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Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like justification for a decision made for less quantitative reasons.

Managers don't say, "So let's see who's the worst performer... it's Tom! Weird, he seems to be one of my best developers. Oh, well! The metrics say he's the worst. Off to fire Tom!"

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You don't know many people who worked for Microsoft? They would let go the bottom 10% of their staff every year.

"Best to Worst Ranking" is the most toxic and destructive environments.

Manu Cornet famous organization chart is the best example of this. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/%22Org_c...

I was under the impression that those rankings were created through a series of let's-sort-everyone meetings rather a pedantic application of metrics.

Yes they are, you are right. My company does them too, somewhat.

If you have to let go 20% of your staff, how do you do it? You have to rank people...

  It sounds like justification for a decision made for less quantitative reasons.

Yes. And the perception of objectivity from the first two points (of the parental article) helps in hiding this.

Not in general, but I'm sure there are some that might.

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