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There is clearly a minimum size beyond which it becomes highly dubious to assume that, in this group, the worst 10% are bad performers. Like, if it's a 10 pers

There is clearly a minimum size beyond which it becomes highly dubious to assume that, in this group, the worst 10% are bad performers. Like, if it's a 10 person group, it's not particularly hard to select a 10 person group where the worst person is pretty good. And this is where "dogmatic use of a rule instead of a guideline" comes in. Stack ranking down to the level of every team has bad results. But it is equally true that in a large organization (and the only places that would even consider stack ranking have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of employees, not 10), you just don't have nobody but high performers. It's not possible. I've discussed stack ranking before on HN, and I feel like there are a lot of people here who want to believe that you never need to terminate anyone. That's not true. There also seem to be a lot of people here who believe that the fundamental failure mode of most organizations is being overly quick to fire. That's also not true -- though there are exceptions. You have to understand that firing an employee is extremely stressful for most managers. So much so that lots of managers will very willingly live with a terrible performer who's a huge drag on their team rather than terminate that employee. And so we get management doctrines that are aimed at forcing managers to actually terminate their problem employees. I'm not a fan of stack ranking, though I've also never worked at an extremely large organization. But it's not a fiendish plan created by mustache-twirling villains in order to cause people pain for sheer sadism. It's a deeply imperfect practice that should be looked at with a clear understanding of what motivates it. Dismissing it as sociopathy speaks a lot more to the commenter than the practice.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> But it is equally true that in a large organization (and the only places that would even consider stack ranking have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of employees, not 10), you just don't have nobody but high performers. But even in those organizations, the "stack" doesn't consist of thousands of employees, as the unit on which stack ranking is done is lower-level units (often very low-level), not the whole organization.
- aetherson 10y ago
  You read the several times in which I said, "Don't apply stack ranking to small teams"? Do you think you're arguing with me?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    I'm pointing out that your defense of stack ranking in large organizations ignores the manner in which stack ranking is actually applied, even in lagrrge organizations (and there is a reason it's not done across broader groups, too; because large organizations that have good enough objective performance metrics to apply consistently organization-wide have better methods of applying them to make decisions than using them as inputs into stack ranking.)
    - aetherson 10y ago
      So, what, you're opposed to people talking about how they think large organizations should work instead of how they actually work? There are about two dozen people in this thread that you should be directing your comments to. But also: If we're talking about an organization where it is impossible for a manager of, say, a 100-200 person department to figure out who the 10-20 worst people are across his entire department -- where he's helpless and just has to say, "Well, I don't know, I'll punt down to my lower-level managers," that's prima facia evidence of a dysfunctional org. What is the doctrine that you feel is going to lead to better termination decisions in that org?
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > So, what, you're opposed to people talking about how they think large organizations should work instead of how they actually work? Stack ranking is based on forced rankings of employees by managers who are familiar enough with them to theoretically be able to provide an ordinal rank of their performance. There is no way this works in large groups, it only works in small subunits. If you have actual objective measures of business-meaningful performance, you have to throw away a lot of the meaningful data to reduce it to a ordinal ranking and use it for stack ranking, which is why organizations that do have such measures use them for more useful accountability than is provided by stack ranking.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> But it is equally true that in a large organization (and the only places that would even consider stack ranking have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of employees, not 10), you just don't have nobody but high performers. But even in those organizations, the "stack" doesn't consist of thousands of employees, as the unit on which stack ranking is done is lower-level units (often very low-level), not the whole organization.

aetherson 10y ago
You read the several times in which I said, "Don't apply stack ranking to small teams"? Do you think you're arguing with me?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  I'm pointing out that your defense of stack ranking in large organizations ignores the manner in which stack ranking is actually applied, even in lagrrge organizations (and there is a reason it's not done across broader groups, too; because large organizations that have good enough objective performance metrics to apply consistently organization-wide have better methods of applying them to make decisions than using them as inputs into stack ranking.)
  - aetherson 10y ago
    So, what, you're opposed to people talking about how they think large organizations should work instead of how they actually work? There are about two dozen people in this thread that you should be directing your comments to. But also: If we're talking about an organization where it is impossible for a manager of, say, a 100-200 person department to figure out who the 10-20 worst people are across his entire department -- where he's helpless and just has to say, "Well, I don't know, I'll punt down to my lower-level managers," that's prima facia evidence of a dysfunctional org. What is the doctrine that you feel is going to lead to better termination decisions in that org?
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > So, what, you're opposed to people talking about how they think large organizations should work instead of how they actually work? Stack ranking is based on forced rankings of employees by managers who are familiar enough with them to theoretically be able to provide an ordinal rank of their performance. There is no way this works in large groups, it only works in small subunits. If you have actual objective measures of business-meaningful performance, you have to throw away a lot of the meaningful data to reduce it to a ordinal ranking and use it for stack ranking, which is why organizations that do have such measures use them for more useful accountability than is provided by stack ranking.