Microsoft employee on stack ranking and its 'most universally hated exec'
networkworld.com
networkworld.com
Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?
Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
Valve does that:
How could a 300-person company not have any formal
management? My observation is that it takes new hires
about six months before they fully accept that no one is
going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going
to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a
promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although
there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to
the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their
responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most
valuable resource in the company – their time – by
figuring out what it is that they can do that is most
valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if
they decide that they should be doing something
different, there’s no manager to convince to let them
go; they just move their desk to the new group (the
desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start
in on the new thing. (Obviously they should choose a
good point at which to do this, and coordinate with both
groups, but that’s common sense, not a rule, and isn’t
enforced in any way.) That everyone on a project team is
an individual contributor, doing coding, artwork, level
design, music, and so on, including the leads; there is
no such thing as a pure management or architect or
designer role. That any part of the company can change
direction instantly at any time, because there are no
managers to cling to their people and their territory,
no reorgs to plan, no budgets to work around. That there
are things that Gabe badly wants the company to do that
aren’t happening, because no one has signed up to do
them.
Pfft. I once worked at a place with 77 employees and 14 VPs. How we didn't wind up taking over the tech world still mystifies me.
I didn't work there long.
Microsoft seems to be run like a prison camp.
This reminds me of just a few years ago when I was arguing with someone about this, when 37signals was in their infancy and were kinda trucking along with the same 'bossless' philosophy. I was trying to show that it could be successful and the person hacked me off at the knees by saying "come talk to me when they get to 100 employees" ... well Github and Valve seems to be doing just fine with that philosophy ... but now the goalposts have suddenly shifted.
I wonder if they get to 50,000 people (how many companies even have this many people anyway?) if somebody isn't going to pop up and go "50k people? pffffft ... come get me when they have 200,000 employees!"
Intel - 100,100
Dell - 110,000
HP - 349,600
Google - 54,604
Microsoft - 90,000
Apple - 60,400 (I don't know what fraction is retail sales)
Numbers from Wikipedia, which I assume are from the annual reports these companies put out.
You have probably heard about Gore-Tex solution—build plants with 150 workplaces.
Split the company into a bunch of mini-companies, don't get beyond "the limit".
Microsoft used to be a pretty flat organization back in the days, depth of the management layer is one of the things MS employees mocked at IBM in the 80s and 90s. It was already a pretty big company back then.
BTW, MS's headcount is closer to 90k than 50k these days.
"Among many 'radical' policies, Semler let his employees set their own hours, design their workplace, choose their own IT, share all information and have no secrets. Every six months bosses are evaluated by their subordinates and the results are posted. Semco has a policy of complete internal financial openness, even teaching factory workers how to read accounts so they can understand the company's books. Salaries are public information unless the employee requests they not be published. In addition, all employees can set their own salary."
As of 2003, they had 3000 employees and was growing at 40% a year. No idea how they're doing now.
Microsoft could easily be broken into several smaller companies.
Overhead in terms of office space etc would increase. However the simplicity of the necessary interactions between the smaller companies could turn the entire arrangement into a net gain for the parent company.
Genghis Khan would disagree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire
I personally think we're better off if businesses are large enough to operate reasonably efficiently at a single or small set of tasks/products, and no bigger. For one, you begin having weird things happen like a product being canceled or retired not because it was unprofitable to make, but because the company thought there were more profitable products they could be making. (Anyone remember HP's decision to stop making desktop computers?)
For another, you end up with a single point of failure with respect to management. With a hundred companies with a hundred CEOs, some of them of them will prosper and some of them will fail. If those hundred companies merge into a single company with a single CEO, the consequences of terrible management are now a hundred times worse.
I think Gabe and the other people in charge realized a quite important fact: it's not because they're in charge that their opinions and beliefs are automatically worth more than those of the people who work for them.
A good manager will act as an umbrella and abstraction layer protecting you from metaphorical objects falling from above and give you time and space to work without interruption. It's hard to overstate what this can do for both your work and mental health.
A good manager will be looking out for your interests /as well as/ their own. That means compensation, vacations, work rules, etc. Some companies make this impossible, but where it is possible it is amazingly helpful.
A good manager will make sure you stay focused, provide useful feedback (both positive and negative), and make sure you are staying on target without getting in your way or hurting your morale.
A bad manager, of course, can ruin your day, week, and possibly year.
"act as an umbrella", really means protect you from other managers
"look out for your interests". That one is interesting, who looks out for your interests better than yourself?
"stay focused". Same as looking out for your own interests. If you are your own manager, you will know what actually needs to be worked on.
Removing management/bureaucracy isn't simple, but it is pretty depressing how much of it is for it's own sake.
Eh, not only. Other non-management employees can mess up your time quite effectively, as can people you're working with outside your company (clients, vendors). Sure you can shield yourself from it if you try... or you could exploit division of labour and get someone to do it for you so you can concentrate on what you do best.
A good manager can get others off your back much quicker and shield you from the political fallout that can occur - essentially being the bad guy for you.
A good manager is a powerful thing, especially a good manager who knows his limits, but too often (especially in continental Europe) "management" seems to be a "reward and natural evolution", to the exclusion of other evolutionary paths and hinging as much (if not more) on the ability to brown-nose and play politics as management skills.
I'm pretty sure almost every big contemporary tech company tries this when the big company is small and growing, but it almost never works. Joel Spolsky wrote it about the management problem here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper....
Actually, politics happen everywhere that more than two people congregate. It’s just natural. By “no politics” I really mean “no dysfunctional politics.”
Funnily enough, he uses an example from Microsoft—but the Microsoft of the early 1990s.
He also writes about it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/07.html.
No formal management doesn't appear to scale above some number of employees / workers. I can't tell what that number is, but I would guess that it's somewhere around 125 – 150 people—that is, the Dunbar number.[1] Maybe it could be as high as 1,000, but I'm pretty damn skeptical it could be higher than 2,000.
Think about it this way, there are long standing issues in many leaderless Open Source projects because people more or less just work on what they want and boring crap like writing drivers, or making button graphics or whatever. That's why the ones that tend to be successful tend to be the ones that have strong leadership structures.
Problems crop up in a couple different cases:
1) The size of the group the manager has to coordinate is larger than the manager can actually handle. This results in all kinds of obvious problems I don't think I need to get into.
2) More subtly, and this is where large corporations end up stagnating and dying. It's when the "meta" aspect gets out of control and there are managers of managers of managers.
In this case what happens is that in order to communicate information up the managerial structure, the data necessarily has to become more and more abstract until it often loses so much meaning as to be almost entirely divorced from reality. The side effect of this is that somebody has to produce the abstractions which ends up being the lower levels of the management hierarchy...which of course means that they're no longer functioning in a coordination role as their data reporting role ends up consuming more and more of their time.
3) In large management chains, decision and vision authority tends to move up the hierarchy towards the top, which of course is the part of the hierarchy operating with the least amount (most abstract) of data...and the issues highly abstract "vision statements" that then must be resolved down through the management chain and end up turning in unmotivated "orders" that the lower level coordinators have no real buy in on -- ending up with unmotivated and uncreative solutions to ensure that the "boxes are checked" and satisfy their fraction of the "vision statement". Success in this area is then reported back up the chain as more and more abstract data.
#3 is why large companies usually end up stagnating and ending up uncreative.
As for me, I'm still trying to find out how to be a better team leader every day - I'll tell you how when I find out ;-)
It is your lack of experience. Historically no company has ever gotten to be the size of MSFT, or AAPL or any other multibillion dollar company without management. I don't know for sure the reason, but would guess that someone has to answer to shareholders and they must organize various people with conflicting opinions, ideas and motivations to accomplish a single goal.
Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?
I don’t think so, but I would guess that much of the effort to measure etc. is put in place by HR consultants in at least some part to avoid discrimination lawsuits and to make sure employees are being treated at least somewhat fairly.
Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?
I can confidently say yes to this. Not just engineers, but everyone. If there was no structure, but you had to get a lot done, people would avoid work, work on their own side projects etc. (side projects are not good for the company if they are a new startup that won’t include the company).
[] Someone mentioned valve below, they have a system, it just looks flat. []
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
It would probably work for a while, except you would have to answer to shareholders (investors) and you would have to organize your team. Eventually you would either become a full time manager or you would hire professional management so that you could work on coding.
It's more likely they would be doing things that are personally interesting to them, but not right for the company.
If you think about it, once you get past a certain size, what is remarkable about your company is that you are past that size and it still operates as a single entity. Individual differences matter a lot less than anything you can accomplish across the entire organization.
There's something about hierarchy that makes us humans more efficient. Perhaps it has something to do with specialization.
Yes, management is much the same as engineers, teachers, masons, textile workers, etc. in this regard... Nature mostly creates consumers, hunters, and possibly prostitutes....
Wait, what is your point?
When everyone isn't getting rich, everyone gets to fight with each other for the limited rewards that are handed down.
I see the same thing happening at Google where the internal systems that worked so well in 2005 are causing political strife with a stagnating stock in 2012.
It is true that ultimately your manager has to make a case for what bonus/raise/promotion you deserve, and rankings will figure into that. If your manager sucks and/or hates you, he isn't going to fight for you. But if you have a sucky manager, you are in trouble no matter which company you're at.
This is sadly true only most of the time. Occasionally companies are organized so that a bad manager affects his people very little before everyone realizes they are a bad manager and gets rid of them.
Sadly not every company is striving for that kind of organization.
I like proverbs, they often distil penetrating wisdom. Over here, there's this saying: "Casa onde não há pão, todos ralham, ninguém tem razão" - literally translated, that's: in a home without bread, everybody nags/fights, no one is right.
Which is probably, and sadly, only too true.
We are all people at the end of the day, nobody is immune except for a select few like Stallman...
She was seen as a huge step up from the guy she replaced, who was rumored to have been having an affair with an underling[1] at the same time that he recorded a video admonishing us to never have inappropriate relations with subordinates. He was also responsible for the infamous towel debacle, which came to define the worst aspects of penny-wise, pound-foolish cost-cutting at the company.
Edit: Thx to, uh, moron for pointing out the new Mini-MSFT post that includes this:
Is she really the most universally hated executive?
I don't know about that, but she certainly slipped away from being loved.
Thousands of employees used to cheer for her. Now?
[1] In the (admittedly anonymous) comments: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/06/locked-doors-martin-tay...
Apparently that didn't happen?
A rigid system that codifies the assumption that managers are doing a bad job will force them to do a bad job. For example, by having to choose between putting good employees on the chopping block, or always keeping around a pool of bad employees (as a buffer to keep the good ones off the chopping block).
"Is she really the most universally hated executive? I don't know about that, but she certainly slipped away from being loved. Thousands of employees used to cheer for her. Now?"
Yes there is a 20/70/10 curve with both the old/new systems, but managers aren't held to the curve until the org size is around 30-50 people so exceptions can be made in either direction for strong/weak teams. Also the claim that only 1/2's can transfer is bogus, plenty of managers are happy to take 3's and 4's can move in most situations (I know of a person who got multiple U-10/5's and he still found a job). Finally the claim that calibration takes a ton of time is way over hyped, I probably spent less than a week on year end calibration (bit more than that including writing reviews, which is hugely important).
As a Software Development Manager at Amazon I can also attest to the fact that calibration isn't unique to Microsoft, Amazon just calls it OLR's. It's not a perfect system, but I have yet to hear great suggestions on how to improve it. I'm also not advocating the Microsoft system, but the facts in the article are just out of whack.
Seriously? When was the last time you've seen anyone with a physical Vanity Fair magazine? To the extent that this claim is true -- and I have to say that no one in my circle of friends at the company seems to care about this article -- it's because surprise tech people largely consume text through electronic devices.
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
I guess it's the Microsoft influence. But things seem to work out well for them...
I would say that unless a company of some size has the luxury of choosing absolutely who they want from the start, the "rock star" ideology is going to be as corrosive as it sounds like it is at MS.
It indicates 4 things:
1: Your hiring isn't up to scratch such that this needs to be done (i.e. rank and yank). Raise the hiring bar and reduce firings.
2: You don't trust your employees to do the work you hired them too - this breeds mistrust and increases the level of politics used in the work force. You need to let creative employees freely do what you pay them to do.
3: You don't give projects enough time to mature.
4: You allow randomeness and false causation to determine employee outcomes. For example AIG Finance was completely ripping the other departments during the bubble run up. But come the crash - they almost took the entire firm down.
Life as a management consultant is a perpetual job search, networking internally to get placed on the best projects to get the best performance metrics to get the best bonus. It makes sense, because your job is to give advice to large bureaucracies. If you can't figure out how to navigate corporate politics, you aren't qualified to serve your clients.
G# and particularly Jack Welch was the one who first introduced this system en masse. Even he, IIRC, did say that, this Forced Ranking (as it was called), system should be more of a short term thing where in you clean the system of the non-performers (how can someone identify justly and accurately is a question) and do not enforce this once it has run its course (3-5 years). Everyone attributed the success of the G#'s northward share prices during his reign to this "performance culture". If there was any truth in that approach, only it has not sustained after Immelt took over.
Even I>M follows this so called "bell curve" based assessment. Every manager should strictly adhere to the skew in his department, down to the smallest of teams.
With this being essentially a HR question for decades to solve, with so many people graduating with MBA HRs and Ph.Ds, I am surprised at the lack of progress or do not know of any alternative system being implemented in a big company successfully.
The normalization which is done at these companies make a mockery of sound statistical principles. A bell curve is forced on even the smallest of teams rather than letting a pattern emerge with very large populations where the distribution is in a shape of a bell curve.
e.g., In a particularly bad year, in a sales team of 10 people the guy/ girl who sold a 50 mill USD as opposed to a top ranker who has done a 150 million is rated bad and equated with some body who wrote 1000 lines of code and his project got cancelled (Note: Project could have got cancelled for any reason, not necessarily and least likely because of the code he wrote). A person who wrote 1000 loc and showed off (read:built visibility with managers who decide his fate on the rating discussions) could easily get a better rating. The whole system goes around a) building perception b) taking credit for success c) pushing responsibility for failure onto someone else. People become paranoid. Nobody shares information with any one else which would help the other guy get a better rating. The organization suffers as a result.
Despite all this and despite Edward Deming's call decades ago to abolish this rating system as one of his 14 principles, I have not seen a successfully implemented system which replaces this Darwinistic one. Does anybody have any examples of better systems or better implementations in organizations?
Because the current system benefits the managers, the MBAs, and HR consultants just fine.
The more energy you have to put into such a competition, the more you'll get out of it. Managers spend more time learning and playing the game, by definition. Since it's engineered as a zero-sum game, compounding benefits accrue to those in inverse proportion to the time they actually spend creating externally-meaningful value for the organization.
As per the Welch system, if each manager cuts down 10% of his under performing team. The managers themselves get stack ranked in their managers staff all the way up to the CEO. There fore managers themselves get ranked and cut. But that is not what we see most companies. In many of those companies the axe falls only on people working on grass root levels. And the managerial layers get thicker and thicker and years pass by.
Also for this you need a very good leader at the very top who can drive this. Jack Welch could do it because its his system. Other just do it because they have to.
this isn't a conspiracy, it's just a gossip source. that sort of exaggeration makes the article harder to read.
Google has a bicameral system consisting of (a) manager-assigned "calibration scores" that are the outcome of stack-ranking nonsense and (b) annual peer reviews. It seems like a bicameral review system would be a good thing, by removing career SPOFs. If a bi- or multicameral system is well-designed, that's exactly what you get: multiple paths to success.
Where Google fails it is by making it an AND-gate rather than an OR-gate, even for lateral transfers, much less promotions. (Without good calibration scores, transfer is impossible.) At Google, people need managerial support AND peer support to advance, which means there's endless jockeying for visibility in addition to manager-as-SPOF. It really is the worst of both systems.
In a properly-run company, you have several review signals: peer review, extra-hierarchical work, demonstrated curiosity and will to self-improve, and managerial review. For firing (excluding people who do something outright wrong) the decision should be based an AND-gate. If someone does poorly by his manager AND can't get peer support AND can't find a transfer, then it's time to fire him. Not before. That's how decent companies do it. On the other hand, for title upgrades and pay raises and better projects, decent companies use an OR-gate. If he gets good managerial reviews OR good peer reviews OR has other managers interested in taking him, then treat the employee as successful: give him a decent raise and let him transfer as he wishes.
Now, managerial positions are a bit different. There, you actually want to see strength in several signals before you give someone power over other people. So there's justification for making selection into management be based on an AND-gate. You just really need to be sure that the person can lead. That's different. But title upgrades, pay raises, project allocation, autonomy and transfer opportunities should be based on an OR-gate; if one signal indicates potential for success, move forward. If you can't see this, then you're FAL and you should not be allowed to leave the house without assistance, much less make decisions that affect other people.
Google fucked up its bicameral system by making it an AND-gate for promotions and transfers and an OR-gate for adversity. That's the destruction of what was once a great company. It has cost the software industry billions of dollars worth of value. It sounds like a similar billion-dollar immolation occurred at Microsoft.
Microsoft's system, advanced half a decade or more further in necrosis, seems much the same but worse. It seems like these types of systems get worse over time because more people want to tack on their own shitty ideas as more people develop the system. They're not happy enough with other peoples' pre-existing shitty ideas; they need to make a personal mark on a shitty system by making it noticeably shittier, enough that they hear people complaining about their changes in the cafeteria (which they justify as a good thing because "those people are obviously no good, because good people have nothing to worry about come review time.")
I am glad the Vanity Fair article got published. I have no strong feeling about Microsoft either way, and I have a lot of respect for the great work coming out of Microsoft Research, but it's about time that we see bad HR policies leading to outright exposure and frank humiliation.
Now I think it's time for an update. What's the difference between Microsoft and Google? Six years.
Having seen far too much inside the latter (as you did), it seems inevitable. The path has already been blazed, and they are barreling down it just as fast as they can.
It's a shame because F# could become utterly awesome, but faces a hard battle under Microsoft's thumb.
Active Directory and Outlook are supposed to be awful, but there is still nothing I see that I could replace them with. (I might be wrong, I haven't been looking at it lately)
I don't use Microsoft's products (100% Linux, Android, iOS and OSX), but I'm not blind to their charms.
I like Postgres, but when I see the tools people use with MSQL, not to mention Oracle, I feel jealous.
Things like Google apps and other web based mail and calendering services. Employees can accessed them from their Android and iOS devices. And IT people don't have to manage it all.
Gmail doesn't even support group-level filtering!
/full-time Gmail user of more than 8 years
That's a retarded comment.
Don Syme invented F# while at MSR. When he first created it, it was basically OCaml.NET (well, a very small OCaml subset), just as a proof of concept.
Now (last I checked, which was well over a year ago) it's one of four first-class languages with a full team behind it in DevDiv, enjoying equal support in VS.NET and other dev tools as C#, VC++, and VB.NET.
F# isn't under anyone's thumb; it's a Microsoft product through-and-through.
I'm sure this comment will fall on deaf ears, but please, Michael, try to restrict your comments to things you know something about.
The hierarchy gets things done that need doing. The social network transcends, not only moving people between divisions and teams within the company, but also between companies. One might even see this as a principle behind the ascendancy of the likes of Facebook, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
Make no mistake, there are people at Microsoft operating to make things better, and the competition, both internal and external, plays a part. We who like to read, like to practice reading the writing on the wall, as we did while focusing on the chalkboard from our desks, now replaced by the whiteboard from our bouncy balls and standing desks. But we also know that a company lives until the last person turns out the light.
What isn't so well known is how to run a large, knowlege worker driven company well.
That's why it is so hard to cast Microsoft and Google aside as easily as people seem to. Yes, they are doing all kinds of things wrong. What's amazing is how much they are getting right, given the odds. That's the insight the author of this article seems to lack.
Welch himself says this. He says the Head of HR is almost as important as the CFO.
The issue is blindly copying his style without understanding the spirit behind it.
Now, a large company in 1981 (when Welch became CEO of GE) would have a reasonable amount of deadweight. Why? Because from 1945 to 1981, people were still (culturally, at least) in shell shock from the Great Depression and (a) firing was rare, and (b) people didn't leave stable jobs, even after they'd checked out, and even if there were great opportunities elsewhere. So, as much as I dislike the "greed is good" attitude of the 1980s and the rampant "cost-cutting", I have to admit that most companies circa 1980 could use a bit of cutting, because they'd become pretty bloated and risk-averse.
Firing the bottom 10% of a large, sprawling company in 1981 was probably a good idea. You could do this maybe twice (i.e. two years in a row) and improve the company. The first time, you get a major effect, because the worst people aren't just costing money, but sucking away time and morale: they're dividers rather than mere subtractors. Every divider gone is a good step for a company. Subtractors tend to be just less competent than expected, and they should be improved and given more chances; but don't ever think twice about firing a divider.
But once you've gotten rid of your deadweight, now you're firing half-decent people who just haven't "clicked" yet. After the obvious underperformers (1 to 30% depending on the organization) are gone, the next targets are junior members of underperforming teams (and this is perverse, because the newest people are least responsible for the team problem). This, however, exacerbates the discrepancy between the good and bad teams: before, the differences were of prestige and where one sits in the cafeteria, but now being on the wrong team means getting fired. So, the careerist scramble to get on the right projects and under bosses who can protect their underlings gets a lot more heated. Soon you have the careerism and "warring departments" dynamic that Microsoft is getting raked over the coals for. Google, which has a less severe rank-and-yank (5% get PIP'd, which doesn't usually lead to firing, but only because most Googlers can get jobs anywhere they want with "Google" on their resume) has the careerism but not the warring departments (yet) but the internal mismanangement of Google+ sociology is definitely a step in the wrong direction.
Once your organization is large enough, a pretty reasonable case can be made that this distribution remains constant (although in fairness, the argument isn't that 10% deserved to be fired, it's that 10% are underperforming, and you need to quickly determine if that is going to change). It's undoubtedly NOT precise or immutable, but it is probably closer to "correct" than what happens without such practices in place.
> But once you've gotten rid of your deadweight, now you're firing half-decent people who just haven't "clicked" yet.
You are assuming no hiring, acquisitions, and changes in your business that change the value of employee work. That is the typical image of a large, lumbering conglomerate, and part of the point of codifying the practice is to force the organization to step out of the myth.
You were not here long enough to experience the situations you claim to have suffered; you did not fit in, in many aspects, and were unwilling to adapt or in any way change your stance or expectations; and the assertions you make are warped to maintain your own position as being "right" and whatever else needed as being "wrong" to fit.
The title may be hyperbole, but the content of the blogpost seems spot on.
The healthcare changes are most upsetting to myself and my wife, especially since we always looked at healthcare as an amazing benefit and competitive advantage to Microsoft. For anyone who doesn't know, there is currently a healthcare plan available that basically covers everything, all the time, with no out-of-pocket costs ever. No copays, no prescription costs, nothing. Of course there are limits, but for many typically cases, like myself, I never pay anything. This plan is going away in 2013 and being replaced by a more typically, less comprehensive option.
>"If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,"
that is not true.
Stack ranking really isn't as bad as it has been made out to be in the past few weeks.
I'm curious how it could possibly not be as bad as it sounds, considering the simplicity of the concept and the obviousness of its implications.
For example consider two managers that both report to a VP. Each manager has 10 direct reports. If the managers and VP are all friends then the actual ranking distributions could vary a bit: one manager really has a strong team and the VP knows this. The VP also knows the other manager has a weaker team. As long as the VP's stack ranks are approximately correct in aggregate the individual managers probably have some wiggle room.
The point is politics in large organizations usually trumps strict rules. This can work both for and against someone hence some people don't view stack ranking in such a harsh light.
So to summarize what I heard so far: stack ranking is a terrible system based on flawed assumptions, everybody involved knows it, it doesn't actually measure performance but charisma, and for a company to work with this thing they have to sidestep it anyway?
This year's review process was the worst I've seen, though, and really showed that only manager feedback is considered, at least in my area.