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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

It did not work like that at Microsoft at all. Stack ranking happened at an organization-wide level, so the total pool was hundreds of employees. It was perfectly normal for one team to be full of high performers, and vice versa. And being ranked in the bottom bucket didn't mean you were going to be fired. In most cases it wouldn't even lead to a PIP. It was simply a lower bonus, that's it. I have no idea about Amazon but at Microsoft the whole manager having to fire 1 out of 5 employees every year was 100% a myth. I worked there for many years and out of many hundreds of coworkers maybe 2 or 3 were ever fired for underperforming (while it should have been way more).

Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.

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I ended up being on the losing end of the stack ranking at Microsoft and it was pretty terrible.

My manager straight up told me that my performance was fine but because he had to rank someone the lowest, it was my turn since I was the least experienced on the team. If I had actually been doing a bad job it wouldn't have felt as bad because at least then I would have had some control over the situation.

I moved teams shortly after that and my new manager was pretty surprised to see my last review. He started keeping a list of other developers on the other teams that I was helping so he could help me get ranked higher. That felt super shitty and I left the company right after.

That happened to be right at the same time they did away with the stack ranking. I have no idea if it improved things but it had to be better than what it was. (At least in my part of the company.)

The current company I work at uses stack ranking. I had no idea what it was until I joined a new team and was told, "Well, no bonus for you, because you're the new guy. Mark always uses the new devs to rank against so he can give out bigger bonuses to his cronies."

Sure as shit, for three years, it didn't matter how awesome or shitty a job I did, I got the same middle of the road review. One year, I got a paltry bonus and no salary increase. The next was neither and the final year I got a pittance of both. By the second year, I knew what was happening and just completely checked out. I went full "Office Space" and did the exact minimum in order to get my work done and not get put on a pip. Would come in around 11, get my stuff done in a few hours and tell my team I was going to be "WFH" the rest of the day.

Finally left that team and two years since leaving that team, I've had several large bonuses and salary increases.

Stack ranking is some toxic bullshit and managers use it to make themselves look better to their own skip managers. Fucking corporate politics man, it ruins everything.

> Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft

I would imagine that nearly every change in performance review structure at nearly every company is unpopular:

People who were let go (or who left voluntarily of low bonuses/raises/refreshes) aren't there to complain!

Everyone who is left, who knew how to game the system (or was so good they didn't need to) now has to optimize to a completely new metric.

That's also the case at Amazon. And likely most large organizations. It's not a strict stack rank but an expectation that over a certain population size, there is a certain percentage of under-performers. It's also used as a method of calibration. Performance evaluations are hard.

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