My father was director of engineering for a large company, and when they got new upper management, they attempted to install thatkind of “curved” review. They gave him back his cohort reviews and told him to downgrade some of them.
“I only hire excellent engineers” he retorted. “If you’d like to find out how hard that is to do, I’m sure I can arrange for all of us to leave”. And that was the end of it. A different era, to be sure.
I was a grunt engineering manager in a fortune 100 tech firm. At yearly reviews we were required to identify the bottom 5% of engineers and either performance manage them to better results or help them out the door. We tried to use the old “we only have excellent engineers” ploy. The response wa - you can always find better.
Over the years the company morphed into a kinder and gentler approach. No one was performances managed. Bad part is that the company has fallen from a tech leader to an afterthought. Wonder why?
Of course, when performance reviews are graded on a curve, that creates cutthroat competitive incentives for employees, because being helpful to other employees succeed could help them elevate themselves above you on the grading curve. The large size of college classes graded on a curve can dilute this incentive, but most work groups that a manager manages and reviews are far smaller.
Knowing in advance that a company has an up or out culture is helpful if you want to set expectations about managing our poor performers.
The next couple of years are going to be shock to a lot of people in tech who’ve had a decade where this culture has almost completely disappeared.
It will be particularly interesting to see what happens to WFH culture, some people think it’s going to disappear pretty quickly:
Daughter graduated 10 years ago, and son graduated 7 years ago. Both are still in the first full-time jobs they got after college. When I got my first job in Silicon Valley in 1983, I thought something was wrong with anyone who stayed in the same company for more than 3 or 4 years.