Yeah, I ran a team like this. I was able to attract the best of the best and built a solid team, but the incentive was to hire some people that weren't as good so they could give you somewhere to throw the 10%'s. It's awful because a lot of those people still work hard and are reasonably good at their job, no one wins. I was fortunate that a partner team had a lot of low-performers and I got a little break when we combined curves.

That said, I'm skeptical that the stack rank system is gone, based on what I hear from those that are still there (I've been out for many years now). It sounds like a lot of the same curve-fitting is just renamed.