“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...

How’s that different than Jack Welch’s famous “fire the bottom 10% of your workforce” that he implemented in GE in the 80s? Honestly, it was close to textbook management strategy when originally implemented at Microsoft.

Now, sure management science has advanced since then, and a lot of the ways that Microsoft implemented stack ranking at the beginning we’ve realized are counterproductive.

But that doesn’t really change the core principle that they end up ranking employees at some point in time

I don't know the specific case of GE, but could imagine that, as it was a novel strategy at the time, workers weren't already in a competitive ranking-focused mindset.

Additionally firing the bottom 10% is something that should happen naturally as you discover hiring mistakes. Of course just firing the bottom 10% when they are close to average performers is counter productive.

I've already been refuted by the fact that GE did it first.

The shocker to me is that such a huge player in our industry applied it to a collaborative task like software development.