Also... I left amazon a while ago to go work for a (much) smaller company. Think about 50 engineers in three groups. Exec management came from HP who had a type

Also... I left amazon a while ago to go work for a (much) smaller company. Think about 50 engineers in three groups. Exec management came from HP who had a type of rank-and-yank. Employees were ranked in their group and across the board. And then those rankings were used to compare engineers across teams. The idea was they wanted to make sure there was parity in terms of pay and job grades across teams, which I sort of thought was laudable. They didn't want "Bob" in team 1 to get paid a lot more than "Alice" in team 2 just because everyone in team 2 were super-geniuses. Moral of that story is stacked ranking can have some legit uses. We didn't automatically fire people at the bottom of the ranking, but if a senior engineer was being ranked low, it got management's attention. Ranking mostly led to determining who got the largest bonuses . Even though I wasn't going to fire low ranking engineers, I still had to tell the people in the middle they were getting a 10% bonus instead of a 15% bonus, which, surprisingly, was a lot harder than telling someone we were letting them go from amazon.