6 ms·

> The process, called "stack ranking," requires managers to give about 5% of their employees a low performance evaluation to fit on a bell curve of relative per

• gurchik 4y ago
  Capital One does, and I hear many banks do
• sosodev 4y ago
  Seems like managers are often asked to stack rank before layoffs...
  • midoridensha 4y ago
    That's about the only time I can think of where it makes sense. If you have to lay off some people, then obviously you want to get rid of the lowest performers. But if times are good and everyone is performing well enough and contributing, why get rid of them? If they're not performing well enough, then you shouldn't need stack ranking to figure that out, and you don't need to arbitrarily set a percentage of employees to put on performance improvement plans or fire.
    • dasudasu 4y ago
      The rationale is that there can only be so many employees and if natural attrition is low then they’d prefer to re-roll on mediocre performers in an attempt to capture the top ones.
      • midoridensha 4y ago
        That's a bad rationale. Mediocre performers, are, by definition, average. Unless your hiring process has completely changed, you're not likely to get anyone better if you toss out a mediocre performer and hire someone new: the new person could be better, or could be worse. Moreover, the mediocre person is experienced and productive; the replacement will not be, and probably won't be for a long time. (If the mediocre performer isn't productive, then they're not mediocre unless most of your employees are terrible, and should be fired for bad performance.)
    • ilyt 4y ago
      But then you should probably look at what is not earning money or facilitate earning money. But that's kind of irrelevant when layoffs are coz shareholders want more returns this yeah, not because company has problems...
      • midoridensha 4y ago
        Earning money is not really relevant to whether people are good employees or not; that's based on the market, management decisions, etc. I'm sure there were lots of great employees at BeOS, but the fact that the product failed financially wasn't their fault. Companies change product strategies all the time to pursue profit, trim unprofitable ventures, etc., and that's all fine. But it's dumb to lay off good employees when they can just be re-deployed somewhere else, assuming the company isn't having financial hardship that actually requires them to shed headcount.
    • lelanthran 4y ago
      > If you have to lay off some people, then obviously you want to get rid of the lowest performers. It depends. In medium and large (and even some small) organisations, the intention behind layoffs is not only to save on the salary bill, it's to cut those divisions, projects, groups initiatives and work units that are a net loss or that are not contributing to the bottom line. IOW, the intention should be to get rid of certain positions; it's a side-effect that people are usually in those positions. For example, at Amazon I would imagine that even the high performers in the Alexa team would be considered for layoffs over the low performers in the cash-cows. It's positions that get laid off, not people.
    • astrange 4y ago
      Google's layoff was apparently pretty random; I wonder if they actually did lay off people at random. That'd avoid discrimination lawsuits at least… There seems to be an assumption people will interview for their own job again at the end of the severance period.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  If the facts don't fit your theory, change the facts! The US obsession with force-ranking everything is unhealthy, and I say that as someone who has often been fortunate enough to end up on the right hand tail.
• alkz 4y ago
  blizzard was acquired by microsoft
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • blibble 4y ago
    not yet, still in progress
    • sleepybrett 4y ago
      wasnt it blocked? or at least possibly blocked?
      • Hamuko 4y ago
        Basically every regulatory body in the world is looking into the sale.
• mjr00 4y ago
  The problem with the 2000s-era Microsoft method, as I understand it, was that the population sizes they used were too small. Stack ranking was done at the individual team level, and that did indeed lead to people sabotaging each other, because in a team of 10 only 2 people could get the highest pay raises and 1 person would be placed on a PIP (or whatever the ratios were). But yes, all major companies still do something like this AFAIK, just with a larger population size now. Speaking from my experience at Amazon, the target was around 4%, but this was across entire departments. My department was 300 people. Is it possible that you can have a department of 300 people where you can't find 12 people who are below-average performers? Yes. Is it likely? No. I don't know how many people the lead in the article managed. If it was a team of 15, he has a legitimate gripe. If it was a team of 200, not so much.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    Who's the next 4% after you lay off the last 4%?
    • georgemcbay 4y ago
      Hopefully your hiring processes suck so you can keep refreshing a new batch of people to get fired!
      • mjr00 4y ago
        If you have a hiring process that results in only a 4% bad hire rate, create a business right now because every business in the world will want to pay you massive sums of money for the secret to such an amazing process. from my own experience, a bad hire rate of 15-20% is what I usually see accepted across the industry.
        • whatshisface 4y ago
          Let me check the math here... 20% of the 4% rehired is 1/5th%, leaving 3 and 4/5ths of a percent of to come from the better performers.
• adamredwoods 4y ago
  >> Stack ranking has received continuous criticism since General Electric popularized it in the 1980s. I didn't know this existed until now. The problem with this (among others) is that I can never personally know where I stand. If I'm doing well, but being excelled by others, I still get penalized. There's no guarantee, it's almost random. Also, I now have a new question to ask in interviews, and if it does exist in a hiring company, I can negotiate by declining bonus pay performance reviews and in lieu of ask for higher wages (not that any company would go for this).
  • wombatpm 4y ago
    Ah the 1980’s when Neutron Jack Welch (he kills the people but leaves the buildings intact) was seen as a visionary. He was ahead of the curve in massive layoffs while doing tons of mergers and acquisitions that years later seem to have been questionable at best. Nice to see this MBA hookum continue to survive like some radioactive zombie cockroach
• unclekev 4y ago
  > ...companies still use it ? Yep, Currently working for an absolute horror show of an employer who proudly uses stack ranking during yearly and half yearly reviews. Cant wait to move on from this place.
  • calvinmorrison 4y ago
    Just move somewhere people are incompetent and you'll be safe and the best programmmer. Unfortunately when you hit a new crossroad, you'll need to reach out to outside peers to get moving in the right direction and spend a lot more time on self study.
• technofiend 4y ago
  I managed a small team in a company that then used stack ranking. I hated the process and as others here mentioned pointed out many times applying a bell curve to a small population is bad math. While we still used the process I saw everything from voting blocs, managers intentionally submitting all of their employees ranked up one notch from where they should be, managers collecting "dirt" on employees managed by others so they could shoot down those employees during the ranking process and more. The process itself was flawed because people had a tendency to stay in the rank where they were submitted because frankly managers didn't have the time, energy or interest in really talking through every employee. It was just easier to rubber-stamp the whole process and move on. Also it was nearly impossible to get rid of the process because of course people who had succeeded in it didn't want change. I couldn't in good conscience continue like that, so I took over rankings for my location. It went from one day to a week-long process and I made people vote anonymously and incorporated a ranked choice system and then aggregated the results. It was a far more time consuming process but IMHO fairer. I still hate forced ranking despite succeeding in it. It becomes part of your job - managing to the metric. Vestiges of it remain because people still don't know how to distribute compensation without ranking people, particularly for employees that have the same review rating.
• MBCook 4y ago
  I feel like the lesson they (unintentionally) taught the industry was “stack ranking exists and was used at big SV companies!” So managers everywhere who only saw lots of headlines thought it must be cool just like Scrum and microservices and decided to adopt it.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  The original one is 10% at the bottom.
• shultays 4y ago
  I am refusing to believe that a company has less than 5% low performant employee ratio. With pretty much everyone is pulling their weight with no employees that are plain slacking and/or bad hires that delivers less than expected. In fact 5% is quite a low estimate in my opinion. I would estimate it 20%, easily 1 in 5 Maybe there is a bigfoot out there but I will refuse to believe until I see one Stack ranking seems to be a solution for managers that are not doing their job. Either because they are trying to be nice or oblivious or just don't care. Since this guy quited to me it sounds like the first.