> That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers Engineering (especially software engineering) seems like a particularly bad field

> That in turn was followed by a small exodus of many of the better engineers Engineering (especially software engineering) seems like a particularly bad field in which to have "forced attrition" or stack ranking since so much of a team's success depends on the engineers' ability to work together directly on an interpersonal level, and for their code to be easily maintained/extended/tested by others. I suppose there are partial ways around this, such as factoring rankings from one's peers into the forced attrition. But overall it's very difficult to imagine any engineering environment that would benefit from incentivizing engineers to compete with one another rather than cooperate. (Lot of engineers are already good at playing the game in which they look like team players, but are really autocrats of their own little silos and knowingly make themselves hard to replace & keep others down)