Grumpy Coworker

Tag: performance

  • Stack Shanking

    Stack ranking (see Vitality Curve)

    Constantly replacing (or threatening replacement of) the bottom performers on an annual basis seems like incremental optimization. So you get two classes of performers replaced: Ones in a long term slump and ones that are persistent performance problems/bad fits. If you’re looking at machinery, then being unable to distinguish between the temporarily malfunctioning and the permanently broken is of no major consequence. But with humans, if they are temporarily malfunctioning due to life circumstances, personal issues, or recovering from burnout, you’ve just discarded someone who likely has institutional knowledge, established relationships, and could return to being a high performer.

    The real problem is that stack ranking treats your workforce like a statistical distribution that must maintain its shape regardless of actual performance. Got a team of eight excellent engineers? Sorry, two of them are now “bottom performers” by definition. Hired nothing but rockstars this year? Congratulations, some of your rockstars are now officially mediocre.

    This creates perverse incentives. Smart employees learn to avoid teams with other high performers. Why join the infrastructure team full of senior engineers when you could join the feature team with a couple of passengers? You’ll rank higher, and ranking is what matters at review time.

    The statistical absurdity compounds when you realize that the bottom 10% getting cut this year might have been middle-of-the-pack last year, and could be top performers next year—but they’ll never get the chance because we needed to satisfy our quota of ritualistic firings. We’re not optimizing for performance; we’re optimizing for the appearance of optimization, which is a very different thing.

    Meanwhile, the stack ranking process itself consumes enormous amounts of management time that could be spent on actual work. Managers spend weeks arguing over whether Sarah deserves a 3 or a 4, while the real problems—unclear requirements, technical debt, process inefficiencies—remain unaddressed.

    And let’s talk about what happens to team dynamics. The moment you tell people they’re competing against their teammates for survival, collaboration dies. Why would I help you solve that gnarly bug when it might make you rank higher than me? Why would I share that clever solution when keeping it to myself might be the difference between keeping my job and losing it?

    Stack ranking is management by spreadsheet, the corporate equivalent of deciding which child to abandon based on their last report card.

  • Creative Writing for Business

    banner Shakespeare
    Image via Wikipedia

    It seems like the greatest skill that many rely on to get through their careers is creative writing.

    Most jobs start with a resume, in which you may have to creatively explain how your dark periods, lack of qualifications, and employment gaps don’t make you a less desirable candidate that all the people with creative resumes.

    If you’re in a place which provides a peer feedback mechanism, you may need creative writing skills to critique a coworker without completely demolishing that person.

    If you’re required to write your own performance appraisal, you will need to strike the balance between accuracy and best story possible. I believe this genre is called “historical fiction”.

    Finally, every day you have to respond to an email from a customer or coworker who’s out-of-line, you have to respond creatively.

    Forget all the business and formal writing classes. You need well-developed creative writing skills to succeed.

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  • Risk Taking and Startup Mentality in a Large Organization

    Can a large organization really encourage the risk taking and game changing thinking that a small business or startup does?

    What if large team performance is very much like a well-diversified portfolio, but in the sense that the high performing ideas get offset by the stable performing ideas and horribly performing ideas.  The consensus ideas tend toward the mean of the group.  The larger the organization, the closer the sample is to the general population, and the more likely that the results will tend toward the mean, i.e., mediocrity.

    By contrast, a small business or team is going to be a less diversified sample of the population.  With less diversification of ideas, performance becomes concentrated.  This increases the possibilities of a spectacular failure as well as of a spectacular success.

    The advantage of this quick success or death is that failure becomes obvious.  In a large organization, the slow death may be enough for the organization to continue on its path for decades, until their business is completely gone.

    Think of this as the difference between investing your 401(k) in CDs, bond index funds, or maybe even index funds [large organization] vs. picking a single company to throw money into each year [small team/business].  In the former choices, you will get higher performance only by sheer volume, and yet, even the CDs seem like they’re gaining in value all the time.  30 years later, you will have anywhere from the low end of mediocre performance to the high end.

    In investing in a single company each year, you may end up with a boom or bust scenario, but you’ll have opened up the possibility of performance outside of the “mediocre” or “average” range.

    The bottom line is, the smaller the sample size, the larger the performance swings can be.  Would a large team really even want those performance swings if they were possible?