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I think this is not correct because many of our biggest and most successful companies stack rank. If there is a substantial productivity advantage to not doing

I think this is not correct because many of our biggest and most successful companies stack rank. If there is a substantial productivity advantage to not doing it then the next company with a million person workforce has some low hanging fruit to pick.

deleted 5y ago
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mattnewton 5y ago
Like an evolutionary process, companies are only ever graded on the sum of their policies. There is almost never a company that offers almost everything the same but no stack ranking; it would not surprise me to see that the market for labor is “inefficient” here. I wonder if there are management studies on introducing stack ranking to a unit inside of a company?
- Applejinx 5y ago
  If there are, they are not framed in societal terms but in Darwinist terms. In regular society, it's more profitable to be a criminal/mugger/what have you, viewed entirely in a practical sense. It only becomes unprofitable when (a) there's law to prevent you and (b) there's a general idea that preventing you from doing that is correct in some way. If anybody's experimented with this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon had as it seems like they'd try anything to see if it worked, I would guess that at scale stack ranking produces slightly more efficiency and productivity than it costs in harm to the well-being of workers. Since Amazon doesn't care at all about the well-being of workers OR employers… they're like a sort of pyre to the cause of scale and profitability… then stack ranking would stay. If it didn't return some arbitrarily small (or large, as far as we know) benefit to the company at the cost of the well-being of the workers, it would be gone. Somebody's got to have measured this by now, and all these tech unicorns are smart enough to ditch it if it was actually impinging on their productivity. It's not, it's impinging on worker conditions, so win/win as far as the tech giants are concerned.
acdha 5y ago
It's hard finding counter-examples since no two companies are in the same business and situation, but consider Microsoft: stack-ranking coincided with their lost decade where they stagnated, ceded control of mobile & web to Apple & Google, etc. A new CEO changed many things so it's hard to say whether stack-ranking was more a cause or symptom of Ballmer's bad management but from the outside it certainly seems like a healthier company now that it's gone. That's also important to think about from the other perspective: stack-ranking seems like a frictional cost — Microsoft would have been profitable no matter what since anything short of discontinuing Windows/Office would have left a massive cash flow, but it's harder to see where pushing people out cost you until after the fact. Amazon has enjoyed a massive first mover advantage from the cloud and they're certainly executing well now but I would not be surprised if, say, strong competition lead to a point in a few years where they might wish that they hadn't lost staff due to their checkered reputation for being an enjoyable place to work.

deleted 5y ago

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mattnewton 5y ago

Like an evolutionary process, companies are only ever graded on the sum of their policies. There is almost never a company that offers almost everything the same but no stack ranking; it would not surprise me to see that the market for labor is “inefficient” here. I wonder if there are management studies on introducing stack ranking to a unit inside of a company?

Applejinx 5y ago
If there are, they are not framed in societal terms but in Darwinist terms. In regular society, it's more profitable to be a criminal/mugger/what have you, viewed entirely in a practical sense. It only becomes unprofitable when (a) there's law to prevent you and (b) there's a general idea that preventing you from doing that is correct in some way. If anybody's experimented with this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon had as it seems like they'd try anything to see if it worked, I would guess that at scale stack ranking produces slightly more efficiency and productivity than it costs in harm to the well-being of workers. Since Amazon doesn't care at all about the well-being of workers OR employers… they're like a sort of pyre to the cause of scale and profitability… then stack ranking would stay. If it didn't return some arbitrarily small (or large, as far as we know) benefit to the company at the cost of the well-being of the workers, it would be gone. Somebody's got to have measured this by now, and all these tech unicorns are smart enough to ditch it if it was actually impinging on their productivity. It's not, it's impinging on worker conditions, so win/win as far as the tech giants are concerned.

acdha 5y ago

It's hard finding counter-examples since no two companies are in the same business and situation, but consider Microsoft: stack-ranking coincided with their lost decade where they stagnated, ceded control of mobile & web to Apple & Google, etc. A new CEO changed many things so it's hard to say whether stack-ranking was more a cause or symptom of Ballmer's bad management but from the outside it certainly seems like a healthier company now that it's gone. That's also important to think about from the other perspective: stack-ranking seems like a frictional cost — Microsoft would have been profitable no matter what since anything short of discontinuing Windows/Office would have left a massive cash flow, but it's harder to see where pushing people out cost you until after the fact. Amazon has enjoyed a massive first mover advantage from the cloud and they're certainly executing well now but I would not be surprised if, say, strong competition lead to a point in a few years where they might wish that they hadn't lost staff due to their checkered reputation for being an enjoyable place to work.