[blm]

I guess I don't understand something. Everywhere I have worked has had a ranking of employees such that when finances become difficult they knew who they would make redundant first. To me this is also stacked ranking.

The problem with some implementations is that it awards people for individual contributions and only if you are above average. This drives people to avoid contributions to a team so they can focus on their own personal contribution and to not want to help colleagues because that would drive the mean up eroding the value of personal contributions.

Couldnt you have stacked ranking with a criteria that rewards all involved for collaboration?

[ScottBurson]

The biggest problem with stack ranking, as I have read about it being practiced, is that it is implemented on a team-by-team basis rather than across an entire engineering department. The consequence is that differences in strength between teams are not taken into account -- the members of each team are ranked only relative to the other members of that team. This leads to people trying to game the system in various ways to make sure they're not seen as the weakest on their team.

Ranking all engineers in the department together would be more difficult. Managers have a hard enough time getting a read on the strength of their own people; getting them to agree on how their people rank against the other managers' people would take quite a bit of work, I imagine. But it would give a much better answer to the question of whom to let go first, and it wouldn't provide as much incentive to game the system.

And I agree with you that the ranking should explicitly emphasize how well each employee works with their teammates.

[mathattack]

I guess I don't understand something. Everywhere I have worked has had a ranking of employees such that when finances become difficult they knew who they would make redundant first. To me this is also stacked ranking.

This is a stacked rating.

Couldnt you have stacked ranking with a criteria that rewards all involved for collaboration?

Yes, though it's tougher to measure. People generally know who the best mentors are, and who they can call when they need help with a tough problem. They also know the worst mentors, and the people who don't return calls. It's very hard measuring the people in the middle.