this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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This is the typical Jack Welch stack-ranking nonsense. The theory is that there will always be a bell curve or similar distribution that requires a certain percent (Welch said 10%, but it's all over the map) be cut while new hires are constantly brought on.
It kills morale and forces employees into short-term impact patterns to avoid the constant churn of cuts. It also means that performative work rather than actual substantive work is encouraged, since the appearance of productivity in whatever metric is stack-ranked is all that matters.
Finally, it encourages people to do the minimum, because the alternative is to compete for bonuses that are only going to the people who meet the highest appearance of productivity metrics, which doesn't correlate strongly with actual productivity, just as actual productivity (in terms of "producing" output) is also not strongly correlated with value (such as by knowing enough to efficiently complete tasks such that you are not appearing to "produce," due to being extremely efficient).
Oh yeah they called them "STAR awards" or something to try and make it look like some great achievement.
Just did a review and we successfully removed KPIs from our project by pointing out that we could hit the targets and cost the company money or we could operate as required instead of trying to please metrics that, while relevant at a surface level, are impacted by external forces.
Will you talk to my bosses? They're addicted to arbitrary KPIs and rank & spank.
"I absolutely can operate to lines of code per month but until we agree detailed targets with our client we will be building roads to nowhere. Instead we could be using this time to focus on process improvement, documentation and acclimarising new staff"
I dont build roads or write code but this the gist.
Aalso our project is long term, somewhat changeable and dependent on industrial agreements outside our team.
This kind of system is how you get the consistency and excellence that microsoft are known for.
Great for creating a lot of churn and quick-fix make-work. Rather than deploying a single comprehensive solution to a persistent problem, just take credit for fixing the symptoms over and over and over again.
If the goal of the individual is a measurable delta of positive change, then it would be beneficial to the individual to cultivate problems now to solve and get recognized for future accomplishments? It would be much easier to solve a problem that you know intimately, because you were the original cause.
And much harder to replace you with someone unfamiliar with the problem.
i worked at fb a long time ago, it was already exactly like how you describe. everyone was optimizing for their performance review—juicing metrics and prioritizing for the short term. accountability only existed in a 6-month cycle.