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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

In a world where every single person except a heterosexual, healthy Caucasian male under 40 has a potential lawsuit against their former employer when they are terminated, be it age / sex / race / disability / and on and on, stack ranking can make rational sense when trying to improve efficiency across the board at scale while dodging lawsuits. This is, IMO, the reason it was originally instituted. I agree with you it isn't the best way and I think stack ranking is inefficient. But there is a logic to it.

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This is pure mythology: very few people sue, because it’s expensive and stressful. Most who do have good reasons but if they didn’t, stack ranking wouldn’t help because the rankings are subjective and involve considerable managerial discretion - what projects you’re assigned to, the working environment, the standards used to assess quality, etc. are all going to come up no matter whether the corporate defense is that they were stack ranked or not.

You can do 100% of the legal ass covering that you need to do, with performance evaluations, pips, and careful documentation.

I’m not convinced that stack ranking is a good solution to this problem. A good organization and HR team knows how to terminate someone who is not performing well without incurring legal liability.

It can be a somewhat drawn out process, but a stack ranking system doesn’t seem like it would make it a lot faster to me.

My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is), and if you could continually prune the worst performing 3% of the org you could continually improve the quality of the remaining workers.

> My gut is stack ranking came about because a business school graduate realized that performance is probably distributed among a bell curve (it probably is)

I’m fairly sure it really isn’t. Unless you hire random folks from the street it’s likely pareto or close. Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb because in the fat tail they’re all pretty close

> it’s likely pareto or close Which makes bottom 5% firing even more dumb

Sure, I'd agree with that. I was just trying to say I can see where the "on paper" logic comes from. But the on paper falls apart in the real world, where we're not dealing with "resources", but people.

But, yea, I think even the "on paper" case is weaker than it naively appears.

With a Pareto distribution you may as well fire the bottom 30-40%, but I suspect the remaining 60% of workers will redistribute their relative contributions again to go back to a roughly 80/20 split of relative contribution.

That’s right the 80/20 arises from hierarchy and associated bias in how the work is being assigned unless you happened to pick up highly uneven talent which is unlikely.

You seem to have strong opinions about the demographics of plaintiffs in employment-related lawsuits. Is that based on evidence? I’d be interested in seeing any relevant data. My impression of lawyers is that they can look at a prospective client of any color of the rainbow and see green.

Stack ranking is irrelevant to all that and doesn't solve that "problem". If you want to protect yourself from lawsuits, just have a documented policy for evaluation/incentives with a papertrail showing you adhere to it and your decisions. Stack Ranking can have a poor papertrail too. Consider how you would respond to: "This ranking board was all men, and all the women were ranked low. Why?" That's when you want something more substantive behind the ratings.

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