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[Dave_at_Home]

*Puts on tinfoil hat*

Microsoft sheds jobs at their first party studios to please shareholders and look weak in front of regulators despite being a behemoth company.

At the same, Activision, wanting the deal to go through, makes themselves look worse in front of regulators in order to make Microsoft look like potential saviours.

It's all going according to plan.

Anyway, just let me know if I can Tony Hawk on Game Pass or not.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Welcome to the real world ex-Blizz manager.

Looks like he's a new manager and never knew corporations might use employee evaluation pigeon holing. It's that time of the year for all bosses to score their employees! I dont know how long this has been going on for but I saw ranking systems 20 years ago. Who knows, maybe it's been going since the WWII days. There's all kinds too. 1-10 scales, 4 or 5 star ratings, or 4-5 text rankings (no number but the same thing as a 5 pt guy would be labeled something like "Substantially Exceeds" or whatever the term is.)

Quota systems are all relative. You can have all employees being great workers and the coolest people to chat with compared to a subjective standard. But compared against each other, some will still be worse than others. Unless a subordinate is truly bad, most managers will always say their group of workers are the best ever too. So it's all subjective and all of them protecting their own herd.

The purpose of this isn't to piss off people just for the hell of it. It's for the company to not be complacent, and ensure the employee pool is always striving to be better long term. And to ensure managers and bosses have some teeth. The company doesn't want bosses being too chummy with their subordinates because they want performance out them not the cool chill boss who lets things slide.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

You should hear the stories from FMCG industry…After that, gaming industry will look like heaven.

Tech and gaming workers dont understand how good they have it in terms of money, chill offices and deadlines.

Every company I've worked at has these evaluation systems. And this goes back 20 years. And even more fun.... do any tech/gaming workers have peer evaluations? Ya, people you work with anonymously critique you and during your final performance meeting with your boss he goes over the comments. Not even the boss knows who wrote what (although sometimes you can tell who wrote it if the person is dumb enough to detail info in it relating to them). And you get to do it to other people.

 

[Hot5pur]

I'm not against ranking systems, but it's not perfect, and there will be edge cases.
But it's important to establish that the top performers will be rewarded the most - need to dangle that carrot.
The other end of this is a blanket "everyone gets the same raise". There is a happy middle.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

I'm not against ranking systems, but it's not perfect, and there will be edge cases.
But it's important to establish that the top performers will be rewarded the most - need to dangle that carrot.
The other end of this is a blanket "everyone gets the same raise". There is a happy middle.

Every year you always hear stories people share where someone willingly tells you, or it's grapevine talk where Susie or Brad is pissed they got put on probation with a shit star rating.

When I hear those stories, I have always agreed. They are shit. I have never ever heard of one of these sob stories where someone got grilled by their boss being bad, but was in fact a star performer everyone liked. Never saw it. Dont get me wrong, small sample sizes. Not like it comes from 10,000 people getting fired at once. But just talking normal course of business where every year some people got to be put in the bad boxes.

The funny thing is avoiding those bad boxes cant be that hard. Ya, I got laid of in a restructuring 15 years ago when I was young. The company merged divisions and gassed like 30% of the people so I couldnt have been that great since I lost my job. But hey just suck it up and get a new one. I did in 5 weeks.

As for the other years, I never got put into any box worse than the average 3/5 or 5/10 ratings system. Dont get me wrong, I never got a 5/5 or 10/10 either. But as long as you do your job well and dont act like a jackass, it's pretty hard to be among the 5% of employees needing to be quota'ed into a 1 or 2-star box. You got to be pretty bad to be put on probation when 95% of the other people at the office got 3/5 or higher.

And at no time are these employee rankings systems spread out equally. It's a major bell curve where a tiny number get plastered, and a tiny number get 5-star ratings. Most people will get a middle of the road score. Think of it like major bell curve.

Unless someone can prove me wrong, there is no way any company does a spread out system like 33% get grilled, 33% get middle, 33% get great reviews. It's probably more like 5-10% low/80-90% middle/5-10% high

 

[flying_sq]

I recently left my employer for this exact reason. It's all over major business. Not just in gaming.

 

[Nocturno999]

All of these corporate metric-scoring systems are pure evil and a farce.

No matter how hard and consistent you work, the system is rigged to make sure you don't always get the higher scores/bonuses (randomized).

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Here's another thing how employees reviews work and it depends how Blizzard does it.

The ex-boss says he had to grill someone with a bad ranking. But is it because someone told him he had to do it directly? Or because he didn't fight for his employee.

In some companies, there's a process called "calibration". All managers score their employees but know execs have a quota system to peg people into their final rating. No joke. What happens is they get in board room and discuss who should get the bad marks. Unless a boss truly hates one of their subordinates, every boss will come in with their employees having good scores. Everyone cant get a great score, so they fight for your reviews and get you at least a middle score. Its up to them to truly discuss why someone should get the bad score and it can literally be like sports where bosses trade and deal who gets the bad ones.

At my old company which did this, none of us ever got worse than a middle score. Why is that? Is it because were all brainers? Doubt it. One guy was half a moron but still got a 4/10. He was bad but not that bad. Not a great score, but he avoided probation and zero bonus. If he can make it, it shows what a good boss will do for you. Fight for your job and not just accept one of his people to get a bad mark if they dont deserve it. There should be enough lousy workers in in every company to put in those bad boxes. So it comes down to the bosses discussing.

I might be wrong, but if the boss is quitting up in arms about this, he's probably a new manager or has never seen this kind of system before.

 

[Starbuck2907]

Companies have been doing this for decades as a way to keep raises low. They do all kinds of ugly stuff to avoid paying more wages. Setting unachievable goals, all sorts of stuff. I’ve seen it firsthand.

 

[pramod]

Yeah, unfortunately this kind of thing is the norm at most big companies.

If you don't like it, you have 3 choices:

1. Become a manager.
2. Work your ass off to make sure you're always at least above average.
3. Put yourself in a financial position where you can just not give a fuck (I actually found 3 to be a lot more effective than 2. Ever since I've stopped caring about performance reviews, etc, I actually did better in them.)

 

[bender]

 

[Boneless]

Amazon has the same structure. It's simply treating performance as relative to you co-workers or team.

 

[BabyYoda]

He's right to protest that of course. Shame no one's (or it's rare) protesting diversity quotas though, it's discrimination (racism and sexism) by a different name.

 

[SJRB]

I'm 100% for performance analysis amongst employees [that's literally my job], but putting the bottom 5% in a "shame" basket and giving them less compensation is overwhelmingly bad management.

You're supposed to help the lowest performing team members get better, not punish them. Fear is an inherently bad motivator.

How archaic.

 

[Mephisto40]

All of these corporate metric-scoring systems are pure evil and a farce.

No matter how hard and consistent you work, the system is rigged to make sure you don't always get the higher scores/bonuses (randomized).

Wait people still get bonus'?

You'll be telling me people still get pay rises next!

 

[lh032]

damn that seems like a very stressful environment to work in.

 

[AV]

Brian was honestly one of the only guys there who I believed had the game's best interests at heart with Classic. Obviously the suits were always going to give them orders to inject MTX crap into Classic and he spun it as best he could, but I always thought he was a genuine guy. Good to see that him having to directly fuck people there over was the final straw.

 

[Meicyn]

I'm 100% for performance analysis amongst employees [that's literally my job], but putting the bottom 5% in a "shame" basket and giving them less compensation is overwhelmingly bad management.

You're supposed to help the lowest performing team members get better, not punish them. Fear is an inherently bad motivator.

How archaic.

Yep, and the stupidity of it all, is that having a 5% quota of “bad performers” is throwing objectivity out the window. You should have objective measures in place to determine who is pulling their weight, who is pulling more, and who is pulling less. If objectively 1% of your folks aren’t pulling their weight, shoving in an additional 4% of your workers into the lower tier to meet some quota makes your ranking system less than useful. Now that 4% of workers are disincentivized to pull their weight.

Forced quotas like this are incredibly dumb, and I question the management skills of anyone who thinks this is a good idea. This kind of stack ranking bullshit was implemented by Steve Ballmer when he took the reigns of Microsoft when Bill Gates retired, and it turned the company from THE most valuable tech company in the world to losing over 40% of its value during Microsoft’s “lost decade”. Why? Teams stopped working with one another. After all, why help your competition if you’re trying to climb the corporate ladder? Competition was focused within the walls of the company, rather than against other tech companies that ended up surpassing them over time.

 

[Fuz]

Not everyone deserves a high rating, promotion, huge bonus, and raise. If you give everyone a high rating then there is no point to ratings and your company has no standards. Everybody has room to improve but sometimes people don’t do a good job and it’s ok to call them out on it. I know this is hard to believe for millenials and zoomers but that’s how it is.

of course we are talking about WoW, they haven’t had high standards for a decade at this point.

Shifting the goalpost.
"Not everyone", the guy in the article apparently did. And you said that it was "not necessarily a bad thing" while the article is pretty clear on how that would have had a (undeserved) long lasting impact on his career.

 

[gaming_again]

Stack ranking has to be one of the worst management systems ever created. Designed by and for psychos.

 

[gaming_again]

Didn't MS do this in the past but the bottom guy got fired?

I think Paul Allen brought it in. Luckiest roommate ever.

 

[shaddam]

I am really suprised that Jason is reporting about this. I mean he was silent about the Cosby suite

 

[Boneless]

I'm 100% for performance analysis amongst employees [that's literally my job], but putting the bottom 5% in a "shame" basket and giving them less compensation is overwhelmingly bad management.

You're supposed to help the lowest performing team members get better, not punish them. Fear is an inherently bad motivator.

How archaic.

If you bring more (financial) gains to the company, you get more compensation. You bring less? You get less. Quite a simple logical construct.

Considering this is applied across FAANG, which are pretty much top performing companies, it's fair to say that this is likely not bad management.

 

[SJRB]

If you bring more (financial) gains to the company, you get more compensation. You bring less? You get less. Quite a simple logical construct.

Considering this is applied across FAANG, which are pretty much top performing companies, it's fair to say that this is likely not bad management.

You mean those companies that have all but Apple reported huge losses and fired literally tens of thousands of employees last week, often overnight?

I wouldn't call FAANG the paramount of good management by any metric, but okay. If any, it's becoming increasingly clear how mismanaged they are.

 

[Meicyn]

You mean those companies that have all but Apple reported huge losses and fired literally tens of thousands of employees last week, often overnight?

I wouldn't call FAANG the paramount of good management by any metric, but okay. If any, it's becoming increasingly clear how mismanaged they are.

What’s additionally dumb about Boneless’ vapid post, is that Amazon is the only one of the FAANG companies to use stack ranking with quotas similar to the Blizzard example given in this thread. The rest of the companies handle performance evaluations and the after effects differently from one another.

Stack ranking might work when you’re dealing with low-skill labor where moving volume of product is the only thing that really matters in a company like Amazon, but software development is an entirely different beast. Games are more than the sum of their parts. When you’re coding, efficiency matters, and writing less code to accomplish the same task is generally preferred. So measuring performance becomes more complicated and using say, total lines of code written measured on a purely quantitative basis, would be a terrible metric to use.

 

[GeeseGoose]

I hate these stack ranking things. My previous company (international coupon deal website starting with G) had limits on how many you could have in higher bands, which ended up screwing me out of top ranking due to tenure.

 

[BbMajor7th]

No, but a bit of healthy workplace competition never hurt anyone either. But apparently competition is now seen as a dirty word in society, all the way down to schooling systems. The world's gone soft.

A high performing team leverages the complimentary strengths of each member to produce the best performing team. Any team member incentivized to work for themselves against other members of their team will, without exception, place their individual performance above that of the team. This is so basic and simple to understand that I shouldn't need to explain it. It is a terrible management strategy that you almost only ever find it shitty sales departments where short-term output it put over long-term sustainable growth.

 

[Flutta]

I have a hard time putting any faith into stories like these from Schierer. Too much political agenda behind it.

Feel you.

It’s hard to trust a snake .

 

[ProtoByte]

Two things can be true. This specific evaluation system can be slightly overbearing, and the modern game industry can use more hard meritocracy at the same time.

Far be it from me to make the claim that upper management at Activision Blizzard, or any other publisher, is entirely on the ball, but this idea that the employees bear no responsibility for when a game comes out with deficiencies is nuts.

 

[GHG]

A high performing team leverages the complimentary strengths of each member to produce the best performing team. Any team member incentivized to work for themselves against other members of their team will, without exception, place their individual performance above that of the team. This is so basic and simple to understand that I shouldn't need to explain it. It is a terrible management strategy that you almost only ever find it shitty sales departments where short-term output it put over long-term sustainable growth.

I've worked for and with some of the biggest companies in the world and all of them have rewards systems based on meritocracy for their sales teams and with the exception of one all of them have been high performing. In the instance where it wasn't high performing it was down to personell, not the system in place.

Every single time you have both individual and team targets, both of which are rewarded accordingly. The individual rewards have always been greater than the team ones (financially speaking at least) and it promotes a culture where everyone is pulling in the same direction, both pushing themselves and each other. At the end of every month, quarter and year you are assessed in terms of your overall contribution, both as an individual and for the team. Everything is measurable.

Every single time there have been clearly set out and enforced rules of engagement for things such as business areas, lead sharing, commission/bonus sharing (if it's a cross-department deal), etc. Going against any of that will result in you being reprimanded, harshly sometimes.

The pressure involved isn't for everyone but people need to get away from the idea that it doesn't work (I'm not even sure why there are a bunch of people here saying it doesn't work to be honest). It does but you need the right individuals and personalities in place.

I will say though that while the core principles (meritocratic rewards) will remain the same, those kinds of structures will require significant adjustments to get them working well in more creative industries, especially so when you will find it to be more uncommon to see the personalities that you would typically find in sales teams.

 

[BbMajor7th]

Two things can be true. This specific evaluation system can be slightly overbearing, and the modern game industry can use more hard meritocracy at the same time.

Far be it from me to make the claim that upper management at Activision Blizzard, or any other publisher, is entirely on the ball, but this idea that the employees bear no responsibility for when a game comes out with deficiencies is nuts.

There's nothing meritocratic about forcing every team into an arbitrary performance hierarchy - your team may have no 'exceptional' performers or any 'developing' performers, but under this structure, you have to unfairly reward some for doing well enough and punish others for doing ever so slightly less so.

This mechanistic approach to human behaviour - this idea that you can reduce complex, variable things down into consistent catch-all terms - is the root of so much stupidity (from corporate compensation schemes to 'progressive' social policy) that it might just be worst trend of the 21st century.

 

[GHG]

There's nothing meritocratic about forcing every team into an arbitrary performance hierarchy - your team may have no 'exceptional' performers or any 'developing' performers, but under this structure, you have to unfairly reward some for doing well enough and punish others for doing ever so slightly less so.

If that's the case then the entire team will underperform (or at best be entirely average) and will need to be gutted.

In an ideal world you want to struggle to find underperformers in your team and you will want to feel bad for even having to put anyone in that category (if you are a manager in this position and your assessment is accurate then it's actually a good thing). However, in the context of where those "developing" individuals sit against their peers it will be accurate even if they are still giving 100% and contributing well. If they are in a high performing team and have aspirations to become one of the higher performers then they will understand.

It's like being the "worst" player in a world cup winning squad, it doesn't suddenly mean you aren't any good and/or that you can't have a significant contribution. That's why it's important that every individual in these structures has the right personality and that the messages are delivered appropriately.

 

[Fully engaged]

Modern managment. 1. set Key performance indicators. 2. set smart goals. 3. set "commitments" 4. watch as the worst most selfish people take advantage of all the loop holes to get themselves good scores while shitting on all your talent. They have to shit on your talent, or they will look bad..
5. watch your companies output collapse. 6. talentless selfish people blame each other until there is nothing left.

 

[BbMajor7th]

I've worked for and with some of the biggest companies in the world and all of them have rewards systems based on meritocracy for their sales teams and with the exception of one all of them have been high performing. In the instance where it wasn't high performing it was down to personell, not the system in place.

Every single time you have both individual and team targets, both of which are rewarded accordingly. The individual rewards have always been greater than the team ones (financially speaking at least) and it promotes a culture where everyone is pulling in the same direction, both pushing themselves and each other. At the end of every month, quarter and year you are assessed in terms of your overall contribution, both as an individual and for the team. Everything is measurable.

Every single time there have been clearly set out and enforced rules of engagement for things such as business areas, lead sharing, commission/bonus sharing (if it's a cross-department deal), etc. Going against any of that will result in you being reprimanded, harshly sometimes.

The pressure involved isn't for everyone but people need to get away from the idea that it doesn't work (I'm not even sure why there are a bunch of people here saying it doesn't work to be honest). It does but you need the right individuals and personalities in place.

I will say though that while the core principles (meritocratic rewards) will remain the same, those kinds of structures will require significant adjustments to get them working well in more creative industries, especially so when you will find it to be more uncommon to see the personalities that you would typically find in sales teams.

You keep going back to sales, when we're talking about video game developers - a creative, pipeline-focused, project-led environment where an entire team can only move as fast as it's slowest player.

I work in exactly this kind of environment, at the global HQ for a very large corporate that is absolutely spanking the opposition right now (and has been for nearly a decade). Targets are set at the top and rolled down to individuals, with each person examining the fiscal goals of the company, the department, the team and finally looking at how their field of work can contribute upwards. These are set each year and your performance is measured against them and it's a global, company-wide system that doesn't pit individuals against one another, it pits them against their own goals and rewards them based on how well they measure up.

Modern managment. 1. set Key performance indicators. 2. set smart goals. 3. set "commitments" 4. watch as the worst most selfish people take advantage of all the loop holes to get themselves good scores while shitting on all your talent. They have to shit on your talent, or they will look bad..
5. watch your companies output collapse. 6. talentless selfish people blame each other until there is nothing left.

Literally seen incompetent twats fail upwards through multiple promotions by exploiting these kinds of systems - only to duck out before the shitstorm hits, leaving everybody else to fix the destruction they wrought. On their Resume it lists out all the projects they single-handedly spearheaded to completion, and they take that into new companies and demand even higher salaries and more senior roles, without mentioning that in the years after they left, those systems were completely moth-balled because they were (as so many people warned them at the time) completely unworkable.

 

[Meicyn]

I've worked for and with some of the biggest companies in the world and all of them have rewards systems based on meritocracy for their sales teams and with the exception of one all of them have been high performing. In the instance where it wasn't high performing it was down to personell, not the system in place.

This is a fascinating paragraph. In the instance where there wasn’t high performance, you associate the results to the personnel and not the system, but in the instances where there was high performance, you credit the system and not the personnel.

Why is that?

 

[nush]

Here's another thing how employees reviews work and it depends how Blizzard does it.

The ex-boss says he had to grill someone with a bad ranking. But is it because someone told him he had to do it directly? Or because he didn't fight for his employee.

In some companies, there's a process called "calibration". All managers score their employees but know execs have a quota system to peg people into their final rating. No joke. What happens is they get in board room and discuss who should get the bad marks. Unless a boss truly hates one of their subordinates, every boss will come in with their employees having good scores. Everyone cant get a great score, so they fight for your reviews and get you at least a middle score. Its up to them to truly discuss why someone should get the bad score and it can literally be like sports where bosses trade and deal who gets the bad ones.

At my old company which did this, none of us ever got worse than a middle score. Why is that? Is it because were all brainers? Doubt it. One guy was half a moron but still got a 4/10. He was bad but not that bad. Not a great score, but he avoided probation and zero bonus. If he can make it, it shows what a good boss will do for you. Fight for your job and not just accept one of his people to get a bad mark if they dont deserve it. There should be enough lousy workers in in every company to put in those bad boxes. So it comes down to the bosses discussing.

I might be wrong, but if the boss is quitting up in arms about this, he's probably a new manager or has never seen this kind of system before.

The system is bullshit, everyone involved with implementing it knows it's bullshit. It's some shit that was created by HR to make it look like they are actually doing something in regards to "Developing employees to their full potential".

Reality is, that if you're shit you'll have been fired already. If you get an A+ golden star mega rating your already at that pay grade or if not you are not going to get handed a raise and a promotion anyway.

Smart workers already should have worked out that job hopping is how you get ahead. No, I'm not going to work extra hard for the same salary to get a C ranking up to an A ranking in a years time for no benefit to me.

 

[nush]

Literally seen incompetent twats fail upwards through multiple promotions by exploiting these kinds of systems - only to duck out before the shitstorm hits, leaving everybody else to fix the destruction they wrought. On their Resume it lists out all the projects they single-handedly spearheaded to completion, and they take that into new companies and demand even higher salaries and more senior roles, without mentioning that in the years after they left, those systems were completely moth-balled because they were (as so many people warned them at the time) completely unworkable.

Don't hate the playa, hate the game. Get yours.

 

[GHG]

You keep going back to sales, when we're talking about video game developers - a creative, pipeline-focused, project-led environment where an entire team can only move as fast as it's slowest player.

I work in exactly this kind of environment, at the global HQ for a very large corporate that is absolutely spanking the opposition right now (and has been for nearly a decade). Targets are set at the top and rolled down to individuals, with each person examining the fiscal goals of the company, the department, the team and finally looking at how their field of work can contribute upwards. These are set each year and your performance is measured against them and it's a global, company-wide system that doesn't pit individuals against one another, it pits them against their own goals and rewards them based on how well they measure up.

And i acknowledged that in my final paragraph.

In creative teams where the entire team can only move as quickly as the slowest player there needs to be a way of identifying those individuals along with ways of incebtivising them to improve. Failure to do so results in bottlenecks in the project pipeline. There is no clearer message than not being given a bonus. At that point the individual can make a decision on whether or not they are willing to improve as necessary or they can seek employment elsewhere. Might seem harsh but it is what it is.

Behind every excellent product is an excellent high performing team that were able to work in harmony. There is little to no room for laggards in those situations and these kinds of structures are created to try and help facilitate that.

Your final paragraph is at odds with itself by the way. How and why do you think those goals are set? Just because your company does a good job of filtering the competitive element out of consciousness for employees at an individual level it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Multiple people will have identical targets. It would be impossible for that not to be the case at a larger business.

If you are indeed in sales or business development, stop putting numbers on the board and fail to pull your weight for a sustained period of time - see how quickly you'll get told about it.

This is a fascinating paragraph. In the instance where there wasn’t high performance, you associate the results to the personnel and not the system, but in the instances where there was high performance, you credit the system and not the personnel.

Why is that?

Different personnel suit different systems, it's that simple. The people who suit systems that by today's standards are seen as being more "boiler room" in fashion wouldn't perform well in more laid back structures and vice versa. Some people need pressure to perform while other crumble under pressure.

Have you never seen someone be an absolute disaster somewhere and then go on to be a superstar elsewhere? How do you think that happens? Especially when both companies are performing very well in their own right.

 

[BbMajor7th]

Don't hate the playa, hate the game. Get yours.

I do hate the game - that's what I'm shitting on. And I do believe in meritocracy, which means actually doing the right thing, rather than gaming the system to make yourself look like an asset when you're actually a leech.

Your final paragraph is at odds with itself by the way. How and why do you think those goals are set? Just because your company does a good job of filtering the competitive element out of consciousness for employees at an individual level it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Multiple people will have identical targets. It would be impossible for that not to be the case at a larger business.

As I said, the targets are balanced against the individual, not against other verticals or departments. If you're responsible for overseeing a handful of developing markets in Central Europe, no one's expecting you to compete on sales with the person overseeing North America. Your team's goals will ladder up to your goals, as your goal ladders up to your department's and the business'. You're expected to look at prior years' performance, identify key areas for improvement, develop a strategy for doing that and deliver against it. None of this requires you to compete with other territory managers for profit share, because (a) no two markets are alike and (b) it's not a zero sum game.

 

[Fully engaged]

Don't hate the playa, hate the game. Get yours.

Yeah... see how far that gets you when there is nothing left to get...

You keep going back to sales, when we're talking about video game developers - a creative, pipeline-focused, project-led environment where an entire team can only move as fast as it's slowest player.

I work in exactly this kind of environment, at the global HQ for a very large corporate that is absolutely spanking the opposition right now (and has been for nearly a decade). Targets are set at the top and rolled down to individuals, with each person examining the fiscal goals of the company, the department, the team and finally looking at how their field of work can contribute upwards. These are set each year and your performance is measured against them and it's a global, company-wide system that doesn't pit individuals against one another, it pits them against their own goals and rewards them based on how well they measure up.



Literally seen incompetent twats fail upwards through multiple promotions by exploiting these kinds of systems - only to duck out before the shitstorm hits, leaving everybody else to fix the destruction they wrought. On their Resume it lists out all the projects they single-handedly spearheaded to completion, and they take that into new companies and demand even higher salaries and more senior roles, without mentioning that in the years after they left, those systems were completely moth-balled because they were (as so many people warned them at the time) completely unworkable.

The problem I have seen is when the "Sales model" is applied to project management. Total nightmare. Sales people can be animals.. ( I am being overly dramatic.) so they will rip each other to pieces to win.. a creative team or a management team doing that is just a shit show, where the least creative, most uncaring people thrive, and, as you said "fail upwards" and then get poached.. To be honest the quicker they are poached the better for the company, as long as the company realizes what not to do again.

 

[GHG]

The system is bullshit, everyone involved with implementing it knows it's bullshit. It's some shit that was created by HR to make it look like they are actually doing something in regards to "Developing employees to their full potential".

Reality is, that if you're shit you'll have been fired already. If you get an A+ golden star mega rating your already at that pay grade or if not you are not going to get handed a raise and a promotion anyway.

Smart workers already should have worked out that job hopping is how you get ahead. No, I'm not going to work extra hard for the same salary to get a C ranking up to an A ranking in a years time for no benefit to me.

At the very least these systems exist to give people a chance to change things if they want to but you are right, most people in that category leave or get pushed out. Fundamentally the systems are designed so that you organically shed the worst performers each year and then replace them with people who are at least as good as the mid-high performers for the same salary. The theory is that over time the overall standard improves. Doesn't always work that way though.

And yes, job hopping is the best way around it. That, or setting up your own business

 

[hlm666]

Why doesn't he want to be ranked, Blizzard have been ranking their players for ages and locking rewards to ranks. It's only fair he gets ranked and needs a good one to get his bonus. He was just worried all the carries he gets was finally gonna come out.

 

[MoneySings]

No real news here. I work for a company which half way through the year, they tell you you're a "high performer" which means a 7.5% bonus. Then when the final year APR is in, you are told they had to downgrade you to a "performer" because management aren't awarding any "high performers" this year as there were too many. So you get a 2.3% bonus.

 

[nush]

Yeah... see how far that gets you when there is nothing left to get...

It's got me a lot actually, in the bank. When I was young, sure I brought into the whole hard work gets rewarded bollocks. Now with a CV/resume full of brand names and a silver tongue once I've squeezed the juice out of one place I'll move onto the next. Companies have no problem fucking you, fuck them first.

 

[BbMajor7th]

Companies have no problem fucking you, fuck them first.

I mean, it's more often the co-workers that get fucked, but if everyone took that attitude the gravy train would soon come to a screeching halt. The process is - in the nicest possible way - parasitic, but again, it's the game I blame. Systems like this can and will be exploited and it's up to middle and upper managers to actually recognise the red flags and spot this kind of thing.

 

[Boneless]

What’s additionally dumb about Boneless’ vapid post, is that Amazon is the only one of the FAANG companies to use stack ranking with quotas similar to the Blizzard example given in this thread. The rest of the companies handle performance evaluations and the after effects differently from one another.

Stack ranking might work when you’re dealing with low-skill labor where moving volume of product is the only thing that really matters in a company like Amazon, but software development is an entirely different beast. Games are more than the sum of their parts. When you’re coding, efficiency matters, and writing less code to accomplish the same task is generally preferred. So measuring performance becomes more complicated and using say, total lines of code written measured on a purely quantitative basis, would be a terrible metric to use.

You do know Amazon is loaded with software developers where they stack rank performance? I would not call that low-skill labour.

 

[Boneless]

You mean those companies that have all but Apple reported huge losses and fired literally tens of thousands of employees last week, often overnight?

I wouldn't call FAANG the paramount of good management by any metric, but okay. If any, it's becoming increasingly clear how mismanaged they are.

It depends on what you define as good management. In the end, they work for the profitability of the company, and from that perspective those companies are doing well. I personally do not like stack ranking, but I can see the reasons and motives for it. Simply calling it 'bad management' is a bit simplistic, especially for someone calling themselves a performance analyst.

 

[WoJ]

I have yet to work for a company that doesn't do this and I've worked for some of the largest employers in my industry (not the game industry). Somehow I've survived as have hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. People who work in game development sure like to bitch and moan alot.

 

[speckz]

Time to recycle https://www.activisionblizzard.com/leadership

 

[nush]

Systems like this can and will be exploited and it's up to middle and upper managers to actually recognise the red flags and spot this kind of thing.

In my experience even reporting it nothing happens. Just gets handwaved. For example I worked for one company and in a few weeks I'd worked out that this woman I shared an office with was up to some shady shit. I didn't have viability on exactly what though. So I tried to report my observations to one of the directors, in private so as he didn't look like he'd been taken for a mug (Newsflash, he was) because he thought the sun shined out of her ass.

Anyway, he kept putting me off I could have gone over him to one of the other directors but for sure that would not have worked out well for me. Anyway a few months after I'd left that company word got back to me that they eventually did catch her themselves. She's rinsed them out of 1000's for years, I was told the director that dodged me said "I should have listened to Nush months ago".