Hi Microsoft Friends, I am considering to move to Microsoft. I wonder if Microsoft has stack ranking? Stack ranking some percent of individuals (“low performers”) in the team are focused to leave the company.
Yes, people are stack ranked. I think the pool is at the M2 or M3 level and there has to be a lowest performer who gets flagged (even if they are performing okay) and if you're the lowest performer for consecutive years, things will go south. In practice, I don't think the lowest performer would ever be considered a "good" performer, so I don't think it's a problem from the company's point of view.
Not true about flagging the lowest performer
which company doesn’t do this?
Yes yes yes yes. Yes they do. It's not called stack ranking anymore but you're still fit on a bell curve. Someone gets the good ratings and someone gets the axe. Although from what I heard, the consequences aren't as bad as they are in Amazon or Facebook
Afaik, there are no fixed percentages, though the bonus pool is still effectively zero sum at M3 (?) level. This allows for more flexibility and avoids the case where you are the (n+1)th best performer and end up with significantly lower bonus than top n.
No, they abandoned that
Hmm, that's not what I heard from my ex-manager when the annual rewards happened this year. Maybe it varies across orgs?
Annual rewards are still based on stack ranking, but managers are no longer required to give a certain number of each rank like they were before. So a manager can say everyone exceeds expectations. That just means the general comp for exceeds will be lower than if only one person got it