So nothing changed in the five years after I quit. I guess that isn't too surprising. The review process is toxic, especially stack ranking. I don't think you could pay me enough to go back.
- stack ranking leads to competition leads to everyone doing their best,
- at the end of the day you have to offer differentiated rewards to your team, and it's better to offer more rewards to those who earned them (vs. just blanketing everyone with the same rewards)--stack ranking just makes this explicit, and
- it puts pressure on bottom performers to leave the company or find a team that's a better match.
That said, I recently left Microsoft (after 8 years in the Office org, probably near OP), and stack ranking was one of the reasons. For me the toughest part of it was that I felt there was no part of my compensation that was tied to the overall product my team produced--we could have produced a gorgeously engineered, ground-breaking product or a buggy piece of bloatware no customer wanted; it really didn't matter from a review perspective.
Stack ranking is also generally despised by the rank-and-file, often because they are sure it's the reason they haven't had a meteoric rise despite their obvious superiority over everyone else. Folks who have "made it" to the upper echelon often mysteriously acquire the stack ranking religion.
Stack-ranking makes it impossible for everyone but the top 25% to transfer, though, because no one wants someone with a bad or mediocre review history.
If you need to fire people, fire them. Flushing out good people in the name of stack ranking is a pointless, morale-killing waste.
or, as I am wont to say, back up the dump truck filled with money and then we'll start talking. It has to be worth it (however you measure what "worth" and "it" are) to go back to something that goes against your principles. :)