The big thing over at Microsoft is that the towels are back in locker rooms. I jest somewhat, because it’s not just towels. There’s a change to office supplies too: office supplies will now be easier to find. They will now be on every floor.

There’s also a revision to their “peer-relative review ranking via fitting The Curve” so that the “trended 3.0 review score is gone”. In layman’s terms this means that review ratings will now be based on how well an employee performs in relation to their set expectations. I don’t work at Microsoft, so I don’t claim to know anything about the rationale or history behind certain policies, but this revision sounds so obvious and so basic that I wonder how anything else could have been formulated.

On the downside, there are still “Stack Rankings” feeding into a “Compensation Curve”. Huh?

But in these blog posts I found interesting other snippets of information. Little things that say so much about Microsoft:

• Everyone writes about their rankings and others’ rankings, and tries to achieve specific target scores.
• Employees appear to have ‘levels’. When I worked for Plessey, the company had about 15 levels. I remember when I got to Level 9 and lost my overtime but gained free First Class travel. Only to then have a company policy change two months’ later which dropped First Class travel. (Yes, I’m still bitter about that one!) Microsoft appears to have dozens of levels, quote “Level 59s in a group. 60s, 61s and 62s in a group. 63s and 64s in a group… A 59 isn’t penalized because she works in a team with a bunch of 66s.”
• A manager can ask you for your review score. What? Don’t HR give this information out?
• Buildings have numbers.
• Cafes have numbers.

Does anyone reading this see a pattern here? It’s obvious and necessary that a company of the size of Microsoft needs explicit immutable procedures to rate achievements, because this ties in directly with the way work is managed and tracked. The Capability Maturity Models also demand this. But it doesn’t need to be this brain-numbing, because it appears that employees are more concerned about ratings, numbers, targets and curves than they are about delivering.

A few weeks’ ago, I realised that I wouldn’t mind working for Microsoft, because I’m passionate about their products – i.e., I hate them. Every single one of them. I’d love to change them. I changed my mind today. In the words of Microsoft, sorry, but you might have lost a >3.0 today.