Microsoft's review system sounds like an even more vicious variety of what Google has, which is more than bad enough to fell a great company.
Google has a bicameral system consisting of (a) manager-assigned "calibration scores" that are the outcome of stack-ranking nonsense and (b) annual peer reviews. It seems like a bicameral review system would be a good thing, by removing career SPOFs. If a bi- or multicameral system is well-designed, that's exactly what you get: multiple paths to success.
Where Google fails it is by making it an AND-gate rather than an OR-gate, even for lateral transfers, much less promotions. (Without good calibration scores, transfer is impossible.) At Google, people need managerial support AND peer support to advance, which means there's endless jockeying for visibility in addition to manager-as-SPOF. It really is the worst of both systems.
In a properly-run company, you have several review signals: peer review, extra-hierarchical work, demonstrated curiosity and will to self-improve, and managerial review. For firing (excluding people who do something outright wrong) the decision should be based an AND-gate. If someone does poorly by his manager AND can't get peer support AND can't find a transfer, then it's time to fire him. Not before. That's how decent companies do it. On the other hand, for title upgrades and pay raises and better projects, decent companies use an OR-gate. If he gets good managerial reviews OR good peer reviews OR has other managers interested in taking him, then treat the employee as successful: give him a decent raise and let him transfer as he wishes.
Now, managerial positions are a bit different. There, you actually want to see strength in several signals before you give someone power over other people. So there's justification for making selection into management be based on an AND-gate. You just really need to be sure that the person can lead. That's different. But title upgrades, pay raises, project allocation, autonomy and transfer opportunities should be based on an OR-gate; if one signal indicates potential for success, move forward. If you can't see this, then you're FAL and you should not be allowed to leave the house without assistance, much less make decisions that affect other people.
Google fucked up its bicameral system by making it an AND-gate for promotions and transfers and an OR-gate for adversity. That's the destruction of what was once a great company. It has cost the software industry billions of dollars worth of value. It sounds like a similar billion-dollar immolation occurred at Microsoft.
Microsoft's system, advanced half a decade or more further in necrosis, seems much the same but worse. It seems like these types of systems get worse over time because more people want to tack on their own shitty ideas as more people develop the system. They're not happy enough with other peoples' pre-existing shitty ideas; they need to make a personal mark on a shitty system by making it noticeably shittier, enough that they hear people complaining about their changes in the cafeteria (which they justify as a good thing because "those people are obviously no good, because good people have nothing to worry about come review time.")
I am glad the Vanity Fair article got published. I have no strong feeling about Microsoft either way, and I have a lot of respect for the great work coming out of Microsoft Research, but it's about time that we see bad HR policies leading to outright exposure and frank humiliation.
There was a joke some years back: what's the difference between Enron and Qwest? Six months.
Now I think it's time for an update. What's the difference between Microsoft and Google? Six years.
Having seen far too much inside the latter (as you did), it seems inevitable. The path has already been blazed, and they are barreling down it just as fast as they can.
FYI: He didn't see much at all inside the latter. His tenure was order of single digit months and he appeared to have his mind made up within a matter of weeks.
Google has one advantage, which is that they have a history of being mediocre at the business game but make great products. Microsoft was great in its heyday at the business game but makes mediocre products. This is an era of technology when a lot of the best things really are free (e.g. PostgreSQL, the best relational database, is open source) and Google is way better adapted to that environment.
It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb.
You are not going to convince anyone by making such a generalized comment about a huge company like MS. Moreover, the comment is just false Microsoft makes good products. C#, Windows 7, Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft SQL, etc.. Even Zune was a decent product that merely failed to find an audience Google makes bad products too; they just vanish when Goog starts cleaning up, while Windows Vista lingers in my CD spindle, like a bad code smell in code I wrote 5 years ago.
Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't been looking at it lately)
I don't use Microsoft's products (100% Linux, Android, iOS and OSX), but I'm not blind to their charms.
I like Postgres, but when I see the tools people use with MSQL, not to mention Oracle, I feel jealous.
> Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't been looking at it lately)
Things like Google apps and other web based mail and calendering services. Employees can accessed them from their Android and iOS devices. And IT people don't have to manage it all.
If you do a feature comparison between Gmail and a 1998 version of Outlook Express, OE wins handily. I've never used Outlook, but I imagine since it was developed by the same company with much of the same needs and it's a much bigger application that a Gmail comparison with Outlook would have the same result.
"It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb."
That's a retarded comment.
Don Syme invented F# while at MSR. When he first created it, it was basically OCaml.NET (well, a very small OCaml subset), just as a proof of concept.
Now (last I checked, which was well over a year ago) it's one of four first-class languages with a full team behind it in DevDiv, enjoying equal support in VS.NET and other dev tools as C#, VC++, and VB.NET.
F# isn't under anyone's thumb; it's a Microsoft product through-and-through.
I'm sure this comment will fall on deaf ears, but please, Michael, try to restrict your comments to things you know something about.
At every company, and in fact in every village, there is both a formal, extraverted, hierarchical organization, and an informal, social, graph-like organization. Much is made of "networking", but I wonder how many understand that the social network is where the real power is.
The hierarchy gets things done that need doing. The social network transcends, not only moving people between divisions and teams within the company, but also between companies. One might even see this as a principle behind the ascendancy of the likes of Facebook, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
Make no mistake, there are people at Microsoft operating to make things better, and the competition, both internal and external, plays a part. We who like to read, like to practice reading the writing on the wall, as we did while focusing on the chalkboard from our desks, now replaced by the whiteboard from our bouncy balls and standing desks. But we also know that a company lives until the last person turns out the light.
How bad HR practices can screw a company is a well known fact.
What isn't so well known is how to run a large, knowlege worker driven company well.
That's why it is so hard to cast Microsoft and Google aside as easily as people seem to. Yes, they are doing all kinds of things wrong. What's amazing is how much they are getting right, given the odds. That's the insight the author of this article seems to lack.
My problem with Jack Welch's "vitality curve" is that it assumes a certain distribution of performance is immutable. It assumes a static world in which 20% deserve to be promoted and rewarded, 10% deserve to be fired, 70% are good where they are.
Now, a large company in 1981 (when Welch became CEO of GE) would have a reasonable amount of deadweight. Why? Because from 1945 to 1981, people were still (culturally, at least) in shell shock from the Great Depression and (a) firing was rare, and (b) people didn't leave stable jobs, even after they'd checked out, and even if there were great opportunities elsewhere. So, as much as I dislike the "greed is good" attitude of the 1980s and the rampant "cost-cutting", I have to admit that most companies circa 1980 could use a bit of cutting, because they'd become pretty bloated and risk-averse.
Firing the bottom 10% of a large, sprawling company in 1981 was probably a good idea. You could do this maybe twice (i.e. two years in a row) and improve the company. The first time, you get a major effect, because the worst people aren't just costing money, but sucking away time and morale: they're dividers rather than mere subtractors. Every divider gone is a good step for a company. Subtractors tend to be just less competent than expected, and they should be improved and given more chances; but don't ever think twice about firing a divider.
But once you've gotten rid of your deadweight, now you're firing half-decent people who just haven't "clicked" yet. After the obvious underperformers (1 to 30% depending on the organization) are gone, the next targets are junior members of underperforming teams (and this is perverse, because the newest people are least responsible for the team problem). This, however, exacerbates the discrepancy between the good and bad teams: before, the differences were of prestige and where one sits in the cafeteria, but now being on the wrong team means getting fired. So, the careerist scramble to get on the right projects and under bosses who can protect their underlings gets a lot more heated. Soon you have the careerism and "warring departments" dynamic that Microsoft is getting raked over the coals for. Google, which has a less severe rank-and-yank (5% get PIP'd, which doesn't usually lead to firing, but only because most Googlers can get jobs anywhere they want with "Google" on their resume) has the careerism but not the warring departments (yet) but the internal mismanangement of Google+ sociology is definitely a step in the wrong direction.
> My problem with Jack Welch's "vitality curve" is that it assumes a certain distribution of performance is immutable. It assumes a static world in which 20% deserve to be promoted and rewarded, 10% deserve to be fired, 70% are good where they are.
Once your organization is large enough, a pretty reasonable case can be made that this distribution remains constant (although in fairness, the argument isn't that 10% deserved to be fired, it's that 10% are underperforming, and you need to quickly determine if that is going to change). It's undoubtedly NOT precise or immutable, but it is probably closer to "correct" than what happens without such practices in place.
> But once you've gotten rid of your deadweight, now you're firing half-decent people who just haven't "clicked" yet.
You are assuming no hiring, acquisitions, and changes in your business that change the value of employee work. That is the typical image of a large, lumbering conglomerate, and part of the point of codifying the practice is to force the organization to step out of the myth.
Michael;
As a correspondent on your many internal rants at Google, I am not surprised, although sad to see that you have progressed to being a disgruntled ex-employee with an axe to grind.
You were not here long enough to experience the situations you claim to have suffered; you did not fit in, in many aspects, and were unwilling to adapt or in any way change your stance or expectations; and the assertions you make are warped to maintain your own position as being "right" and whatever else needed as being "wrong" to fit.
Real Games was a huge missed opportunity. If they'd engaged indie developers to get quality games instead of mainstream Zynga dreck into Google+, they'd have a real singular (non-copyable) draw instead of competing in the red ocean with Facebook as a "Me, too" product.
Google has a bicameral system consisting of (a) manager-assigned "calibration scores" that are the outcome of stack-ranking nonsense and (b) annual peer reviews. It seems like a bicameral review system would be a good thing, by removing career SPOFs. If a bi- or multicameral system is well-designed, that's exactly what you get: multiple paths to success.
Where Google fails it is by making it an AND-gate rather than an OR-gate, even for lateral transfers, much less promotions. (Without good calibration scores, transfer is impossible.) At Google, people need managerial support AND peer support to advance, which means there's endless jockeying for visibility in addition to manager-as-SPOF. It really is the worst of both systems.
In a properly-run company, you have several review signals: peer review, extra-hierarchical work, demonstrated curiosity and will to self-improve, and managerial review. For firing (excluding people who do something outright wrong) the decision should be based an AND-gate. If someone does poorly by his manager AND can't get peer support AND can't find a transfer, then it's time to fire him. Not before. That's how decent companies do it. On the other hand, for title upgrades and pay raises and better projects, decent companies use an OR-gate. If he gets good managerial reviews OR good peer reviews OR has other managers interested in taking him, then treat the employee as successful: give him a decent raise and let him transfer as he wishes.
Now, managerial positions are a bit different. There, you actually want to see strength in several signals before you give someone power over other people. So there's justification for making selection into management be based on an AND-gate. You just really need to be sure that the person can lead. That's different. But title upgrades, pay raises, project allocation, autonomy and transfer opportunities should be based on an OR-gate; if one signal indicates potential for success, move forward. If you can't see this, then you're FAL and you should not be allowed to leave the house without assistance, much less make decisions that affect other people.
Google fucked up its bicameral system by making it an AND-gate for promotions and transfers and an OR-gate for adversity. That's the destruction of what was once a great company. It has cost the software industry billions of dollars worth of value. It sounds like a similar billion-dollar immolation occurred at Microsoft.
Microsoft's system, advanced half a decade or more further in necrosis, seems much the same but worse. It seems like these types of systems get worse over time because more people want to tack on their own shitty ideas as more people develop the system. They're not happy enough with other peoples' pre-existing shitty ideas; they need to make a personal mark on a shitty system by making it noticeably shittier, enough that they hear people complaining about their changes in the cafeteria (which they justify as a good thing because "those people are obviously no good, because good people have nothing to worry about come review time.")
I am glad the Vanity Fair article got published. I have no strong feeling about Microsoft either way, and I have a lot of respect for the great work coming out of Microsoft Research, but it's about time that we see bad HR policies leading to outright exposure and frank humiliation.