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It's a nice theory. But it doesn't work.

Looks like the objectivists downvoted you. Such is the nature of Hacker News!

I think the stack ranking thing comes from quotas for sales people. The thing about salesman is that you can more or less rate their performance objectively by how much they sell. Trying to bring this over to knowledge workers is a recipe for disaster though.

Ayn Rand considered collectivist intellectuals and politicians to be the parasites.

She particularly lamented big businesses that harness government to gain advantages over the "regular guy," who she actually stood up for.

Regarding people who work productively, all she did was heap praise on them---whether they were at the top of the company, or the bottom.

For Rand, being moral was never about how much you actually accomplish compared to other people.

So, the parent comment is an uninformed and (possibly unintentional) smear.

There was a very strong backlash against Rand from the intellectual left the second she was published (in the 40s), and the reverberations from that are still very prevalent in the culture, but they are secondhanded and mistaken.

I read the Fountainhead, and it was hard to square the views expressed in that book with her extreme enthusiasm for capitalism and business that she expressed in other writings (I didn't read the other books). In the Fountainhead, capitalism comes off as looking rather corrupt and dishonest, a system that was exploited by Peter Keatings at the expense of Howard Roarks. I couldn't really discern a clear and consistent philosophy from that book, so I interpret it as basically a romance, set in an ideal fantasy world, between a heroic uber-mensch, Howard Roark, and a beautiful woman whose high standards admit only uber-mensches, Dominique Francon. The Dominique character I interpret as an idealized Ayn Rand.

Romance? Doesn't Roark rape Francon at one point?

Yes. And she still likes him. It's not an unknown fantasy.

If I remember correctly, Dominique intentionally hit Roark in the face with a huge stick while she was riding a horse through the woods. That was before the rape scene.

I think she had to "bring him down" because she loved him, and she always destroyed that which she loved (e.g. a statue), because she didn't believe that such things belong in a corrupt world.

The point of all this was not to condone such a sequence of actions, but to tell a psychological story about two people.

Rand rejected the Nietzchian ubermensch, favoring free and voluntary association. Fountainhead specifically references this with the downfall of Gail Wynand. The characters are idealized though, yeah.

> In the Fountainhead, capitalism comes off as looking rather corrupt and dishonest

There is a lot of corruption and dishonesty in the Fountainhead. Ayn Rand was trying to show the difference between firsthanded and secondhanded people (i.e., people who try to let others think for them or dictate their values). That can happen in any society, whether it's a capitalist one or not.

Ayn Rand does not simply equate "capitalism" with "business." By "capitalism" she means "pure capitalism" (as opposed to a mixed economy or something else), which is a system where all people are completely free from having force used against them unless they first initiate it. (In other words, a system purely based on trade, never on coersion.) This whole issue was not really a topic in The Fountainhead.

> exploited by Peter Keatings at the expense of Howard Roarks

Was it? Peater Keating's life was completely miserable.

> I couldn't really discern a clear and consistent philosophy from that book

The point is that Howard Roark lives for his own happiness and his own values and actually achieves them, while all the other characters live in some secondhanded way and are miserable.

> a heroic uber-mensch, Howard Roark

Gail Wynand, the newspaper baron, was the Nietzschean uber-mensch in the book. He achieves complete domination over New York (he controls what people read enough to control public sentiment, has all the politicians in his pocket, and is wealthy enough to buy anything he wants). Yet he ultimately hates himself and is miserable. Because dominating other people is not a means to happiness; it is empty and ultimately miserable. Gail Wynand did not achieve _his own_ values. That was the point of that character, and it was also Ayn Rand's response to Neitzche, who she rejected.

> The Dominique character I interpret as an idealized Ayn Rand.

There is a character that can be interpreted that way, but it's Dagny from Atlas Shrugged. Dominique was psychologically perverted because she didn't believe that values were possible in a world full of second-handers; that's why she goes around smashing artwork in the beginning. This is definitely not an idealized version of Ayn Rand.

I think Ayn Rand described Dominique as "myself on a bad day".

> The point is that Howard Roark lives for his own happiness and his own values and actually achieves them

Roark doesn't provide a useful model for how to achieve this, because he is sui generis -- a genius. IIRC, there were characters that were first-hand that had ordinary jobs, but the book didn't dwell on them. It may be because first/second-hand make a big difference for an artist, but not so much difference for a grocery clerk.

> Because dominating other people is not a means to happiness

It's not a means to happiness, but it's clearly a means to capital accumulation, according to the book.

> Dominique was psychologically perverted because she didn't believe that values were possible in a world full of second-handers

But she came around by the end, and lived happily ever after with the hero, didn't she? I read the end quickly. It got strange.

I haven't read Nietzsche, but Roark is a kind of perfection, given that he is artistically-gifted, has total confidence in himself, and loves his work. He has strong values that he never wavers from. He has trouble achieving success in the market, though. I guess you could say that that's because the market is dominated by second-handers, who don't value people like Roark. If ideal capitalism requires every participant to be a Roark, then it's not any more achievable than ideal Marxism.

There is nothing inherently poisonous about doing company-wide ranking (though it is infeasible to do precisely since objective measures of "goodness" are non-existent and you can't do subjective ranking of everyone in all but the smallest environments; whether or not good-enough approximations exist is debatable).

However, doing it on a per-team basis is stupid. It guarantees that some teams will have bottom-performers, since a team without bottom-performers will fire or scare away the lowest in the team. Furthermore you incentivize sabotaging your teammates and--even if nobody does it--that makes everyone suspicious of their teammates.

If there were a magical wand I could wave to nearly perfectly rank all the employees at a company I were running, I would do it and base compensation off of it. Doing so on a per-team basis is stupid.

You still run into problems if you do an org wise stack rank and manager popularity and pull is going to impact which groups are magically determined to have only top performers.

A better approach really I think is to just do 360s and if there are clear problems with key employees that are holding back other employees let them go. If you have everyone working on complex code and are pushing for excellence over time it will become clear who is making the grade and who isn't.

Even if some of the employees that work well on the team could be replaced by other slightly more efficient or intelligent employees the benefit of doing so is greatly offset by ramp up and recruiting time that takes away from team productivity.

But to do that you need to be able to trust managers to make competent hiring and firing decisions. I have watched firing decisions happen at Microsoft, as well as been hired. I can tell you that managers are definitely not trusted to make these decisions or at least weren't when I was there.

So once you establish that you don't trust managers, you pick managers who excel at politics rather than anything else and the problem continues.

Well I think that is a major underlying reason for why they used the forced curve. It's a problem. I can't say I have an answer for avoiding it other than flattening the business hierarchy and taking the first step of trusting managers to make those decisions.

If you aren't trusting your managers to make these decisions, why do you have managers in the first place?

Those are two things that Microsoft needs to do, namely use IT to replace depth in business hierarchy, and to empower team managers to make these decisions.

Managers do the dirty glue-work that allows their teams to get things done. Managers interface with other business units, again, to allow their teams to get things done. Managers pull together a clear picture of what everyone else is doing so that they can see when something isn't being done--so that they can communicate that back to the team, so it can, once again, get stuff done. See most of the stuff Rands has written on the topic of management (http://www.randsinrepose.com/). Basically, a manager is a glorified secretary who works for everyone in the team at once. The equivalent in sports is the coach.

Management is, however, not the command-and-control backbone of your company. That's leadership, and that's an orthogonal role. Management is about oiling teams to run better; while leadership is about taking responsibility for, and ownership of a team's output.

Leaders, of course, want their teams to be managed, because it makes them work better--and if nobody else will do it, they can do it themselves. But, importantly, the leader role works better when held by a member of the team--someone doing the work, down in the trenches--while the manager role works better on someone who doesn't have any other responsibilities (since it's a full-time job in and of itself.) Leaders who are also managers become out-of-touch in their leadership, because the job of management deprives them of access to the distributed knowledge they need to make leadership decisions (the kind they'd just pick up naturally by doing the job alongside the team.)

Ideally, leaders are just members of teams held in high regard by their peers, who just end up taking ownership of the team's project by default. In contrast, ideally managers are free-floating socialites, working with several teams and ensuring that everyone has everything they need (including introductions to people outside their team they might not know they need!)

You'll notice that there's nowhere in this list of requirements for a "boss" who tells you to "get to work." This is because, if your team lead actually has your respect--and if that lead actually cares about the project--then you don't want to disappoint them by giving them any less than your best. And if either of those two things aren't true, then you probably need to rebuild the team, or scrap the project.

This is all true but here is the other side.

Knowledge is local. We can prove that (see the CAP theorem). Therefore decisions are best made at a local level. Someone needs to take ownership of decisions like hiring and firing and that needs to be someone close to the work. Since the leader is not the one with that power, that leaves the manager, and if you can't trust the manager with that power, then you can't trust the manager with anything.

The basic problem is that with responsibility comes power and vice versa. You can't be responsible for something without the powers necessary to live up to that responsibility. Likewise power without responsibility doesn't work out so well either. The question, as always, is what are the responsibilities and what are the powers that come with them.

My sense from where I was (front lines of Product Support Services in 2000-2003), that the team managers were bit players. They could not fire people. All they could do is try to interface one team to another, but they didn't have the authority to get anything done. I found that for anything out of the ordinary, the last person I wanted to bring in was the team manager because they would claim responsibility for it, but had insufficient power to do anything about problems.

So my point is this: if you are going to give managers responsibility for the production of the team, they need to have the powers to do things like hiring and firing (within a budget of course). if you can't trust them for these things, you are giving them responsibility without power.

It doesn't happen on a per-team basis, at least the curve isn't strictly enforced at that level. That really would be insane. As you go up and up the org chart to bigger and bigger collection sizes, the curve is more strictly enforced.

(At least according to the 2 stack ranking reviews I took part in before I left.)

People at the tip top of success like Ballmer tend to be ardent defenders of competition and pure meritocracy, because viewing the world this way frames their own success as heroic. Perhaps a zero-sum mentality also helps to provide the motivation to claw your way relentlessly to the top of the pile in the first place.

It's especially amusing considering that actual "merit" is usually the last thing I think of when I see people at the "tip top of success" like Ballmer. Very few of these people did much more to merit their success than anybody else in the industry they're in, in terms of actually doing quality work. Most of the "above and beyond" effort they put in is related either to simply being part of the relevant 'old boys club'/coming from wealth already or else engaging in the kind of backstabbing and negative competition that MSFT's stack ranking encourages.

[Citation needed.]

Well, formerly from the ground level of Product Support Services, I will point out one key thing.

The review system is one of the surest ways to ensure that the hard workers stay on the work floor and are never promoted. The people who find the problems, and fight to get them fixed, are the people who make their bosses eventually look bad just a little, and they get barely ok reviews. Those who work to rule get good reviews and advance.

What this effectively means is that middle management ends up killing the organization.