Just because employees are ruthlessly stack ranked doesn’t mean they are working on impactful projects. Directors and especially VPs have a ton of autonomy on

Just because employees are ruthlessly stack ranked doesn’t mean they are working on impactful projects. Directors and especially VPs have a ton of autonomy on what their orgs pursue and are in the dark on some areas of their org, which further provides frontline and middle managers a lot of authority and it’s up to them to report up stacking within their remit and defend the positioning. So while stack ranking decisions are made, it’s not always “fair” and varies greatly across orgs. All managers regardless of level are fallible and do not always make perfect decisions on what to pursue so that adds another layer to effectiveness of employees even if they are doing the best they can at what they have been given. Cuts are at the org level based on value to the business. Low performance can be gauged in many ways and what is a high performer in the context of a team or org may be a low performer if taking value to the overall business into account. Headcount allocations do not always reflect value (and that value varies greatly when comparing short term to long term).