In '90s Microsoft, you either shipped code or shipped out

Microsoft has made headlines for mass layoffs in recent times, but former company engineer Dave Plummer has explained how things were done a quarter of a century ago – and what it was like living through the tech giant's notorious stack ranking system. While Plummer obviously can't speak from personal experience about the …

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

Stack Ranking

In my experience back in the 90's, stack ranking is for lazy executives who are insecure in their own judgement so basically behave like bullies. It still bothers me that I had to let some excellent people go because they had the misfortune of being on a team entirely composed of stellar people, but they were (by arbitrary criteria) the bottom 5%. Had they been on one of the less important teams where the average was lower, they'd have been ranked at or near the top. Stupid doesn't even begin to describe stacked ranking.

[Marty McFly]

Toe tags

A good boss always has a secret list of employees fitted with toe tags. That way when the senior boss comes knocking, the decision is already made by the immediate boss.

The problem comes when arbitrary cut decisions are made at the senior level with no regard to performance. That's how I was cut a year ago. My boss was given a list of names and a choice. RIF these people, or take the package yourself....then we will have someone else RIF these people. The names chosen were done with no input from my boss and made by a senior manager new to this business unit.

Stupid way to run a business that advertises hiring & retaining the best & the brightest.

[JWLong]

Re: Toe tags

Yeah, RIF by cost not value sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Toe tags

Ironically, a CFO is only irreplaceable if he's hiding something.

[simonlb]

Re: Toe tags

That's always assuming the boss assigning the toe tags is being genuinely impartial and honest in the process, and not shielding a lazy and incompetent team member because they are mates.

[Blackjack]

Meanwhile nowadays they can bork Windows all the time and nothing happens.

[ecofeco]

Oh it's far worse

I have an acquaintance who had a large role in coding Win 95. A lead role in fact. He has some insane horror stories.

Silos. Psychopathic manglement. Inter-department wars. More meetings than production time. Entire months of work suddenly abandoned. Everything.

My hate for M$ isn't JUST from 30 years of experience, it's also from sources like my acquaintance.

[Annihilator]

Re: Oh it's far worse

To be fair, that's in no way unique to Microsoft, by any stretch of the imagination. Most large organisations in my experience...

[IGotOut]

Re: Oh it's far worse

"Silos. Psychopathic manglement. Inter-department wars. More meetings than production time. Entire months of work suddenly abandoned. Everything."

You've pretty much ch summed up every mid-large size business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bell curves as a tool for performance management are an absolute abomination. It came about through some stat that showed if performance management were being done correctly, you could expect to see a bell curve of performance in a sample size greater than 50 - 5% awful, 15% poor, 60% 'fine', 15% great, 5% excellent. It was seen as evidence of a high performing organisation.

The problem was that managers, in a crude attempt to short-circuit the system, would simply force the curve to exist, in the expectation that would make them a high performing organisation. Worse, they would apply it to teams smaller than 50.

[parlei]

In a similar vein I wish Excel would refuse to show percentages from numbers not totaling more than 100. I have seen percentages from sets of 3 ("over 30% of the group is whatever!")

[J.G.Harston]

=if(total<100,"****",thisbox/total)

[Mike Lewis]

From programmer to project manager

"Many developers have encountered situations where a brilliant engineer is promoted to management, resulting in the business losing a good engineer and gaining a bad manager." That happened to me, apart from the "brilliant" bit. I went from flow-driven programming where I worked with a computer on one problem in depth for a long time to interrupt-driven managing which required working with people needing quick answers to a wide variety of problems.

[Anonymous Coward]

"PIP could serve as a lifeline for temporarily underperforming employees.. with personal issues"

Did someone from HR write that? Because that's not the view of anyone in the tech industry.

PIPs are an evil way to "manage people out" (read: make them so miserable they quit). How about giving people with personal issues some support?

[ComicalEngineer]

Getting the black spot

Happened to me when working for a large oil company who wanted to get rid of a number of people. They brought in a specialist "business efficiency" consultancy who interviewed most of the management team indicvidually. As far as I could ascertain the main purpose of the interviews was to dig some dirt on certain people (in fact more or less anyone) who was considered not to be "performing".

Following on from this process we were all graded A - C where A meant that the company wanted to keep you and was not going to offer you a redundancy, B was "you can stay or go" with the caveat that you may have to change role, and C was the company deemed you expendable and you would be given a [semi voluntary] redundancy.

About 30% of the workforce were graded A, another 50% were graded B [including me], and 20% were graded C.

This went really well [not] until the unions got involved. E.g. Billy the most useless operator on the planet could not be made redundant because he has a wife and children etc etc.

And so it transposed the my functional alcoholic worst operator [let's call him Reg because that was his name] got to stay. When I say functional, Reg could work when he had sobered up enough to remember his name and approximately which day of the week it was. I sent him home on at least two occasions for turning up absolutely rotten drunk and almost incapable of walking. That wasn't the first time either.

In the end I volunteered to leave and Reg got to stay, but it backfired spectacularly on the company as those grade A's who wanted to leave ended up being allowed to leave with a package and most of the grade C muppets who would struggle to find alternative employment were allowed to stay.

Leaving was actually my best career move ever.

[gaston]

Always felt it was a beauty contest

I always felt that sucking up to management was more important to retaining a job and receiving pay increases. Lack of interpersonal skills was the fastest path to getting canned. At one company all the misfits (myself included) were placed in the same department. Suddenly our department was being rewarded for our productivity. The wheels fell of after 2-3 years due to two factors. Our boss got tired of running a kindergarten of antisocial personalities and took a much better paying job at another company. His successor did not know how to market our capabilities internally and the department was dissolved.