Source? I've literally never worked at a company that regularly fired the bottom X% of workers.

Large orgs regularly do this. E.g., most of the banking industry, esp. the non-wall st side, have had layoffs every few years for awhile now. It can be called all sorts of things, and it adds up.

When you think about it, it makes a sad sort of sense at scale. Hiring mistakes mean, at scale, a good number of jobs aren't fits for the people you hired, half the people out there are below average to beginwith, and a good number end up toxic (they slow down orgs!), and over time, these folks cost more money and suborgs decay. We've all inherited WTF+NIH projects and worked with people who drain energy. So even if an org doesn't do explicit layoffs or stack ranking, and hiring committees and employees have good intentions, a healthy org should be fixing hiring mistakes somehow: it can't all be retraining / reshuffling the deck. Arguably, the numbers mean most tech companies are _unhealthy_ orgs because the high demand for engineers makes the healthy level of rehiring tough to do.

The result is toxic devs get retained and the tail wags the dog from a business perspective. E.g., I bet some of the #MeToo issues in tech, deep down, relate to the difficulty of curating a top org at scale, with very few exceptions (Netflix?)

At Microsoft itself. If a manager has $100 budget for hikes and rewards, she has to invisibly stack rank to distribute it with some logic (and not give $10 to each in 10 people team)[0].

Stack ranking was not about firing at Microsoft (or any other place), it was about distribution of bonus and hikes.

[0]Spreading the peanut butter: https://www.compensationcafe.com/2014/03/spreading-the-peanu...

There are several notable companies still doing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Companies_using...

Of course it’s not called that

It’s called a corporate restructuring. Or they’ll just fire a few people here and there until they get to 10%. They call it “we re heading in a new direction”