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A comment on Microsoft ditches the stack ranking system. Yahoo lays off 600 because of it.

Re:Microsoft ditches the stack ranking system. Yahoo lays of... by PeterisP on Saturday November 16, 2013 @05:35PM (#6746691)
Stack ranking sucks if the 'bands' are enforced on a small team level. Sure, your organization may well have 10% of people that noticeably underperform and need to be identified and fired; but yahoo-style ranking doesn't implement that.

Think of it from pure statistics viewpoint - if you put in a bag 10 red balls and 90 green balls; and then grab handfuls of them to form "teams" - you'll get a bunch of teams with no underperformers and most likely a team where most or all of them are underperformers. Put the same 'level' quota for each team - and you'll get exactly what you deserve.

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Re:Microsoft ditches the stack ranking system. Yahoo lays of... by ProblemFactory on Saturday November 16, 2013 @06:04PM (#6746758)
Teams are not formed randomly - competent people like working with other competent people, and underperformers find safety among other underperformers. Even an impersonal evaluation of entire teams as a whole would be more accurate than a 10% firing quota for every team.
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