Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.
My manager straight up told me that my performance was fine but because he had to rank someone the lowest, it was my turn since I was the least experienced on the team. If I had actually been doing a bad job it wouldn't have felt as bad because at least then I would have had some control over the situation.
I moved teams shortly after that and my new manager was pretty surprised to see my last review. He started keeping a list of other developers on the other teams that I was helping so he could help me get ranked higher. That felt super shitty and I left the company right after.
That happened to be right at the same time they did away with the stack ranking. I have no idea if it improved things but it had to be better than what it was. (At least in my part of the company.)
Sure as shit, for three years, it didn't matter how awesome or shitty a job I did, I got the same middle of the road review. One year, I got a paltry bonus and no salary increase. The next was neither and the final year I got a pittance of both. By the second year, I knew what was happening and just completely checked out. I went full "Office Space" and did the exact minimum in order to get my work done and not get put on a pip. Would come in around 11, get my stuff done in a few hours and tell my team I was going to be "WFH" the rest of the day.
Finally left that team and two years since leaving that team, I've had several large bonuses and salary increases.
Stack ranking is some toxic bullshit and managers use it to make themselves look better to their own skip managers. Fucking corporate politics man, it ruins everything.
I would imagine that nearly every change in performance review structure at nearly every company is unpopular:
People who were let go (or who left voluntarily of low bonuses/raises/refreshes) aren't there to complain!
Everyone who is left, who knew how to game the system (or was so good they didn't need to) now has to optimize to a completely new metric.
It's up to the Sr managers and directors if they spread the 6% goal around all their teams, or let one or two teams "implode". But the line managers know that their team either needs to outperform other teams or that the performance management buzzsaw is likely coming for one or more of their reports.
Heck, I even saw directors and VP refer to "regretted attrition" and "unregretted attrition" in all hands meetings.
(although I worked at a place that never fired anybody and I'm not sure I recommend that either)
This is well documented behavior, even in Jack Welch’s book. He was the one famous for cutting 5% every year at GE.
* - as I understand it; never worked there.
Are we really suggesting that's the norm at Amazon? Maybe, but wow.
It says that managers who don't perform well will be out. And that was the reason given for why this practice doesn't happen. Wouldn't the existing employees know the system better and be more valuable? Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff. Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk. It is setup to be toxic.
You don't seem to understand. Amazon grows by 15-30% every single year.
We're constantly hiring, even if there is no attrition. We also have a high bar. The ~ ratio is 20 phone screens to 4 onsites to 1 hire. That's a lot of work to get a butt in a seat.
> Unless you want to get rid of someone it is better to keep your existing staff.
Only if you presume that every single team has to identify that X% of people for the URA target. They don't. Period. Full Stop. It's a lie.
> Team members can't help the new person because them doing well would mean putting yourself at risk
The #1 thing that gets asked about individuals during yearly operational reviews is "what did they deliver"? We try to identify individual contributions but individuals can't ship. Teams ship.
That makes it way easier to meet an URA target.
Do you imply that standing stack ranking is a quality needed to work at big tech ?
I've never been at a company who uses it where the teams improved at all. Most of the time those regressed since people were actively working in silo's and shitting on other people's work to make their own work appear better.
You could stack rank how nice you thought people were, making two layers -- like "really nice" and "mostly nice" (of course, there were no labels in the tool). Or you could use it to highlight two particular team-mates who really stood out by making a layer for them, and then a layer for everyone else.
It could also be used to stack-rank the entire management chain, which was fun.
The second is that people respond to incentives. So a manager might make a bad hire because so they don't have to fire any of the people they like. The team might not help someone struggling because they need a sacrifice every year. And finally people might trade to barely avoid the bottom 10% (if you'll make this decision i want, i'll rank you higher). Then the people you are keeping are the low productivity, agile political operators. And a low productivity highly political worker is 10 times worse for productivity than the plain version of low productivity worker.
There doesn't seem to be any indication that Amazon is forcing this kind of decision on small teams. On a larger scale of 1,000 or 10,000 workers it makes sense to track if you are losing people that you don't care about losing or "un-regretted attrition". It's also good to have a process where a manager says "this person isn't doing well" and HR says "tell them what they need to improve and give them a few months" (or find them a different position). And the manager says "hey that worked" 2/3 of the time and then fires them when it doesn't. Otherwise you end up with sudden surprise firings or managers who never fire anyone.