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Comment by overgryphon | Hacker News Reader

Is it so important that the individual components of a person's performance be evaluated individually? What about someone with exceptional technical abilities who uses those skills to ensure that blame for potential failure is always assigned to other people, rather than focus those impressive skills on the success of the overall project? Is it so important that person receive recognition for their technical skills?

If someone's social behavior jeopardizes the success of projects they work on, then perhaps it doesn't matter how technically competent they are.

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I understand your point, and I agree that cooperation, friendliness, humility, etc. are all extremely important skills in any engineer or developer, but I think there is some value in looking at the two things distinctly (technical and social).

As a counterexample to yours, what if someone is very friendly, witty, and amicable, but is severely lacking in technical skills? Perhas they are not even remotely pulling their weight in projects, resulting in friendly coworkers essentially doing their work for them and covering for them? In such a case you'll want to know that their technical skills are below what they should be.

The answer to your question is probably "no". However, most of the discussion was in reference to the stack ranking at Microsoft, where people's pay was being determined by how well they were ranked by their peers. If you were generally likable, people might also say that your coding skills were better than they really were. So, I think that you're right, and it's a good reason why the stack system didn't work very well.

Except Microsoft doesn't stack rank people based on peer feedback- it's based on all the leads getting into a room and stack ranking their directs.

It's very possible to have a bad stack ranking but excellent peer feedback.

With this system, someone who delivers very well, but undermines other people or projects they work on would likely receive a high stack ranking, but poor peer feedback resulting in private discussions. People in charge of managing said employee may ignore the problem, attempt to place the employee under people who will help them address social problems, or quietly find a way to move them to a different org. It's quite likely none of this shows up in stack ranking.

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