[burkaman]

> they would do a stack-rank 10% cut to reach the target turnover each year

Does this mean leadership would rank all employees once a year and fire the bottom 10%, so they could hit a statistic? And that was before the owner came back? Obviously your story is insane and I'm sorry you had to go through that, but I can't get over this part. I think the concept of a terrible person owning a business is less shocking to me than the idea of someone giving themselves a minimum quota of people to fire every year.

[lazyasciiart]

Thats a really popular idea, I think it came from Jack Welch at GM. Microsoft used to be famous for it. https://www.jaywren.com/20-70-10-employee-stack-ranking/

[ipaddr]

It is an idea based on you have some method of determining the best employees and you select the most productive which sounds fair.

What happens is people make choices that put them in that 10%. Some by increasing odds by hiring awful in purpose. Some will target others work. Selecting the right group becomes more important than doing good work.

I believe you should hire or fire based in objective numbers. If 50% are bad fire them now. If none are bad keep them and give them a raise.

[atomicnumber3]

It was the owner's idea, and yeah as a sibling comment pointed out, it was something he copied from Microsoft.

In the owner's words, it was his way of basically taking people who were "doing fine" in that there wasn't an active reason to fire them, but who had plateau'd or something and "re-roll" to potentially get someone with a higher ceiling. This is, obviously, a completely sociopathic view of employees and people in general.

In between the lines, it was just a fear tactic to keep people "working harder".