The article doesn’t answer the question which would have been fascinating.
Article tldr; it’s happening, it started in the 80s, it persists, it’s real bad, it doesn’t do what companies think they want, oh well.
Then why? Because there’s another reason unstated here? Because it’s the lowest effort one that lets them set up a machine and claim the equation did it? Because they’re cruel and that’s the point?
My experience is that a vast majority of managers would prefer to not face the fact that some of their employees are underperforming.
There are a variety of psychological or procedural "tricks" to get managers to be more discerning in evaluating that. Forced curve stack ranking is just one of them (procedural).
Another (psychological) is to ask managers to rate their employees and separately, to answer the question "Knowing everything that you know now, would you hire this person again?" There is a fair percentage of "this person is meeting expectations/highly valued/<whatever the middle ranking is>" combined with "yeah, in retrospect, we made a mistake by hiring them."
If you have absolutely no controls over the curve, many managers of modestly performing teams will earnestly report that their team is a mix of 25% superstars and 75% stars.
I don't know what the best answer is here, and the best answer certainly varies by company and might even vary by department within a company.
A lot of that is that weird headcount thing that translates to how important you are as a manager.
- if you have a lot of reports YOU ARE IMPORTANT
- if you have a big budget (because of lots of reports) YOU ARE IMPORTANT
wait, firing someone might take away a req/headcount. I AM NO LONGER AS IMPORTANT
To the point that managers that don't have more than, like, 4 or 5 reports basically should plan and aren't a "I do a workers job plus management", regardless of company, should know they are going to get laid off or fired at some point.
You're right, it is a forced culling. I can see it as being done for a couple years to cull fat, but as a permanent fixture of the business practices? Well then it's your culture, and your culture is backstabbing, machiavellian, ass kissing, undermining, outright sabotaging, juking stats, etc.
The Apollo astronauts also had to rank each other, with that feeding into who got assigned to missions. (I'm not saying this was or was not a good idea - probably too small a sample size and they were all superstars - only that it was a thing that happened). [Source: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/23149]
It seems straightforward. If a company wants to fire an employee with cause, stack rankings and performance-improvement plans provide them. Otherwise people in orgs that apply it wouldn't call it "rank and yank" when they're being candid or honest about it.
If you've ever wondered why there's one weird result outside your filters at the top of your search, or why sites insist on expanding your search, let's talk about how user testing leads companies to make unfortunate decisions.
Any good alternatives? I've been using DH to self-host Wordpress (which has been a real bad time), and real simple short-lived public-facing prototypes/etc. It's always been not great, but cheap and not important, and swapping out too much of a pain. But it's time.
(And "Go host a high-volume-spike blog at ___ like a normal person, and then solve the other problem" is entirely valid and welcome)
If you need a place where you can out several websites that don't make money for a sustainable, reasonable small cost, you'll be surprised by the price/quality/performance offered by good, independent cPanel based hosting providers these days.
By independent, I mean not owned by GoDaddy or Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance International Group, EIG). Just as an example, Bluehost, Hostgator etc are owned by Newfold Digital, with big brand recognition and subpar service.
cPanel isn't aesthetically pleasing, but it keeps the market outside the big names extremely competitive. You can ask another cPanel based host to migrate your accounts at any time in a process that's standardized and quick.
With NVMe disks and software built especially for the hosting industry, such as CloudLinux and LiteSpeed, these hosting options can be very performant. On CloudLinux, all hosting accounts run in their own containers with RAM and CPU limits so the system as a whole stays responsive. These environments can easily feel as snappy or better then self-configured virtual machines.
I tried out A2Hosting's Turbo hosting early this year. The performance was very good, but their EU datacenter had connectivity issues.
I now use a British company called Stablepoint, run by people who used to operate TSOHost before selling out to GoDaddy. Stablepoint uses public cloud infrastructure, so the reliability is very good for very reasonable prices around numerous data center regions globally.
I do use Stablepoint's highest-end reseller account, so I can't speak for the performance of their regular servers. A2 is probably very solid network wise in the States, and their non-reseller Turbo plans are affordable and very well regarded. Both companies have generous 2-4 GB RAM limits per cPanel account on their mid-tier accounts.
Easiest is probably a dedicated WordPress hosting provider like Kinsta or WPEngine. More expensive, but they definitely take away $20-30/month worth of hassle and worry. Stick a free CloudFlare plan (they have some WP-specific security and caching options, IIRC—if those are available on the free plan, make sure you turn them on) in front of it and block admin and API paths except from allowed IP addresses, then turn on auto-updating (plugins and core) in WP itself, if you want a reasonably secure and low-effort site that can survive occasional large traffic spikes without sweating. May have to tweak a couple settings to make sure it's serving from CDN nearly 100% of the time, but once that's done, it's done.
If you like wordpress, I had an excellent experience with wpengine. They handle large chunks of security (nontrivial for the junk show that is WP and plugins), backups, came with a staging environment (maybe not all accounts? But ours did), etc. It was as good a time as you can have with wordpress, imo.
Oh, and I got good support who quickly figured out a db issue that a custom plugin was having and got us a solution. Turned around in 1.5 business days. And we weren't on a super expensive plan.
If you're interested in something managed and curious about performance, I just published https://WPHostingBenchmarks.com this week (with 2022 data - 33 companies, 79 hosting plans benchmarked for performance). There was one company on there that offers a command line tool to stand up WP servers on your own Digital Ocean account as well.
I personally would lean towards nearlyfreespeech.net as a first choice. They seem to be highly robust. At least this holds until we get to sites that need a full daemon.
I always wonder, for folks who self-host on Droplets or EC2 - how do you handle provisioning the server to ensure that it's secure and has everything you need? I use Laravel Forge for this. I'm not a server admin and don't want to pretend to be.
For droplets and ec2, you 'own' the inside of the virtual machine and its your responsibility to install software that you need and patch it according to a routine schedule.
That said, both services have firewall rules you put in place that help manage this. IE - you may expose SSH to your local ip address, but only port 80/443 for the rest of the world.
You are right though - its another attack vector. If you don't want to muck with that, and you have a static site, you could put your static site into S3 and then host with cloudfront. With that, you have no risk.
Agreed, Cloudways is great. Just a little expensive.
It essentially provides the power and flexibility of a cloud VM with the convenience and "set-it-and-forget-it" nature of shared hosting.
For those who don't know, Cloudways is essentially a management service that runs on top of a cloud VM of your choosing (choices include DO, Vultr, Linode, AWS, GC). For a premium over the cost of the VM, they take care of all the provisioning and config for you, while still providing a powerful platform (allows SSH access, etc) and some added functionality (Git hooks, staging sites, credential management, and more out-of-the-box). It's really quite slick.
Cloudways is good at providing a control panel with a user experience resembling expensive Wordpress hosts, including developer workflows and such, while also giving a little more control over the server stack. You pay per server and its resources rather than per site.
The default Cloudways Wordpress stack performs very well. Their caching solution is built on Varnish, controlled by a competent plugin. However, I do find that some themes and site builder themes simply don't play well with at least Cloudways' Varnish conf, so one might end up using the included memcached or redis for page caching, with the help of some plugin like W3 Total Cache.
Customer support can be hit-or-miss.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend using Cloudways' lower tier plans, and Cloudways doesn't recommend them for production use either. I pay about USD 100 per month for a server on Digital Ocean that hosts sites I maintain with a web agency. We rely on Cloudways' development tools. For the number of sites we host, it's a very appealing price compared to certain big-name Wordpress hosting companies.
For someone just wanting to host one or more small websites for a sustainable, low cost, I would recommend looking into well regarded cPanel hosts that runs CloudLinux and LiteSpeed on NVMe hardware. These companies also have some very decent, standardized Wordpress management features these days, even though the cPanel GUI us far from pretty. I describe this in more detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32255962
I'll second Siteground. My WordPress sites were gradually getting slower on DreamHost - with support saying there weren't any problems. I switched to Siteground a few months ago, and so far, I've been happy with them.
Siteground had a "move my WordPress site" plugin that worked much smoother than I expected.
I'm not allowed to. I've made the arguments for, and HR controls the actual job listings, and they won't put salary in the JDs. I've been trying for two years to make this happen.
Reasons I've heard -- and again, this is not me, this is what I'm told -- include
* we can't as a matter of company policy, which can't be changed
* we offer great benefits (true, they're the best I've ever had) and so it's not fair to us to post salaries, because it'll look low and we'll lose candidates
* we want to start the conversation about the company and the position, and not the money
* it lowers our ability to negotiate with candidates and thus costs the company money
I've made all the arguments you'd expect for why we should, generally, and why specifically not doing so costs us candidates, and in return I don't get an engaged debate, just select 1-2 of the above reasons and then refuse to elaborate or work to find a way to "yes"...
Which makes me suspect there's something else going on, but what? We pay significantly above-average, with good incentives, great benefits, it's not like we're a used car lot where the goal is to get someone on the phone or property to work the high-pressure magic.
But in short: for whatever reason, I can't, and I would bet other hiring managers are in the same situation. I'd love to hear an HR/legal person explain what the actual reasons companies don't allow this are.
I think this is the real reason right here: it lowers our ability to negotiate with candidates and thus costs the company money.
I started making more money faster when I stopped answering the salary question and start countering it by saying, "How much are you authorized to offer?"
> it's not fair to us to post salaries, because it'll look low and we'll lose candidates *
Is that a valid argument ? I mean if it is low even after going through the hiring process people will end up rejecting the offer. Its just that both candidate and company would have sunk quite a lot of time in interview process.
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Article tldr; it’s happening, it started in the 80s, it persists, it’s real bad, it doesn’t do what companies think they want, oh well.
Then why? Because there’s another reason unstated here? Because it’s the lowest effort one that lets them set up a machine and claim the equation did it? Because they’re cruel and that’s the point?
That’s what I’d love to know, and it’s not here.