Yeah defenders of the institution hand wave and say well once you get enough people in the mix, the math works out. I'm skeptical when you're asked to force ra

Yeah defenders of the institution hand wave and say well once you get enough people in the mix, the math works out. I'm skeptical when you're asked to force rank people into a bell curve no matter how small the population. People who are on the bottom due to forcing it into a curve tend to stay there or near there. Your bottom-most Harvard PhD is unlikely to find himself in the top 10% when mixed into a general population because other human factors come into play, not the least of which is it's incredibly time consuming to review and re-rank every person. So managers tend to leave people where they landed because fatigue eventually sets in. This in turn inspires other behaviors that are not really what the designer envisioned. For example one manager used to carry around a book of every mistake other teams made: if anyone challenged the ranking of one of his employees he'd start firing off potshots at the other manager's org. Needless to say his rankings were left alone. The irony is not lost on me that this manager eventually left to start a company that allegedly uses AI somehow to help people identify the best candidates. He spent his days subverting a system meant to measure employee performance and now claims expertise in finding the best performing employees.