zlacker

The advantage of stack ranking is that it's a formal process, and one in which managers' behavior is more measurable and reviews are definitively scheduled. It also aligns employee churn with performance to some degree, moving weaker hires out and encouraging better hires to stay, again via a formal process.

What it reduces is the tendency of less formal processes to give raises to those who ask and to stiff those who don't and to throw up the "your salary is confidential". All those things it avoids are known to create a high potential for bad company culture and moral.

>>brudge+(OP)
Considering the quality of software and innovation produced by MS while stack ranking was in place, and the drop in software quality coming out of Google after its own version of stack ranking was introduced, it seems unlikely to be effective.

As I understand it individuals were stack ranked within teams, so even if a team outperformed the company or industry average, individuals were still tagged as underperformers.

And generally it became a matter of politics, popularity, and self-promotion, not objective competence - which is hard to measure anyway.

To me, it seems like a fast road to madness.

As for Netflix - I can't imagine any company needs to be staffed entirely by ninja rockstar code demi-gods. Many development projects are mundane and by the numbers, and basic competence is fine. If you want to be disruptive, hire a core of creative innovators who can code. They probably won't be ninjas, but for product development, talented customer-oriented innovators are a really good thing in any business that sells stuff to real customers.