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Comment by chiph | Hacker News Reader

Look up MiniMsft's blog -- he talked a lot about stack/ranking at Microsoft and the effect it had on the business. It wasn't a positive, let's just say that.

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Yeah, I learned, probably from it, that that's exactly one of the results from this sort of stack ranking. At the extreme, it's almost impossible to assemble a "dream team", tiger team or whatever because absent sustained political cover, some of them will have to be assigned a 1 or 2, and be shown the door or otherwise have their career zapped.

Raytheon has a four-bin(Far exceeds, Exceeds, Meets, and needs Improvement) ranking system that, while officially not a stack-ranking system, unofficially is because managers are under significant pressure to have their sections roughly meet corporate's expected rating distribution. The system is not a total clusterfuck because the "I" category, which gets you put on a Performance Improvement Plan, is allowed to have nobody assigned. A manager still needs to respect the E and F targets, though, so awesome sections end up screwing people over and mediocre sections end up rewarding people who don't deserve it.

How can someone far exceed expectations more than once or twice. Aren't the managers just bad at judging expectations at that point?

I think it means "far exceeds the expectations at his current role". If you get several FEs, then it's time for a promotion.

In a political organization there's no problem with repeated "we were frat buddies in college", "we have fun going golfing together", "I've never met anyone who kisses up that much", etc.

In practice you see it applied in very large teams with team wide metrics. Like 1000 people in a call center. The guy who hacks the system or gets assigned to a special team that naturally results in better results, can consistently win every time.

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