4 ms·

Ballmer likes stack ranking. I don't know why...

• jmcphers 13y ago
  The religion inside the company (not my personal view, but what you'll get if you talk to an upper-echelon manager) is that: - stack ranking leads to competition leads to everyone doing their best, - at the end of the day you have to offer differentiated rewards to your team, and it's better to offer more rewards to those who earned them (vs. just blanketing everyone with the same rewards)--stack ranking just makes this explicit, and - it puts pressure on bottom performers to leave the company or find a team that's a better match. That said, I recently left Microsoft (after 8 years in the Office org, probably near OP), and stack ranking was one of the reasons. For me the toughest part of it was that I felt there was no part of my compensation that was tied to the overall product my team produced--we could have produced a gorgeously engineered, ground-breaking product or a buggy piece of bloatware no customer wanted; it really didn't matter from a review perspective. Stack ranking is also generally despised by the rank-and-file, often because they are sure it's the reason they haven't had a meteoric rise despite their obvious superiority over everyone else. Folks who have "made it" to the upper echelon often mysteriously acquire the stack ranking religion.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    it puts pressure on bottom performers to leave the company or find a team that's a better match. Stack-ranking makes it impossible for everyone but the top 25% to transfer, though, because no one wants someone with a bad or mediocre review history. If you need to fire people, fire them. Flushing out good people in the name of stack ranking is a pointless, morale-killing waste.
    • jacalulu 13y ago
      Also, firing someone based on stack-ranking takes about 2 years (at least it did on my team).