What are the chances a supervisor/manager here would have the convictions and guts to do something like this?
From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/blizzard-manager-departs-in-protest-of-employee-ranking-system:
By Jason Schreier - January 23, 2023 at 5:14 PM EST
A manager at video game developer Blizzard Entertainment said he was ousted after refusing to give a low evaluation to an employee that he felt didn’t deserve it in order to fill a quota.
In 2021, Blizzard, a unit of Activision Blizzard Inc., implemented a process called stack ranking, in which employees are ranked on a bell curve and managers must give low ratings to a certain percentage of staff, according to people familiar with the change who asked not to be named discussing a private matter. Managers were expected to give a poor “developing” status to roughly 5% of employees on their teams, which would lower their profit-sharing bonus money and could hamper them from receiving raises or promotions in the near future at the Irvine, California-based company, known for games like Overwatch and World of Warcraft.
Brian Birmingham, who was the co-lead developer of World of Warcraft Classic, wrote an email to staff last week to express his frustration with this system. He wrote that he and other managers on the World of Warcraft team had been able to circumvent or skip filling the quota for the last two years and that he believed the mandate had been dropped or wasn’t strictly enforced. But recently, Birmingham said, he was forced to lower an employee from the average “successful” rating to “developing” in order to hit the quota.
“When team leads asked why we had to do this, World of Warcraft directors explained that while they did not agree, the reasons given by executive leadership were that it was important to squeeze the bottom-most performers as a way to make sure everybody continues to grow,” Birmingham wrote in the email, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. “This sort of policy encourages competition between employees, sabotage of one another’s work, a desire for people to find low-performing teams that they can be the best-performing worker on, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity.”
Birmingham wrote that he refused to work at Blizzard until the company removed this stack ranking policy. “If this policy can be reversed, perhaps my Blizzard can still be saved, and if so I would love to continue working there,” Birmingham wrote. “If this policy cannot be reversed, then the Blizzard Entertainment I want to work for doesn’t exist anymore, and I’ll have to find somewhere else to work.”
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