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You can do 100% of the legal ass covering that you need to do, with performance evaluations, pips, and careful documentation. I’m not convinced that stack rank

You can do 100% of the legal ass covering that you need to do, with performance evaluations, pips, and careful documentation. I’m not convinced that stack ranking is a good solution to this problem. A good organization and HR team knows how to terminate someone who is not performing well without incurring legal liability. It can be a somewhat drawn out process, but a stack ranking system doesn’t seem like it would make it a lot faster to me. My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is), and if you could continually prune the worst performing 3% of the org you could continually improve the quality of the remaining workers.

dilyevsky 4y ago
> My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is) I’m fairly sure it really isn’t. Unless you hire random folks from the street it’s likely pareto or close. Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb because in the fat tail they’re all pretty close
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > it’s likely pareto or close Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb Sure, I'd agree with that. I was just trying to say I can see where the "on paper" logic comes from. But the on paper falls apart in the real world, where we're not dealing with "resources", but people. But, yea, I think even the "on paper" case is weaker than it naively appears.
- LarsDu88 4y ago
  With a Pareto distribution you may as well fire the bottom 30-40%, but I suspect the remaining 60% of workers will redistribute their relative contributions again to go back to a roughly 80/20 split of relative contribution.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    That’s right the 80/20 arises from hierarchy and associated bias in how the work is being assigned unless you happened to pick up highly uneven talent which is unlikely.

dilyevsky 4y ago

> My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is) I’m fairly sure it really isn’t. Unless you hire random folks from the street it’s likely pareto or close. Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb because in the fat tail they’re all pretty close

ncallaway 4y ago
> it’s likely pareto or close Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb Sure, I'd agree with that. I was just trying to say I can see where the "on paper" logic comes from. But the on paper falls apart in the real world, where we're not dealing with "resources", but people. But, yea, I think even the "on paper" case is weaker than it naively appears.
LarsDu88 4y ago
With a Pareto distribution you may as well fire the bottom 30-40%, but I suspect the remaining 60% of workers will redistribute their relative contributions again to go back to a roughly 80/20 split of relative contribution.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  That’s right the 80/20 arises from hierarchy and associated bias in how the work is being assigned unless you happened to pick up highly uneven talent which is unlikely.