3 ms·

...you understand that the idea is that you hire to replace the people you fired, and that you suffer turnover as well, right? Yes, applying a strict stack ran

...you understand that the idea is that you hire to replace the people you fired, and that you suffer turnover as well, right? Yes, applying a strict stack ranking mechanism to an arbitrarily small team does not have good results. Agreed. That's what I mean by saying, it has bad results as a dogmatic rule. But the goal is not to reduce your workforce by 10% every year, either.

falcolas 10y ago
> the idea is that you hire to replace the people you fired And if you can't hire because of budget constraints? Or you had a 5 person team that was gelling well, but now you've tossed one to the curb and replaced them with someone new (and burdened the remaining team with the interview process in the interim). Any "fire x percentage" mandate is going to suck when you're looking at a team of high performers. Or, the manager is just going to hire a dud for the express purpose of having someone to fire the next go around. I've seen that happen more times than I want to think about.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Of course, I didn't even mention hiring as I assume we all know its a terrible solution. Hiring is a spotty, error-prone process. Its arguably better to train who you have, than take another roll of the dice. Hiring is how you got into the situation you're in.
- aetherson 10y ago
  Ah, the "never fire anyone" approach. You can train all low performers into being excellent employees! That is far more detached from reality than stack ranking is, and far more destructive than stack ranking is to a large organization. Stack ranking is exactly intended to deal with the fact that hiring a spotty, error-prone process. It says, "No, you can't only hire high performers, whether by having brilliant hiring processes or by training low performers. What you need to do is fire the low performers and roll the dice again. Because eventually the dice will roll high."
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    No, but obviously minimize it. Don't manufacture reasons to fire, like the stacking scheme does.

falcolas 10y ago

> the idea is that you hire to replace the people you fired And if you can't hire because of budget constraints? Or you had a 5 person team that was gelling well, but now you've tossed one to the curb and replaced them with someone new (and burdened the remaining team with the interview process in the interim). Any "fire x percentage" mandate is going to suck when you're looking at a team of high performers. Or, the manager is just going to hire a dud for the express purpose of having someone to fire the next go around. I've seen that happen more times than I want to think about.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

Of course, I didn't even mention hiring as I assume we all know its a terrible solution. Hiring is a spotty, error-prone process. Its arguably better to train who you have, than take another roll of the dice. Hiring is how you got into the situation you're in.

aetherson 10y ago
Ah, the "never fire anyone" approach. You can train all low performers into being excellent employees! That is far more detached from reality than stack ranking is, and far more destructive than stack ranking is to a large organization. Stack ranking is exactly intended to deal with the fact that hiring a spotty, error-prone process. It says, "No, you can't only hire high performers, whether by having brilliant hiring processes or by training low performers. What you need to do is fire the low performers and roll the dice again. Because eventually the dice will roll high."
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  No, but obviously minimize it. Don't manufacture reasons to fire, like the stacking scheme does.