[asdasdasdasdwd]

> Also people just game the system and only do what will get them a good review.

Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review? This reminds me of the xkcd comic about the bots starting to have constructive messages to avoid spam filters. Mission fucking accomplished.

[kyllo]

You get what you measure, for better or for worse.

But what tends to happen with stack ranking is that people only do what their direct manager values and rewards in the short term, and avoid other work that really needs to be done, or what the actual customer wants. Your boss becomes your only customer. You invent redundant new shit because that's more impressive than fixing your existing shit that's broken. This can be incredibly damaging to the quality of the product, and also to the careers of anyone the boss just doesn't personally like for whatever reason. It creates a monoculture of like-minded, demographically similar people who suck up and shit down.

You even can see pathological behaviors like managers purposefully recruiting low performers as sacrificial lambs to offer up at the next review time.

Companies got rid of the rank-and-yank system in the last decade or so for a very good reason.

[zozbot234]

> Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review?

Nope, because incentives are not aligned to that extent. The whole point of a company is that it's not a pure market where incentives are everything by definition; it's a rather more complex organization and these often rely on "soft" constraints as better sources of drive, guidance, cooperation/coordination etc. If you're relying on "hard" incentives (like firing the 'worst' 5% no matter what) you'll invariably distort behaviors in ways that are hard to even predict, and are almost never what you really want.

[cookie_monsta]

I thought this was an interesting take on the review process from an xoogler:

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/

[JohnFen]

> Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review?

If only life were that simple.