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Comment by snackbugs | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally I've heard my friends who work in small business food and alcohol places as servers, cooks, bartenders, etc. call their bosses and business owners sociopaths more than once in unrelated conversations.

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I mean, that's always going to be a standard capital v. labor argument. What I'm saying is that industries like tech shouldn't be singled out for run-of-the-mill decisions.

They are, and they should be. Which industry gave us stack ranking?

Depending on how broad your definition of stack ranking is, every industry does stack ranking.

Every single successful business has the problem of "we have this large amount of money in bonuses that we would like to distribute out to our employees and we want to figure out equitable way to do it". Invariably they end up having the rank and group the employees to do that.

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...

How’s that different than Jack Welch’s famous “fire the bottom 10% of your workforce” that he implemented in GE in the 80s? Honestly, it was close to textbook management strategy when originally implemented at Microsoft.

Now, sure management science has advanced since then, and a lot of the ways that Microsoft implemented stack ranking at the beginning we’ve realized are counterproductive.

But that doesn’t really change the core principle that they end up ranking employees at some point in time

I don't know the specific case of GE, but could imagine that, as it was a novel strategy at the time, workers weren't already in a competitive ranking-focused mindset.

Additionally firing the bottom 10% is something that should happen naturally as you discover hiring mistakes. Of course just firing the bottom 10% when they are close to average performers is counter productive.

I've already been refuted by the fact that GE did it first.

The shocker to me is that such a huge player in our industry applied it to a collaborative task like software development.

Not tech. Jack Welch at GE gave it to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

The most famous example is GE which is a huge conglomerate that spans many industries.

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