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The difference between "bottom 5%" and "bottom 5% IN EACH GROUP" boils down to whether the "bell curve" is imposed on a per-small-team level, or a per-departmen
by tytso 13y ago
The difference between "bottom 5%" and "bottom 5% IN EACH GROUP" boils down to whether the "bell curve" is imposed on a per-small-team level, or a per-department level, or across the entire company. The last is not really practical, but it have seen companies who have imposed the "normal distribution" (which might or might not be a formal bell curve) across a department of 500 engineers. The argument then becomes, "in a department of 500 engineers", it's likely that at least 5 are duds.
My point remains, though, that what people are recoiling with horror is not "stack ranking", but "stack ranking as it is done at Microsoft", which includes a whole host of implementation details that make a huge difference to how it affects company culture.
- lisper 13y ago> The last is not really practical That's true. But applying stack ranking to small groups because applying it to large groups is impractical is kind of like looking for your lost keys under the street light because it's too dark to look where you actually lost them. > "in a department of 500 engineers", it's likely that at least 5 are duds. That's true too. The problem is this reasoning does not scale downwards. Its correctness DEPENDS on the number being large. What MS is doing is saying: "In 50 groups of 10 engineers, at least 2 engineers IN EACH GROUP MUST BE DUDS" and that is NOT true. But because policy dictates that the company will behave as if it were true it produces very strong pressure on people to spend their time making it appear to be true rather than doing productive work.