Ask HN: What is “Stacked Ranking”?

Posted by gamesbrainiac on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @08:29PM
from the ask-hn dept.

Hi folks! I've been hearing a lot about stacked ranking these days, and recently when Intel decided to mass fire some of its employees, I thought I'd get a better understanding.

So, what is it? What kind of variants are there? Who wins in Stacked Ranking?

Looking for something canonical here since I think there are lots of ways in which this policy manifests.

( 2 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: What is “Stacked Ranking”? by mtolan on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @08:33PM (#10045300)

The short form is that in a Stacked Ranking performance measurement system, you rank every employee in an ordered list. Most often the next thing you hear is that the top X% of employees are the ones who will be given raises/bonuses, and the bottom Y% of employees are the ones who will be finding new jobs.

Reasonable references to get you started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/stacked-ranking http://www.businessinsider.com/stack-ranking-employees-is-a-...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What is “Stacked Ranking”? by greenyoda on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @11:34PM (#10045885)

"Who wins in Stacked Ranking?"

The winners are the people who can convince their managers to give them the best performance reviews (upper X%). Of course, your review isn't necessarily correlated with your contributions to the company - it can be based on your political skills, e.g., making your manager look good, making your rivals and your manager's rivals look bad, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]