Abandon All Hope

Stack rank (and calibration) is to Microsoft as acidophilus is to yogurt - they both create acidic conditions.

Get out the Tums, because the heartburn is never-ending.

For ICs in their never-ending quest to move higher. And for managers in their never-ending quest to push their people higher, even if their best performer just pushed out a patch that caused over 3 million clients to hash the VM file and then blue screen and their worst performer spends more time justifying their shitty work than actually doing their shitty work.

You might be asking yourself, "Now why would a manager try and push crappy people up in the stack rank?"

It defies common sense. You would think that at an egalitarian programmer's paradise, managers would cooly and calmly rank their team members, interleaving them with their peer's in about five minutes, and then they would all disperse and go back to making sure that the ones and zeros were being cranked out in the correct order.

The riddle is answered when you realize that the Leads get stack ranked as well. As do the Managers, the Directors and so on.

Dropping the egalitarian bullshit, you can see that if you are a manager and you have a team full of losers, you're not going to do so well at your own stack-rank. "Kim's team sucked. They're all ten-percenters and fucked up all sorts of things this year. You can't put Kim above Kimee."

Things get even weirder when you have collections of rock stars in groups. There curve starts to come into play, and good people get screwed because, well, just because sometimes. They may get an Exceeded, but get shoved into the 70% bucket for stock, losing out on hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of dollars in stock award based on their level.

Nutty eh?

Nothing says, "We value you," more than having to be squishy about what it will take to get into the 20% bucket next year. As a manager, I'll have to use words like "visibility" or "strategic" to guide you in the right direction.

Take those words as code that it's not you, it's the organization, and that it has screwed you out of money and me out of my ability to be as level with you as I would like.

Some would argue that being a good manager at Microsoft means that you can play the stack rank and calibration game to get your top performers the rewards they so justly deserve.

Deconstruct that, and you'll find a tarball of entitlement and an object example of how managers at Microsoft now spend way, way, way too much time playing the game instead of actually managing employees.

Which is one of the biggest fucking problems at Microsoft today and has lead and is still leading to all sorts of management by committee group-think dumb decisions.

LisaB, I'm looking right at you when I make this request - limit the stack rank and calibration to teams managed by leads only. Only let managers of managers do the interleave and so on up the chain. Make disclosure of this data a fireable offense.

By classifying these data points, managers will have to focus more on managing their teams instead of jockeying around so much.

Managers, ask for this. Wouldn't you rather spend more time guiding your team than in interminable meetings that can last hours as your argue over the minutiae of slot 21 vs. slot 22 on the list? If your answer is no, quit. Those of us that give a shit are really tired of your ilk, and we're going to key your new BMW until you get the message.