Teams are supposed to work together, but with stack ranking performance, you have a big incentive to work against and bring down your teammates. Your teammate missed a critical deadline because you withheld critical information? Good for you. Your teammate wants to work on a impactful project? Kick them out and let them do repetitive operational work, good for you. You see a problem in your teammates design doc that will be disastrous? Don’t point it out, more fire caused by teammate is good for you Dragging down your teammate is much easier than being a stellar performer yourself, so people will choose the easiest path. Do you think stack ranking performance is good?
If I show you a wrench, could you tell me what size it is without looking at the labeling? How often would you be right? Probably not often. If I showed you two, could you tell me which one is larger? How often would you be right? Probably always. Relative performance evaluation is the same, it’s a lot easier and more accurate that absolute performance evaluation.
OP: 1) I don’t think you fully understand the meaning of stack rank. 2) Even when a company says they don’t do stack rank, they do it anyways. They generally don’t peanut butter rewards. It’s not a communist or socialist country. Simple way for you to understand stack rank is to ask yourself a question - if you went above and beyond and delivered a major impactful project, helped create a new product line, helped promote couple for other engineers, and wrote code that stood the test of time, should you get more rewards than someone who coasted and flew under the radar with an entitlement attitude?
Top tier will like it for sure, it’s the bottom 50% that will muddy the water. For a mediocre engineer, throwing your teammate under the bus means you won’t be piped
:) not sure what team or company you are talking about, but I’m an L7 SDM at Amazon and what you are explaining is not the norm. Besides, Blinders embellish this pipping process quite a bit. Don’t stress yourself with this shit because being scared you won’t be able to do your best work.
Ok OP, answer me this: You’re a Senior Manager and have 40 people in your org. You’re given 100,000 RSUs to award your org. What do you do? - Divide equally? Wouldn’t be fair to the star performers. - Ask your managers to identify top performers? Wouldn’t be fair to only award top performers, and also wouldn’t be fair to award medium performers the same as low performers. So…
You know what, you convinced me, I have no better solution here, it’s the pip quota that is the main problem
It makes sense when there is a drastic difference. Top tier is rewarded differently anyways. I don’t think it is easy or quantifiable to differentiate others.
I assume they you're talking in general, and not only amazon. If that's the case, you seem to be mixing a few things up. 1. Stack ranking is sometimes used for bonuses, BUT not for PIPing which is separate. 2. Even in "PIP happy" companies, the numbers are extremely small. It would be 5-10%, and the vast majority are nowhere close to being borderline (so they shouldn't care). People get stressed because of blind threads and baseless hall chats. 3. In companies like fb, for example, you font get stack ranked in the traditional sense, but there is a process of calibration across the company. This reduces your incentive to throw your peer under the bus, because you are not compared to them and it wont serve anything. 4. Finding some way to calibrate is the only way that I've seen that gets closer to assessing people fairly. Other performance management systems are far more susceptible to favoritism and random easy vs hard manager assessments
Is naive stack ranking within a team bad? Yes - I think so
Amazon 101