Google isn't pure evil. Its problem is that, since its inception, it's had the attitude that engineering is smart people work and everything else (design, HR, people management) is stupid people work. So, guess who sets up its HR systems? And who, might one expect, makes product decisions?
You can thank me for that. I embarrassed their performance review system, and it started costing them money in increased recruiting difficulty, and so they changed it up. Of course, they won't admit to this.
Whether the new system is better or worse, I couldn't possibly opine on that. And I have no idea whether calibration scores have been abolished or are just hidden.
Oh for fuck's sake. The word "queynte" is probably related to the word "cunt" (and the word "quaint") but it's a different word. It doesn't even mean "vagina" although it was euphemistically used that way in and after the time of Chaucer.
I could have just as easily used "assclown" or "taint-smear" or just "jerk", but, really, this stuff is just a distraction. Dan G's personal tantrums and high-horse nonsense aside, the fact is that if you take Google's evil stack-ranking system to another company, you're a horrible person.
When people are literally destroying lives by the hundreds for their own malicious, personal amusement, the only thing that matters is stopping them-- not what people choose to call them.
My information is as of 2011. When I was there, the percentage who had to fail fluctuated between 3 and 5 percent, based on market conditions, but I'd heard that it was higher than 5% in 2008-- a dishonest layoff under the guise of a "low performer initiative".
I know next to nothing about what Perf is like as of 2015; my insights are 4 years out of date. I must ask, though: do they still call people assigned sub-3.0 scores "pillow biters"? Or did HR put the kibosh on that term-of-art? Personally, I hope it lives on; it means that Google management is being honest about how it views people.
Google isn't pure evil. Its problem is that, since its inception, it's had the attitude that engineering is smart people work and everything else (design, HR, people management) is stupid people work. So, guess who sets up its HR systems? And who, might one expect, makes product decisions?