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I hate that some people say rockstars and mean ‘really great developers that write beautiful working well documented code quickly and work great as part of a team’.

And other people say rockstars and mean ‘assholes that churn out new features really fast with incomprehensible code and then leave others to maintain their monstrosity as they move on to the next thing”.

I assume Amazon is large enough to have a team somewhere with 6-10 of the ‘good’ version, and also a team somewhere with 6-10 of the assholes.

> Managing low performers is a magnitude more work than solid performers; no manager would do this to themselves on purpose. It would be easier to cut their 2 least rockin' stars.

Then what do you do a year (and a half for Amazon) later for the next cycle?

One of the many problems with stack rank cull N% of your employees every year is that "every year" part. At whatever level it's mindlessly applied, if the company wants to keep it at the same head count you by definition have a steady churn of hires, which I'll grant you won't always be good, and fires.

If 2 pizzas can’t feed 10 people, the chances are there are some health questions to be asked about a given team.