I was clicking around Google news and I found this gripe piece about the "new" Microsoft ranking system for engineers. I have read about this before in the Time article about disgruntled employees so I decided to read it.
What I find REALLY amazing about it, is why didn't msft have this sooner? Every big company falls into a pay and management funk using approaches like this, and I thought everybody knew it. otoh, there isn't much else you can do when you have 60K employees. When these plans take over, all the good people leave. Doh. It happened at HP, IBM, everywhere.
In the 90s this was mitigated with stock options and contractors. So you could have a *great* engineer working in a dept as a contractor making 50% more than you could pay him/her as an employee. Your dept was judged on output so if you could arrange this and it worked, all was fine. Or you could do what cisco did and relegate your "rank and file" of average workers to the griping and acquire all the stars in small companies. That works too. But to think top engineers are going to be happy with this system is naive.
What is causing considerably more ire than pay levels, however, is a performance review ranking system that uses a bell-curve model to decide who gets high scores and who takes the low ones.
Microsoft Corp. has over 60,000 employees, and like almost all large corporations, it uses a performance review process to rate them. The idea behind any corporate performance review system is to provide an accurate and fair assessment of employee contributions, but some employees say Microsoft’s system promotes politics over fair reviews.
According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers “fight” for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale.
washtech.org |
