(posting under new account because I don't think anyone can talk freely about their employer under a real name) Stack ranking is not a well defined term. It c

(posting under new account because I don't think anyone can talk freely about their employer under a real name) Stack ranking is not a well defined term. It can mean any of 1. The result of the review process is that people in a team are ranked, the top X% are rewarded and bottom Y% are punished. 2. Reviewers are asked to rank people they review (possibly not all in the same team) and this information is part of the input to the review process. 3. When making decisions, all the people in consideration (possibly not in the same team) are ranked. Case 1. is a problem because we can't expect the law of large numbers to hold within a small team, and because it gives people bad incentives. Case 2. is less of a problem for incentives because people being compared can be from different teams. This also provides comparisons across teams that let people be judged relative to the company rather than their teams, and so the law of large numbers does hold. Case 3. is not really relevant to anything, since when deciding the outcomes for N people, you obviously want the best outcomes to go to the best people. Stack ranking is just an aide to turning subjective impressions into numbers. I've seen it used in essay grading, and also assigning final grades in classes (ranks are based on individual test scores and not altered, then cutoffs for letter grades are determined).