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[Mich the Tester]

The big problem with these US management approaches is that they all stem from the early part of the 20th century, and are all related to Taylorism; the ideas of Frederick Taylor about 'efficiency' that were developed to manage manual labour (and were never proven to work). Fordism was a development of that where Ford split jobs into simple repetitive tasks, but paid his people a decent wage; that worked up until the 70s when people got sick of being treated like mechanical objects and the 'blue collar blues' damaged industry in both the US and the UK, while the Germans and Japanese had moved on to more participatory forms of management.

In the 1900s, manual labour was cheap and readily available; the US was experiencing an immigration driven boom, and for every job there were 10 fresh young, strong immigrants ready to take over. That's not the case in knowledge industries now, so anyone applying the management methods derived from those days is clearly a dangerous idiot; sadly, the whole MBA scheme still seems to be based on ideas from 100 years ago, which apparently worked in an entirely different environment. That's why I say it should be scrapped, on not a penny of public money should go into business degrees and MBAs, and none of them should be officially recognised until they've reformed and caught up with the modern world.

Oh, and outsourcing to low wage countries is an extension of the same failed ideas, and doomed to fail.

[minestrone]

They still use a process in ClientCo called inter-ranking.

All staff have to be placed on a certain bell curve, from 1 (GREAT) to 5 (TULIP).

The scary thing is that it means someone has to be 5 even if they aren't really, so if you have a closely matched team it means someone has to be slightly better but could mean they are 4 ranks apart.

Its really hated here too.

EDIT - read more of the article, exactly like that.

Visibility to upper management, being seen to do a great job, even if you are only mediocre. @rse lickers by any other name.

I know that system well.

[vetran]

Spooky, just like here.

[Gentile]

I'm all for getting rid of sub-par performers when necessary (which hopefully wont be too often if you've picked the right people in the first place). But frankly, if you need a Stasi-like system where every member of your team is coerced into informing on their colleagues to tell you when somebody needs to go, then that says more about your abilities as a manager than it does about their abilities as a team. As long as people are writing code that's robust, does the job it was meant to do, hasn't consistently taken the developer ten times as long to write as their peers, and doesn't contain variables named String1 and String2, that's pretty much all I care about. I'm capable of monitoring all of that by simply being part of the coding effort myself, and keeping a quiet eye on what's being checked in. After that, a good team gets its morale maintained by positive reinforcement of its good qualities, not by digging around for non-existent bad ones.

[Mich the Tester]

I'm all for getting rid of sub-par performers when necessary (which hopefully wont be too often if you've picked the right people in the first place). But frankly, if you need a Stasi-like system where every member of your team is coerced into informing on their colleagues to tell you when somebody needs to go, then that says more about your abilities as a manager than it does about their abilities as a team. As long as people are writing code that's robust, does the job it was meant to do, hasn't consistently taken the developer ten times as long to write as their peers, and doesn't contain variables named String1 and String2, that's pretty much all I care about. I'm capable of monitoring all of that by simply being part of the coding effort myself, and keeping a quiet eye on what's being checked in. After that, a good team gets its morale maintained by positive reinforcement of its good qualities, not by digging around for non-existent bad ones.

Hence my belief that we don't need 'managers'; we need senior or master craftspeople who are respected by their peers. Along with them go entrepreneurs who can get the product sold, or can see the gap in the market. Cut out all the middle management.

[minestrone]

From what I have witnessed having worked next to this system for a number of years (contractors are exempt ) is that it completely destroys team spirit in the able and only motivates the cretins who learn to play the system.

Being average in a team of doughballs is your ticket to the top. Do not get motivated and search out a team of clever people to work with on really complicated innovative stuff what ever you do, you might end up getting managed out.

[Gentile]

Hence my belief that we don't need 'managers'; we need senior or master craftspeople who are respected by their peers. Along with them go entrepreneurs who can get the product sold, or can see the gap in the market. Cut out all the middle management.

Agreed, although frankly some of the very worst managers I've seen have been ex-techies that imagined the way they did things back in 1995 is the only possible way they can and should ever be done, even if they personally don't having any experience coding any more and haven't for more than a decade. You need to be capable of taking your ego out of the equation to be an effective manager. It's no longer about doing things the way you found worked for you personally in the past, but about providing an environment in which other people get to be effective in their own way. Knowing when to leave well enough alone is something that many people that were personally effective in their own technical work never learn to do. That can make them more of a liability than an asset to any team they're entrusted with looking after and mentoring.

[Mich the Tester]

Agreed, although frankly some of the very worst managers I've seen have been ex-techies that imagined the way they did things back in 1995 is the only possible way they can and should ever be done, even if they personally don't having any experience coding any more and haven't for more than a decade. You need to be capable of taking your ego out of the equation to be an effective manager. It's no longer about doing things the way you found worked for you personally in the past, but about providing an environment in which other people get to be effective in their own way. Knowing when to leave well enough alone is something that many people that were personally effective in their own technical work never learn to do. That can make them more of a liability than an asset to any team they're entrusted with looking after and mentoring.

I agree with that, but I think part of the solution to this is to avoid appointing those people to a traditional management role of sitting in a seperate office playing politics with other managers; they need to remain in the tech team as 'primus inter pares'.

[AtW]

I am surprised this tulip of system is used in UK, never came across with it personally but then I did not work for many different companies here either.