Personally, the new stack ranking bit doesn't bother me much, as it doesn't seem a whole lot different than before (transposed system of assigning numbers 1-5 and different sized buckets).

The healthcare changes are most upsetting to myself and my wife, especially since we always looked at healthcare as an amazing benefit and competitive advantage to Microsoft. For anyone who doesn't know, there is currently a healthcare plan available that basically covers everything, all the time, with no out-of-pocket costs ever. No copays, no prescription costs, nothing. Of course there are limits, but for many typically cases, like myself, I never pay anything. This plan is going away in 2013 and being replaced by a more typically, less comprehensive option.

I work for Microsoft so I don't think I can go into too much detail but..

>"If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,"

that is not true.

Stack ranking really isn't as bad as it has been made out to be in the past few weeks.

> Stack ranking really isn't as bad as it has been made out to be in the past few weeks.

I'm curious how it could possibly not be as bad as it sounds, considering the simplicity of the concept and the obviousness of its implications.

While stack ranking sounds terrible on paper the actual implementation might soften the blow. Managers probably bend the rules a bit when it comes to the actual distribution in their groups.

For example consider two managers that both report to a VP. Each manager has 10 direct reports. If the managers and VP are all friends then the actual ranking distributions could vary a bit: one manager really has a strong team and the VP knows this. The VP also knows the other manager has a weaker team. As long as the VP's stack ranks are approximately correct in aggregate the individual managers probably have some wiggle room.

The point is politics in large organizations usually trumps strict rules. This can work both for and against someone hence some people don't view stack ranking in such a harsh light.

Forgive me, but holy crap that sounds even worse! Not only does everybody seem to know the system can't work in practice, they actually have to conspire behind the scenes to prevent the worst outcomes? And the assertion that politics trump rules anytime isn't in any way reassuring either. We all know the kinds of people who excel at office politics and they're usually the most destructive, corrupt and unproductive members of the team!

So to summarize what I heard so far: stack ranking is a terrible system based on flawed assumptions, everybody involved knows it, it doesn't actually measure performance but charisma, and for a company to work with this thing they have to sidestep it anyway?

Great summary. Welcome to big company life!

I think our main problem is the layer and layers of internal systems that we are required to use but that are painfully out of date versus whats available on the open market.

Well, it can be true at the beginning of the process, but only if your team has everyone within a given set of levels. But I don't think that's normal.

This year's review process was the worst I've seen, though, and really showed that only manager feedback is considered, at least in my area.

A lot of it. The stack ranking system (the one the article mentioned is old), the fact that people are reading the Vanity Fair article secretively, etc... Most of this article is trying to paint an immensely negative picture that simply isn't true.