Bare in mind, real actual money was tied to this stupid scheme, and you had to spend at least 2 hours writing a document explaining what you've done for the company, the team and the product, to justify your "averageness".
I lasted 3 quarters in that social experiment. And I'll laugh in the face of corporate recruiters till the day I die.
Moral of the story: If you are a middle manager then grow a backbone.
Control Data decided to lay off 10% of its employees, and to do so across the board. Seymour Cray had a group of only 20 engineers in his lean development group in Chippewa Falls, so they told him to fire two. So he and Les Davis, his right-hand man, quit and started Cray Research.
The first story concerns a Control Data senior financial executive who one day reportedly called Seymour at Chippewa Falls and told him that the lab budget would have to be cut by 10 percent. The Chippewa Lab, with its thirty-odd employees was certainly the most cost-effective computer development facility in the world. Certainly it was the envy of IBM, as attested to by the Watson memo described earlier. Seymour reportedly replied, "Fine, cut me and Les Davis out of the budget" and hung up the phone. This rumor was given credibility by the continuing budget crunches and by the fact that Les Davis, Seymour's chief assistant did resign and join Seymour in his new venture.
The second story was told to me by a friend who had worked at the Chippewa Lab. He met Seymour in the hallway at headquarters one day. Knowing that Seymour hated being away from his work at Chippewa, he asked him what he was doing at headquarters. Seymour replied that he had been asked to serve on a senior technical task force that had been convened to recommend the future direction of computer development at Control Data Seymour intensely disliked meetings and task forces, but he agreed to serve because he had been personally assured by a very senior executive that the recommendation of the task force was vital to the future of the corporation. The task force of seven members met for some weeks and concluded that the design direction being taken by the model 8600 (the newest machine under development at Chippewa, successor to the model 7600) was indeed the best architecture for future CDC computers. Just before the final report was submitted, the members of the task force received memos from a second senior executive thanking them for their efforts and stating that the corporation had elected to go in a different design direction. Seymour immediately resigned."
From "A Few Good Men From UNIVAC"
This applies more generally even if you’re not managing people. Particularly as most corporate cogs are programmed to avoid confrontation. You’re more likely to get someone who respects your principles or someone who just bends over than an incalcitrant “no”.
Company had something like 5000 employees.
I felt good that I often got the highest mark, but others were doing well too, they deserved more.
I finally asked my boss, he told me.
“I figured out that other being told in an email how to award perf reviews… nobody checks… so I give everyone the highest reward.”
Further, it’s rare for the managers giving the 100% top performance evaluation to individuals to be leading groups with high overall accomplishment/delivery. (Occam’s Razor suggests that it’s evidence of poor leadership to be squandering the ability and contributions of all these high-performers. An analog might be an MLB Manager with All-Star players at every position and turning in a 0.500 season; they should expect to be fired.)
Sure a manager can affect performance but ultimately it's down to the individual.
And happiness is all nice and good but if work is the only thing that affects your happiness then you have some deep self-discovery urgently pending.
Under such a moronic system, with your reports' welfare on the line, I believe marking everyone as a top performer is an admirable form of rebellion.
I hated it but I had to pick the X best in the team. You should have reported your manager to HR.
https://knowstuffs.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/the-parable-of-t...
But nowadays... I'm not sure with the strict hierarchies on if Alan would actually be promoted. And ofc, in todays' unprecedented environment there's probably more Charles out there than people want to admit, who's still providing value to companies. Very interesting story, one where you can argue that there's no obvious moral to take away when considering this 80's tale in the 2020's.
I wrote some scripts that chunked the input, sanitized it, scripted loading and reloading (basically baby's first ETL) and got it to run without failing every week.
A few months later I fat-fingered a rm -rf and lost all the scripts. There were no backups because the machine was not rated as being in production.
I didn't get a big merit increase but they created a new position to oversee the callcenter technology a few months later that was really my thing. Then the merit increases came too. This was almost 20 years ago and I still work there today. During this time I built custom reports, wall displays and even a basic call recording system when there was no budget to buy off the shelf :)
I'm sorry that company didn't appreciate you but a lot of them also do!
It seems some people have a religious view of work: it is valuable only if you are toiling and pushing yourself.
Hours of butt in seat doesn't necessarily correlate with value delivered.
What your boss should have done is lower your working hours but keep the pay the same.
For most company the exit interview is done to tick a box. The feedback given will not be listened to at all. I can absolutely understand why he didn't feel like it was his job to setup and entire source control system on his way out the door.
The company did not mistreat the employee, just that it undervalued the employee.
I think the situation is analogous to the company giving the employee a big unwarranted pay raise, and then the employee lazily not doing more work, then the company firing the employee, but then arguing that at a minimum, the company has a reasonable professional courtesy to give the employee hours for their vacation days, even though it isn't specified within the contract.
Weirdly enough, the director that forced me out had been a programmer in a past life. All he could see of me was that I was a cost center on his spreadsheet. He never sat down with me to ask what I did all day. He'd see me in a corner of the office wired in and I guess he assumed I was watching cartoons or something.
Fuck 'em. I left and I'm sure dozens of systems I had built and maintained broke, just by virtue of my company email address being shut down. I did try my best to document what I could and onboard others. There's only so much you can do in two weeks when you have to start with explaining what Firebase and Google Apps Script is to multiple people.
If I'm reading correctly, you're saying that it's sad that their hard work went to waste.
I started scripting and automating parts of it, which eventually got pieced together to be completely hands off unless a new partner came on board or there was some new error. Since some of these steps used keyboard macros on VT100 terminals, I couldn't even use my computer while it was running, so I requested another, with the explicit intent that I could use it to surf the web while my main computer was doing it's thing. Data load lag times went from weeks, to days, to hours.
When it came time for performance review, I was told I had "completely redefined the position". I would therefore be assessed against the new definition, and was therefore deemed average, and got a 3% cost of living raise (pro-rated to 2% since I'd only been there 8 months) with no merit increase. A few weeks later, my manager was somehow surprised to the point of tears that I had a new job elsewhere.
A few months later, I got a call from my ex-manager, asking if I had any backups of the programs I wrote (this was long before the days of offsite source control). I said no, I had no need for them and that would probably be illegal. My replacement had somehow lost everything, and was now trying to keep up the old burnout way and they were weeks behind.