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A quick Google shows estimates of about ~10K Blizzard employees. That's a plenty large enough population for mass-population trends to show up.

Blackstrat 4y ago
It may be, but remember that most companies do stack ranking at some roll up level, not over the entire population. I had 40+ developers in my organization with two peers having comparable sized teams. We were expected to horse trade amongst ourselves to insure the VP got his distribution. However, the VP would always try to browbeat each of us into matching the curve. It was pretty intense and he frankly didn’t give a rat’s rear end who got steamrolled in the process. To say I was thrilled to have outlasted his employment would be an understatement.
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xbar 4y ago
And in your imagination of stack ranking, every employee gets a rank number from 1 to 10,000? That would be neat, but probably bad for a variety of other reasons. Like, why is all of sales getting fired? Well, they unfortunately all ranked poorly... It's more like, a manager has 7 employees and he has to stack rank them 1 to 7 and manage #7 out and rehire a replacement. Was #7 a bad employee? Why would any system of management assume that they are? Such as system assumes that the sea is full of employees of rank #1 to #6 and that the difference between 6 and 7 was so great as to warrant the costs associated with termination, hiring, training, on-boarding, and ramping up a new #7. Will they be better enough to warrant doing it all again?
schnitzelstoat 4y ago
But the sample size could be a billion and it wouldn't matter if the process that generates the population isn't random. If Blizzard was just hiring people off the street then yeah, sure I'd expect a bell curve. But given the whole recruitment process, it's not necessarily going to form a bell curve. Plus, the implementation is usually at the manager level - so each manager has to meet a quota of x% good, y% okay, z% bad etc., and each manager doesn't have 10k employees.
vintermann 4y ago
Sure. That's a large enough population that you're going to see a vaguely bell shaped curve, even if all the employees are exactly alike. From just random day to day variation. If you punish and reward based on that, you'll get better results, right? W. Edwards Deming is rolling in his grave.
greedo 4y ago
My company has about 4K employees. My team? 20. As best as I can tell, we have two stellar employees, two terrible, and 16 who are all basically the same. How these 16 are ranked is based on how well they get along with their boss, the PM that manages the projects they're assigned to, and the managers of other teams that they periodically interact with. Yet somehow, management/HR can classify these 16 with enough certainty to decide that 8 deserve good compensation/promotions, and the other 8 should be PIP'd? In some teams I work with, every single employee is what I consider an 8 through 10. Yet the 8's should be RIF'd/PIP'd? Evaluating and compensating employees is tough enough without using voodoo like Stack Ranking.

Blackstrat 4y ago

It may be, but remember that most companies do stack ranking at some roll up level, not over the entire population. I had 40+ developers in my organization with two peers having comparable sized teams. We were expected to horse trade amongst ourselves to insure the VP got his distribution. However, the VP would always try to browbeat each of us into matching the curve. It was pretty intense and he frankly didn’t give a rat’s rear end who got steamrolled in the process. To say I was thrilled to have outlasted his employment would be an understatement.

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xbar 4y ago

And in your imagination of stack ranking, every employee gets a rank number from 1 to 10,000? That would be neat, but probably bad for a variety of other reasons. Like, why is all of sales getting fired? Well, they unfortunately all ranked poorly... It's more like, a manager has 7 employees and he has to stack rank them 1 to 7 and manage #7 out and rehire a replacement. Was #7 a bad employee? Why would any system of management assume that they are? Such as system assumes that the sea is full of employees of rank #1 to #6 and that the difference between 6 and 7 was so great as to warrant the costs associated with termination, hiring, training, on-boarding, and ramping up a new #7. Will they be better enough to warrant doing it all again?

schnitzelstoat 4y ago

But the sample size could be a billion and it wouldn't matter if the process that generates the population isn't random. If Blizzard was just hiring people off the street then yeah, sure I'd expect a bell curve. But given the whole recruitment process, it's not necessarily going to form a bell curve. Plus, the implementation is usually at the manager level - so each manager has to meet a quota of x% good, y% okay, z% bad etc., and each manager doesn't have 10k employees.

vintermann 4y ago

Sure. That's a large enough population that you're going to see a vaguely bell shaped curve, even if all the employees are exactly alike. From just random day to day variation. If you punish and reward based on that, you'll get better results, right? W. Edwards Deming is rolling in his grave.

greedo 4y ago

My company has about 4K employees. My team? 20. As best as I can tell, we have two stellar employees, two terrible, and 16 who are all basically the same. How these 16 are ranked is based on how well they get along with their boss, the PM that manages the projects they're assigned to, and the managers of other teams that they periodically interact with. Yet somehow, management/HR can classify these 16 with enough certainty to decide that 8 deserve good compensation/promotions, and the other 8 should be PIP'd? In some teams I work with, every single employee is what I consider an 8 through 10. Yet the 8's should be RIF'd/PIP'd? Evaluating and compensating employees is tough enough without using voodoo like Stack Ranking.