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Comment by colinhowe | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this happen at companies before. The other side I've seen is:

  HR bod: sorry, you can't give everyone a 5 on your team, someone has to have a 1
  Manager: but, I've hired my team sensibly!
  HR bod: sorry, you can't give everyone a 5 on your team, someone has to have a 1

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Yes, seen that. One variation I experienced was separating retention rank (how critical is this person to the team, dept., etc.) from performance rank (how effective and skilled is this person). That was a bit of a painful exercise as it was very clear to me that the organization was sifting for a reduction in force despite high performance after having culled the low performers.

It makes sense on the most basic level of "we have 5 high-performing individuals but we only have enough work to support 4."

If you have a group of people who all get 5's on a review but you are required to let one of them go, how do you do it in a way that isn't picking a name out of a hat, or the first person to get stuck in traffic and be late to a meeting?

But one knows what the numbers can be used for when assigning performance review numbers to people. So instead of picking a name out of a hat, the process is to pick a number out of a hat corresponding to a name?

Yep currently got that. HR: You may only put up one person for promotion per year Me: But I have 5 people in the team. Its unfair. HR: Sorry. Only one.

At least it's being up for promotions, not having to finger one for remediation/termination. The binning scheme where every team needs a super star and a low performer (a la Jack Welch) is atrocious and the smaller the unit it's applied to, the more likely that the curve fits.

I've seen (in Banks) this applied like a religion and it leads to situation where the "low performing" member of Team A would be solidly in the middle of the pack of Team B, if not the "high-performing" member of that team.

If you're exceedingly lucky in that kind of environment, there's enlightened management running interference and manually balancing team to avoid having to can a good person because their team is overall good.

I worked in healthcare briefly and saw a lot of the same. We'd have a handful of people assigned to new teams and magically 3-6 months later half of them would be part of a round of layoffs. It got to the point where anyone who got reassigned during non-obvious times (excluding a business unit failing or a small acquisition or something) almost immediately started looking for another job and they usually quit within a month anyway.

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