"Keep the dream alive" spam

I believe a lot of employess like me received an email (or SPAM?) today from a group called DREAM (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dreamsft/) talking about the some of the abusive practices in the performance review process. I really wonder where they got all the employee's emails? I don't think it is an insider job and if it was, it is very bad.

My take on these claims is that there is some truth (not the whole truth) to it and it is not entirely baseless. Not a day goes by without me wondering about why the entire process is so secretive. I have my concerns about the review process and want some openness and fairness. If the performance review process is objective, why such a secrecy? I go even farther and suggest the following:

• Make the performance ratings public. What is wrong with knowing who performed better and why they are better? Maybe someone could learn a thing or two by following the super performer.
• Make the employee's commitents public. I would be very happy to learn about what everyone plans to achieve and see if I could colloborate with others. Otherwise, there is guaranteed to be duplication of efforts.
• Banish the stack ranking. It is a subjective process mostly and is not a documented process by HR. Since there is no guidence from HR about this (which is crucial to your rating), either formalize the process or make it transparent

UPDATE: After this mail got sent out, I asked one of the manager in my team on what he thought. To my surprise, he thought stack ranking is the way to go and even mentioned that holding one before the employee gets a chance to write a review and make his case is perfectly alright!!!!!!!

Here is the e-mail that got sent out to many employees:

From: A DREAM [mailto:dreamsft07@yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 10:27 AMTo: keep_his_dream_alive@yahoo.comSubject: Your rating, salary, and bonus may have all been decided by the time you read this email ...

Make your performance review count – stop stack ranking abuse!

That’s right - your review rating, salary, and bonus may have already been decided by the time you read this email. How? Through a process known as stack ranking, your managers may have already met and decided it before ever reading your performance review. Without objective performance data and feedback, your managers rely on gut instincts to decide your fate. Unfortunately, these instincts are often wrong and highly subjective. After stack rankings have been established, review ratings, salary, bonus, and stock grants are assigned accordingly. Even though stack rankings can have the single most impact on determining an employee’s rating and compensation, the process is not documented in the employee handbook, nor are employees allowed to know their stack ranking or appeal them.

If stack rankings are so unfair and subjective, why do managers continue to rely on them? For one, it is a very convenient way for managers to bypass the performance review process and determine the all important numbers in a short meeting. No waiting for employees to write their reviews, read them, provide comments, and talk to them to make sure they are in mutual agreement. Instead, managers simply assign employee a rank and see how they fair with the rest of the team. In cases of disagreement, higher ranking managers, who may have no knowledge of your performance, have veto power and can favor the employees they like best. Keep in mind each 4.0/4.5 rating requires a 2.5 to balance out the curve even if the difference in performance is negligible. One employee is given lavish rewards while the other gets nothing but a warning that their job is in jeopardy. All this without the inconvenience of having to read the employee’s performance review to ascertain if their performance is unacceptable.

The other reason stack rankings are popular is the fact that they are remarkably effective in maintaining the status quo. Minorities groups are significantly underrepresented in the ranks of management at Microsoft. By allowing managers to make performance management decisions based primarily on personal preference and not actual documented performance, managers will tend to favor those who they are most familiar and comfortable with. Since there are far fewer minority managers participating in stack ranking meetings they are out voted than their Caucasian peers, This unfortunately makes stack ranking an effective self perpetuating method for preserving a status quo imbalance that ultimately denies minority employees with equal pay and promotional opportunity in the company.

So what can you do to stop stack ranking abuse? Plenty:
· Talk to your manager and find out if and how they use stack ranking. Don’t take “no” or “that’s confidential” as an answer. If stack ranking is used, ask when they are done. In most cases they are done weeks before performance reviews are turned in so that managers can submit numbers to HR on schedule. If so, tell your manager that you consider this practice unfair and insist that they adhere to Microsoft’s performance management policy by using performance reviews as the basis for making decisions. Also find out your rank and if you can appeal it.
· Write to your business unit VP and the VP of HR and tell them you want stack ranking abuse to halted once and for all. Tell them that the stack ranking process cannot be secretive and must be standardized across the company and documented in the employee handbook. Also, stack rankings, if used, must be done following the completion of employee performance reviews and not before so that managers have access to the most objective and current information on individual employee performance.
· If you receive a poor performance review or are denied a promotion that you deserve as a result of stack ranking, don’t accept it – fight it. If your manager is not willing to do anything about it, you can file a complaint directly with the HR Employee Relations Investigation Team. Better yet, if you believe there are possible grounds for discrimination against you, contact state or federal agencies such as the WA State Human Rights Commission or EEOC who can ensure your civil rights are protected.

This message is brought to you by DREAM, employees for Diversity & Racial Equality At Microsoft. If you would like more information on stack ranking abuse or any other topics related to protecting civil rights, diversity, and fighting discrimination at Microsoft, please visit our web site at http://www.groups.yahoo.com/groups/dreamsft

...Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation

That is what the Fifth amendment says and it is fair enough. But the U.S supreme court's ruling last week expanded the power of government to grab land for private projects just blew my mind away! For example, now it is possible for the city to take your land (and of course pay the compensation) to build a shopping mall instead just because it might produce jobs and tax revenues.

This just leads the way for the people with money/power to force people out of their homes easily since any commercial development will ofcourse produce jobs/revenues. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor warned in her dissent in this decision: "Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."

The government and the consitution is there to protect the minorities and the powerless. But these rulings simply expand the powers of the powerful and this is not what the framers intended.

The Downing street memo

Check it out at http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

America is considered one of the most advanced and open societies. But I am constantly amazed by the amount of censorship that happens (either by whitehouse or self-sensored due to business interests) in the press. The press covers things what it wants to cover without the consideration for the people's need to know which is why there was no watergate after the original watergate. These days the press has become more of a mouth piece for whitehouse in U.S which is why I rely on BBC and other foreign press for the information. http://news.google.com/ is my new friend since it brings news from multiple sources.

I am not sure how many people know of the book series Censored 2005 : The Top 25 Censored Stories (Censored) published every year by Sonoma state university on stories that never made it to the public because of the censorship. I read the 2004 release and couldn't believe that I am living in an open society!

As for the authenticity of the memo, I don't care. From the beginning, I had the strong belief that this war was the war of choice than the war of necessity. So this is nothing new to me.

Taking some time off

I am taking some time off after an extremely busy product milestone. I worked on an average of 11+ hours a day for the last couple of months. I plan to read the following 2 books during my vacation:

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell

Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman
by Richard M. Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Joshua Gay

These 2 books were in my "Todo" list and now is the time. I don't think I will be doing much blogging.

Microsofties are not slaves!!

At least that wasn't the impression I got when some one I know told me what happended to him last week at work!

He went to his manager and requested that he needed to take 2 extra weeks of unpaid leave so that he could spend more time with his family which he hasn't seen in many years. The manager said "No". He said you take what vacation you have accrued and return to work afer that. If he failed to do so, he was warned that it could be considered as abandonment and one of the consequences is termination of his employment!

What the hell is going on here? Here is an employee who feels the need and the company says that it has work cut out for him and so he can't go! The truth is, this employee over the last few years has lost so much unused vacation (he is workaholic) and there was no patterns of misuse that I could see from what he told me.

This is what they used to call slavery in the past and it now seem to have taken a new form and name now! I just wish that this is an isolated case and that this comapny is better than this.

Performance..What?

I have said it before and saying it again. Microsoft needs to ship a quality product that exceeds customer expection for reliability, performance and functionality. There is no point in shipping products every other year with incremental changes just for revenues sake. I see many examples of this quite often and especially in the product I work in. Here is a real story:

A Program Manager who works in some other product division came to my Office asking for my help fixing the solution she deployed. She built a solution using the product I work on because it made their process better. She spent days creating the solution and after deploying it, nobody in her team wants to use it because the performance is so bad. Editing the document is very slow and the users are staying away because of that. The way she put it and shared her story, I really got emotional and felt bad for not being more proactive and vocal about product performance. I looked at her solution and saw that it wasn't a very complex solution but not simple either. Spent some time with my colleagues trying to find some tips on improving the performance and in end couldn't do much (It would have required re-writing the solution).

I did something about it and talked to the performance guys. The problem turned out to be the mindset. The common answer to performance problems that the performance team would get was:

• Why would someone display 1000 rows of data instead of filtering it?
• This is stupid scenario
• Why would anyone want to do that?
• This is not our issue. The external component X is the bottleneck

So the performance team ended up writing some guidelines for easing the performance problem. But we were all dead wrong. Most the real world solutions that I saw are above the mark we set and they perform badly. In other words, customers are doing things we thought were bad ways to do things and said all the time that there was a better way to do these things.

Customers aren't stupid to build solutions that doesn't scale or do stupid things. Just as we all do, we learn from our mistakes. I write much better code than I did a few years ago. I didn't want to write bad code few years ago but I did because I didn't have the knowledge that I have now. But the lack of knowledge didn't stop me from achieving my goals or do things that I wanted to do. A desktop application that is used by everyone has to perform reasonably well in such situations. Note that we are not taking about C++ compiler performance for badly written code. We are talking about applications like Microsft Word (e.g.) that slows down trmendeously when used differently.

What is the remedy?

It is the mindset stupid!

• Don't assume that everyone who is using your product is Raymond Chen or Charles Simonyi.
• Expect some unreanable uses and don't expect that everyone has time to read books and manuals before starting/getting their job done
• Take resposibility for the performance of the external component that you use. If that doesn't scale well, invest time in it to re-write as customer benefit far exceeds our financial goals
• Make performance part of the process and not an after thought
• There is more but I need to go :-)

Note: I stopped using Outlook and instead switched to OWA. Now my days go a lot smoother and I do a lot less cursing everyday. Outlook Guys, your product has a lot of nice features but if it will only perform well in an ideal environment, you guys totally got it wrong. I can't understand how a version 11 of a product can have still such issues as performance and reliability!!

I love Steve Ballmer

It has been an awesome week at Microsoft for me. There were a lot of discussion around the company (through letters to editor of Micronews, In Gleam DL, executive communication etc) about the HL1515 and diversity and discrimination. One thing that came out of it was that I am proud (and surprised to some extent) of the position that company took in the end which is to support legislation similar to HL1515 if it comes up again in washington state.

One perception that changed in the last couple of weeks was that SteveB is my hero. I always considered him in the past as some one with excellent marketing skills and someone who is funny and vocal on stage (i.e. speeches). I really never took notice of him nor was he in my thoughts or felt sorry for him on something. Now that I have seen his human face, courage to take a stance on social issue like this and his commitment to diversity, I think now of how hard it would have been for him the last couple of weeks and how much soul searching he would have done and what would I have done if I was in his position. He would be in my prayers if I did one.

Clarification: When I said earlier that companies should not take a stance on social issues. I meant that they shouldn't on issues like Gay Rights in general. But it should when it comes to discrimination at work including discrimination based on sexual orientation. Also, I meant that companies shouldn't actively engage politically on bills like HL1515 but instead provide letter of support when asked by legislative branch. There is a difference if you can see it. Bottomline, don't spend shareholder money by politically engaging on social issues but when it comes to workplace issues like this, just let them know where you stand.