Ouch...is that true? Microsoft ranks a group of 5 presenters on a scale of 1 to 5??

Maybe I'm just naive, but do the same things happen for developers there as well? I understand there are a lot of happy people at Microsoft, but it's hard to imagine how "teams" work if you're constantly competing against the members of your own...

-J

J -

I'm not actually sure. I've been working at Microsoft for about seven months now, but I still don't understand how we're "graded."

There *is* a scale of 1 to 5, but I don't know how it works.

I generally try not to think about these things. I figure that, if I do well, then I do well. If I don't, I don't.

How it's computed isn't that important to me :)

MS grades on a curve. No, that doesn't mean that out of 5 people, each one gets one number from 1 to 5. But there are a certain amount of grades to pass out... you are competing against your peers to do the best job you can.

The scale is basically as follows:

5 - amazing (no one gets this)
4 - excellent (rare)
3.5 - above average (pretty common score)
3 - average (also common)
2.5 - not good
2 - really not good
1 - adios

3 is what you get if you do your job to the letter and meet your base objectives, nothing more. You must do something extra to justify a higher score. Since you write your own review, you are basically selling yourself as to why you deserve a certain score.

> you are competing against your peers

This is tricky to do without committing what Peopleware calls 'teamicide'.. "Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect."

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000225.html

p.s. I give Rory an F-