I worked at Microsoft just as they were getting rid of the stack rankings. My first review I got the normal "You're doing a good job" rating that the majority

I worked at Microsoft just as they were getting rid of the stack rankings. My first review I got the normal "You're doing a good job" rating that the majority of the company gets. Next review comes along and my original manager that hired me has quit. For most of the review period a senior dev on the team that had zero interest in managing was leading the team. Right before review time we get a new hire that's a bit of an idiot. I was still the newest person on the team and got ruined in my reviews because there wasn't anyone to advocate for me. I got the lowest rating. This is when I found out there are apparently two versions of the lowest ratings. One where you're on the way to being fired and one where it was assigned because somebody has to get it. My rating was the latter. My manager then explained that there was a class of employee at MS that simply accepted these low ratings and moved on, collecting their salary. The only good advice he ever gave to me was that if this happened again I should find a better job. (I don't think he ever felt like it was his fault I got that rating.) I almost immediately tried to transfer to a different part of the company, but my low rating prevented me from doing that. Shortly after that, the team was reorganized and I ended up on a different sub team with a different manager. My new manager told me they were surprised at my previous poor review and nothing in it reflected how they thought of the work I was doing. He started asking me to collect stories about what developers on other teams I was helping to use as ammo during the next review time. It felt very off-putting. I didn't want to throw my coworkers under a bus any more than I wanted to be thrown under one. So I left the company. That previous review ended up being the last where they used the stack ranking. I think I did get one final review right around the time I left but I never even saw it.