Sausage, sausage, sausage ...
It's midyear career discussion time again at Microsoft, and you know what that means: more sausage!
More specifically, "sausage, sausage, sausage" is the phrase I mutter to myself every time I'm dragged into yet another meeting explaining the performance review process. The meaning is this: the performance review system has all the appeal of watching sausage being made. While I find it endlessly fascinating to learn what goes into the sausage, and while I'm glad Microsoft HR is committed to explaining every detail of how the sausage is made, in the end ... it's all just sausage.
Microsoft officially has a "pay for performance" philosophy. At least that's what they claim on the offer letter every new employee receives. What they don't tell you is that the philosophy and the implementation don't match. The implementation is closer to "pay for perceived performance measured relative to your immediate peers who are working on uncomparably different things than you which may be less sexy but no less vital to the project's success, divorced from the group's actual results measured subjectively by people who sometimes have no idea what you do from day to day".
Ultimately, the system isn't fair or rational and the review score you get has absolutely nothing to do with your potential or your performance.
None of this is sour grapes, by the way. I've been fortunate so far; I've got nothing to complain about. I am simply pointing out a universally accepted, if unspoken dirty little secret here at MSFT: your review can suffer for any number of reasons unrelated to you. Maybe you weren't set up for success by your manager, your team or your PMs. Or your work wasn't "visible" enough. Or that you're simply in a good group where there's tough competition for limited, yet differentiated awards.
Objectively measuring people's performance is a hard problem. No matter what system you can imagine, your performance review will invariably be influenced highly by what your immediate manager thinks of you. If you have a poor manager, you're screwed; he'll never understand your true worth -- unless, of course, you're a very talented bullshit artist, in which case it's someone else who's screwed, maybe the person doing the actual work.
There is really no substitute for a good management chain. But neither is there any guarantee of good management either. Groups at Microsoft run the gamut from ridiculously amateurish to amazingly productive. Yet you can't tell from results alone which is which. Some groups are somehow always the victims of forces outside their control, whereas other groups could have easily smashed through the same obstacles. And yet other groups truly are confronted with harsh realities which cannot be humanly overcome.
Incompetent groups can go on malingering for years before anyone finally realizes what's really going on.
So I'd rather not watch the sausage as it's made. I simply don't care about levels and CSPs and proficiencies and commitments and experiences and contribution ratings and stack rankings and all this other nonsense. I guess I should, because there's good money in it if you can learn to work the system. But does it all really matter? Not really ...
Such complicated sausage-making, and yet the outcome is ironically no different than this: do your best, stretch yourself to new limits, cross your fingers and if there's any justice in the world, you'll get what's coming to you.
For the really curious ... step up and smell the sausage ...
