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Sufficient_Series154 t1_iwsqrfb wrote

Ummm.... thats what managers do. As an exec for a large financial services corp I had to do this annually.

Happens everywhere, why is this news?

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be0wulfe t1_iwst1tt wrote

Because stack ranking is supposed to be dead as a doornail, but Amazon keeps hanging on to it

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CobraPony67 t1_iwt2w7k wrote

Yes. It is like having the NBA dream team but you stack rank them and the lowest have to go even though they are all great.

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CappinPeanut t1_iwuk49r wrote

If they need to trim fat and reduce their headcount, is there a better way than stack ranking? If you had to cut players from the dream team, you’re certainly not going to cut MJ.

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tlsr t1_iwuy6yn wrote

I worked at a company that does this, year round, regardless of environment -- through good times and bad.

They are arrogant about why too: they believe there is always someone better than what they have and that someone will always want to work for them (they never explain why this super-hero doesn't currently work for them).

Ironically, this super-hero that they get to join the company is now a potential low performer as well. The circualr logic to this process is stunning.

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CappinPeanut t1_iwuz1et wrote

Yea, my company used to do this year round. It was a horrific and toxic environment. It didn’t last long at all.

But, announcing layoffs and asking managers to rank everyone is a different animal. Performance based cost cutting seems to make the most sense and ranking everyone worst to best is the way to do that.

It sucks any time a company does layoffs, but it’s much better as a one off exercise than as a yearly practice, that’s for sure.

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ginbear t1_iwukfwn wrote

Christian Laettner did suck though.

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hezeus t1_iwsz5rw wrote

Hate to break it to you but most big companies have a flavor of this despite what it’s called.

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be0wulfe t1_iwt2nqi wrote

Fully aware. A significant portion have moved away from it.

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frolie0 t1_iwt4mgf wrote

They have not. At least the 4 I've worked at. I know others at other large companies too and everyone has some form of performance reviews where ratings are applied. Even the ones thst have softened the ratings system still have a poor performer designation.

No company is immune to poor performing employees and any halfway decent manager is going to push out their low performers.

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SlowMotionPanic t1_iwtax9s wrote

Huge difference between stacked/forced ranking and performance reviews.

Stacked ranking is when employees are forced into arbitrary boxes and then the company cuts a certain category loose by termination. Managers will be will told “your team has 10 people, you MUST review and rank someone as a 1 then fire them.” The manager has little choice. Some companies offer leeway if teams are very small, but others like Amazon are cut throat because they haven’t lost massive class action lawsuits from their employees yet like GE and Microsoft did.

Amazon is being very transparent in what they are doing here. They aren’t doing performance reviews. They are cooking the books to cut an arbitrary number of people for performance issues because it sounds better than I ranked layoffs. In this case, they have just instructed managers to forced rank everyone they want laid off into the bottom tier.

Hence forced distribution.

Edit: a key component of forced distribution is that you can technically meet or exceed your company demands and still rank in the bottom tier because company policy forces someone to be there. So a team of high performers who all exceed will have an arbitrary percentage ranked as not meets or equivalent.

This really happens. Companies really get sued. Although probably not in this environment considering corpos have well and truly captured the courts.

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frolie0 t1_iwtef3b wrote

Amazon literally uses a performance system like I described. What's described in the article may be something happening in a specific team, but Amazon uses a company wide performance rating scale.

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PleasantWay7 t1_iwtfuli wrote

No they don’t. At most companies, if your team of 4 people are excellent you rank them as such.

At Amazon one must be marked as not performing m.

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MarionberryIcy5149 t1_iwtnpm3 wrote

Nope - curve applies to orgs of at least 50. A team of 4 would not be required to have one low performer.

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frolie0 t1_iwuajgs wrote

I literally work at Amazon in corporate. You are wrong.

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwuk548 wrote

Yea that's why I was surprised by this article

I haven't noticed the use of stack rankings in my org in my time here

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be0wulfe t1_iwt9at6 wrote

There's a difference between measuring performance and stack ranking.

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hezeus t1_iwtanu4 wrote

What’s a significant portion? Which companies?

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drysart t1_iwu19z4 wrote

Stack ranking was always intended to be used when a company needs to slim down its workforce and wants to make sure it gets rid of the lowest performers; but the business world cargo-culted it into being used for regular performance reviews when lowering headcount wasn't the goal, a task which it is absolutely awful for.

Business is in the middle of waking up and deciding it's worthless as a general evaluation system; but it's still very good at its intended purpose, and that's what Amazon appears to be using it for here.

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jwizzle444 t1_iwt4oey wrote

It’s very active and alive. Never stopped.

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RunninADorito t1_iwt6ciy wrote

I can't think of a tech company that doesn't do this.

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Temby t1_iwtl78q wrote

Microsoft removed it in 2013. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303460004579193951987616572.

It created an infamously toxic culture of people and teams withholding information from each other, and working against each other so they would be ranked comparatively higher.

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[deleted] t1_iwtpofn wrote

[deleted]

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Temby t1_iwtrwx6 wrote

Thanks, the downvotes are weird. It's not like it's a subjective opinion, it's a thing that happened. I worked for EDS, which was similar and had its own set of culture problems.

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwukbpm wrote

EDS?

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Temby t1_iwump8d wrote

Electronic Data Systems. It was an large international IT provider based out of Texas, and founded by Ross Perot who tried to run for president. Unfortunately EDS was gobbled up by HP in 2009.

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwywbf4 wrote

Yea weird I did a Google search for "EDC" and none of this came up

"EDC company" worked though

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Temby t1_iwyxg1t wrote

EDS not EDC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Data_Systems

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwyxt96 wrote

Yea sorry I meant EDS

If you google EDS, that wikipedia entry doesnt up in the initial results

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Temby t1_iwyy8x9 wrote

All good :) To be fair to google, it hasn't existed since 2009.

HP bought it and soon rebranded it to HP Enterprise services (HPE). Then I think HP sold it off as DXC.

EDS were a behemoth of a tech company in the day, owned a bunch of private aircraft. They ran into some big financial turmoil, got a new CEO who started turning things around before it got bought out by HP in what is considered one of the biggest blunders in tech history. Bit of a rollercoaster ride for the company.

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwyye4l wrote

Yea this is weird but I'm trying to improve my searching skills

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Temby t1_iwyz48f wrote

In my earlier post I mentioned Ross Perot and Texas in relation to EDS. If you Google:

EDS Ross Perot

or

EDS Texas

You should get that wiki article as the top result also!

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwyzo0s wrote

Mannn I should have added Ross Perot to the search :(

Stuff like this helps for work

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Temby t1_iwyzxuw wrote

This is how we learn! As an IT professional I would often joke with people that my job was being a professional googler... You'll get the hang of it.

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwz04dm wrote

That's what I realized too but there isnt any training on this, is there?

Just a lot of practice

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Temby t1_iwz0qxn wrote

I'm not sure if there's training, it's just something I picked up over too many years on the internet.

At the most basic level, you want to use all relevant key words. Lets say you needed find what year the Barcelona Olympics was held. You wouldn't just google "Olympics", you could google both words. Maybe you would even google "Barcelona Olympics Year".

Now lets say you needed to know what year the movie "Taxi Driver" was released. What would you search for?

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwz12sw wrote

"Taxi Driver movie release year" ?

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Temby t1_iwz1gaf wrote

>Taxi Driver movie release year

I copy/pasted that into Google and it told me the year, so I'd say that's perfect :)

​

So besides throwing key words at google, here's a few more advanced points.

Firstly, quotes. There is a difference between Googling

Taxi Driver

and

"Taxi Driver"

When you put quotes around a word of a phrase, Google will only return that EXACT match. If you don't use quotes, Google will often try to substitute words with other words of a similar meaning. So use quotes when you know exactly what you want, or you have an exact phrase you want to match!

​

Secondly, you can use the word "OR" to allow Google to use multiple different words. So you could Google:

"Chocolate OR Vanilla" cake

And it will return you both results for chocolate cake and vanilla cake.

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Truetree9999 OP t1_iwz1nrm wrote

Yup do you use AWS?

Theres a lot of this stuff w AWS cloudwatch that I do for work

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Temby t1_iwz2qh1 wrote

Sadly not, AWS has the largest market share and is great to know, but I worked for large corporate and government clients where Azure was the only technology they used.

FYI, using quotes is very useful when you have an error message. 99% of the time you want to search for the 'exact' error and you don't want Google to give you any partial/unrelated matches.

Tip 3: Google's date filter. Lets say a recent vendor hotfix broke something. Filter your google results to the last week or month. With the amount of buggy patches MS release, that one came in handy sometimes.

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Peralton t1_iwtv112 wrote

Teams would also hire people just to have someone to sacrifice at a later date to keep the rest of the team.

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slow_connection t1_iwsvor3 wrote

Old companies do this but in startups and the tech world it's considered horrendous practice. Plenty of research to back it up.

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Objective-Throat-614 t1_iwswzmx wrote

Maybe but Amazon has known to always do this.

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Ameren t1_iwstqxj wrote

Really? I've never heard of stack ranking at FFRDCs or defense contactors, for instance. It seems really risky to push people out the door en masse like that given it'd invite recruitment from foreign adversaries.

Just to name one example, of course. I'm sure folks from other industries can weigh in.

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Fynn_the_Finger t1_iwsvbp7 wrote

I mean, I wouldn't work any place that required me to stack rank my team. Some jackoff above me would eventually come in and play corporate "hero" and go Jack Welch. I get rid of people who are holding my team back, if everyone is doing a good job, firing people will hurt my team, not help it.

We do software development. I've roughly 20 developers on my team. They're all awesome, and hard to replace. I let two people go over the last year, one just didn't have the skills and wasn't pulling his weight, the other was an abusive asshole who was negatively impacting team morale. We get rid of people on the merits of their behavior, not some arbitrary ranking.

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deathdefyingrob1344 t1_iwsxqoe wrote

Same where I work. If you suck at your job you suck at your job and need to find something better suited. When you have a good team why make some arbitrary ranking system and fuck over a good team. Seems shitty

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VenicePlaya t1_iwt7dwn wrote

Wouldn’t those 2 employees be at the bottom of the rank? Seems like the same outcome.

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Peralton t1_iwtvj0m wrote

Once the inexperienced employees are gone, there's more firings to come. With stack ranking, there's a regular culling of the teams. So at x date one of the good employees will have to be let go in the name of stack ranking.

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justsomeoneSILLY t1_iwuozo6 wrote

Because it is wrong to harm people, and actions like this can devastate the real lives of people and children. As an exec at a large financial services company, why did you fail every year to figure out how many people you actually needed? Your failure caused harm. You were rewarded for that failure. Good fucking luck in whatever happens in the next life. Woof.

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Nemesis_Ghost t1_iwswbz2 wrote

It's news b/c tech companies doing it recently as a precursor towards layoffs. I know my area did it recently with our contract employees b/c we got our funding cut. As long as we had funding we were hiring more & rarely got rid of anybody, even crappy employees simply b/c they could at least do enough to justify their pay. But once we had to reduce team size or number of teams, stack ranking came out & the bottom rungs got cut.

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pohl t1_iwu49nv wrote

Because Wall Street needs to see the headline so the stock will stop sliding. Duh.

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