Stack ranking and related schemes are so obviously going to be gamed, will definitely measure something other than the nominal thing, and will gum up the works. It's one thing to have a Hunger-Games-style hiring process. Bad as that is, there's an expectation that once you've passed those trials—once you're hired—that you can then devote your time to building things or leading a team that builds things.
But when it extends into quarterly or annual reviews, where there must be a loser, then of course it will serve as a distraction from accomplishing actual goals and doing useful work. Now you have to spend time managing your image, making sure you don't piss off the wrong peer, and choosing assignments that are trendy.
Companies try to avoid all of that by adding even more complexity to the review process. More layers to prevent favoritism, more concrete metrics to sidestep subjectivity, a longer list of metrics to mitigate any one of them being over-weighted.
This just means more time and attention is stolen from productive work, and directed instead toward image management and politics.
The goal of corporate employees usually is not maximizing profit. If it were, things like private equity, LBOs, and shareholder lawsuits would not be necessary. Rather, the goal of organization-man is maintenance of the hierarchy. Why? Because people who aren't interested in this goal either quit and take jobs outside of the corporate world (like consultant, therapist, small business owner, etc.) or they circulate freely throughout many different companies and rely on up-leveling at the interview stage to get raises and promotions.
With this goal, all the stack ranking, annual reviews, politics and image maintenance makes sense. For there to be a hierarchy, there must be people at the bottom of the hierarchy. There must also be a pathway to the top of the hierarchy, lest people tire of the game and quit. Therefore, people seeking to preserve the hierarchy will create processes to ensure some people are defined as needing improvement, and others are defined as being worthy of promotion and upward mobility.
The folks who are purely interested in maximizing profit usually enter finance and become hedge fund managers, where they have a small staff (largely dispensable, other than themselves) but outsize influence on markets, and can keep 20% of their profits (100% if trading their own capital) for themselves.
At the end of the day even upper management doesn't matter. This is about Owners and Workers and everything in between is just fluff. The $300k - $400k these engineers are making is a rounding error. Turning middle management into cannibals so that one day they might reach slightly higher management is exactly what is supposed to happen, because it means they are willing to kill for the owners.
So many people lose sight of the bigger picture, workers are always cogs in the machine. Luxurious, comfortable cogs, sure. But its crabs in a bucket.
Intelligence isn't a spectrum, it's an infinite-dimensional space. Someone can be smart on one axis and a dunce on infinity-minus-one other axes. Every genius ever born was almost certainly mediocre at nearly everything outside their expertise.
And even today such people exist. Encountering them is often quite an experience. Seeing them being better than you at almost everything is on one hand really nice, on the other hand it makes you wonder what you did wrong. Such folks are usually quite rare though, 1 in a thousand types of people. But I'd imagine Google should be full of them. Or maybe it isn't, idk, given GP.
Without any examples of his work it’s hard to believe that they are of any consequence. I don’t think anyone can just write a piece of music, but you don’t present a strong case that anything he wrote is even remotely worthwhile.
Hell, Bruce Willis has a band that’s released records. I just don’t see any reason to think they’re worth listening to over anyone else.
Form Wikipedia:
> an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks.
We assume that the people implementing stack ranking have good incentives.
At one of my jobs, my manager blurted out what we have all suspected about Scrum. It is valuable to generate a neat numerical progress report for the guy above. It has no other value.
My manager doesn't give a shit about achieving anything either. He is doing the same gaming we are.
None of this is true for creative workers in actual teams with deep technical or site knowledge. Someone with a decade of experience that is a bit burnt out and underperforming may still have amazing contributions albeit less frequently or predictably. Someone that doesn't commit code often but "holds the team together" by lending a helping hand and giving sage advice to juniors can be invaluable. Fire them and the juniors will flounder. New developers not only don't bring customers with them, but likely won't be productive for months. And so on, and so forth.
Stack ranking originates in organisations where sales are in charge at the upper levels. They think that what applies to them applies to everybody else at the organisation.
This is a mistake, of course, but it's fantastically difficult to overcome "cultural" biases like this. Even otherwise very smart people have a blind spot to this kind of thing. After all, the fish is the last to know it swims in water.
Not to mention that decisions on whether or not to stay in education are often taken when fairly young, and even very clever people can arrive in their 20s with incorrect views about the world based on what their parents/teachers/etc believed - if you've spent your childhood being told that a degree is the only way to have a secure future, you have to not only be smarter than needing a degree you also have to be bold enough to think you already know better than everyone around you (which sure, some people are that confident as 12 year olds, some never get that confident even as adults).
TLDR, I get why business degrees get a bad rep, and agree that many idiots do do them; but also, a couple of the cleverest people I've ever known have done them, mid-career, because the job they were aiming for (and in both cases I'm thinking of, then went on to achieve) had hard requirements attached and they considered it worth wasting time on an MBA to progress.
I didn't realize it was this bad. This is awful.
First, it’s important to understand that managers are held to outcomes. If a manager retains low performers because “they’re friends”, over time they’ll find themselves with a low performing team and it will be visible in their results. At that stage they are now at the bottom of their manager’s stack-ranking process. Retain and promote your low-performing friends at your peril.
Of course, if you believe your entire management chain to be incompetent, perhaps those managers will never be held to account. But if you hold that view there’s no reason to believe anything is functional, let alone promotions, and I’d explore other employment opportunities if you can.
Respectfully, I disagree.
First, let me point out that when I say "popularity" I don't mean friends necessarily in the nepotism sense (in response to your later point). "Popularity" is a reductive term but still a relatively accurate one. What's really going on here is the intangible factors lead other around you to interpret the same set of facts charitably or not almost arbitrarily.
A big factor here is similarity in terms of demographic factors and background. This so often gets wrapped up "culture fit", which itself can be a euphemism for more problematic biases.
The example I like to give is this: a person may work on a project for a half that never ships. It may not even produce an MVP. Given this set of facts you will people who will say "we learned a lot and will take those learnings into future projects" all the way to "this team failed to deliver a prototype and as such we canned the project".
What's driving this are social factors.
Managers are subject to the same social forces that drive this interpretation. A given manager may get credit for dealing with reports that aren't necessarily bad enough to be exited but would otherwise be a headache for someone else in the org. Or that manager may be blamed for their team being perceived as low-performing even though they're given projects doomed to fail (eg under-resourced).
It's also worth noting that with any form of stack ranking or performance quotas, another factor that comes into play is horse-trading. That is, different managers are competing for a limited pool of ratings. You will find that a manager has decided someone should be promoted and that report will find themselves high on stack ranking as a result. There's an implicit quid pro quo here because other managers can get your support (as a manager) when one of their reports gets put up for promotion.
> Of course, if you believe your entire management chain to be incompetent
It's not competence. It's biases masquerading as objective determinations and an implicit over-reliance on social cues and factors all while managers have incentives that may come at the expense of those of their reports.
How could this be fixed? If true, what would we expect to see, versus its not being true?
“there’s no reason to believe anything is functional” should be “you don’t believe in your manager.” Good managers divorce moral edict from feelings. Good managers know they don’t get to define what functional means.
Sure you can buy ad$... but are you prepared to buy the 30% fake impressions to fake people we require?
The fact that both systems / strategies were developed by the same group of people is for sure the "why" behind these cuts.
Not only is it graded on a curve but to prevent ratings inflation there are quotas for each ratings bucket. Many deny this, even when presented with concrete proof that such quotas exist (but were called "performance targets"). This itself would be fine except that negative ratings have a target percentage of ~10%. This includes regrettable losses and ratings below Meets All Expectations.
Such targets are enforced at a reasonably high level, typically at director or higher over an org of 100-150+ employees.
Why is that bad? Because it creates a hugely toxic environment. Why? Because such directors and VPs will demand their managers find sufficient "low" performers to meet their targets.
The other aspect to this is that all of these ratings are essentially bullshit anyway. Why? Because it's a popularity contest. If your manager and director likes you, you'll pretty much always get a good rating. If they don't, you won't. The exact same set of facts can be used to argue ratings pretty much +/- 1 bucket, possibly more.