Indeed some of these rules and policies are ridiculous. I particularly enjoyed my time as a mid-level manager at a large aerospace company where we did stack ranking each year. We had to stack rank an organization that consisted of five departments with over 300 engineers. I was one of the department managers. Each department manager's goal was to get as many of his members ranked as highly as possible. The game theory was thick in those meetings. Unfortunately, one of the other managers had weak game and ended up with poor rankings every year. It seemed very unfair to his better people.

However, this statement in the article is pretty dumb: "If you don’t trust the people you hired, why did you hire them?" How about because they interviewed well and you thought you could trust them but once they started working they proved themselves untrustworthy. That's not rocket science; it's something that happens and is not particularly rare.