>"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.