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No, no, the problem is that skill distribution is not random in an organization. Let me give you a very real example: I am contracting for a big company that has its own form of stack ranking. I've spent this last month with a team where the very best member they have seems to be in the bottom 10%. In comparison, I've worked with other teams where their worst performer is very competent, and would be a developer king in the first, low performing team. But with their stack ranking, the worst player of a good team is ranked lower than people from the bottom 10% team. Even if hires were assigned teams at random, attrition doesn't occur evenly. Bad teams lose good people very fast. Teams with bad managers will have huge rates of churn (people rarely quit their job, they quit their manager). So the end result is to naturally divide into multimodal distributions: Rich get richer, poor get poorer. Since ranking teams is, from an organizational perspective, extremely political, you'll rarely get management to point fingers to the bad teams. Also, splitting a high performing team rarely works: A team is not a collection of individuals, but also a culture. Dump a great performer on a bad culture, and even if you put him in charge, you do not get a good culture: Instead, you get less out of that person. If there's anything I've learned, is that we are better off ranking teams, not people. The one reason to look inside a team is for voting people off the island, and that is something that should be started from within a team. |