[twright0]

"Stack ranking employee evaluations"

I agree with a great many criticisms of Microsoft, but this one always strikes me as nonsensical. I was an intern at Microsoft and (while I never participated in stack ranking) it never seemed particularly destructive. I went on a tour of Valve and one question that was asked during the Q&A was what kind of evaluation and ranking system they used - the answer was stack ranking. Companies have to use some form of evaluation and ranking for their employees once they grow past a certain size - it's just an organizational requirement. The alternative is upper management without quantifiable information about the many people under them, which makes it harder to allocate resources and operate efficiently. Or so I imagine, I'm not in upper management at a very large company, but that certainly seems to be the case pretty much everywhere.

[RandallBrown]

Go through a stack ranking where you get a bad review simply because "there are too many good developers on the team" before you say that it is a nonsensical criticism.

Making employees feel like shit for reasons outside their control is bad management.

[throwawaykf02]

Anecdotal, but, I know a bunch of good developers at Microsoft, and I've never heard any one of them complain about that before. They complain about a bunch of things, many of them related to upper management, but that "lost decade" article was the first I heard anyone complaining about stack ranking.