I haven't seen much backstabbing either, but what I have seen is plenty of people acting way differently than they would if the stack ranking curve doesn't exist.

People are constantly doing stuff to make them "visible" instead of doing what is best for the project. How many features do people fight nail and tooth for, that should be cut, just because if they aren't in the product they won't have anything to show for their work when review time comes around?

People are terrified of making decisions, because if they make a bad one, it's going to look poorly when they're ranked. I don't know if you've noticed this, but our managers tend to give "guidance" rather than outright telling us what to do. That way when something goes wrong, it isn't their fault. They didn't say we had to do it the wrong way and it's our fault for not bringing up that it was wrong sooner.

The first year I was here, I didn't think anything of the stack ranking. It was just one of those evils of working at a huge company. Then I started to notice that people were just doing weird stuff. Calling pointless meetings, making big stinks over small things, and just doing weird things just to create more work for themselves. I realized all of that was just so people could have more bullet points on their list of accomplishments at the end of the year.

Sure, killing the curve won't solve everything and I think there is a lot of truth to what you're saying about not valuing teamwork. I just think that killing the stack ranking is a BIG step in the right direction.

The visibility thing is an excellent point: I've been told before that I need to work on more visible projects. But when I work on very visible projects I get feedback like "provide more leadership".

This reminds me very much of the article the other day, "You're only getting the nice feedback": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712289

The intersection of requirements for visibility and prominent project get even more interesting when attempting to cross bands.

Isn't it the case the stacked ranking exacerbated the backstabbing issue?

I see this move overall as a positive one for Microsoft - without removing the perverse rewards to screw over your teammates and other teams, the actual cultural fix can't take place.

I think the culture will shift soon - Microsoft, for more than a decade, had no real competitors. They made more money each year whether they executed (see Win2k) or not (see Vista). Consequently, their biggest threat was actually internal. Stacked ranking enforced this, and prevented internal response.

Now that situation is changing (or has changed). Microsoft is looking at actual competition in the form of Apple and Google as mobile and search erode the desktop. On the datacenter side, Amazon and other cloud provider are threatening Microsoft's server profits.

When the heat gets strong enough, there will be a unifying force within the company (or it'll just crumble - personally don't think that's the case).

My point was that no, I don't think stack ranking provides a greater impetus to backstabbing your coworkers than this sort of vague compensation model. In fact, I think a continuous model may lead to more backstabbing than exists now.

Currently, I go into a bucket - let's say I'm a two, for instance - and all the twos get the same compensation. Can I backstab somebody so that I get a two and they get a three? Maybe.

But if we remove the buckets and we have some continuity, where now if my coworker outperformed me and we were both twos... now this coworker just straight up outperformed me. I'm more inclined to want to stab that person in the back so that I'm better, since being almost as good isn't valuable anymore.

Now, it's possible that we'll end up with stack ranking all over again. The previous compensation before the current stack ranking system put you in a bucket from 5-1 where 5 was good and 1 was bad. So... it turns out that we don't change this very much even when we do change things.

In the world outside of stack ranking, you aren't winning/losing against your peers, you are being paid what you are worth. Backstabbing somebody else does not change your worth, it just makes them less valuable than you. So your salary does not change, theirs just goes down.

Far more importantly, I have spent my 25 year career in non-stack ranked companies, and I have never seen the behavior you describe. Yet just about everyone at stack ranked companies report back stabbing behavior. I think empiricism wins over speculation.

It doesn't really matter. Most of the time you don't know which bucket you're going to end up in, so constant back stabbing is the modus operandi to stay on top. I'm more curious about the absence of the formal review cycle in the new model.

>But if we remove the buckets and we have some continuity...

But this is still stack ranking. What you are describing is still an ordinal system where employees had to be ranked in order from 'best' to 'worst'.

As I understand it, Microsoft are proposing to remove any sort of relative ranking between team members and instead reward for actual productivity.

I'm saying that: there is a fixed bonus pool for employees. All of this bonus pool will be allocated. Said bonus pool will be allocated in a merit-based way such that those who are deemed "better" get more than those who are deemed "worse".

So yes, employees will indeed be sorted from 'best' to 'worst' by some metric. This is pretty much true of every performance-based evaluation system, no?

Removing the "stack ranking" system refers to removing the 20%/70%/10% buckets from 1-5 that we currently sort into, not the fact that we're doing a merit-based reward.

Thus my point remains: if our review system is a problem (and certainly a great many people seem to think that it is) then this seems like a tweak on the system, not an overhaul. What we're being evaluated on and who is doing the evaluating is much more important than whether we're explicitly "stack ranked" into buckets or not.

Stack ranking is just one part of the many problems in MS's corporate culture. Once it's gone it won't end the politics, they'll just find other outlets (of which there are many). Another big problem is the review system in general, regardless of stack ranking. MS prioritizes highly visible and easy to complete work over more important and more difficult work. This creates perverse incentives to, for example, avoid fixing things that are known to be broken, or even assuming responsibility for them. It's far more beneficial to spin up a new project of trivial value than it is to take ownership of some broken or long abandoned system or tool that desperately needs improvement.

Is there a human organization of any size that doesn't have politics?

That's a bit like asking whether or not there is a human population of any size that doesn't have STDs.

Sure, that's plenty true, but it's one thing to have a small incidence of herpes and another thing entirely to have a pandemic of HIV or syphilis.

Your analogy reminds me of this I just read the other day:

"Some countries initially felt they were isolated from AIDS, but now they realize there is no such thing. There is no border, no boundary. We've learned that walls endanger because they encourage a false sense of security. Even if you could impose the perfect program for screening international travellers, infected people will get in, and some of your own citizens will come back infected. In the meantime, people won't follow safe sex practices, because they figure they're protected inside their walls. (...)

One of the major barriers we face in trying to get countries to deal effectively with AIDS is the tremendous gap between social myth and social reality. I think closing this gap is a useful step. It's important to deal with things as they are, and not as somebody would like them to be. (...)

I have asked a lot of government officials and experts, 'At what age do young men and women in your society begin to have sexual intercourse?' This is not prurient curiosity on my part. I'm trying to figure out when you might start certain kinds of educational programs. The expert thinks a minute. He may take on a reflective look as he considers his own adolescence, and he makes a decision. Is he going to tell me when he had sexual intercourse, or when he should have had sexual intercourse? The answers are not at all scientific, and frankly, people often don't know what's going on in their own society in terms of sexual practices and drug use."

- Jonathan Mann, director of the Global Program on AIDS, from the book: "Reinventing the Future: Conversations with the World's Leading Scientists" by Thomas Bass, 1994

Great book. But the (somewhat paraphrased) quote fits rather nicely if you replace screening with "hiring process" and "career advancement" with "sexual practices".

How do we want our organizations to work? What should the life-cycle of an employee be? Can we state that frankly in a way that's both good for the company and good for the employees? Where do managers go as they grow older? Up or out? If up, where does the CEO go?

This is manipulative language if there ever was. What matters is the scope and degree of the problem/benefit created by politics not its existence.

Are you a current employee?

I think that's an accurate assessment. It certainly wasn't stack ranking that made J Allard leave. Microsoft has an inward looking culture because there is so much money to play with when Microsoft launches a huge initiative like XBOX or Windows Phone. Google's "moon shots" and Apple's "hobbies" are not instant tickets to the top of the organization.

Overlaid on those high-stakes struggles for control and prominence are some correspondingly huge egos, whence come dogmas like "Everything Windows."

The Enterprise part of the company suffers less from this because the growth there is more organic.

From the outside as a developer, you can feel the effect of such a drama-driven system as Stack Rank. MS's obsession with perfect backwards compatibility means they can't make mistakes, because those mistakes are forever.

So why embrace a process that seems to celebrate daring? A move-fast-and-break-things approach to projects? You'd think MS would be an analysis-paralysis company, because every MS product needs to integrate with hundreds of other MS products and be supported on oodles of platforms for like a decade.

But instead? We see this crazy wasteful churn of APIs and packages and MSDN Magazine-driven fashions.

I mean, how long will MS be stuck supporting Silverlight? Or Linq2SQL? Or ClickOnce installers? Or the zillion different SKUs of SQL Server and Access?

From an inside perspective, stack ranking was actually hurting backwards compatibility. "I made this cool new feature" gets you a lot more recognition come review time than "I made sure that Sim City kept working in the new version of Windows". That's why no one really takes the time to fix things like the console host, preferring instead to write the fancy new PowerShell ISE.

Still, it felt like BC was always a priority at MS, even if things often slipped by... it just felt like they were trying to maintain backwards compatibility on so many APIs and products in cases where things really did need breaking fixes. But instead of breaking fixes, we get a Whole New Product that is totally better than the old one, but has its own learning curve and its own problems and none of those will get fixed either.

Also, the new powershell ISE is slick (reminds me of Python), but at the same time the near-total lack of integration between Powershell and Visual Studio is pretty surprising. I generally find Powershell a bit disappointing... it feels kind of messy next to C# or Python or plain command-line. I'd probably rather just have a C# REPL with good intellisense. I'm sure one exists.

I think the main problem with stack ranking is that you convince your employees that their personal competitors are their teammates and not actual business competitors.

Any time the best way for me to get ahead is by using "The Art of War" on my peers you have set up your organization for eventual failure.

Of course we're competing. That's the whole point of a merit-based bonus system. What's your counterargument?

Generating value for your employer is not a zero-sum game. If I make the company an extra $x and the company rewards me with a bonus of $0.1x that money doesn't have to come from the guy next to me, it comes from the extra $x I brought into the company.

The idea that "there's a fixed budget for raises" or "that money goes into a different pot" is simply a way of refusing while transferring blame to an inanimate object.

Even if the reality is that there is a fixed budget for raises that needs to be awarded fairly, it doesn't logically imply there should be a fixed number of 'excellent' and 'awful' employee reviews to be handed out.

When one person succeeds we all succeed breaks down when you are pushed to succeed at the expense of everyone else. You are supposed to be working for the good of the whole, not just yourself.

Cooperation and team work are also meritorious, but they are not rewarded or encouraged in this type of merit-based system.

I agree with you, but this doesn't address the clever and glib but ultimately content-free argument above. You can stack rank on any criteria - including cooperation and team work.

You're handwaving away the problem of measuring intangibles.

It should not be a zero sum game. I attempt to pay my team based upon what they are worth to the company; not how they rank compared to their co-workers. You should be able to have an entire team of #1 developers ...

You know what, though? Productivity on a team can be just as separate from people's perception of you (i.e. how much they like you) as individual productivity is.

Imagine this experiment: you have a great, productive team who has one member they all hate (and therefore assume isn't doing much for the team.) You take that person off the team... and the team's productivity plummets.

Or productivity goes up because other team members can now flourish without being berated.

Yes, that can happen--it's intuitive that that is what happens. But that doesn't mean that it's what does happen, even in a majority of cases. To guess at the result without doing the experiment is to rationalize the result you want to be true. You have to follow the numbers.

Thanks for sharing.

It honestly surprises me that MS gets away with having such poor working conditions and team work [1]. I guess the end of stack ranking shows that things are changing at least.

I know lots of people in IT, but somehow no one who works at MS [2]. Its seen as uncool or worse unmoral in my circles [3]. And these people, including me, didn't even know how bad the working conditions are at MS! I always thought of MS to be like one of those 'defense' companies [4]. You either don't really want to work there, because even if the technical challenge and the available resources are great, you don't agree with their mission or you fear that your friends and peers would look down on you. But to make up for that, they have really good work conditions [5]. Thats at least what I hear from people who worked on military projects at Raytheon, Boeing and EADS.

Hope you don't take this comparison as an insult. I think MS makes great things! OneNote, VisualStudio, Kinect, Age of Empires are all great products. And personally, I would have much, much (!!!) less reservations against working for them, than a so called defense company [6].

--- [1] And, I can't help myself pointing out, that MS's version control system is called 'Team Foundation'. New speak?

[2] The exception is MS Research, which is awesome, but thats not really MS.

[3] Most of us were born in the 80's (and many including me in Germany) and grew up hating MS. Even if you wouldn't use computers on your own, everyone including parents and teachers would tell you how bad MS, their products and their business practice were.

[4] Other examples are 'big pharma', tabaco, finances, esp. investment banking. I know people working in all of those industries. They all report excellent work conditions and compensations. Some are ok with the company actions it, some are proud to work there. But all of them look very self aware when they get asked "What do you work?" The counterexample are jobs like social work, medical care taking, NGOs, academic research and yes, usually engineering as well. Many people want to work their, either because they believe in it, or because it brings them social prestige. As a result the high demand allows for poorer working conditions and less pay.

[5] Salaries at MS are still very good, as far as I know.

[6] Though, DARPA projects are very attractive. I can't deny that.

I'm sure all the stories you hear are true -- for one or even many. It's a huge place and I'm sure there are some teams in that "bottom 20% bucket" of pleasure to work in.

I work in dev in Redmond. All I can say is, for me, it really is a wonderful fun place to work and not at all like the outside impressions.