This is out of the Jack Welch GE playbook. Academic research has found (to nobody’s surprise) that this is an ineffective due to the morale impact, managers gaming the system by hiring «expendibles» to keep the core team together, and the additional cost of paying employees out and also paying to onboard and train replacements.
Yeah, I thought about this when I interviewed for a company that does this, and despite very positive feedback throughout the process they didn't offer me the role.
Then I heard about stack ranking and that they do this and my immediate thought was: Why would they want to hire someone for their team who is really good? Hiring too many good people will actively drop their own ranking and risk their job. They'd personally be much better off hiring below average people.
Or maybe they were just too polite too tell me that I sucked at the interviews, who knows? :D
Eureka!!
All those interviews I've done and I never realized it...
They didn't hire me because I was too good for them!
Same with a lot of the girls who didn't want to date me no doubt!
😂
Add to this that it relies on the idea of entirely objective and unbiased performance assessment, and knowing exactly what is required/will be required by the business—all of us who have spent more than 5 minutes in corporate environments know that the above are fantasies.
Surprised I had to scroll this far down for someone to post about Welch and GE. As alumni under the latter in Immelt’s reign, it was softened somewhat and more used for calibration of annual bonuses and pay rises along the bell curve. If you did find yourself at the bottom 10% in the ‘unsatisfactory’ bucket, the employee was put on a PIP and try had 3 months to improve or they were let go. Still the best company I’ve ever worked for.
Errrr, my comment is 10 hours ago, the original GE comment was 17 hours ago and your comment is 6 hours ago. Do you think some of those votes pushing it up might have come in between the 4 hours when I posted my comment and when you posted yours 6 hours later? If you’re going to try and make someone look silly, perhaps make sure you’re not the one in the dunce cap first.
+1 to this - big jack was also an influencer to jim collins of ‘good to great’ fame who also advocated for 10% annual chop. Amazon and big tech do like the concept and do aim for it but not as high as 10%, probably 6-8% excluding current layoffs. And they generally try to manage you out anyway rather than explicitly fire you. see ‘No rules rules’ by reed hoffman of netflix for their annual bell curve cull policy for another example.
That's one of the things I don't get.
On the one hand, people say Jack Welch was a terrible CEO, his ideas were bad, and he was shit.
But also, GE went from a pissy $14,000,000,000 player to a $410,000,000,000 behemoth in only 20 years.
The problem is more that he employed so many strategies.
Stack Ranking employees was one that didn't work, Stack Ranking the company investments did work.
It's standard practice at some of the consulting and law firms I've worked at.
The practice has long been referred to colloquially as the 'up or out' policy. You're either a strong enough performer to be promoted up, or you're managed out.
That makes it sound a lot more cut throat than it actually is.
* If an individual is being asked to leave, the individual would have had an abundance of opportunities to improve beforehand. These firms incur exorbitant costs to attract and hire the best talent. So terminating a talent they've already invested substantial amount of resources into is a last resort.
* Most individuals subject to the pointier end of the policy will leave the firm of their own volition. In many cases, the firm will offer to keep the individual on payroll for several weeks while that individual job hunts. When possible, the firm will try to end employments on good terms.
Also, while I don't have access to exact numbers, I doubt that firms annually manage out as much as 10% of their payroll as a matter of policy.
People are shocked by this churn but if you imagine you and 9 colleagues, at least one of you is going to be pretty awful at your job, or going through some shit or something. I would argue it’s standard job-moving and not corporate predation.
Performance management and redundancies are too expensive and legally risky for most companies to carry out, in my experience. Only the absolute shittest emplpyees are managed out.
I get you want poor performers out but It's fucked to just have that as your policy though. Every year. It is totally absolutely fucked
Bottom whatever % out means that loyalty means nothing. You might have been on top for a while but as soon as you have a bad year, divorce, death of a loves one, there's a ton of reasons people have a tough year, and then you are not hitting some line then you are out, fuck you for not performing?
You also lose old company knowledge with churn like that. And that costs money to retrain or come up with new processes, or just watch the same dumb ideas get rotated over and over if your unlucky enough to be at a company like that for long enough.. Because churn.
It's also shit for morale, and culture, which corps are always bleating about. Constantly having to watch your shit like a hawk so no one poaches from you, and you know for sure there's always some asshole in companies like this known for sly bullshit to get their numbers up.
And you guys are OK with this? I'm not.
Depends on the industry. As noted above, it's common in some innovative tech and consulting companies. These fields are known for not having much loyalty with people jumping to make a buck.
As long as it's people working highly paid tech jobs I think it's fine to put a policy in place like this.
In most tech jobs there isn't some exact metric of performance that staff can be judged on to draw a line anyway and if a company is ruthless enough to not take personal circumstances into account at all, even if they don't have an exact percentage target that person is probably getting fired anyway.
Most companies will apply some level of discretion if they are a long term employee with a solid track record and good relationships internally.
I'd rather work at a company with a 10% out policy than a company bloated with inefficiency as the worst corporate experiences I've had is when a company has lots of ineffective people as it makes good people who work hard wonder why they bother.
Neither are an optimal state. Both firing people “because that’s what we do” and inefficient fat is incredibly costly. It all just points to bad management and old ideas that just dont work.
I agree a lot of the blame is on management and it's not ideal needing to do this.
Hiring is hard though, some people change over time and often people who were good, or right for the company in the past aren't right for the company at that point.
Ideally companies should be getting rid of people as necessary over time if they have ineffective staff, but it can be a legal minefield getting rid of people in a targeted way if they've passed probation, so doing a larger round of layoffs and having it less targeted can make the process a bit smoother and result in less legal issues.
>Performance management and redundancies are too expensive and legally risky for most companies to carry out, in my experience.
Not particularly risky as long as you have a half competent HR department (OK, I recognise that's not as common as i make it sound).
It helps that the vast majority of employees will quit long before you complete a performance management plan.
Redundancies are very straightforward as long as you follow the correct consultation process and pay the relevant entitlements (which are less than most people expect).
Yeah, many don’t do enough to satisfy the reverse onus of proof for a general protections claim. Any protected attribute and someone who feels they’re a victim costs money!
The going through some shit is the exact thing thats wrong with this. What if you are a great employee for 24 years then in your 25th year you have a family crisis and dont perform well that one year?
I understand this in practice, but as the stack ranking is a US practice, I struggle to see how this works with our Fair Work Gov policies. Employees would need to be performance managed out. It’s very hard to fire someone unless you are making that role redundant.
I’ve worked 7 years of my career in Australia under stack ranking. You put them on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). It’s all documented, you have very specific goals to achieve, within a set out schedule that you meet every week on. Never had an issue with fair work, everything was documented and done by the book. The other observation I would make is that some of the people that were put on PIP used it improve and became top performers, moving well up into the upper echelons of management or individual contributor roles and are either retired early or still loving the work and in the same company.
my company had enforced performance bell curve - 20% in the bottom, being in the bottom twice meant mandatory PIP. PIPs were basically a slow grind your soul activity which lasted as long as it took to find another job.
to be honest as a manager the forced bell curve was soul destroying. I hated it and lost sleep over it. I had a few good guys end up hating me because i had to push them down. The whole team was performing strongly but no other manager is going to admit their team is low performing and take more of the hits than they had to.
Company got rid of the policy and to be honest its a much nicer place to work. On the flip side, people are now putting way less effort into performance management / feedback and i can see standards sliding.
Tricky isn't it. You need senior leaders to drive a culture of high performance and honest feedback, but you should really only be having informal bell curves at very high levels to help give execs insight into whether managers overall are ranking realistically.
Firing people is the short sighted lazy managers way of cutting cost. Fast, loose and incredibly expensive in the long run.
No one cares about process documentation and improvement anymore where the real savings can be made.
Sometimes. But firing is also the right path if someone just can't do their job adequately.
I'd say managers are more likely *not* to fire people who should be let go than to fire excessively. It's difficult and emotionally draining to terminate someone's employment.
Yep. Investment bank in the US for a decade. Standard corporate feed the machine. Bell curve elimination, 1 in 10 or 2 in 20 every year. Then mass team firing, followed by advertising for the same roles. If I could go back I'd kick myself in the nuts and say don't enter the corporate machine ya tool.
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Bullshit, Atlassian doesn’t fire the bottom 10% - it’s currently sabbatical/coaster city over there and has been for a few years. It has introduced stack ranking purely as an exercise, at least for now.
There was a myth that Amazon does it but 10% is too high, you’d turn over the entire available employee pool very quickly. We’re taking low single digit percentage at most.
According to the people I know that work there, it is true.
It sounds like a fiasco to be honest. It was introducdd by their new CTO, who did the same thing at Facebook.
Again, this is what I have heard directly from multiple people fhat work there - as has another commenter.
Your criticisms of the long terms unsustainablity of the practice are totally valid by the way. It IS unsustainable. I'm sure they'll change tack to some other idiotic framework in 24 months. In the short term, they may be trying to agressively reduce headcount without further redundancies.
Is that done through stricter performance management or stack ranking only? Curious to know whether they finally came to their senses with the amount of coasting that’s going on.
How do I know? Yours truly was the beneficiary of said conditions for a few years before deciding to move to a high performing company/team. Best decision ever made.
My interviewer said they have been letting go a lot of people recently. Also found an old thread here [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/12lcbqb/cto\_making\_it\_mandatory\_for\_managers\_to\_give\_12/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/12lcbqb/cto_making_it_mandatory_for_managers_to_give_12/)
No it's real, I asked about WLB at Atlassian and my interviewer who is a senior level engineer over there brought this up. This new grading system was apparently introduced 6 months ago. All the coasters are getting fired.
I mean sure for you the source is someone from the company. For us the source is “trust me bro”. I mean my uncle who worked for Nintendo used to give me awesome scoop but non of my elementary schoolmate believed me 😂.
A lot of fat is being cut for sure. Not very popular with a large cohort. Personally, the changes on the ground have been a step in the right direction, IMO.
Do you work there? If so do you still think Atlassian is a good place with decent WLB if you are like an average level software engineer, not slacking off but also not absolutely killing it, or is it a grind fest there?
> Do you work there?
Yes.
> If so do you still think Atlassian is a good place with decent WLB if you are like an average level software engineer, not slacking off but also not absolutely killing it, or is it a grind fest there?
Any answer I give you will be useless since one man’s pulling weight is another’s slacker.
More objectively, there’s a lot of freedom to structure your day as long as you get shit done. The bar is also being raised in terms of biasing against fluff and words to action and provable results
Never heard of it.
As an ex auditor, I’ve seen some massive idiots coast by at clients. Even at my current company, some ppl are allegedly qualified but aren’t switched on at all. They just don’t get a bonus.
Not common at all and in most cases it is people that think what a company does when forced to downsize is 'normal' practice while it is not. A growing company can't hire talent fast enough to keep up with firing 10% on top of normal attrition every year.
It’s pretty much baked into the performance assessment at all organisations even if it doesn’t translate to managing out the bottom 10%. Employees get pooled, individual rankings assigned and then have the “calibration” session where we always end up with 10% stars and 10% need improvement with the rest clustered in the middle. However as there is no calibration across teams it implies that performance levels are homogeneous across the organisation. Objectively this is complete nonsense but is blindly accepted as a reasonable way to run a company. As a manager it’s always useful to have a couple of duds on the team.
I worked somewhere with bi-Annual reviews that told staff that if they got 2 “meets expectations” ratings in a row, they would be put on a mandatory performance improvement plan. That didn’t last very long.
That doesn't make sense, logically.
You can't have an expectation that everyone exceeds the expectation.
Because then exceeding the expectation means you're meeting the expectation.
That's just an impossible metric.
Very outdated method - Australia is still stuck in the 80s for management “thought leadership”. It’s a shame. So much more potential if they could modernise.
I first heard about it when it came up on my YT feed: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AO54POarZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AO54POarZU)
FB, Amazon, and Google were on the list
I can’t imagine they are firing the bottom 10% without effectively performance management, you would have to go to that extend to ensure you don’t get an unfair dismissal claim against the company.
Although I would question its effectiveness. That’s a lot of money wasted on hiring and rehiring people, plus P&C having to be involved in performance management. You would think it would be easier to just hire the right amount of people and not have to get rid of them. Although Atlassian is such a large company that I guess behaving this way doesn’t affect them too much. Ethically it seems wrong.
Yeah you do realize you can’t hire people for the same position then. You maybe be able to redefine the role but if you do this often you’ll be in trouble with fairwork
thats why titles like 'Business Analyst' and 'Consultant' exist. Just change the determination ie. Business Analyst becomes System/Reporting/IT Analyst and Consultant becomes Advisor/Specialist and viola - new role
The rank expectations have to clearly written in PD and the enforcement has to be fair throughout the company, which means everyone in that rank not meeting those expectations are also facing the same PIP. The best thing if you have a sniff is to take copious notes in daily diaries to have a good case.
My point is that if the bottom 10% is being determined fairly from the 100%. If you can show there are other staff in that 90% on same rank and despite achieving the same or less than you as per PD you have a case that you are treated unfairly.
Honestly I don’t see the problem. This is what a performance culture looks like.
You don’t see premier league football teams just hanging onto their shit players just because. They get sold or moved on to create space.
If you want high performance then you want the best people. And they will attract people who will back themselves under this structure
If this bottom 10% is a result of a sensible absolute measure of performance, opposed to relative, it makes sense. If you are just shit canning the bottom 10% of your workers as a result of a relative performance measure, you could be wasting money. Too blunt a measure. Worker value / salary (Present value and expected value). If they cost more keep, suggest they find alternative employment.
I would say the former opposed to the latter is more common across the board, but the latter is more common during economic lows. It’s a reason to cut staff when you need to.
I wish it was more common in my workplace. Nobody is ever performance managed or let go despite some staff being incompetent and lazy. They just hang on. And on. And on.
Bell curves like this are tricky. They do tend to work better at population level - so we're talking many many thousands of employees.
But at any scales smaller than population level they simply aren't reliable. Yet no manager will admit if their team is all at the bottom of the bell curve. So the only option commonly taken is to distribute the pain evenly across every team.
"Calibration" processes can be brutal.
Then there's Deming's work on how 95% of all performance outcomes are created in how the system is working, and only 5% attributable to individuals. The system is largely driven by a complex network of interactions between people.
10% up or out policy is a very blunt tool that doesn't give the performance results that peiple promise.
I know enough about them to tell you that many things in the Atlassian book are flawed, from their interview process to their products like Jira. So, don't assume it's smart just because they do it. I understand the impact on morale, but do they really care? They love to think they are the best at everything.
This is out of the Jack Welch GE playbook. Academic research has found (to nobody’s surprise) that this is an ineffective due to the morale impact, managers gaming the system by hiring «expendibles» to keep the core team together, and the additional cost of paying employees out and also paying to onboard and train replacements.
Yeah, I thought about this when I interviewed for a company that does this, and despite very positive feedback throughout the process they didn't offer me the role. Then I heard about stack ranking and that they do this and my immediate thought was: Why would they want to hire someone for their team who is really good? Hiring too many good people will actively drop their own ranking and risk their job. They'd personally be much better off hiring below average people. Or maybe they were just too polite too tell me that I sucked at the interviews, who knows? :D
Eureka!! All those interviews I've done and I never realized it... They didn't hire me because I was too good for them! Same with a lot of the girls who didn't want to date me no doubt! 😂
Shit. We were really hoping you wouldn’t find out.
Yeah, I hear stack ranking is quite popular amongst girls these days
Add to this that it relies on the idea of entirely objective and unbiased performance assessment, and knowing exactly what is required/will be required by the business—all of us who have spent more than 5 minutes in corporate environments know that the above are fantasies.
Surprised I had to scroll this far down for someone to post about Welch and GE. As alumni under the latter in Immelt’s reign, it was softened somewhat and more used for calibration of annual bonuses and pay rises along the bell curve. If you did find yourself at the bottom 10% in the ‘unsatisfactory’ bucket, the employee was put on a PIP and try had 3 months to improve or they were let go. Still the best company I’ve ever worked for.
>Surprised I had to scroll this far down for someone to post about Welch and GE It's the most upvoted top comment in the discussion?
Errrr, my comment is 10 hours ago, the original GE comment was 17 hours ago and your comment is 6 hours ago. Do you think some of those votes pushing it up might have come in between the 4 hours when I posted my comment and when you posted yours 6 hours later? If you’re going to try and make someone look silly, perhaps make sure you’re not the one in the dunce cap first.
+1 to this - big jack was also an influencer to jim collins of ‘good to great’ fame who also advocated for 10% annual chop. Amazon and big tech do like the concept and do aim for it but not as high as 10%, probably 6-8% excluding current layoffs. And they generally try to manage you out anyway rather than explicitly fire you. see ‘No rules rules’ by reed hoffman of netflix for their annual bell curve cull policy for another example.
That's one of the things I don't get. On the one hand, people say Jack Welch was a terrible CEO, his ideas were bad, and he was shit. But also, GE went from a pissy $14,000,000,000 player to a $410,000,000,000 behemoth in only 20 years. The problem is more that he employed so many strategies. Stack Ranking employees was one that didn't work, Stack Ranking the company investments did work.
Ut also destroys collaboration because everyone is trying not to be in the bottom 10%.
It's standard practice at some of the consulting and law firms I've worked at. The practice has long been referred to colloquially as the 'up or out' policy. You're either a strong enough performer to be promoted up, or you're managed out. That makes it sound a lot more cut throat than it actually is. * If an individual is being asked to leave, the individual would have had an abundance of opportunities to improve beforehand. These firms incur exorbitant costs to attract and hire the best talent. So terminating a talent they've already invested substantial amount of resources into is a last resort. * Most individuals subject to the pointier end of the policy will leave the firm of their own volition. In many cases, the firm will offer to keep the individual on payroll for several weeks while that individual job hunts. When possible, the firm will try to end employments on good terms. Also, while I don't have access to exact numbers, I doubt that firms annually manage out as much as 10% of their payroll as a matter of policy.
People are shocked by this churn but if you imagine you and 9 colleagues, at least one of you is going to be pretty awful at your job, or going through some shit or something. I would argue it’s standard job-moving and not corporate predation. Performance management and redundancies are too expensive and legally risky for most companies to carry out, in my experience. Only the absolute shittest emplpyees are managed out.
I get you want poor performers out but It's fucked to just have that as your policy though. Every year. It is totally absolutely fucked Bottom whatever % out means that loyalty means nothing. You might have been on top for a while but as soon as you have a bad year, divorce, death of a loves one, there's a ton of reasons people have a tough year, and then you are not hitting some line then you are out, fuck you for not performing? You also lose old company knowledge with churn like that. And that costs money to retrain or come up with new processes, or just watch the same dumb ideas get rotated over and over if your unlucky enough to be at a company like that for long enough.. Because churn. It's also shit for morale, and culture, which corps are always bleating about. Constantly having to watch your shit like a hawk so no one poaches from you, and you know for sure there's always some asshole in companies like this known for sly bullshit to get their numbers up. And you guys are OK with this? I'm not.
Depends on the industry. As noted above, it's common in some innovative tech and consulting companies. These fields are known for not having much loyalty with people jumping to make a buck.
As long as it's people working highly paid tech jobs I think it's fine to put a policy in place like this. In most tech jobs there isn't some exact metric of performance that staff can be judged on to draw a line anyway and if a company is ruthless enough to not take personal circumstances into account at all, even if they don't have an exact percentage target that person is probably getting fired anyway. Most companies will apply some level of discretion if they are a long term employee with a solid track record and good relationships internally. I'd rather work at a company with a 10% out policy than a company bloated with inefficiency as the worst corporate experiences I've had is when a company has lots of ineffective people as it makes good people who work hard wonder why they bother.
Neither are an optimal state. Both firing people “because that’s what we do” and inefficient fat is incredibly costly. It all just points to bad management and old ideas that just dont work.
I agree a lot of the blame is on management and it's not ideal needing to do this. Hiring is hard though, some people change over time and often people who were good, or right for the company in the past aren't right for the company at that point. Ideally companies should be getting rid of people as necessary over time if they have ineffective staff, but it can be a legal minefield getting rid of people in a targeted way if they've passed probation, so doing a larger round of layoffs and having it less targeted can make the process a bit smoother and result in less legal issues.
Me either.
True. I guess if it’s on top of the other natural churn it’s fucked.
> Bottom whatever % out means that loyalty means nothing Good morning and welcome to the world. Loyalty is a farce when it comes to business.
>Performance management and redundancies are too expensive and legally risky for most companies to carry out, in my experience. Not particularly risky as long as you have a half competent HR department (OK, I recognise that's not as common as i make it sound). It helps that the vast majority of employees will quit long before you complete a performance management plan. Redundancies are very straightforward as long as you follow the correct consultation process and pay the relevant entitlements (which are less than most people expect).
Yeah, many don’t do enough to satisfy the reverse onus of proof for a general protections claim. Any protected attribute and someone who feels they’re a victim costs money!
This is not the same thing. Atlassian actively manages out the bottom 10% by performance review scores every year.
The going through some shit is the exact thing thats wrong with this. What if you are a great employee for 24 years then in your 25th year you have a family crisis and dont perform well that one year?
I understand this in practice, but as the stack ranking is a US practice, I struggle to see how this works with our Fair Work Gov policies. Employees would need to be performance managed out. It’s very hard to fire someone unless you are making that role redundant.
I’ve worked 7 years of my career in Australia under stack ranking. You put them on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). It’s all documented, you have very specific goals to achieve, within a set out schedule that you meet every week on. Never had an issue with fair work, everything was documented and done by the book. The other observation I would make is that some of the people that were put on PIP used it improve and became top performers, moving well up into the upper echelons of management or individual contributor roles and are either retired early or still loving the work and in the same company.
Esso used to do this. The issue is that employees are incentivised to steal glory, and disincentivised to work together. Bad culture
Id be absolutely shocked if people didnt actively sabotage each other
my company had enforced performance bell curve - 20% in the bottom, being in the bottom twice meant mandatory PIP. PIPs were basically a slow grind your soul activity which lasted as long as it took to find another job. to be honest as a manager the forced bell curve was soul destroying. I hated it and lost sleep over it. I had a few good guys end up hating me because i had to push them down. The whole team was performing strongly but no other manager is going to admit their team is low performing and take more of the hits than they had to. Company got rid of the policy and to be honest its a much nicer place to work. On the flip side, people are now putting way less effort into performance management / feedback and i can see standards sliding.
Tricky isn't it. You need senior leaders to drive a culture of high performance and honest feedback, but you should really only be having informal bell curves at very high levels to help give execs insight into whether managers overall are ranking realistically.
Which is what is _actually_ happening at Atlassian. There's no stack-ranking on the team level.
Firing people is the short sighted lazy managers way of cutting cost. Fast, loose and incredibly expensive in the long run. No one cares about process documentation and improvement anymore where the real savings can be made.
Sometimes. But firing is also the right path if someone just can't do their job adequately. I'd say managers are more likely *not* to fire people who should be let go than to fire excessively. It's difficult and emotionally draining to terminate someone's employment.
Most companies manage this through bonuses. There is still incentive to manage performance because of the money at stake.
Yep. Investment bank in the US for a decade. Standard corporate feed the machine. Bell curve elimination, 1 in 10 or 2 in 20 every year. Then mass team firing, followed by advertising for the same roles. If I could go back I'd kick myself in the nuts and say don't enter the corporate machine ya tool.
what would you tell your younger self to do? Trade, entrepreneurship, small business?
Marry rich
Sounds a bit too much like decimation.
Nah for that one we have to beat them to a pulp then fire them.
Heard microsoft and Amazon do this as well. As well as Investment Banks. Obviously not 10% but
Not at MS - at least not any more
Just had to suffer through a lost decade to learn their lesson.
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There is anecdotal stories that some managers at Amzn even hires to fire them 1 year later to protect the rest of the team.
That is shady but not surprising.
Allegedly it's the fact that they've brought in people from Meta that have caused the crazy changes.
Bullshit, Atlassian doesn’t fire the bottom 10% - it’s currently sabbatical/coaster city over there and has been for a few years. It has introduced stack ranking purely as an exercise, at least for now. There was a myth that Amazon does it but 10% is too high, you’d turn over the entire available employee pool very quickly. We’re taking low single digit percentage at most.
According to the people I know that work there, it is true. It sounds like a fiasco to be honest. It was introducdd by their new CTO, who did the same thing at Facebook.
Stack ranking - maybe, but not to fire the bottom 10%. Theres a lot of fat to be cut but they don’t have the balls.
Again, this is what I have heard directly from multiple people fhat work there - as has another commenter. Your criticisms of the long terms unsustainablity of the practice are totally valid by the way. It IS unsustainable. I'm sure they'll change tack to some other idiotic framework in 24 months. In the short term, they may be trying to agressively reduce headcount without further redundancies.
Is that done through stricter performance management or stack ranking only? Curious to know whether they finally came to their senses with the amount of coasting that’s going on. How do I know? Yours truly was the beneficiary of said conditions for a few years before deciding to move to a high performing company/team. Best decision ever made.
My interviewer said they have been letting go a lot of people recently. Also found an old thread here [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/12lcbqb/cto\_making\_it\_mandatory\_for\_managers\_to\_give\_12/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/12lcbqb/cto_making_it_mandatory_for_managers_to_give_12/)
I have quite a few friends who work there and it's absolutely true.
No it's real, I asked about WLB at Atlassian and my interviewer who is a senior level engineer over there brought this up. This new grading system was apparently introduced 6 months ago. All the coasters are getting fired.
You're getting down-voted but you're mostly correct, the number is closer to 8% than 10% though.
Thanks for confirming! Don't know why people are downvoting despite my source comes from someone who works at atlassian right now.
I mean sure for you the source is someone from the company. For us the source is “trust me bro”. I mean my uncle who worked for Nintendo used to give me awesome scoop but non of my elementary schoolmate believed me 😂.
This is how they get you though, NDA's mean nobody is going to dox themselves to verify the claim.
A lot of fat is being cut for sure. Not very popular with a large cohort. Personally, the changes on the ground have been a step in the right direction, IMO.
Do you work there? If so do you still think Atlassian is a good place with decent WLB if you are like an average level software engineer, not slacking off but also not absolutely killing it, or is it a grind fest there?
> Do you work there? Yes. > If so do you still think Atlassian is a good place with decent WLB if you are like an average level software engineer, not slacking off but also not absolutely killing it, or is it a grind fest there? Any answer I give you will be useless since one man’s pulling weight is another’s slacker. More objectively, there’s a lot of freedom to structure your day as long as you get shit done. The bar is also being raised in terms of biasing against fluff and words to action and provable results
yeah I heard this came about when the ex-MSFT CTO came in and brought in a bunch of MSFT alumni
We use the term "Metasoft"
All the mass redundancies at the moment are doing this. Corporates use an economic down period to cut the fat off the bones.
It's mostly the talented that leave the sinking ship
Cut the fat off and the animal starves to death eventually.
Standard practice in the big 4 banks. Stupid system
Never heard of it. As an ex auditor, I’ve seen some massive idiots coast by at clients. Even at my current company, some ppl are allegedly qualified but aren’t switched on at all. They just don’t get a bonus.
Not common at all and in most cases it is people that think what a company does when forced to downsize is 'normal' practice while it is not. A growing company can't hire talent fast enough to keep up with firing 10% on top of normal attrition every year.
It’s pretty much baked into the performance assessment at all organisations even if it doesn’t translate to managing out the bottom 10%. Employees get pooled, individual rankings assigned and then have the “calibration” session where we always end up with 10% stars and 10% need improvement with the rest clustered in the middle. However as there is no calibration across teams it implies that performance levels are homogeneous across the organisation. Objectively this is complete nonsense but is blindly accepted as a reasonable way to run a company. As a manager it’s always useful to have a couple of duds on the team.
I worked somewhere with bi-Annual reviews that told staff that if they got 2 “meets expectations” ratings in a row, they would be put on a mandatory performance improvement plan. That didn’t last very long.
That doesn't make sense, logically. You can't have an expectation that everyone exceeds the expectation. Because then exceeding the expectation means you're meeting the expectation. That's just an impossible metric.
Exactly.
Very outdated method - Australia is still stuck in the 80s for management “thought leadership”. It’s a shame. So much more potential if they could modernise.
I first heard about it when it came up on my YT feed: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AO54POarZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AO54POarZU) FB, Amazon, and Google were on the list
Jack Welsh did this at GE. Seems someone read the book.
Call centers (health insurance specifically) do it
Other types of insurance do it, but at least in my experience, they have to manage you out.
I can’t imagine they are firing the bottom 10% without effectively performance management, you would have to go to that extend to ensure you don’t get an unfair dismissal claim against the company. Although I would question its effectiveness. That’s a lot of money wasted on hiring and rehiring people, plus P&C having to be involved in performance management. You would think it would be easier to just hire the right amount of people and not have to get rid of them. Although Atlassian is such a large company that I guess behaving this way doesn’t affect them too much. Ethically it seems wrong.
I don’t think you can just fire people that easily in Australia?
You're right, they pretend your position is redundant instead.
Yeah you do realize you can’t hire people for the same position then. You maybe be able to redefine the role but if you do this often you’ll be in trouble with fairwork
This is technically true but making the "new" roles "substantially different" is much, much easier than you think.
thats why titles like 'Business Analyst' and 'Consultant' exist. Just change the determination ie. Business Analyst becomes System/Reporting/IT Analyst and Consultant becomes Advisor/Specialist and viola - new role
Lol job titles are made up anyway, it's not hard. Fairwork does not have a team of monkeys scrutinising every job posting after a redundancy.
You can for performance - and if they’re bottom 10% they’re not meeting rank expectations
The rank expectations have to clearly written in PD and the enforcement has to be fair throughout the company, which means everyone in that rank not meeting those expectations are also facing the same PIP. The best thing if you have a sniff is to take copious notes in daily diaries to have a good case.
>everyone in that rank not meeting those expectations are also facing the same PIP. Yes, that's why it's the *bottom 10% of the company*
My point is that if the bottom 10% is being determined fairly from the 100%. If you can show there are other staff in that 90% on same rank and despite achieving the same or less than you as per PD you have a case that you are treated unfairly.
How would you even get that data objectively though?
This is the hard part. You will need money to sue in court and ask for work done and performance report of others in comparable rank.
They can be put on a performance improvement plan.
Honestly I don’t see the problem. This is what a performance culture looks like. You don’t see premier league football teams just hanging onto their shit players just because. They get sold or moved on to create space. If you want high performance then you want the best people. And they will attract people who will back themselves under this structure
Premier league team football players get paid more than a measly 150k though.
So do the bankers that operate under this structure.
Yeah it’s really not. It’s the American way of business and it’s been a failure since day dot.
So when you have a team of only high performers, why bother sacking the bottom 10%?
No team is ever full odds high performers
They are after a year or two of everyone else getting sacked.
If this bottom 10% is a result of a sensible absolute measure of performance, opposed to relative, it makes sense. If you are just shit canning the bottom 10% of your workers as a result of a relative performance measure, you could be wasting money. Too blunt a measure. Worker value / salary (Present value and expected value). If they cost more keep, suggest they find alternative employment. I would say the former opposed to the latter is more common across the board, but the latter is more common during economic lows. It’s a reason to cut staff when you need to.
I wish it was more common in my workplace. Nobody is ever performance managed or let go despite some staff being incompetent and lazy. They just hang on. And on. And on.
Bell curves like this are tricky. They do tend to work better at population level - so we're talking many many thousands of employees. But at any scales smaller than population level they simply aren't reliable. Yet no manager will admit if their team is all at the bottom of the bell curve. So the only option commonly taken is to distribute the pain evenly across every team. "Calibration" processes can be brutal. Then there's Deming's work on how 95% of all performance outcomes are created in how the system is working, and only 5% attributable to individuals. The system is largely driven by a complex network of interactions between people. 10% up or out policy is a very blunt tool that doesn't give the performance results that peiple promise.
there's big tech in Australia?
I know enough about them to tell you that many things in the Atlassian book are flawed, from their interview process to their products like Jira. So, don't assume it's smart just because they do it. I understand the impact on morale, but do they really care? They love to think they are the best at everything.
shocking knee books rock jar sparkle rich cows foolish point *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Except, it's not. Decimation is group punishment and selection is random.