[civilized]

> Stack ranking and quotas suck, and you feel like shit having to abide by them, but I've also seen managers being overprotective about underperforming employees.

Then those managers are bad at their jobs and should be PIP-ed even more ruthlessly.

It's always interesting to me how managers get a complete and utterly unexamined pass in these conversations. The bar is so, so low for them. Managerial incompetence can be breezily cited as the reason for a horrible policy, like managing out a fixed percentage of every team, and everyone considers it a fait accompli. After all, what would be the alternative? Managers actually being held accountable for doing the most important part of their jobs?

ICs must be held nose to the grindstone every minute of every day... but ya can't do anything about bad management!

[tezza]

Managers have their own Managers , and those are appraising them too.

Big Orgs have big re-orgs all the time and the entire management structure can change swiftly. Leaf node workers left untouched.

[Cupertino95014]

Umm, no... directors & VPs do get ruthlessly Lord of the Flies'ed (new verb here).

Middle managers, other than maybe first-level ones, are the lowest of the low, and very rarely get managed out. In fact, they are the cause of nearly all corporate problems, IMHO.

[civilized]

I've seen one incredibly horrible manager managed out this way. But anyone above incredibly horrible tends to survive all the reorgs.

If the reorgs actually got rid of bad management, it wouldn't be necessary to shrug and cite bad management as the excuse for mandatory stack ranking and attrition quotas.

"We can't help it! Our managers can't be trusted to tell us if someone is effective!"

[H8crilA]

Being a (low level) manager sucks, though. At least if you're a competent programmer and could get by with a very similar pay with little involvement in politics.

[civilized]

If I said "being a programmer sucks", people would tell me I can do another job and let someone who likes the job do mine instead.

Not so for the poor manager, somehow. The poor manager who, in most cases, bent over backwards to get that promotion.