3 ms·

> You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful No one [0] denies this. The problem with stack

> You will realize that running a business is extremely hard and a bunch of antagonistic employees are unhelpful No one [0] denies this. The problem with stack ranking is that you are forced to find problematic employees even when there are none. I do agree with the overall point you are making, but I think that option two could be formulated in a less inciting way. Sometimes it might make sense for a company to do worker-hostile actions, but stack ranking just seems like a generally bad idea and not really related to getting rid of antagonistic employees; at worst, it probably helps making them. [0] Figuratively, not literally.

IMTDb 4y ago
> The problem with stack ranking is that you are forced to find problematic employees even when there are none. Could you share some insights on how you organise an hiring process and a company to reach a point were despite having several hundreds employees and adding/replacing few dozens per month, there are no problematic individuals. I have never seen, anywhere, ever. If you can offer some evidence that you can replicate that consistently, please open some consulting business, you’ll make millions and help so many organisations.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  The thing isn't that you don't have a number of problematic employees, as you correctly pointed out you most likely have them in any sufficiently large organization. The problem is that you can't find a static number for them. It's quite easy to see this, actually. If you let the bottom 5% go, stack ranking now dictates that you still have 5% problematic people. Repeat this cycle a few times and people previously considered perfectly average are now problematic. This obviously doesn't make any sense. In reality, some companies might be super lean and only have 1% bad performers (as in negative business value), while some companies might be 90% overhead. For some companies the bad employees might be spread over all teams, while in others some teams are incredibly efficient and others are completely worthless. Coming in with a 5% brute-force hammer just doesn't make much sense in general and comes with all the morale and infighting drawbacks mentioned sufficiently in this discussion.
- gsinclair 4y ago
  The context is stack ranking of _teams_ rather than _organisations_, isn’t it? The size of a team is not in the hundreds.

IMTDb 4y ago

> The problem with stack ranking is that you are forced to find problematic employees even when there are none. Could you share some insights on how you organise an hiring process and a company to reach a point were despite having several hundreds employees and adding/replacing few dozens per month, there are no problematic individuals. I have never seen, anywhere, ever. If you can offer some evidence that you can replicate that consistently, please open some consulting business, you’ll make millions and help so many organisations.

Sebb767 4y ago
The thing isn't that you don't have a number of problematic employees, as you correctly pointed out you most likely have them in any sufficiently large organization. The problem is that you can't find a static number for them. It's quite easy to see this, actually. If you let the bottom 5% go, stack ranking now dictates that you still have 5% problematic people. Repeat this cycle a few times and people previously considered perfectly average are now problematic. This obviously doesn't make any sense. In reality, some companies might be super lean and only have 1% bad performers (as in negative business value), while some companies might be 90% overhead. For some companies the bad employees might be spread over all teams, while in others some teams are incredibly efficient and others are completely worthless. Coming in with a 5% brute-force hammer just doesn't make much sense in general and comes with all the morale and infighting drawbacks mentioned sufficiently in this discussion.
gsinclair 4y ago
The context is stack ranking of _teams_ rather than _organisations_, isn’t it? The size of a team is not in the hundreds.