Have you ever had to provide a Stack Ranking?
It’s lay-off season and sacrifices are made to the Stack Ranking Gods. What have you seen play into people’s positive/negative ranks? Do you have direct experience with this? Is this really the best way to make cuts? Is the failure of a manager (people not given enough opportunity to perform) ever factored in?
Yes and it sucks.
Microsoft used to do this and it was awful
When did they move away from this? How it done now?
They stopped forcing percentages of people into specific buckets. Now you must stack by impact. HR says you put people wherever they should go. Many orgs don’t allow that - they force you to put percentages into buckets. So same thing different label.
How is stack ranking different than performance-based culture at Facebook, etc. Committee decision vs manager decision?
Stack ranking forces you to put a certain amount of people in the bucket of “worst”
Stack ranking is different in that the purpose is to throw out a percentage of the population and replace it. Then in the next cycle, reshuffle and repeat. So you may survive one year, but the next you may not. And that would mean you’re out, possibly forever (like at Amazon). Enjoy.
Uber does this, managers spend about 90% of their time in perf meetings for about a month to figure out the rank.
Thermo does this still. Being friends with the right people seems to be a big factor.
My friend/boss worked as a senior SDM at amazon and had to do this constantly . He said he got sick to it very fast .
Stack ranking is a terrible way to figure out performance. But it's the fastest way for the company. Often being on KTLO projects lowers people in rank. Where as high profile new capability projects artificially lifts people up. It's a failure of the org which have adopted the policy. And the failure of managers to be 'people managers'.
They do this for sales people at Oracle
In the best of all possible worlds, we would reward managers for team efficiency and impact per person to incentivize trimming underperformers and eliminate forced bucketing. All the big tech companies reward managers with promotions for accumulating headcount and growing impact and scope though, which misaligns incentives toward keeping anybody who is "good enough" as long as they add some value and don't adversely impact their team. Forced bucketing is a pretty version of stack ranking to offset this incentive. Reward efficiency, with tangible financial bonuses to managers and suddenly managers will be incentivized to cut underperformers without the forcing function.
What companies still do this? This seems so toxic for a team, like everyone is out for themselves and nobody wants to work together
We do, it really turns everyone against one another. Literally the only thing that matters is how loud you talk, not the work you do.
Wow I couldn't imagine, I'm here trying to make sure my co-workers get known for their efforts and promoted when needed for the work they do. But it would be so toxic if we were all just trying to keep our jobs. Plus I would interview like every year just in case, and that's exhausting