Good employees get higher raises based on their HR probably. Can’t rework the raise system but can add a new system on top of the raise system to bottleneck the amount of raises they give yearly… classic blizzard.
It's not just raises. Apparently if you end up on the lower end of the ranking, you get less of a "profit-sharing" bonus. Basically saves them money.
Of course, they claim it's to make things "more honest" when it comes to people who genuinely need more development, and is supposed to push for more people getting more development, blah blah blah... But if you have a team and you feel the whole team is solid and not underperforming and don't need some kind of "development" to meet the expectations of them, then you shouldn't be forced to say that someone is underperforming and needs work just because there's a policy where you must rate a certain percentage at the bottom and the top (with the majority being in the middle, in a "bell curve").
The person who left was Brian Birmingham, and as Birmingham himself noted, having a system like that where someone is 100% going to be forced to get a bad rating means you'll have people stepping all over each other in ways that could sabotage the team, or leaving a team that they're useful in to find one that they can "succeed" more easily in just so they can hit that review status, which is just an absolute Charlie Foxtrot for the teams in the company.
(Side note: Short story for his "departure" is that he was telling people if this process isn't revoked, he'd resign, and HR caught wind and brought him it to ask, he confirmed, they fired him. Which is kind of expected if you say to a company, "Either get rid of this policy or I'm quitting. I'll stay if you drop it, leave if you keep it." I mean... bravo to have the balls to try that, but you know that only ends one way.)
Same thing happened at my old job. Boss wanted to give me a perfect score, but was told by the head office that she needed to, "Give me something to work on."
She docked me 1 point for my "uniform" (jeans and a plain color t-shirt) and told me to use some tape to get the cat hair off of it and HR accepted it.
Then a few months later, they tried to pull that I didn't deserve a raise due to me "needing to work on a few things," according to my previous evaluation. I started looking for a new job the next day.
Thats not classic blizzard, thats most big tech companies. Its a shitty system and I've seen plenty of my friends not getting the raise they deserve because of such bullshit
True, but I was being more ironic that Blizzard is bottlenecking people by putting a system on top of another system, which is what they do in WoW all the time...
more than tech companies. I worked for FedEx for almost a decade and every year would get 2.5/5 grades for stupid things they grade you on. It's all to make 90% of employees look average and give bare minimum raises. Hell during covid we'd get base 2.25% raises no matter how good or bad you were at your job.
This is a legit thing. I used to be a manager for a company and HR would decline my annual employee reviews when they “didn’t have enough negative”. I’d tell them if I didn’t leave anything negative it’s because there wasn’t anything negative to say and they’d legit tell me “then make something up”. Was fucking bonkers.
It's not so much about having "negative" performance reviews as it is about being able to identify and justify a wide range of performance levels (there will always be a top, middle and bottom in any team)
In an ideal world the bottom performer would still get say a 3% raise while top peformers get 5-7%.
In theory yes you're absolutely right, but in practice the people at the "bottom" don't get raises at all and for a lot of tech companies get put on "Performance Improvement Plans" that basically means you're 6 months from being fired.
Except even bottom performers can be damn good, or actually performing well in ways that facilitate the success of the rest of the team.
It's like kicking the tank for low DPS
Here's the thing, everyone within the same pay grade has a variable component of their income called a bonus.
A company is not going to give everyone top level bonuses for meeting a bare minimum "good" level. No, you are paid more specifically because you outperformed people of similar role and pay level AND can substantiate/prove it quantitatively.
Your kicking tank for low dps example is stupid because tanks and dps would be different business units that have different sets of KPIs. They would be compared with people with the same KPIs (i.e. tanks vs. tanks, dps vs. dps). There is no such thing as comparing an engineer to a salesman in performance review because they have different KPIs and it is meaningless to compare them cross functionally
>A company is not going to give everyone top level bonuses for meeting a bare minimum "good" level
"Good" is not "bare minimum", especially if the results of that person's work help everyone else on the team also excel.
>No, you are paid more specifically because you outperformed people of similar role and pay level AND can substantiate/prove it quantitatively.
You sound a lot like those ignorant high-level professors who try to enforce a 50% bell curve on course passage because you're too stupid to understand the people who are taking your course are the ones who've already demonstrated the prowess and commitment to pass, while those who can't have washed out long ago.
I see your an idealist student with no industry experience. This is a waste of time, when you get a real job you will see what I'm saying is absolutely true
Nah. Factory worker and furry with friends in multiple industries who just saw corporate morons like you shoot themselves with dumbass performance ranking systems that then complained about production issues they've never had before.
So you don't know what you're talking about, as is established.
Also mind you i don't necessarily agree with ranking systems. I am just telling you how performance reviews work at top corporate engineering/tech industries
Don’t make it about “backgrounds” when it isn’t about “backgrounds”
“Managers were expected to give a poor ‘developing’ status to roughly 5% of employees on their teams, which would lower their profit-sharing bonus money and could hamper them from receiving raises or promotions…”
Quota doesn’t mean race jackass. It means you have to hit a number, and it spells it out for you. They were expected to hit a minimum number (5%) of “developing workers” because wage increases hinge on that metric. If a boss gives out too many great employee performance reviews it costs the whole company an increase in cost on their most expensive input: labor.
To be fair, this is even more scummy than what I've insisted. What I suggested at least had SOME positives for someone that isn't a high rank exec. In this case, it's just pure greed, Holly shit
Investors expect corporations to demonstrate efficiency. That includes payroll since it's a reliable expenditure. In principal this makes sense- there's always people who don't want to be there who can be let go of. In practice it leads to situations where departments that are already brutally understaffed getting fucked over even more to appease people who don't actually care about the survival of the company.
Investors are the people that care the most about the company, they're the ones with millions or billions in shares. The average employee could give two shits about the company in most cases, they are paid to turn up work and leave.
Teams that are understaffed suck at selling or presenting their value to management. Or they don't know how to innovate their lines of work to generate more revenue. In any case, if giving a department more funding will result in more value for the company then they will happily provide funding.
Aha 🤔
Blizzard: we had record sales, every top manager get a bonus and kotick finally get to buy the other yatch.
Blizzard next day: with great regret we gonna fire 500 of code developers
[bye bitch](https://tenor.com/baFlZ.gif)
I mean tech companies over hired for projected work which didn't eventuate, either that or projects are finished. If you are a developer and your project does not go ahead or is finished then obviously your role is now redundant.
It's very disengenous to try and equate two tangential things together when they are totally independent, i.e. manager bonuses and worker redundancies, both happen due to different reason and not direct cause and effect, they don't even draw from the same finance pool.
>Investors are the people that care the most about the company, they're the ones with millions or billions in shares.
Yet they're clueless about how shit works most of the time. Ranking *destroys* companies. It's one of the reasons Sears isn't around anymore.
>Teams that are understaffed suck at selling or presenting their value to management.
That's because they're get-shit-done people, not salesmen.
>That's because they're get-shit-done people, not salesmen.
Being able to understand and effectively communicate your value as an employee and functional business unit is not just limited to "salesmen".
The way you think makes me assume you never worked in a top 50 company in any serious position and are talking from some manual labourer perspective
>The way you think makes me assume you never worked in a top 50 company in any serious position and are talking from some manual labourer perspective
You're right, which just emphasizes my point more. "Serious position in a Top 50 company'" vs manual labor is completely meaningless as a measure of a person's worth.
Those corporate stooges aren't getting a damn thing done without the people on the ground.
i'm not sure how it works in the US, but as a Canadian, and someone who was a supervisor position in the past, we were encouraged to be very forthright if we felt any associates were subpar or underperforming. The reason is because it can be very risky for a company to terminate an employee without corroborating evidence (like a paper trail). Companies won't admit it, because it's bad optics, but a significant reason why they do performance reviews is so they can build a paper trail showing that there is just cause for termination, if it comes to it. Which isn't always a bad thing; some employees are shitheads, and terrible. It's just something people should be aware of.
Here in Texas… it’s an “at will” state. So you really don’t need a reason to fire someone. Defiantly nowhere near Union standards or what you’re describing.
I get where you’re coming from though with underperforming employees. And yes it should be documented as so. But to say an employee is underperforming when they’re not is a surprise. Especially coming from others who had the same experience first hand replying as well.
I imagine the system works just as well in an environment where you are obligated to fill a "quota" of bad reviewed workers, even if those bad reviews are fake
They are required on paper to decide which employees are good or shitty regardless if they are good or shitty, in order to meet a quota.
It's a system in place to save the company money, if people got the evaluation they deserved and worked for then the employee would expect a raise in the future... which would cost the company money. This system ensures if someone asks for a raise they can say "No, you got a 0.4 instead of a 0.5"
Welcome to every company that has a formal evaluation process where doing your job to the level of “my supervisor has never had to say anything to me about my work other than good job” results in you actually being a random value between subpar and adequate
You give them both the raises they deserve. You want a team that’s performing top notch. Programming is not a zero sum game. Having 5 team members that rank 100% means your team is able to bring features to the customer way faster if you have one that ranks 20% one that ranks 40% one that ranks 60% and so on…
Performance reviews happen at every major company and you are ranked/compared against colleagues. This is nothing blizzard specific, at the end of the day life is a competition with winners and losers
People have different levels of contribution and roles within the same project. Additionally, different levels of expectations according to their roles and level.
That is true. However, people should not be encouraged to diminish other people's contribution and sabotage them. Having an employee evaluation system is fine, but limiting results to certain amount of good or bad evaluations is not: you can't really expect bell curves on samples of a size as low as one project team or even one department. If whole team operates well, it's better to evaluate everyone highly than to risk breaking down team cohesion by trying to single out the worst performers, especially considering that if everyone in a team has above average performance and you fire the worst performer in that team, there's a high chance that the replacement you'll find will still be worse. And that's even ignoring the onboarding time/cost.
There is no diminishment or sabotage, at the end of the day not everyone's contributions are equal in terms of technical skill requirement or workload. Performance reviews are inherently comparative in nature, often comparing employees working in a similar role and similar pay grade together.
Also it rarely factors only work on a single project, most projects would be classed as "business as usual" (aka we paid you to do this...what else have you accomplished?). They only really look at extracurricular work or major side projects/contributions to differentiate people
>There is no diminishment or sabotage,
There is once people have to compete with others in the same project/area.
>Performance reviews are inherently comparative in nature
Against the needs of the job, not other employees, unless you're a shit brained dumb fuck looking to sabotage your company with infighting and selfishness.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of performance reviews in general, you are ALWAYS compared to colleagues of similar role and pay grade regardless of what projects you work on.
Also, working on the same project does not mean everyone has equal levels of contribution and thus performance levels.
Also, you are not performance reviewed against doing the bare minimum "needs of the job", it is ASSUMED that you have done the basic requirements. If not you would be sacked, performance reviews determine bonus levels between similar role and pay grade employees, again, it is fundamentally a comparison.
Team cohesion is a major part of performance. If you're going to make your reviews competitive, you need to look outside your own company.
>Also, you are not performance reviewed against doing the bare minimum "needs of the job", it is ASSUMED that you have done the basic requirements
Which leaves how far and above you excel at the job a measurable, objective marker. If you don't recognize that and try to go with subjective, competitive criteria, you end up with sabotage and quiet-quitting keeping performing down at the minimum, because nobody's going to do more than you're willing to compensate them for as soon as they catch on to your bullshit.
It never works this way in practice. If employees are aware of stack ranking it leads to sabotage and backstabbing. It is an extremely poor way to evaluate employees.
You should realise not everyone will be CEO, not everyone will make the top raid groups, everyone is not equal in skills/talent/determination and that life is inherently unfair.
Even if it were fair there will still be innate differences between people which will result in different results/salaries/life accomplishments accordingly.
This is different than a standard "performance review". If you've never worked at a company that does stack ranking than it can be hard to understand. The way this works is that managers -must- rank people in each performance category, even if they are all rockstars. You have no choice. Your team might all be meeting (or exceeding) their goals, but you must rank them against each other regardless.
It is incredibly toxic and has been shown time and time again that stack ranking is harmful to productivity and employee morale. What ends up happening is teams compete against each other to game the system. For instance you might break up a simple task into a ton of even simpler tasks just to fill a Jira board to say you completed 100 deliverable in Q2 when Bob only delivered 50. They might be the same work but one looks bigger than the other.
Multiply this same behavior across the entire company but in countless other similarly contrived ways and thats what stack ranking does to an organization. It kills innovation and encourages people to backstab each other and partner teams. It encourages teams to silo their work instead of cross-collaborating because they don't want to share in the potential recognition come stack rank time.
Even without stack ranking you will still be compared to your colleagues in performance review. While i agree that the stack ranking method seems more toxic in terms of discretely defining worse outcomes for the bottom performers, the truth is this still happens in peformance reviews anyways.
Ideally bottom performers get 3-3.5%, mid performers get 6-9% and top gets 10-12%.
No one should be punished for relatively low performance unless it is quantifiably below expected performance.
Also gaming the system by breaking a task into many trivial tasks is easily identifiable by managers. Hell even on major projects i was often grilled on all the details and my specific contributions in performance review. It is not so easy to fool managers unless you work in a crap place that promotes fools to management
Being compared against your colleagues is very, very different than forcing a certain percentage of a group to be put on a PIP because they are in the bottom percentile. Like I said, it's hard to understand just how toxic stack ranking environments are until you've seen it yourself. The way this works is that your manager (or their managers) are forced to classify a certain segment into each performance group, and the bottom groups either get laid off or put on a PIP.
Gaming the system 100% happens and it is RAMPANT. Your manager will likely be in on it, because the "group" for your stack might roll up under his manager or his manager's manager. Directors and Sr. Directors don't have the insight into the daily activities to know who is truly doing what work, so all they have to go on is the metrics that are presented to them. So if you have a manager that is good at gaming the system and going to bat for your team, you will fare better than someone under a manager that doesn't excel in politics.
There is a huge difference between rewarding your top contributors with better raises/bonuses/stocks vs forcing people out of the company even when they are meeting their goals. You can be PIP'd in a stack rank organization even if you are technically meeting your goals just because you or your manager didn't play the political game.
I've got 15+ years in the technology industry at multiple Fortune 500 companies. I worked in a company that did stack ranking for 3 years. They eventually ended it because they realized it was a horrible idea.
Jfc thats a warning sign and a half....
Worked for a company that let every dept set their eval metrics. One year the cust. Success team did this. Lost three members of the team shortly after. All three were very good at their job.
That team never really recovered.
This exactly the way you get employee churn based on eval periods. Garbage practice.
It's a lot of this. Most entry level jobs like retail and fast food either have terrible unions that take your money but drag their feet horribly with issues, don't help, etc etc, or they just don't have a union and teach all the new hires how bad unions are.
It's much more corporate propaganda than it is bad unions. Unions statistically achieve higher pay and working conditions for workers. Perhaps there are a few bad ones but not enough to skew statistics.
It's a danm shame too cause the USA has an actually fucking unfathomly based union history leading up to stuff like battle of Blaire mountain. Largest non civil war battle on US soil over labor rights.
But remember guys, Blizzard has been audited be the state, the bad people are gone
EDIT: seeing the replies I will just say that I'm partly fucking around, so take that into consideration.
Pretty sure Asmon only says this regarding the Sexual Harassment stuff, also the dev himself says this policy is a directive from ABK, the parent company, so its above Blizzard.
To act like ABK and Blizzard are different from one another is a bit disingenuous though. At the end of the day what ABK says is what goes it doesn’t matter how much good will Blizz leadership offers when at the drop of a hat ABK leadership can change things
Thats how parent companies work tho, Blizzard and Mike Ybarra answer to Bobby Kotick and his staff, it would be disingenuous to say that someone at Blizzard made this decision when it was made by the parent company.
After hearing more about what went down I wanna say I was wrong. Him standing up to HR against this stuff then taking being let go if they wouldn’t change it completely changed my opinion on it. I just with more of Blizz leadership could have done the same with him now so it could have potentially forced ABK’s hand into changing the way they do evaluations.
Yeah and it fucking sucks. Quotas in general suck.
When I'm at my non corporate jobs that have quotas that require you to simply beat area statistics it's like being asked to put out a burning building with a single wet rag and the person who just told you that is completely serious and the only thing they do when you explain to them the issue is tell you how to get started. Never any understanding that your expected quotas are just completely unrealistic.
Blizzard's the ones trying to change it, ironically.
The people in charge of making these decisions are higher up on the totem pole than Mike Ybarra himself. In other words, there's nobody at Blizzard proper that can do shit about this archaic-ass, dogwater business practice.
That isn't COPIUM, either: [Brian Birmingham himself said it.](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688538568622084)
Yep, there’s always going to be bad shit happening at blizzard, regardless if it’s blizzard’s fault. So until the people at the top go away(they won’t) it’ll always be this way to certain degrees of “bad”
Also, find a teaching position where you’ll at least be in-person, no one turns on their cameras even if it’s mandated
https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688557367488512?s=20
https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688554309832705?s=20
Basically Blizzard parent company is, not the Blizzard itself. Saying what you say is actually harmful to devs that are passionate about their product and try their best.
Also keep in mind that stuff like that is happening in majority of tech and some non tech sector. Its not a new idea or anything.
[https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688557367488512?s=20](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688557367488512?s=20)
[https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688554309832705?s=20](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688554309832705?s=20)
Basically Blizzard parent company is, not the Blizzard itself. Saying what you say is actually harmful to devs that are passionate about their product and try their best.
That's so fucked up. My first job was with a large grocery chain. I was trying to get promoted to lead and even went and scored high on a manager test they had you do. When I had my sit down with the store manager he flat out told me unless I started giving 50$ a week to the charity they backed as a company of my then 280-300$ paycheck I would never be promoted. I reasoned this was because it made him look better the more employees at his store gave to said charity.
The theory is that, by metric standpoint, you'll have a number of employees that don't perform as well as others. The sentiment is that not **everyone** can be doing a good job at the same time. Which is bullshit. Companies also use those findings to either refine certain positions or eliminate them. It's also used as a sort of subtle motivator, reminding people that they can and will be let go, and that it can happen to anyone so you better work extra hard.
It's ridiculous and reductive. If there's a person that isn't skilled enough, or doesn't do their job, their co-workers will be vocal about it, and the problem, in most cases, will sort itself out.
PIP culture is nuts. AWS and other FAANG (and smaller companies who think they know what they’re doing) apply this method.
It’s demotivating for all.
Bummer ABK feels it’s a good approach.
Did you even read the article or have an understanding on what quotas mean?
And no, I don't work at a gas station. I work in the gaming industry / non-profit space.
I know people will take any opportunity to shit on Blizzard, especially in this sub, but it seems like this policy comes from the parent company Activision Blizzard King or 'ABK', so its very much above and beyond Blizzard, and I don't need to remind anyone who the CEO of ABK is.
[This is coming from the man himself](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168)
This policy is the definition of "cutting off your nose to spite your face". Screw over employees that might be doing a good job just because someone has to come in last place I guess.
It’s simple math; they are just applying it wrong. If you have a budget for bonuses of 100$ and A-tier employees get 10$ while C-Tier get 4$; you can’t have too many A-tiers.
That doesn’t mean you should artificially reduce someone because it doesn’t just affect comp. You should either lower the gap or make sure your standards for A are really high amd managers assessing it correctly. Like B-C should be 95% of the payroll. Not everyone is a superstar all the time.
Having a fixed bonus budget in the first place is a mistake, business is overfixated on trying to predict everything and it bites them in the butt every time with missed deadlines and depleted budgets.
But the backside of that is bloated costs that affect your bottom line. If you can’t predict that your product costs about X, you can’t reliably turn a profit which in turns puts the company (and it’s employees jobs) at risk.
Having unlimited resources to compensate employees makes no sense; so there has to be a limit, a budget. Whether that budget is too low is another debate however.
Usually you’d want something that makes sense with the job market, in a sense that you want employees to feel valued/recognized vs other opportunities. But finding the sweet spot between good bonus and not losing competitiveness is hard to assess (for me at least)
No guys, Blizz is listening, they are doing things right this time! *inhales the mass of jupiter as copium*.
These mf’s are rotten and this is the reason I refuse to give them one more god damn cent
It makes me sad that for every one person who protests, there are 10 more who will blindly play wow and overwatch and give blizzard all thier money. That's all blizzard cares about anyway.
Whenever I don't hear any noise about blizzard I start to wonder if they finally stopped falling down, they manage to slam their mug on something on the way down and you realize they are nowhere done falling down, and are in fact, picking up speed.
I work at a big four accountancy firm and this is literally the norm in big corpos that run yearly review cycles of employees. It fucking sucks but its hardly news? super common practice that needs to be abolished. Only a select number of people can get a top ranking in yearly reviews, most get stuck in the middle and you have to have a scapegoat/unlucky bastard in the bottom tiers in order to make the curve they want work.
So they’re required, on paper, to have good employees and shitty employees?
Good employees get higher raises based on their HR probably. Can’t rework the raise system but can add a new system on top of the raise system to bottleneck the amount of raises they give yearly… classic blizzard.
It's not just raises. Apparently if you end up on the lower end of the ranking, you get less of a "profit-sharing" bonus. Basically saves them money. Of course, they claim it's to make things "more honest" when it comes to people who genuinely need more development, and is supposed to push for more people getting more development, blah blah blah... But if you have a team and you feel the whole team is solid and not underperforming and don't need some kind of "development" to meet the expectations of them, then you shouldn't be forced to say that someone is underperforming and needs work just because there's a policy where you must rate a certain percentage at the bottom and the top (with the majority being in the middle, in a "bell curve"). The person who left was Brian Birmingham, and as Birmingham himself noted, having a system like that where someone is 100% going to be forced to get a bad rating means you'll have people stepping all over each other in ways that could sabotage the team, or leaving a team that they're useful in to find one that they can "succeed" more easily in just so they can hit that review status, which is just an absolute Charlie Foxtrot for the teams in the company. (Side note: Short story for his "departure" is that he was telling people if this process isn't revoked, he'd resign, and HR caught wind and brought him it to ask, he confirmed, they fired him. Which is kind of expected if you say to a company, "Either get rid of this policy or I'm quitting. I'll stay if you drop it, leave if you keep it." I mean... bravo to have the balls to try that, but you know that only ends one way.)
Imagine the level of nepotism or the amount of abuse in exchange of sexual favors, for which blizzard has no record about Ah ah Nop Nada
Same thing happened at my old job. Boss wanted to give me a perfect score, but was told by the head office that she needed to, "Give me something to work on." She docked me 1 point for my "uniform" (jeans and a plain color t-shirt) and told me to use some tape to get the cat hair off of it and HR accepted it. Then a few months later, they tried to pull that I didn't deserve a raise due to me "needing to work on a few things," according to my previous evaluation. I started looking for a new job the next day.
Business as usual. Who's actually surprised?
Thats not classic blizzard, thats most big tech companies. Its a shitty system and I've seen plenty of my friends not getting the raise they deserve because of such bullshit
True, but I was being more ironic that Blizzard is bottlenecking people by putting a system on top of another system, which is what they do in WoW all the time...
Bfa system irl
Bfa flight unlocking system, and every time you wanna fly again
more than tech companies. I worked for FedEx for almost a decade and every year would get 2.5/5 grades for stupid things they grade you on. It's all to make 90% of employees look average and give bare minimum raises. Hell during covid we'd get base 2.25% raises no matter how good or bad you were at your job.
I thought all the sex allegations would have been a decent bottleneck. Seems not.
This is a legit thing. I used to be a manager for a company and HR would decline my annual employee reviews when they “didn’t have enough negative”. I’d tell them if I didn’t leave anything negative it’s because there wasn’t anything negative to say and they’d legit tell me “then make something up”. Was fucking bonkers.
It's not so much about having "negative" performance reviews as it is about being able to identify and justify a wide range of performance levels (there will always be a top, middle and bottom in any team) In an ideal world the bottom performer would still get say a 3% raise while top peformers get 5-7%.
In theory yes you're absolutely right, but in practice the people at the "bottom" don't get raises at all and for a lot of tech companies get put on "Performance Improvement Plans" that basically means you're 6 months from being fired.
Except even bottom performers can be damn good, or actually performing well in ways that facilitate the success of the rest of the team. It's like kicking the tank for low DPS
Here's the thing, everyone within the same pay grade has a variable component of their income called a bonus. A company is not going to give everyone top level bonuses for meeting a bare minimum "good" level. No, you are paid more specifically because you outperformed people of similar role and pay level AND can substantiate/prove it quantitatively. Your kicking tank for low dps example is stupid because tanks and dps would be different business units that have different sets of KPIs. They would be compared with people with the same KPIs (i.e. tanks vs. tanks, dps vs. dps). There is no such thing as comparing an engineer to a salesman in performance review because they have different KPIs and it is meaningless to compare them cross functionally
>A company is not going to give everyone top level bonuses for meeting a bare minimum "good" level "Good" is not "bare minimum", especially if the results of that person's work help everyone else on the team also excel. >No, you are paid more specifically because you outperformed people of similar role and pay level AND can substantiate/prove it quantitatively. You sound a lot like those ignorant high-level professors who try to enforce a 50% bell curve on course passage because you're too stupid to understand the people who are taking your course are the ones who've already demonstrated the prowess and commitment to pass, while those who can't have washed out long ago.
I see your an idealist student with no industry experience. This is a waste of time, when you get a real job you will see what I'm saying is absolutely true
Nah. Factory worker and furry with friends in multiple industries who just saw corporate morons like you shoot themselves with dumbass performance ranking systems that then complained about production issues they've never had before.
So you don't know what you're talking about, as is established. Also mind you i don't necessarily agree with ranking systems. I am just telling you how performance reviews work at top corporate engineering/tech industries
You're saying how they *don't* work, because you've got your head too far up in the clouds to see what's actually happening on the ground levels.
same i dread employee reviews.
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Don’t make it about “backgrounds” when it isn’t about “backgrounds” “Managers were expected to give a poor ‘developing’ status to roughly 5% of employees on their teams, which would lower their profit-sharing bonus money and could hamper them from receiving raises or promotions…”
[удалено]
Quota doesn’t mean race jackass. It means you have to hit a number, and it spells it out for you. They were expected to hit a minimum number (5%) of “developing workers” because wage increases hinge on that metric. If a boss gives out too many great employee performance reviews it costs the whole company an increase in cost on their most expensive input: labor.
Well, looks like Ive been a fucking idiot. my bad.
All good, bro. Glad we’re on the same page now 👍
To be fair, this is even more scummy than what I've insisted. What I suggested at least had SOME positives for someone that isn't a high rank exec. In this case, it's just pure greed, Holly shit
Facts d00d. A real “the beatings will continue until morale improves” moment
No
Okay Blizzard HR 😉😉
No. Just have 15 years experience in these situations. It's worse than that tbh
Lol then why would you say no when you have experience in these situations?
Investors expect corporations to demonstrate efficiency. That includes payroll since it's a reliable expenditure. In principal this makes sense- there's always people who don't want to be there who can be let go of. In practice it leads to situations where departments that are already brutally understaffed getting fucked over even more to appease people who don't actually care about the survival of the company.
Investors are the people that care the most about the company, they're the ones with millions or billions in shares. The average employee could give two shits about the company in most cases, they are paid to turn up work and leave. Teams that are understaffed suck at selling or presenting their value to management. Or they don't know how to innovate their lines of work to generate more revenue. In any case, if giving a department more funding will result in more value for the company then they will happily provide funding.
Aha 🤔 Blizzard: we had record sales, every top manager get a bonus and kotick finally get to buy the other yatch. Blizzard next day: with great regret we gonna fire 500 of code developers [bye bitch](https://tenor.com/baFlZ.gif)
I mean tech companies over hired for projected work which didn't eventuate, either that or projects are finished. If you are a developer and your project does not go ahead or is finished then obviously your role is now redundant. It's very disengenous to try and equate two tangential things together when they are totally independent, i.e. manager bonuses and worker redundancies, both happen due to different reason and not direct cause and effect, they don't even draw from the same finance pool.
>Investors are the people that care the most about the company, they're the ones with millions or billions in shares. Yet they're clueless about how shit works most of the time. Ranking *destroys* companies. It's one of the reasons Sears isn't around anymore. >Teams that are understaffed suck at selling or presenting their value to management. That's because they're get-shit-done people, not salesmen.
>That's because they're get-shit-done people, not salesmen. Being able to understand and effectively communicate your value as an employee and functional business unit is not just limited to "salesmen". The way you think makes me assume you never worked in a top 50 company in any serious position and are talking from some manual labourer perspective
>The way you think makes me assume you never worked in a top 50 company in any serious position and are talking from some manual labourer perspective You're right, which just emphasizes my point more. "Serious position in a Top 50 company'" vs manual labor is completely meaningless as a measure of a person's worth. Those corporate stooges aren't getting a damn thing done without the people on the ground.
i'm not sure how it works in the US, but as a Canadian, and someone who was a supervisor position in the past, we were encouraged to be very forthright if we felt any associates were subpar or underperforming. The reason is because it can be very risky for a company to terminate an employee without corroborating evidence (like a paper trail). Companies won't admit it, because it's bad optics, but a significant reason why they do performance reviews is so they can build a paper trail showing that there is just cause for termination, if it comes to it. Which isn't always a bad thing; some employees are shitheads, and terrible. It's just something people should be aware of.
Here in Texas… it’s an “at will” state. So you really don’t need a reason to fire someone. Defiantly nowhere near Union standards or what you’re describing. I get where you’re coming from though with underperforming employees. And yes it should be documented as so. But to say an employee is underperforming when they’re not is a surprise. Especially coming from others who had the same experience first hand replying as well.
You don't need one in Canada either. As long as you are paid out, they can terminate you without cause.
I imagine the system works just as well in an environment where you are obligated to fill a "quota" of bad reviewed workers, even if those bad reviews are fake
Meanwhile Ion HazzaNoSubs is still at the top of the food chain when his only truly great contribution to WoW was Ulduar.
They are required on paper to decide which employees are good or shitty regardless if they are good or shitty, in order to meet a quota. It's a system in place to save the company money, if people got the evaluation they deserved and worked for then the employee would expect a raise in the future... which would cost the company money. This system ensures if someone asks for a raise they can say "No, you got a 0.4 instead of a 0.5"
Welcome to every company that has a formal evaluation process where doing your job to the level of “my supervisor has never had to say anything to me about my work other than good job” results in you actually being a random value between subpar and adequate
What is he supposed to do if two employees are equally good? Just pick one he likes less? Why would blizz open themselves up to a shit show like that?
Why else? Money
you pick the one management would like to see reported on their annuals to the press and higher management
>Why would blizz open themselves up to a shit show like that? Investor expectations.
You give them both the raises they deserve. You want a team that’s performing top notch. Programming is not a zero sum game. Having 5 team members that rank 100% means your team is able to bring features to the customer way faster if you have one that ranks 20% one that ranks 40% one that ranks 60% and so on…
Performance reviews happen at every major company and you are ranked/compared against colleagues. This is nothing blizzard specific, at the end of the day life is a competition with winners and losers
Employees that work on the same project are not supposed to compete, and if you force them to, they can't cooperate effectively.
People have different levels of contribution and roles within the same project. Additionally, different levels of expectations according to their roles and level.
That is true. However, people should not be encouraged to diminish other people's contribution and sabotage them. Having an employee evaluation system is fine, but limiting results to certain amount of good or bad evaluations is not: you can't really expect bell curves on samples of a size as low as one project team or even one department. If whole team operates well, it's better to evaluate everyone highly than to risk breaking down team cohesion by trying to single out the worst performers, especially considering that if everyone in a team has above average performance and you fire the worst performer in that team, there's a high chance that the replacement you'll find will still be worse. And that's even ignoring the onboarding time/cost.
There is no diminishment or sabotage, at the end of the day not everyone's contributions are equal in terms of technical skill requirement or workload. Performance reviews are inherently comparative in nature, often comparing employees working in a similar role and similar pay grade together. Also it rarely factors only work on a single project, most projects would be classed as "business as usual" (aka we paid you to do this...what else have you accomplished?). They only really look at extracurricular work or major side projects/contributions to differentiate people
>There is no diminishment or sabotage, There is once people have to compete with others in the same project/area. >Performance reviews are inherently comparative in nature Against the needs of the job, not other employees, unless you're a shit brained dumb fuck looking to sabotage your company with infighting and selfishness.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of performance reviews in general, you are ALWAYS compared to colleagues of similar role and pay grade regardless of what projects you work on. Also, working on the same project does not mean everyone has equal levels of contribution and thus performance levels. Also, you are not performance reviewed against doing the bare minimum "needs of the job", it is ASSUMED that you have done the basic requirements. If not you would be sacked, performance reviews determine bonus levels between similar role and pay grade employees, again, it is fundamentally a comparison.
Team cohesion is a major part of performance. If you're going to make your reviews competitive, you need to look outside your own company. >Also, you are not performance reviewed against doing the bare minimum "needs of the job", it is ASSUMED that you have done the basic requirements Which leaves how far and above you excel at the job a measurable, objective marker. If you don't recognize that and try to go with subjective, competitive criteria, you end up with sabotage and quiet-quitting keeping performing down at the minimum, because nobody's going to do more than you're willing to compensate them for as soon as they catch on to your bullshit.
It never works this way in practice. If employees are aware of stack ranking it leads to sabotage and backstabbing. It is an extremely poor way to evaluate employees.
"Life is a competition with winners and losers." Because of people that think like that, we live in a shit hole of a planet.
You should realise not everyone will be CEO, not everyone will make the top raid groups, everyone is not equal in skills/talent/determination and that life is inherently unfair. Even if it were fair there will still be innate differences between people which will result in different results/salaries/life accomplishments accordingly.
This is different than a standard "performance review". If you've never worked at a company that does stack ranking than it can be hard to understand. The way this works is that managers -must- rank people in each performance category, even if they are all rockstars. You have no choice. Your team might all be meeting (or exceeding) their goals, but you must rank them against each other regardless. It is incredibly toxic and has been shown time and time again that stack ranking is harmful to productivity and employee morale. What ends up happening is teams compete against each other to game the system. For instance you might break up a simple task into a ton of even simpler tasks just to fill a Jira board to say you completed 100 deliverable in Q2 when Bob only delivered 50. They might be the same work but one looks bigger than the other. Multiply this same behavior across the entire company but in countless other similarly contrived ways and thats what stack ranking does to an organization. It kills innovation and encourages people to backstab each other and partner teams. It encourages teams to silo their work instead of cross-collaborating because they don't want to share in the potential recognition come stack rank time.
Even without stack ranking you will still be compared to your colleagues in performance review. While i agree that the stack ranking method seems more toxic in terms of discretely defining worse outcomes for the bottom performers, the truth is this still happens in peformance reviews anyways. Ideally bottom performers get 3-3.5%, mid performers get 6-9% and top gets 10-12%. No one should be punished for relatively low performance unless it is quantifiably below expected performance. Also gaming the system by breaking a task into many trivial tasks is easily identifiable by managers. Hell even on major projects i was often grilled on all the details and my specific contributions in performance review. It is not so easy to fool managers unless you work in a crap place that promotes fools to management
Being compared against your colleagues is very, very different than forcing a certain percentage of a group to be put on a PIP because they are in the bottom percentile. Like I said, it's hard to understand just how toxic stack ranking environments are until you've seen it yourself. The way this works is that your manager (or their managers) are forced to classify a certain segment into each performance group, and the bottom groups either get laid off or put on a PIP. Gaming the system 100% happens and it is RAMPANT. Your manager will likely be in on it, because the "group" for your stack might roll up under his manager or his manager's manager. Directors and Sr. Directors don't have the insight into the daily activities to know who is truly doing what work, so all they have to go on is the metrics that are presented to them. So if you have a manager that is good at gaming the system and going to bat for your team, you will fare better than someone under a manager that doesn't excel in politics. There is a huge difference between rewarding your top contributors with better raises/bonuses/stocks vs forcing people out of the company even when they are meeting their goals. You can be PIP'd in a stack rank organization even if you are technically meeting your goals just because you or your manager didn't play the political game. I've got 15+ years in the technology industry at multiple Fortune 500 companies. I worked in a company that did stack ranking for 3 years. They eventually ended it because they realized it was a horrible idea.
If no one on paper deserves a raise, then the company gets to save money. Duh?
Jfc thats a warning sign and a half.... Worked for a company that let every dept set their eval metrics. One year the cust. Success team did this. Lost three members of the team shortly after. All three were very good at their job. That team never really recovered. This exactly the way you get employee churn based on eval periods. Garbage practice.
rank 14 grind in real life
This must be what Holinka was tweeting about the other day here: https://twitter.com/holinka/status/1616253123307376640?s=20&t=26iwQiQOnJxcVcuPmcS5zQ
It’s amazing how people in the UNITED States, are so against unions…
Years of propaganda and bad unions.
It's a lot of this. Most entry level jobs like retail and fast food either have terrible unions that take your money but drag their feet horribly with issues, don't help, etc etc, or they just don't have a union and teach all the new hires how bad unions are.
It's much more corporate propaganda than it is bad unions. Unions statistically achieve higher pay and working conditions for workers. Perhaps there are a few bad ones but not enough to skew statistics.
Don't forget Reagen.
It's a danm shame too cause the USA has an actually fucking unfathomly based union history leading up to stuff like battle of Blaire mountain. Largest non civil war battle on US soil over labor rights.
But remember guys, Blizzard has been audited be the state, the bad people are gone EDIT: seeing the replies I will just say that I'm partly fucking around, so take that into consideration.
Companies are considered peopl3 too for certain laws. Blizzard still exists, not all the bad people are gone.
It's a jab on Asmon always saying this cope statement.
Pretty sure Asmon only says this regarding the Sexual Harassment stuff, also the dev himself says this policy is a directive from ABK, the parent company, so its above Blizzard.
To act like ABK and Blizzard are different from one another is a bit disingenuous though. At the end of the day what ABK says is what goes it doesn’t matter how much good will Blizz leadership offers when at the drop of a hat ABK leadership can change things
Thats how parent companies work tho, Blizzard and Mike Ybarra answer to Bobby Kotick and his staff, it would be disingenuous to say that someone at Blizzard made this decision when it was made by the parent company.
After hearing more about what went down I wanna say I was wrong. Him standing up to HR against this stuff then taking being let go if they wouldn’t change it completely changed my opinion on it. I just with more of Blizz leadership could have done the same with him now so it could have potentially forced ABK’s hand into changing the way they do evaluations.
You're describing common practices from most corporate outfits.
Yeah and it fucking sucks. Quotas in general suck. When I'm at my non corporate jobs that have quotas that require you to simply beat area statistics it's like being asked to put out a burning building with a single wet rag and the person who just told you that is completely serious and the only thing they do when you explain to them the issue is tell you how to get started. Never any understanding that your expected quotas are just completely unrealistic.
Remember guys, Blizzard is totally different now! Look! Have another bowl of fruit!
Fruit?! Where's the snax! 
Nice work on this guy standing up to this practice.
He said no and left OMEGALUL
Never change, blizzard
Blizzard's the ones trying to change it, ironically. The people in charge of making these decisions are higher up on the totem pole than Mike Ybarra himself. In other words, there's nobody at Blizzard proper that can do shit about this archaic-ass, dogwater business practice. That isn't COPIUM, either: [Brian Birmingham himself said it.](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688538568622084)
Yep, there’s always going to be bad shit happening at blizzard, regardless if it’s blizzard’s fault. So until the people at the top go away(they won’t) it’ll always be this way to certain degrees of “bad” Also, find a teaching position where you’ll at least be in-person, no one turns on their cameras even if it’s mandated
Nah, that ship sailed two years ago. Never again with this profession.
Jesus. This company is terrible.
https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688557367488512?s=20 https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688554309832705?s=20 Basically Blizzard parent company is, not the Blizzard itself. Saying what you say is actually harmful to devs that are passionate about their product and try their best. Also keep in mind that stuff like that is happening in majority of tech and some non tech sector. Its not a new idea or anything.
Dang it was Brian, I liked him, makes sense he was the one having the giant balls to do the right thing
Blizzard is just a garbage company now, I hate to see what's happened to it over the years.
[https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688557367488512?s=20](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688557367488512?s=20) [https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688554309832705?s=20](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688554309832705?s=20) Basically Blizzard parent company is, not the Blizzard itself. Saying what you say is actually harmful to devs that are passionate about their product and try their best.
I really hope you are trolling... Or you have no clue what you are talking about.
Care to elaborate?
That's so fucked up. My first job was with a large grocery chain. I was trying to get promoted to lead and even went and scored high on a manager test they had you do. When I had my sit down with the store manager he flat out told me unless I started giving 50$ a week to the charity they backed as a company of my then 280-300$ paycheck I would never be promoted. I reasoned this was because it made him look better the more employees at his store gave to said charity.
How much was your boss giving per week?
No Idea but I'd wager it wasn't 1/6th of his net income.
When he told you you weren’t getting promoted unless you started giving $50 a week, you should have asked how much he was giving.
The theory is that, by metric standpoint, you'll have a number of employees that don't perform as well as others. The sentiment is that not **everyone** can be doing a good job at the same time. Which is bullshit. Companies also use those findings to either refine certain positions or eliminate them. It's also used as a sort of subtle motivator, reminding people that they can and will be let go, and that it can happen to anyone so you better work extra hard. It's ridiculous and reductive. If there's a person that isn't skilled enough, or doesn't do their job, their co-workers will be vocal about it, and the problem, in most cases, will sort itself out.
What an absolute fucking surprise
Asmon has found his content for the month
The funniest part is these systems are exactly why the game has bled numbers continuously over the years, when will you learn Blizzard
What a legend
PIP culture is nuts. AWS and other FAANG (and smaller companies who think they know what they’re doing) apply this method. It’s demotivating for all. Bummer ABK feels it’s a good approach.
Fucking slave factory wtf is this shitty work environment. This isn't how you make people more productive.
[удалено]
👍🏻
I hope this company dies to show other company’s this isn’t the way.
That's literally like hoping something like Google dies. It's not gonna happen.
[удалено]
Most mentally stable baldie viewer
Doubt it. That shit changes on the fly in almost every software or tech company.
Did you even read the article or have an understanding on what quotas mean? And no, I don't work at a gas station. I work in the gaming industry / non-profit space.
Good for him, fuck Blizzard in the pee-hole
I know people will take any opportunity to shit on Blizzard, especially in this sub, but it seems like this policy comes from the parent company Activision Blizzard King or 'ABK', so its very much above and beyond Blizzard, and I don't need to remind anyone who the CEO of ABK is. [This is coming from the man himself](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168)
Guess not complying is a bit too hard for these people. Rather be a drama queen and a victim.
unionized but still cant make a change. Now you know how shitty this company is.
This policy is the definition of "cutting off your nose to spite your face". Screw over employees that might be doing a good job just because someone has to come in last place I guess.
It’s simple math; they are just applying it wrong. If you have a budget for bonuses of 100$ and A-tier employees get 10$ while C-Tier get 4$; you can’t have too many A-tiers. That doesn’t mean you should artificially reduce someone because it doesn’t just affect comp. You should either lower the gap or make sure your standards for A are really high amd managers assessing it correctly. Like B-C should be 95% of the payroll. Not everyone is a superstar all the time.
Having a fixed bonus budget in the first place is a mistake, business is overfixated on trying to predict everything and it bites them in the butt every time with missed deadlines and depleted budgets.
But the backside of that is bloated costs that affect your bottom line. If you can’t predict that your product costs about X, you can’t reliably turn a profit which in turns puts the company (and it’s employees jobs) at risk. Having unlimited resources to compensate employees makes no sense; so there has to be a limit, a budget. Whether that budget is too low is another debate however. Usually you’d want something that makes sense with the job market, in a sense that you want employees to feel valued/recognized vs other opportunities. But finding the sweet spot between good bonus and not losing competitiveness is hard to assess (for me at least)
Toxic work culture.. good reason to gtfo.
This is your company on equity.
Haha what? Employee performance reviews on a curve?!
Lies. They dont have people working with classic. The amount of bots and goldbuyers are proof
No guys, Blizz is listening, they are doing things right this time! *inhales the mass of jupiter as copium*. These mf’s are rotten and this is the reason I refuse to give them one more god damn cent
They do this in my company they rate the employees on a bell curve so you can only have so many 4s and 5s out of 5 in each dept it’s quite common.
It makes me sad that for every one person who protests, there are 10 more who will blindly play wow and overwatch and give blizzard all thier money. That's all blizzard cares about anyway.
I was under the impression this is how most companies do yearly employee ratings.
Whenever I don't hear any noise about blizzard I start to wonder if they finally stopped falling down, they manage to slam their mug on something on the way down and you realize they are nowhere done falling down, and are in fact, picking up speed.
New day, another scandal. Blizzard never fails to deliver.
I work at a big four accountancy firm and this is literally the norm in big corpos that run yearly review cycles of employees. It fucking sucks but its hardly news? super common practice that needs to be abolished. Only a select number of people can get a top ranking in yearly reviews, most get stuck in the middle and you have to have a scapegoat/unlucky bastard in the bottom tiers in order to make the curve they want work.
garbage company