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Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, N% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that

Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, N% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that N% of each team are. The weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team. Further, stack ranking mostly ignores the existence of human psychology. As soon as metric is chosen to be a benchmark for the measurement of performance, it almost immediately because useless as a benchmark for performance, because people are people. People will find out how the game works, and they will play the game. Employees will sabotage other's work to make themselves look relatively better, managers will hire whipping boys for the specific purpose of giving a low rating so they can take the sword. Sure this happens with any performance rating system, but the worse behaviors are accentuated with fundamentally broken rating systems. How should employee evaluation be done then? It's straight forward: * Set clear expectations. * Get peer feedback * Manager decides how the employee performed in comparison to the expectations that were clearly communicated to the employee based on the manager's personal knowledge of their reports work, and from that of peer feedback. No zero sum hunger game bullshit required.

blibble 4y ago
> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, 5% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that 5% of each team are. Further, the weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team. absolutely, it may work (possibly) if you could apply that 5% over an entire large department but each line manager only has visibility over their (hopefully) small number of reports so if you have 3 excellent reports on a high performing team: who do you dump in it? the usual answer is the person with the least leverage/ability to resign, which is grossly unfair
GVIrish 4y ago
> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. This is the fundamental flaw with stack ranking that really irks me. Stack ranking force fits people to a normal distribution but that's backwards. With normal distributions you're supposed to measure the phenomena then use statistical formulas to see if the data fits a normal distribution. Maybe it does. Maybe it's bi-modal, or tri-modal. Maybe the data is evenly distributed. But no, companies butcher the concept of a bell curve and end up doing serious damage to the culture of the company as everyone starts optimizing their behavior to succeed in an utterly irrational system.

blibble 4y ago

> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. Sure, 5% of the people in the company might be under performers, but that does not at all suggest that 5% of each team are. Further, the weakest member of a team may well ahead of the curve if you are on a strong team. absolutely, it may work (possibly) if you could apply that 5% over an entire large department but each line manager only has visibility over their (hopefully) small number of reports so if you have 3 excellent reports on a high performing team: who do you dump in it? the usual answer is the person with the least leverage/ability to resign, which is grossly unfair

GVIrish 4y ago

> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work. This is the fundamental flaw with stack ranking that really irks me. Stack ranking force fits people to a normal distribution but that's backwards. With normal distributions you're supposed to measure the phenomena then use statistical formulas to see if the data fits a normal distribution. Maybe it does. Maybe it's bi-modal, or tri-modal. Maybe the data is evenly distributed. But no, companies butcher the concept of a bell curve and end up doing serious damage to the culture of the company as everyone starts optimizing their behavior to succeed in an utterly irrational system.