Great write-up. Several things came to mind as I read this:
- Peter Thiel would nod in approval.
- The ghost of Jack Welch is shaking his ethereal fist at you.
- It's weird how different companies feel compelled to slap their own label on something. I think (can't confirm) that Jack Welch called the 20-70-10 system a "Vitality curve" but Microsoft insisted on calling essentially the same thing "stack ranking."
- Have you heard of the blue ocean strategy? It was popular a few years ago, but has fallen out of fashion lately. The idea is to hoist yourself out of oceans that run red with the blood of competition, immerse yourself in blue oceans untainted by competitive pressures.
- Steve Ballmer was new at the helm when he implemented stack ranking at Microsoft, and Bill Gates had stepped down because of a massive anti-competition lawsuit from various regulators. That background provides some context for (but doesn't necessarily justify) the choice to implement stack ranking.
> competition as the only way to drive the world forwards
In a certain, very important, sense, it is indeed. Evolution is a competitive system, in fact it's the system that M$'s sociopathic reward system is a crude imitation of. It's demonstrably, objectively true that "Stack Ranking" (as implemented by Nature) does indeed hill-climb to the highest local maxima attainable by a species.
What people usually fail to consider is :
1- Moral Cost : After all it would be extremly efficient if we could simply mass-murder all people with heritable diseases, we would probably be saving a whole (exponentially-growing) tree of descendents from diseases too if we did it before they have children.
Evolution is an undirected undesigned amoral process, so it doesn't feel shame, remorse, guilt, etc... But we humans are goal-directed, morality-constrained, design-seeking moral agents, so we do feel shame and guilt and remorse, and there is nothing more shameful than treating other humans as a tool.
Human-Designed systems has to grapple with the is-ought distinction, and has to defend the (often implicit) claims that its design makes. Implicit in M$'s reward system is the claim "making money for the company is so extremly important, so vital and non-negotiable, that this is worth the Moral Cost associated with it".
This is wrong : Making money for M$ is actually so utterly without value, so unimportant and banal, that it's not worth any moral cost at all, let alone the one associated with such a cruel system.
But consider an alternate 3-body-problem-like world where employees in a company are actually working around the clock to make more and better spaceships for humanity to escape/fight aliens, aliens who are approaching Earth and has the explicit intent to murder everybody on it. In this world, is it actually worth it to have "Stack Rankings" ? I would say yes. Perhaps with some modifications, like (a) Making the criteria for evaluations extremly objective and personal-judgement-independent (b) Making the evaluators a random and constantly-changing subset of the top 1% of those who survived the last N evaluations (c) Make it so that everybody has a non-zero, greater-than-10% chance of being fired, including the very top of the organization.
In short, Competitive Systems, even very cruel ones like Evolution, work. Your own existence is a living walking proof of this. They just have a very high negative moral cost associated with them, a cost that can still be paid if the goal we're working toward is sufficiently worthy.
2- The Outcome Needn't Be Death Or Starvation : Unlike Evolution, we have a whole selection of outcomes that we can assert for those who fall behind in Competition. We can have UBI-ish safety nets so that work is never the precondition for eating food and sleeping in beds, we can have a culture that doesn't attach self-worth to work (or, more accurately, **Jobs**), and considered them on an equal footing with hobbies, unpaid volunteer work, unpaid house work, unpaid open source programming, etc...
3- The Process Needn't Be Cruel : This is a continuation of point (2), and point (2) is a precondition of it (i.e. a process whose outcome is death or starvation is cruel by definition). People can always be compensated extra for being fired, promised assistance till they find the next job, reviewers can be anonymous and required to be respectful (where the defintion of respectful is in the control of fired people, and if enough people complain the reviewer is barred from ever reviewing again.) In short, signal that people are valuable. Signal that <doing bad thing> to them was hard, the least-evil alternative from a set of more evil choices.
tldr; your view about competition is not nuanced enough, unless you are just baiting/trolling engagement (in which case congrats, I guess.). There is someone who spends a lot of time thinking about Competition and when it's a Good Thing (^TM), that person is Liv Boeree, start with her Moloch: The Media Wars video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRz54V7rU4U), and maybe see a bunch of her interviews and podcasts. The key message is that Competition is not uniformly bad, it has costs and externalities, those can be evaluated and summed, and if the final sum is positive then the competition system is worth it.
What the fuck was that first sentence? I stopped reading immediately.
reletavistic --> relativistic
Briliant.
Great write-up. Several things came to mind as I read this:
- Peter Thiel would nod in approval.
- The ghost of Jack Welch is shaking his ethereal fist at you.
- It's weird how different companies feel compelled to slap their own label on something. I think (can't confirm) that Jack Welch called the 20-70-10 system a "Vitality curve" but Microsoft insisted on calling essentially the same thing "stack ranking."
- Have you heard of the blue ocean strategy? It was popular a few years ago, but has fallen out of fashion lately. The idea is to hoist yourself out of oceans that run red with the blood of competition, immerse yourself in blue oceans untainted by competitive pressures.
- Steve Ballmer was new at the helm when he implemented stack ranking at Microsoft, and Bill Gates had stepped down because of a massive anti-competition lawsuit from various regulators. That background provides some context for (but doesn't necessarily justify) the choice to implement stack ranking.
> competition as the only way to drive the world forwards
In a certain, very important, sense, it is indeed. Evolution is a competitive system, in fact it's the system that M$'s sociopathic reward system is a crude imitation of. It's demonstrably, objectively true that "Stack Ranking" (as implemented by Nature) does indeed hill-climb to the highest local maxima attainable by a species.
What people usually fail to consider is :
1- Moral Cost : After all it would be extremly efficient if we could simply mass-murder all people with heritable diseases, we would probably be saving a whole (exponentially-growing) tree of descendents from diseases too if we did it before they have children.
Evolution is an undirected undesigned amoral process, so it doesn't feel shame, remorse, guilt, etc... But we humans are goal-directed, morality-constrained, design-seeking moral agents, so we do feel shame and guilt and remorse, and there is nothing more shameful than treating other humans as a tool.
Human-Designed systems has to grapple with the is-ought distinction, and has to defend the (often implicit) claims that its design makes. Implicit in M$'s reward system is the claim "making money for the company is so extremly important, so vital and non-negotiable, that this is worth the Moral Cost associated with it".
This is wrong : Making money for M$ is actually so utterly without value, so unimportant and banal, that it's not worth any moral cost at all, let alone the one associated with such a cruel system.
But consider an alternate 3-body-problem-like world where employees in a company are actually working around the clock to make more and better spaceships for humanity to escape/fight aliens, aliens who are approaching Earth and has the explicit intent to murder everybody on it. In this world, is it actually worth it to have "Stack Rankings" ? I would say yes. Perhaps with some modifications, like (a) Making the criteria for evaluations extremly objective and personal-judgement-independent (b) Making the evaluators a random and constantly-changing subset of the top 1% of those who survived the last N evaluations (c) Make it so that everybody has a non-zero, greater-than-10% chance of being fired, including the very top of the organization.
In short, Competitive Systems, even very cruel ones like Evolution, work. Your own existence is a living walking proof of this. They just have a very high negative moral cost associated with them, a cost that can still be paid if the goal we're working toward is sufficiently worthy.
2- The Outcome Needn't Be Death Or Starvation : Unlike Evolution, we have a whole selection of outcomes that we can assert for those who fall behind in Competition. We can have UBI-ish safety nets so that work is never the precondition for eating food and sleeping in beds, we can have a culture that doesn't attach self-worth to work (or, more accurately, **Jobs**), and considered them on an equal footing with hobbies, unpaid volunteer work, unpaid house work, unpaid open source programming, etc...
3- The Process Needn't Be Cruel : This is a continuation of point (2), and point (2) is a precondition of it (i.e. a process whose outcome is death or starvation is cruel by definition). People can always be compensated extra for being fired, promised assistance till they find the next job, reviewers can be anonymous and required to be respectful (where the defintion of respectful is in the control of fired people, and if enough people complain the reviewer is barred from ever reviewing again.) In short, signal that people are valuable. Signal that <doing bad thing> to them was hard, the least-evil alternative from a set of more evil choices.
tldr; your view about competition is not nuanced enough, unless you are just baiting/trolling engagement (in which case congrats, I guess.). There is someone who spends a lot of time thinking about Competition and when it's a Good Thing (^TM), that person is Liv Boeree, start with her Moloch: The Media Wars video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRz54V7rU4U), and maybe see a bunch of her interviews and podcasts. The key message is that Competition is not uniformly bad, it has costs and externalities, those can be evaluated and summed, and if the final sum is positive then the competition system is worth it.
Jeeze---ten percent every three months?
I think I heard the guys on All In talk about a company that fired the bottom 5% each year and say that sounded good. I didn't agree until now.
Someone should tell this story to SalesForce.
Incredible how truly, incompetently stupid the idea was. Of course a dumbfuck fail-upwards blowhard like Ballmer was all for it.