Stack ranking at Microsoft has a min populaton size (x) - you generally walk up the org chart until the number of employees >= x, and then apply stack ranking to that group.
I think opponents of stack ranking generally overlook this fact. Yes, it's terrible if you have a 5 person team, but the data becomes more normal as you add more people.
Sort the members of each group of 5. Then take the bottom performer from ten groups and sort them. Take the bottom five from ten such groups and sort them. Fire the bottom ten.
If Google did it, they'd call it MapReduce and it would be the coolest thing ever.
How do you know the data becomes more normal as your add more people? Especially if you are performing the rankings independently on each individual.
If you feel like your company is hiring against a certain set of high standards, are your employees at the low end of the 'normalized' curve holding you back as much as the people at the high end are pushing you forward?
If we put it this way, you answer your own question: :-)
>> How do you know the data becomes more normal as your add [data points]?
That said, yeah this is crazy.
The worst problem with stack ratings is not what it do (firing people which don't work out will happen, it is often good even for those fired).
The worst problem is that it destroys team culture as it is described at Microsoft: "if you're in a too good team, switch or you'll be fired." It gets hard for managers to build good teams when the individuals even have an incentive to sabotage each others. And so on.
Edit: The first part had a ":-)" on it. I think that is not interesting, compared to the idea of being in a team with people that have motivation to screw their team mates over. Like being in prison or playing the Paranoia RPG (an orc in Sauron's army?)
Any Stack ranking using a Bell curve would be dumb. Nobody I'm aware of does that. Most curves look more like a Chi Square Curve, which is far more top heavy.
You don't get anything like 'normal' without scores of samples. Any small (<50?) group is going to deviate significantly. Which means stacking is abusive to somebody.
but the mechanism by which it migrates up is 'calibrated' by managers arguing with one another, isn't it? In which case the politics and opinions of a small number have a disproportinately large effect on people's scores in aggregated groups.
Precisely. And because the consequences of stack ranking are so significant you can bet your ass that anyone who can use office politics to game the system will do so. And at MS there are already a lot of politics in play, so stack ranking just brings it to the forefront.
Instead of being a meritocracy it ends up being about whose managers play the game better and have more political power.
