It’s that time of year again at my company, where we stack rank our employees through a forced distribution system and kick out the bottom 10% (I was told yesterday in a session that not everyone can be doing strong and we just need to find a below strong somewhere … and if we aren’t able to find it, then it could be one of us … how f***ed is that??) This is my second year as a manager and this is probably the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s just a huge popularity contest, and I happen to be in a calibration session with people outside of my division who didn’t know my employee. They obviously all voted for each other and tried to knock my employee down, even though he saved the company over $XX million, which is more than anyone else can say. I know this is just how tech organizations work, but morally and ethically I cannot stand behind it. I want to look at someone’s work, not a popularity contest to see who will be saved from the chopping block. I thought I wanted to be a manager and lead people in this organization, but what they are doing is extremely wrong. I love being a people leader, I love when my direct reports succeed and get excited about their work. But I cannot get on board with this forced distribution system. Everyone tells me that “it’s just the way of it” and “everybody else is dealing with it”, but that still does not make it right. My company brags that we have some of the most amazing recruiters out there, but how can that be if we continually try to fire 10% of the workforce each year?
Anyways, I don’t really know how to end this rant, but I have gotten to the point where all of this is affecting my health, and although I might take a huge pay cut, it’s worth not going through this again. I literally thought I was back in high school during those sessions.