Does Zillow encourage there teams management to engage in this unhealthy archaic practice? A truly healthy team will rely on all members. If there is a team for instance that has one developer, PM and QA, and all are fulfilling their role expectations, how can you rationalize stack ranking of them? How will putting the QA engineer on the bottom of the stack help them or the team perform better? I really hope Zillow does not participate in a Stackranking culture.
Stack ranking even at companies not doing it correctly, happens within the same discipline at counts >> 3
In stack ranking you compare apples to apples. It's common at many big companies. Some have publicly disavowed it and the rest have no plans to change it
It was one of the things that made microsoft a dreadful place for so many years.
It borrows a lot of engineers from amazon - the Mecca of stack ranking. Go figure ...
Stack ranking is not evil. It's easy to fuck up, but not evil. For example if you rank by how much people help each other out, much of the toxicity goes away. Ranking with a prescribed curve is semi-evil, especially for small teams (under a hundred). Managing out a fixed percentage of the bottom of the stack is totally evil. This and ignoring teamwork are what gave stack ranking such a horrible reputation. Because it is indeed a horrible combination. But stack ranking itself isn't necessarily horrible.
I'm not convinced. Stack ranking splits people into 3 groups and the bottom group is managed out (PIPs, firings)
I don't think that's how stack ranking works. Engineers are stacked against other engineers. I don't think there is a valid metric for comparison between qa and an engineer.