I mean, on some level I totally agree. Having enforced quotas is highly problematic. I kind of feel like managing a very large organization, on the scale of M

I mean, on some level I totally agree. Having enforced quotas is highly problematic. I kind of feel like managing a very large organization, on the scale of Microsoft or even larger, is a matter of choosing the marginally less highly problematic approach than all the others. Telling everyone to "fire people when they don't meet expectations" works pretty well in a 100 person company where the execs can more-or-less check the work of the line managers and intervene when someone is avoiding firing their low performer. It's not a solution in a 120,000 person organization. What happens instead is some managers tolerate their low performers. And then low performers flock to their team and high performers escape it, and their team becomes dysfunctional. And then it infects all the teams around it with dysfunction. And by the time this bubbles up to a level where you can be reasonably sure that everyone's aligned and high performing and able to effectively intervene, you've got rot throughout entire departments, and fixing that causes incredible morale problems of its own. So you adopt some kind of policy that you believe forces your line managers to have some kind of accountability. Now, is stack ranking the least-worst policy? I dunno. I've never been in charge of Microsoft. They certainly weren't at their best during their stack ranking time, but you could plausibly point fingers in a lot of other directions to explain their overall bad performance in that time period. But what is the alternative? I don't think you can just give everyone the Netflix culture deck and tell them to go to town. Netflix is 3,500 employees, not 120,000. It's pretty unlikely that Netflix's solution scales to Microsoft's size.