Name and shame: Companies that do Stack Ranking.
If your company does stack ranking (rank and yank, forced bell curve) then reply with your company name and give us the details
Among the things Amzn is infamous for, this is definitely 1 of ‘em
Why is this bad? Isn’t this an effective way for a company to trim fat?
In reality it becomes a game of politics where fatness is defined by the manager and not an actual data driven fat percentage. I’ve personally seen many non-fat employees get the hit just because managers had to maintain the clean weight count. In theory it makes sense, practically it doesn’t since it never works that way
What’s a better way to trim fat?
Walmart does it
Northrop does this shit. Worse cuz half the projects you can't talk about what the engineers do because of need to know rule. Favoritism and low skilled workers thrive in this environment, not based on results at all.
MSFT does it
They no longer do forced stack ranking at Microsoft. Managers are not forced to give zero rewards to someone anymore. Small pockets of teams might still do this but employees are not forced ranked. Now... There's only so much budget to go around. There is a bell curve and someone may get low rewards to compensate a top. performer. That is common at almost every company.
Google stack ranks at org (not team) level for performance scores. Not for PIP.
Teradata does it and they call it normalization.
Stack ranking is a way to allocate compensation. Not just (rarely) about firing the bottom. It is a good way to help a manager identify if someone is really not pulling their weight vs. peers. It stinks when you have to force folks into the bottom category "Needs Improvement". If you are a top performer, believe me, this helps your comp go higher than if everyone was considered "great" ... and they are not ...
Fix typos, op. Also "fitting into a bell curve" is a popular way people recognise this system. It could be added to the description.