So many problems with this, but let's just start with the most obvious: there's a big BIG difference between firing the bottom 5% and firing the bottom 5% IN EACH GROUP (which is what MS did). When you do the latter, bad employees become a valuable resource because they provide protection against termination for the other members of the group. Ranking relative to group provides as much of an incentive to surround yourself with losers as it does to improve your own performance.
> the technique of doing forced ranking is and of itself a useful thing.
Maybe if you're taking a psychological self-evalation with no actual consequences. Things are very different when there are actual stakes on the table. When jobs are on the line there is a very strong incentive to game the system, and some people do. As soon as people see other people being rewarded for gaming the system, that provides a strong incentive for them to try to game the system too.
It really all boils down to game theory, and if the game is zero-sum, cooperation is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. (And if you don't know what that means, you need to read "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod.)
The difference between "bottom 5%" and "bottom 5% IN EACH GROUP" boils down to whether the "bell curve" is imposed on a per-small-team level, or a per-department level, or across the entire company. The last is not really practical, but it have seen companies who have imposed the "normal distribution" (which might or might not be a formal bell curve) across a department of 500 engineers. The argument then becomes, "in a department of 500 engineers", it's likely that at least 5 are duds.
My point remains, though, that what people are recoiling with horror is not "stack ranking", but "stack ranking as it is done at Microsoft", which includes a whole host of implementation details that make a huge difference to how it affects company culture.
That's true. But applying stack ranking to small groups because applying it to large groups is impractical is kind of like looking for your lost keys under the street light because it's too dark to look where you actually lost them.
> "in a department of 500 engineers", it's likely that at least 5 are duds.
That's true too. The problem is this reasoning does not scale downwards. Its correctness DEPENDS on the number being large. What MS is doing is saying: "In 50 groups of 10 engineers, at least 2 engineers IN EACH GROUP MUST BE DUDS" and that is NOT true. But because policy dictates that the company will behave as if it were true it produces very strong pressure on people to spend their time making it appear to be true rather than doing productive work.
> the technique of doing forced ranking is and of itself a useful thing.
Maybe if you're taking a psychological self-evalation with no actual consequences. Things are very different when there are actual stakes on the table. When jobs are on the line there is a very strong incentive to game the system, and some people do. As soon as people see other people being rewarded for gaming the system, that provides a strong incentive for them to try to game the system too.
It really all boils down to game theory, and if the game is zero-sum, cooperation is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. (And if you don't know what that means, you need to read "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod.)