of does. When they get fired, like coaches, they get an awesome severance to be released from their contract, then they will bounce around to another company/team and make even more money.

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theKetoBear t1_iws4v6i wrote

None of them obviously , that's why they're executives and managers we can just ASSUME they are good at their jobs because if we don't we get fired even when some of us do their jobs for them !

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RandomHB t1_iwsd74b wrote

My company let 13 mid level managers go recently and zero technical staff. I've never seen that before.

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euph-_-oric t1_iwslmth wrote

It's funny you say that because middle management is often the first to go. It's upper management that gets di w.e the fuck they want.

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WayneKrane t1_iwsmshu wrote

Yeah, middle management usually has a lot of bloated salaries and you can get by longer without them. The last company I was at did layoffs and it was exclusively mid level managers. It made sense to me because each of their salaries was equal to 2-3 employees or more. I knew I was safe because I was the lowest paid employee.

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davebowmanandhal t1_iwuqpdi wrote

I don’t work in tech, but I am a middle manager and I am not making a lot. It can be tough not having any real autonomy and still dealing with upper management and employees.

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MerlinsBeard t1_iwuk8g6 wrote

That's true when a company gets bought out. The technical staff is retained, the management get the boot.

Happens all the time in government contract rollovers also. Company A had contract but lost rebid so Company B basically buys out Company A's tech staff and brings in their management.

Then it's very clear if productivity goes down or up who the problem is.

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Utoko t1_iwsdolk wrote

See, can you really call CEO's like Sam Bankman underperformers when they can burn 30$Billion in 2 years. How many million underperforming worker you need to have to burn that much money?

CEO's are just made to perform

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jeffyoulose t1_iwspyy8 wrote

That's impact. Love the sound of that flesh spatter on concrete.

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[deleted] t1_iwsaoeu wrote

Amazon does in their distribution centers. You get a survey at regular intervals to rate your direct manager. Too low of a score and they get the axe.

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monsterosaleviosa t1_iwsf4ck wrote

Your direct manager in a distribution center is still just a workhorse like you to them, they’re not actually on a different level in the way that corporate leaders are.

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ironichaos t1_iwsdoef wrote

Yeah but that’s for middle management I doubt it effects senior level leaders that much.

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwtf8a2 wrote

My brother in law is a senior manager of some sort in corporate Amazon and gets these direct report performance reviews weekly. Once they dropped for him so he asked everyone what the problem was and they all said “no worries, great work boss” which is not unexpected. But what is the point of the system if there’s no context? What was HR thinking?

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dethb0y t1_iwtl39w wrote

That an anonymous vote is more honest than having your boss ask you "how am i doing as your boss"?

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwu9ed1 wrote

Sure. But in this case there was no j formation or context for my BIL to follow up on or improve. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember the specifics but when we talked, it was very much “someone is unhappy all of a sudden but I don’t know who and I don’t know why”

I understand why anonymous feedback exists but in my experience it is usually filtered through a third party to make sure it’s helpful.

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pnt510 t1_iwtm53d wrote

The problem is no one wants to give their boss honest feedback if it’s negative. There are too many potential downsides.

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwu94zq wrote

Yeah, that’s the point I was trying to make. Why even implement a feedback system like this when there is almost no way to reasonably follow up. It just makes people unhappy and stressed out for no reason. Maybe that’s why they do it.

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JoyousGamer t1_iwumlh5 wrote

Very well could be they are not approachable and encourage open communication.

Could as well be the current review format specific to their position is not correctly done.

Having it so it's not a trackable to the employee allows for a more open line of feedback.

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwvjp3d wrote

I understand why he didn’t get any feedback directly.

Im asking what the point of context free anonymous feedback is. Telling people “you are suddenly bad and not as appreciated by your team” and then not providing any information as to why will not help improve.

Since that context is not built into the feedback I question it’s utility.

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JoyousGamer t1_ixd3mix wrote

It is to encourage individuals to put their true feelings. Regarding context it should be provided to allow free text comments as well as enough variation on questions to piece together a possible issue. If that is not provided then the data collection is flawed not the format of it being anonymous.

As a good leader its your job to be able to have the trust of those working with you to gather that information. Also just because you are rated poorly doesn't mean you are bad at your job its possible that you are not the right fit for your specific team.

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Amigosito t1_iwsqjgn wrote

Amazon does this across-the-board for all employees. They call it “the bar”; if you’re below it, you’re being managed out. Every time they bringing a new employee who “raises the bar”, an existing employee falls “below the bar”. Or sometimes they will hire people “below the bar” just to fire them and set an “example.”

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LordTC t1_iwss7cv wrote

Amazon has stack ranking which requires managers to fire a certain percentage of their team each year (often 10%). Because of this if you are happy with your current team you hire people in order to fire them.

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SomeDudeNamedMark t1_iwsxl76 wrote

That is such an incredibly shitty thing to do.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by it, but damn...

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DaiTaHomer t1_iwt8rs5 wrote

What they do is game this system by hiring people for the express purpose of later firing to keep the moronic management that is Amazon from messing up their teams.

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SlowMotionPanic t1_iwt9hoq wrote

Stack ranking, aka forced distribution, should be illegal. Funny that the companies that pioneered it in America inevitably left it by the wayside after each lost massive class action suits against them for the practice.

Because of that, many of these companies will bend over backwards to avoid using the terms even though it is precisely descriptive.

The people who need to be managed out are all of upper management and their HR enablers. Workers should have a say in how their company is run but a lifetime of capital class propaganda has made people have automatic negative responses to things like that. Like Pavlov ringing a bell for his dogs.

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davebowmanandhal t1_iwuqzlq wrote

I thought this type of jack welch GE management nonsense was shown not to work all that well.

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Drakonx1 t1_iwv77pl wrote

It was, and they teach you that in business school, but that's basically immediately untaught when you get out into the world because execs don't care about data if it conflicts with their feelings.

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davebowmanandhal t1_iwvfl5h wrote

Lol this is absolutely true. They think they’re hard headed business people, but they have a porcelain ego.

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Coyotesamigo t1_iwtfbef wrote

My bro in law hires people just to protect his team. Nuts

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Amorougen t1_iwuko32 wrote

I've done this and hated it. Another example of forced ranking.

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catdog918 t1_iwsb1hs wrote

My company also has a rating for manager but they don’t just fire them for bad ratings. They do take the ratings seriously and I guess if it keeps coming back overwhelmingly negative then eventually they’d be let go or moved around the organization

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RLT79 t1_iwsuvni wrote

The last place I worked tried to do 360 reviews one year (I think that’s what they were called). They stopped doing them after 2 years. Apparently the admins got upset that they weren’t getting glowing reviews and stopped it, rather than actually try to do a better job. Meanwhile, we were still expected to do well on our performance reviews even though they cut all raises due to budget cuts.

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DrEnter t1_iwuvech wrote

It’s all just colorful names for a Vitality Curve. It helped destroy GE, and now you too can use it to destroy your corporation!

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RLT79 t1_iwvppds wrote

Ah... I'd heard of the 80-20 rule, but not this. Thanks!

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DrEnter t1_iwvuxjd wrote

The worst part is you can be a top performer and still be low-ranked because you have a poor manager or because they want to target a specific metric that doesn't apply to you.

The whole thing is almost always used to perform shadow layoffs: Basically a way to target a group you want to layoff, but then fire them "for cause" of low performance based on measures that may have little to do with their job. I had this happen to me at Yahoo after Melissa Meyer took over (another toxic billionaire that shouldn't run a company). I was a senior software developer, and was always a "top performer" in yearly reviews and raises, which meant after a few years I was very expensive. They introduced stack ranking and, while I knew what it was, I wasn't particularly worried as I was always ranking at the top. Then, a month before the reviews and ranking, two of us that were both "expensive" and over 40 were suddenly re-organized under a manager who managed a QA team, and we were then stack ranked against QA engineers based on QA metrics, which are very different from those used for software developers. Even though our reviews were also fantastic, we both fell in the bottom of the QA rankings because we weren't assigned to do QA work. Within a month we were both let go "for cause". As I still knew people there, I found out they repeated started doing ranking every quarter and repeated this process with a few different people each time, always using the same manager (fuck you Brad, you enablist PoS).

That's a classic example of how to use stack ranking to target older and more expensive employees and to get away with not having to do expensive layoffs and severance packages. Incidentally, it isn't always entirely legal: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/employment-law/pages/yahoo-forced-ranking.aspx

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JDizzle69 t1_iwsi9ew wrote

You’re joking right? Executives get fired all the time

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mr_mcpoogrundle t1_iwschzp wrote

Every organization I've been a part of does. Sometimes they are called 360 degree reviews.

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1tacoshort t1_iwtkcb3 wrote

Google does (or did, when I was there) have 360 reviews. I had a manager that left the company stemming from the reviews he got from his direct reports.

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homezlice t1_iwt0bab wrote

Eh. The other executives know. Mostly those people know also and eventually take other gigs.

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not_creative1 t1_iwtq4cv wrote

… this happens a lot.

Many companies have anonymous reporting system for your managers and I have seen managers get fired because of bad reviews from their employees

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5kM6v2FMKfN8WU6 t1_iwtw2sq wrote

Idk what reality this is in but executives/managers get fired all the time by THEIR managers. Any company with over 100 people has performance reviews

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JoyousGamer t1_iwulu0d wrote

Actually in various companies they do. There is reviews of managers, your managers direct superior, and those above them.

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phdoofus t1_iwv5oos wrote

IBM - nope

Intel - nope

HPE - nope

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JoyousGamer t1_ixd4hir wrote

Well sounds like they are broken then. Also various does not mean all as there are orgs out there poorly setup and poorly run.

If you go over to some of the workplace subs you will see plenty of companies that are run terribly.

In my career this has always been a standard I have run across and I work in tech. Heck where I started my career they only did company wide reviews of Sr Director and up otherwise how teams were run were left up to that specific manager/director decision.

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ShakaUVM t1_iwvw5oh wrote

>Nobody ever asks the workers which executives and senior managers are 'low performing'

Whenever there's budget cuts in the Navy it's never the admiral's yacht that is cut

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iws58iw wrote

You know you could have literally googled "do Google employees review their managers" before you just made up nonsense right? Is that really too much to ask?

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NoLogonServAvailable t1_iws6vj4 wrote

If it's anything like most manager reviews, your manager will find out from his manager that the "anonymous" bad review came from you. Hope you don't get PIPed shortly after that.. It's a big club and you ain't in it.

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iwsf8he wrote

I think you severely underestimate how employee friendly tech is. I’d be extremely surprised if giving your manager a bad review put you at serious risk of retaliation at Google or similar.

Anecdotally I do actually work in management at a small tech firm, and when I got a mediocre review for an area of my work, I just worked on getting better at that area instead of trying to retaliate, since that would be dumb and bad for everyone involved.

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rontrussler58 t1_iws8nub wrote

You know there are no laws saying a large corporation has to allow subordinates to do skip-level reviews. C-suite could just not do them if they didn’t value the data so doing them in such a way that causes retaliation and bad blood is extremely counterproductive. Not saying it never happens but I’ve been working for a fortune 50 tech company for almost a decade and have never heard of such a thing.

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NoLogonServAvailable t1_iwsdkxv wrote

>You know there are no laws saying a large corporation has to allow subordinates to do skip-level reviews.

So what is the point of this statement? No one was discussing laws we were discussing how employees won't give bad feedback for their managers because they risk getting fired when the manager finds out.

​

>C-suite could just not do them if they didn’t value the data so doing them in such a way that causes retaliation and bad blood is extremely counterproductive.

They use the data to find out who to get rid of and what pay raises to give out for the year. Companies like Amazon are constantly hiring and firing people and they use this information for exactly that. See if you can grab some person that just got out of college and offer them a large paycheck and stock options (that take 4 years to fully vest) you can run them dry and burn them out after 2 years with a PIP and save the company a boatload of money from not having to give out the stocks year 3/4. Seen this happen sooo many times it wasn't funny how they play with peoples lives. Even Jeff Bezos thinks people are inherently lazy so they have policies in place to turn over people easily.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-bezos-belief-all-workers-are-lazy-2021-6

"He pointed to a short-term employment model and performance trackers to keep workers on their toes."

​

>Not saying it never happens but I’ve been working for a fortune 50 tech company for almost a decade and have never heard of such a thing.

Good for your company, I've worked for a Fortune 5 tech company for 6 years and this is pretty common place and I have plenty of data points that show that this does happen. Just because you never heard it or never experienced it doesn't mean it doesn't happen and you don't get to tell other people their experiences don't matter...

I once had a manager ask me "If you walked into an elevator and Jeff Bezos was in it and he asked you What you did for the company this year? what would you say?" my response would be "Sorry I am currently on lunch break right now".

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DeusExMcKenna t1_iws8pip wrote

We’re gonna need to talk about your, checks notes, pieces of flair.

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phdoofus t1_iws72ro wrote

How many major companies have I worked for in 25 years? About 10-12. How many have asked me to review the executives and senior managers? None. There's some 'Evidence Based' information for you.

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iwsfkas wrote

Did you work at Google? The company this entire thread is about lmao.

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phdoofus t1_iwslal1 wrote

And I made a generic comment about companies. Read smarter not...whatever it is you're doing. When was the last time you got to put an executive on a PIP? Never? Yeah, thought so. If you're allowed to 'review' executives it's like 'student government'. It's there to give you the illusion that you have some say in what's going on.

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iwsrp5w wrote

I mean obviously you wouldn’t yourself be able to directly put them on a PIP, since at most companies it’s outside your jurisdiction.

But your review could prompt the people above them / the board to put them on a PIP or similar.

The board represents the people that own the company so obviously authority flows from there, but that doesn’t mean there is no upwards flow of feedback.

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palindrome_cardinal t1_iws7hnq wrote

This is fair I just can’t resist a dogpile of downvotes

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_iwsfhqe wrote

Don’t worry I don’t mind. Going against populist drivel on 95% of subreddits is asking for it.

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Blastie2 t1_iwsalgs wrote

This is old news. The new performance review system was implemented like 8 months ago. The bottom rating is still going to be reserved for the bottom 2%, but there's a new rating for like 5% of people who are somewhat near there and they'll be getting the same compensation as before the new system. This article just exists to get clicks since other companies have been doing mass layoffs.

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holypig t1_iwt5jpu wrote

Yup, they actually shrink the 2 - 36 group to 2 - 5 and grew the middle rating to make up. It's completely better in every way, and like you said it's 8 month old news. What a trash article

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n21lv t1_iwsut9d wrote

You're probably correct. There's no mention of DORA or anything even remotely related to it, as well as no explanation about why those people are "low performers"

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Bullen-Noxen t1_iwuhraz wrote

Thanks for calling them out on their bullshit. Both the web site, & the poster for wanting clicks/karma.

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don51181 t1_iwsexwg wrote

Google has 139k total employees so that's probably better than a lot of companies.

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Chubacca t1_iwscdsr wrote

6% of a company being low performers doesn't seem crazy unreasonable...

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thekeanu t1_iwuf6ug wrote

Depends.

Imagine a team of entirely high performers. That team still has to designate the lowest 6% as low performers and then punish em accordingly.

That's not a good system.

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Chubacca t1_iwvg1hy wrote

Of course. And it's clearly intended to gear up for layoffs. At a massive, massive company though, it's hard to tell exactly how many low performers there are, and 6% is not a crazy number, especially for a company like Google.

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thekeanu t1_iwvwpp8 wrote

It's not just for layoffs. They and many other companies run this type of system on the reg.

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Chubacca t1_iwvz58f wrote

As it says in the article, they already ran this type of system at 2%, they're just switching it to 6%.

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thekeanu t1_iww0lc4 wrote

I'm just saying that the system of targeting even high performers exists in the normal system which is an obvious flaw and could be viewed as "unreasonable" in reference to your original comment.

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Chubacca t1_iww586z wrote

It's impossible to know whether or not 6% includes people who actually are high performers without knowing the internals within Google. That's why I said "doesn't seem crazy unreasonable" not "is definitely not unreasonable".

It's all relative anyways, and it depends on what you're looking for. The bottom 6% of NBA players could be considered "low performers" in that context even if they would be considered "high performers".

The problem with this methodology is you could have some teams with lots of high performers and some teams with lots of low performers, and the teams with high performers could be forced to mark people as low performers who are actually better than people on other teams.

The "right" way to do that would be to say "here is what we assess to be low performance" and then work backward and figure out what percentage of people fit within that category. However, this can be really difficult as measuring performance is very qualitative and by definition relative.

Because we, as outsiders, have very imperfect information here, it's very difficult to make an assessment of "is this a terrible policy" without knowing what they plan to do with the low performers and how they're assessing what is a low performer. I'm not even sure if it's an "each department cuts 6%" or 6% is just an approximation of what their new methodology will produce.

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thekeanu t1_iwwdszg wrote

It all depends on the details, yes, and like you I'm speculating and adding scenarios that could make it unreasonable.

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Vic_Vinegar-_- t1_iws5z1f wrote

Anyone that has dealt with Google “support” for Ad Tech is not surprised by this.

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WJ90 t1_iws8iar wrote

Quelle surprise that Google thinks it’s flush with low performers. Anyone who has been paying attention to their graveyard lately can clearly see their worst performers aren’t exactly ICs. Looking at you messaging and payments execs.

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Desperate_Resource38 t1_iwszg4w wrote

At Google there's a culture of promotions and accolades being handed out for starting innovative shit, but not much for properly maintaining those initiatives. It's why they have all these products that die after two or three years, and why some of their executives made the jump from IC to management without knowing how the hell to sustainably manage. A good engineer can almost always be a good manager, but there are definitely some who simply can't or who don't get a proper crucible before being placed in a management role.

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chaos449 t1_iwtnk11 wrote

If you think most good engineers can be good managers.... I don't think you've worked with many engineers. A good portion lack soft skills and other management skills... And can very good at technical

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oldcreaker t1_iwsfuox wrote

Under the new system, managers have been asked to categorize 6% of employees, or roughly 10,000 people, as low performers in terms of their impact for the business, according to people with knowledge of the system.

I've seen this system before - it's the one that if your group are all outstanding performers, some of them get dumped anyway, while in another group that's all underperforming, most of them keep their jobs.

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WayneKrane t1_iwsn8si wrote

My first job did this and managers just rated the employees that were their friends high and everyone else low. Still salty a women my boss was best friends with got a very high rating while I got average. I consistently was double or triple her metrics. I asked my manager about it and she said she had to rate me that way to make her numbers work (ie. she would have to rate her friend lower than me). Couldn’t leave that place fast enough.

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JoyousGamer t1_iwunikm wrote

That's when you report it and get a paper trail if you can ahead of time saving it to a personal device.

3

Independent-Disk-390 t1_iwu5aqx wrote

Yuuup. Had the same happen to me. In my experience mid-management is often at their limits of comprehension. Many are terrified of losing their cush jobs, so the ignorant typically gaslight and mess around with things like tone-policing and micro-management. Such behavior is always to the detriment of their team and really is just kicking the can down the road, so to speak.

Edit: Oh by the way, if you’re high up enough you’re doing their job for the most part anyway.

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dungone t1_iwv3g1d wrote

> she said she had to rate me that way to make her numbers work

In order to give her friend a higher score, she had to give you a lower score. Don't you get it? You should blame numbers.

2

Dont-know-you t1_iwt2ri9 wrote

The “quota” applies only at an org of 2k+ (or may be 1k+, I need to re-read it). There was a similar system in the past without any guidelines. Historically that was 2-5%. Google s rolling out a new system and they are saying the bottom 2 ratings are expected to be about 6%. Given what I saw over the past many many years at Google, it won’t be an issue. But the company sucks when it comes to communicating this to the employees and causes stress to low level managers until they go through one or two cycles.

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toogloo1 t1_iwtng02 wrote

Or, you hire below your standards and scapegoat that person so nobody in your team that works well gets wacked.

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ALimpHotdog t1_iwsb4aa wrote

Next article will read “google plans to lay off 10,000 employees”

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jeffyoulose t1_iwsqa8j wrote

I think it might be the next couple of weeks. Seems like the companies are taking turns to lay off people.

3

SenatorCrabHat t1_iwso8ro wrote

I find this funny though because also, in my experience, employees may not be set up for success. They may be consistently blocked by pending decisions way up the ladder, but not allowed the agency to proceed with work they think will be impactful. You gotta think a place like Google is just FILLED to the gills with politics, silos, and blockers.

15

slokenny t1_iwsjldl wrote

May we all piss on Jack Welch’s grave for this abomination.

12

Special_FX_B t1_iwskbln wrote

I never once had an average performance appraisal, let alone a low one. I was, however, axed by the almighty shareholders. In a large group meeting several months earlier when I asked the ‘downsizing’ executive if she could guarantee that I would not lose my job she said yes in response. It has nothing to do with performance. It has everything to do with eliminating older, more highly compensated employees to reduce expenses and satisfy those aforementioned insatiable, greedy fucking shareholders.

12

WayneKrane t1_iwsntiw wrote

Yup, happened to my mom. She spent 25 years at a company, won tons of awards and was highly praised and sought after for her work. She and many of her other older coworkers were slowly laid off to bring in cheaper young workers. Many were going to bring a class action lawsuit but my mom doesn’t like to rock the boat and she easily found a job making way more so whatever.

5

Special_FX_B t1_iwsv5vt wrote

25 years for me, too. Bad timing because it occurred as the country was about to enter the Bush crash in 2007. The weasels did their cuts in relatively small batches to avoid scrutiny. They had downsizing people sneaking around but we knew who they were. In a way it was comical. Not Office Space Bobs-like, those two doofuses were out in the open. I never recovered financially but I’m OK. I fear for my kids generation and especially my two young grandchildren. I believe there will be relatively many less people living comfortably. Every time I see the chart showing the transfer of wealth upward from about 1980 until now I am reminded of the drastic difference in compensation compared with the cost of everything, but especially housing. I just saw a headline today about one of the big Wall Street firms planning to buy 1 billion of housing. Their greed is unbounded.

8

Lode25 t1_iwsmx1p wrote

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Have a look at Enron's rank and yank policies of yore. Microsoft tried something similar in the early 2010's. The policies are meant to retain the best workers but in reality all it does is retain the most ruthless pieces of shit. In Microsoft's case most people spent their working time trying to make their colleagues look bad rather than doing any actual work. In my opinion, Google's HR is bristling with fucking idiots who can't be bothered to look at the results of the stupid policies.

11

SomeDudeNamedMark t1_iwsz0wt wrote

Hi. I'm a Microsoft employee that survived/thrived during that period and I'm not a ruthless piece of shit. Also didn't do it by tearing down others.

Mostly kept my head down (though I'd rock the boat if it was really necessary) and did my job. Also helped that I took ownership of some legacy code that was critical to some part of our team, and there was zero documentation for it. So basically I made myself indispensable! :)

But many of the more recent Microsoft layoffs have not been performance-based. Instead, they just decide to end entire projects. Even if you're a rock star, you still have to go through a round of interviews if you want to move to another team.

5

Celtictussle t1_iwtdk74 wrote

Most people are shocked to learn that sitting down and working 40 hours a week legitimately makes you a rockstar in most workplaces.

3

WorkingClassWarrior t1_iwst5xl wrote

Funny to assume HR has any say in these policies. HR is just an extension the the C Suite. So any shitty policies you see coming from HR are usually the C suite.

3

Desperate_Resource38 t1_iwt1xs3 wrote

Since Satya Microsoft has gotten much mellower in terms of performance ratings maybe to a fault; 80% of interns get full time offers and I personally know of a team of five senior engineers making collectively over a million in base pay alone whose sole collective responsibility is managing the UI buttons for a fairly minor product. The issue in an industry that actually produces stuff (as opposed to creating like financial instruments from pre-existing assets and selling those) is that it's IC-based, and sometimes it's justifiable resource-wise to just keep on senior engineers that you know for a fact will be useful in the future even if you have nothing for them to do right now rather than go through the hoops to find actually good new ones at that level if and when the need arises. Balmer didn't understand this and tried to run it like a financial firm instead of a tech company, which I'm honestly shocked didn't kill it altogether. I think what Google is doing isn't what Enron was trying to do; what Enron execs wanted was to light a fire under their employees asses, what Google is doing is judging long-term growth and whether it's worth it to keep on engineers that aren't really necessary to whatever product they're working on right now. Not excusing them, just saying big tech is often pretty bloated and often prints enough money that it's not an issue for them to keep people on rather than hiring new, but things seem to be getting bad enough to the point that they feel the need to take such measures.

3

Fenix42 t1_iwtror5 wrote

It can take over a year to onboard a new engineer. That process takes time from your current engineers to interview and then train the new person. That can mean over a year of lowered productivity before you break even or see an uptick in output.

That is why it's cheaper to retain people who are already trained on your code.

2

double297 t1_iwt3xfq wrote

I heard Twitter is hiring....

11

hackingdreams t1_iwskp4b wrote

They are desperate to get Google in on this layoff scheme of theirs... like that will somehow fix the numbers on these corporations.

Please, fuck off already Wall Street. Go back to playing with GME and AMC.

8

beatvox t1_iws3i5o wrote

Is 10,000 the amount of workers added during the pandemic growth? Facebook, Amazon, Google..

6

Nickjet45 t1_iws76hq wrote

Amazon added a lot more than 10,000, same with Facebook

9

beatvox t1_iwt1wlf wrote

How much more, curious

1

Nickjet45 t1_iwt37xd wrote

I know meta doubled their headcount, Amazon usually has around 15,000 interns (2021 numbers). 75% of them get an offer, let’s say only 60% accept. (I.e 60% return to full time, probably higher but can’t confirm.)

That’s 9000/year. Factor in industry hire and new grad hire, wouldn’t be surprised if they were hiring 15,000/year.

2

FleaBottoms t1_iwtb1x8 wrote

Our teams always met deadlines and QA goals TOGETHER. I rated them as all meeting/exceeding expectations and had one I wanted I rated an Outstanding (highest) rating.
I was directed to rate 1 as a poor performer, 2 as not meeting expectations and the rest as meeting expectations. The Outstanding was not allowed because it would look badly and a person on another team doing completely different work was “tagged” for that rating.

6

terrymr t1_iwsedd6 wrote

Bean counters sucking all the joy out of another workplace.

5

Le_Woof t1_iwsamw0 wrote

Layoffs incoming!

2

Uncertn_Laaife t1_iwsc28j wrote

Dominos are falling. Everyone’s got an excuse to layoff now.

2

WayneKrane t1_iwsnh33 wrote

Yup, easy to blame “the economy” so investors don’t get worried. It’s like joining in on a riot when they start looting so you can get some free shit.

5

SideburnSundays t1_iwtjp6q wrote

Like the C-suites who sit on their asses all day doing nothing?

2

RatInaMaze t1_iwuclml wrote

The second golden age is over. Gone will be the three squares a day of truffles and bean bag chairs. It’s only a matter of time before the FAANG employees are wearing ties and shoved into gray cubicles in the name of profit.

2

vroart t1_iwuwf4n wrote

A lot of middle management

2

Gideon_Effect t1_iws8q8y wrote

If you have to call google for gmail or any other issue then you would understand the rating.

1

ndudeck t1_iwslyg1 wrote

I get that is a lot if people, but it could also be true.

1

Rogendo t1_iwt3rvh wrote

Sounds like a convoluted way to figure out who to fire

1

sansaman t1_iwt4fxu wrote

Fire the execs. The ship has sunk under their leadership.

1

WAT0020 t1_iwtg2lo wrote

I will Google THAT

1

[deleted] t1_iwu1rrf wrote

Where do we get to rate the executive’s I think I know what score they might get

1

spaphytwitch t1_iwuhf7k wrote

See now that’s how you do it. You don’t cut pay per investors you get rid of dead weight

1

sisqo_certification t1_iwujo39 wrote

Nobody in positions of power, of course. Decision makers couldn’t possibly be responsible for bad decisions that were made.

1

TheEvilBlight t1_iwunufv wrote

“Migrate to new thing: the next stadia, the next et. Etc “

1

Cryowatt t1_iwuv4ct wrote

Time to unionize.

1

YawaruSan t1_iwvoi85 wrote

When do we get to sort other professions by performance metrics, cause I think there are a bunch of jobs with low performers in high paying positions across all industries, seems unfair to only look at coders in such a way because it’s convenient.

1

dopadelic t1_iwy0ayi wrote

Let's be honest here, it would be surprising if there wasn't at least 6% of their workforce are coasters and rest&vesters. One only needs to look to Reddit to see how popular is the idea of taking home a Google salary while doing as little work as possible.

Only except reddit wants you to think that no one deserves to get fired either. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

1

PMzyox t1_iwscisv wrote

well shiiiiiiiit

−2

staovajzna2 t1_iwscuao wrote

Doing what you expected of them instead of wasting their life for you...? Dear God no....

−2

DocPeacock t1_iwshd11 wrote

Good for those 10k. Get that Google money and do good enough.

−2

No_Category_2039 t1_iwtbqcu wrote

Google is one of the worst sites, they steal constantly and abuse your data.

−2

Elliott2 t1_iwsqtkm wrote

They probably are. So many over employed tech companies

−3

[deleted] t1_iwsb5pv wrote

[deleted]

−13

bauerplustrumpnice t1_iwsclsx wrote

If you think that Google's working environment "sucks," I have some bad news for you about literally every other company...

10

dylanr1221 t1_iws5bu4 wrote

But working from home makes people more productive. Maybe Elon should buy Google too

−16

jeie8r83hiww7766poop t1_iws7g2l wrote

Hahahahahhahahahahahahahhauauaha

Google is the world's most evil company!

−16