Ask HN: What is “Stacked Ranking”?

2 pointsgamesbrainiac2 comments

Hi folks! I've been hearing a lot about stacked ranking these days, and recently when Intel decided to mass fire some of its employees, I thought I'd get a better understanding.

So, what is it? What kind of variants are there? Who wins in Stacked Ranking?

Looking for something canonical here since I think there are lots of ways in which this policy manifests.

View on HN

The short form is that in a Stacked Ranking performance measurement system, you rank every employee in an ordered list. Most often the next thing you hear is that the top X% of employees are the ones who will be given raises/bonuses, and the bottom Y% of employees are the ones who will be finding new jobs.

Reasonable references to get you started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/stacked-ranking http://www.businessinsider.com/stack-ranking-employees-is-a-...

"Who wins in Stacked Ranking?"

The winners are the people who can convince their managers to give them the best performance reviews (upper X%). Of course, your review isn't necessarily correlated with your contributions to the company - it can be based on your political skills, e.g., making your manager look good, making your rivals and your manager's rivals look bad, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com