I ended up being on the losing end of the stack ranking at Microsoft and it was pretty terrible. My manager straight up told me that my performance was fine bu

I ended up being on the losing end of the stack ranking at Microsoft and it was pretty terrible. My manager straight up told me that my performance was fine but because he had to rank someone the lowest, it was my turn since I was the least experienced on the team. If I had actually been doing a bad job it wouldn't have felt as bad because at least then I would have had some control over the situation. I moved teams shortly after that and my new manager was pretty surprised to see my last review. He started keeping a list of other developers on the other teams that I was helping so he could help me get ranked higher. That felt super shitty and I left the company right after. That happened to be right at the same time they did away with the stack ranking. I have no idea if it improved things but it had to be better than what it was. (At least in my part of the company.)