Sacked Google worker awarded €110,000 for unfair dismissal

This is actually pretty big. If I&#x27;m interpreting this correctly, Google arbitrarily stack ranked employees then dropped the lowest ranked one. Courts thought that process was unfair, opening up the door for every single ex-Googler in Ireland.<p>I&#x27;d love to have a protections like this in the US. I&#x27;ve had the same thing happen to me at a large company. Political ranking rather than performance leads to some incredibly insular work places.

The article is very vague on the actual specifics of this termination, and I don&#x27;t claim to know any more details. However, to at least play devil&#x27;s advocate to this one sided story, what incentive does Google have to fire someone &quot;arbitrarily&quot; if they have been performing satisfactorily, especially considering that Google has been on a continuous hiring spree for a while? Doesn&#x27;t it seem plausible that the said employee wasn&#x27;t doing a great job in the first place?<p>If Google fired the lowest stack ranked member in each team every year, we would have heard about 100s of stories or lawsuits by now. I don&#x27;t know if Google is clean in this particular case, but something smells fishy from the story as it is currently portrayed in this article.

Basically with stack ranking, if I see a colleague doing well, that&#x27;s bad for me?<p>Sounds horrible.

<i>Because of this, she said staff were ranked from one to five and someone at Google always had to get a low score “of 2.9”, so the unit could match the bell curve. She said senior staff “calibrated” the ratings supplied by line managers to ensure conformity with the template and these calibrations could reduce a line manager’s assessment of an employee, in effect giving them the poisoned score of less than three.</i><p>Being from Ireland myself, it amazes me that Americans tolerate stack ranking, grading on a curve, and t-scores - tools whose statistical utility has been obviated by the abandonment of all other contexts.

When I worked for a consultancy in about my second year I got a great review. A few days later my manager called me into a meeting and apologised and said the grading had to be reviewed as the country manager wanted it to be lowered. This person didn&#x27;t know me and didn&#x27;t know what I was doing. And so it was lowered. This did affect my pay rise I believe, that was all. It did annoy the hell out of me at the time though.<p>I think my manager made a mistake in letting me know the rating before someone who didn&#x27;t know me approved it. This probably happens a lot, ratings getting downgraded, and people don&#x27;t know.

Interesting. I was unaware that Google used stacked rankings.

More details in an earlier article <a href="http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/sacked-google-manager-got-30pc-pay-rise-previous-year-tribunal-told-29394243.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.ie&#x2F;irish-news&#x2F;courts&#x2F;sacked-google-ma...</a>

Another article on stack ranking system? We get it. Stack ranking is evil. What more could we expect from a horrible company when the best thing that could happen is that they fail. We hateses nasty lying Mic...<p>Nevermind sorry gollum gollum.