Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a more issue of "Stack Ranking", which by itself should be illegal, but somewhat it is still legal.

While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good faith" is assumed in the system....

Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a team of all good performers, it is common place that stack ranking punishes good performers/employees as well).

It is very similar to the "decimation" system that the Roman Army practiced, when a particular unit or legion performed bad or cowardly in battle, one in ten was chosen (via short sticks), and culled to death by their companions. Very brutal, and can't see how it improves morale even if the unit itself is actually performing well. (which stack ranking is, constant decimation). This causes rampant politicking and favoritism to the point that systematic discrimination arises from it.

That doesn't sound very similar to decimation. Stack ranking is picking and punishing the worst team members based on some system. Decimation was purely random.

Decimation was a system for BUILDING cohesion. You don't flee battle because you might be decimated. You don't let your comrades flee battle because you might be decimated. It's for when you want to severely punish a collective group of people but can't afford to hurt them all.

Stack ranking is the opposite. You are actively competing against your colleagues. You are incentivized for your colleagues to fail.

You missed the part that in a team of good performers, (i.e. no dead woods in the team), it ends up being a defacto "random" system.... when it comes to actual performance, and that's where politiking and favoritisms kick in.

Both have the "Culture of Fear" as a central point, and yes, stack ranking has its roots on the Roman Decimation system.

http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/article-details/performance-impr...

Stack Ranking seems like it should be a perfectly legal method of performance management. You might choose to not work at a company that practices it, but why should it be illegal?

It is perhaps a natural fear that a Stack Ranking system would lead to a "Rank and Yank", but the mere ordering of employees during a performance management process doesn't give me any particular concern, nor do I consider it a bad faith system.

In fact, it forces people to make a sometimes hard choice, which I believe has more benefits than drawbacks to an organization, else you run the risk of having a massive "undifferentiated middle" and no clear development plans because you have no feedback from rich discussion about why Jane is better than Joe; instead Jane and Joe are simply declared to be equal without any discussion about what Joe could do to improve or what Jane should continue doing, etc.

I don't agree, but you make a valid point so I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

But I think it's fair to assume that in most minds stack ranking includes a fire quota, and that's what most commenters mean here.

Microsoft used stack ranking for some time and from what I've read it caused a lot of problems and was considered to be negative overall. It led to a cutthroat environment where employees were competing with each other (and not focusing on doing their best work) so that they would get a good ranking [1]. According to reviews on Glassdoor, it's still used unofficially for their 6-month reviews [2]. Amazon also used it for a time [3] and has since abandoned it.

1: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l... 2: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Microsoft-stack-ranking-Re... 3: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-w...

We also used it in the past (pure ranking, no rank-and-yank) and have since abandoned it.

I thought it was effective in forcing deeper conversations as part of the comparison process, but became unwieldy and unworkable when we passed about 50 engineers which was a long time ago, so I'm not sad to see it go.

It’s such a dumb way of doing business. Like on a surface level it makes sense — if you constantly let your worst performers go, the average quality of your employees has to go up, right?

But five minutes of thought will tell you that people will hate working on that environment and will quit or just not apply to work there.

Or hire some dumbshits to be the sacrificial firings.

Decimation was a punishment for serious offences, like mutiny or desertion- not for performing badly in battle, or being cowardly.

With Romans, specifically, if cowardice was punished, there would be noone left. They were disciplined and had great quality equipment, but their morale was not the highest. For instance, before they met the Germans on the field, having heard of the military prowerss of their enemy, the Romans would spend their time crying and making their will, certain that they'd die in battle - Cesar has written about this.

Cowardice in the form of running away from battle was definitely a cause for decimation.

Only for cohorts or larger groups. Individual deserters and smaller groups were simply all executed.

Why should stack ranking be illegal? It’s your company. You’re allowed to run it as well or as poorly as you want. We have at-will employment.

Decimation also generally involved the unit beating the unlucky member to death themselves, as part of the punishment.

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