Stack ranking comes out of a couple ideas. One is that it's important to always be bringing on new people with a fresh perspective. If no one is leaving the company it's hard to do that effectively, although normal attrition can usually take care of this. Two, it's management admitting that they have hired the wrong people at some point and have dead weight. Of course management never wants to say they screwed up, but if every hire was a perfect hire then there were be little reason to try and remove people.
The problem is that stack ranking on an individual level puts the employee focus on themselves instead of the team and the company. All employees should be focused on doing what's best for the company as a whole and not what's best for themselves. Stack ranking sets up the exact opposite situation.
If there are poor employees on the team then speak with them, put them on corrective action, etc... If you already have a team of great performers, ranking them will only work to align their goals differently from the company and that can lead to all sorts of problems.
To be fair to Valve, it sounds like you're talking about rank-and-yank, which is not necessarily the same thing as stack-ranking. I made the same mistake in my response: assuming that stack-ranking meant that those who come up in the bottom get PIP'd or fired. That's not strictly true. However, most stack-ranking systems end up as de facto rank-and-yank.
Objective, across-the-board incompetents are very rare. Generally, companies that are well run are going to have very few people (at lower levels) who actually should be fired. Oddly, the levels at which firing 10-30% of people make sense are the managerial levels where people almost never get fired (and if they do, they get huge severance packages that include outplacement assistance).
Most hiring mistakes are bad matching, not bad hiring. The right person was brought on and put in the wrong place. So the correct solution is to pivot: help the person find a transfer to a more appropriate team.
In very small companies, this may not be an option. If there's only 1 project, and you hire someone who's a bad fit for it, you have to fire him, because there's nowhere else to put him. But companies at that size generally don't have HR departments or company-wide stack-ranking.
> Most hiring mistakes are bad matching, not bad hiring. The right person was brought on and put in the wrong place. So the correct solution is to pivot: help the person find a transfer to a more appropriate team.
Maybe at google. But objectively bad hires are not uncommon in general.
In "objectively bad", I'm talking about competence.
I've met 5 times as many unethical people as incapable people. Easily. The unethical people should be fired once found out, but that's a given. The problem is that unethical people are usually impossible to spot until after they've screwed you.
Comments
Stack ranking comes out of a couple ideas. One is that it's important to always be bringing on new people with a fresh perspective. If no one is leaving the company it's hard to do that effectively, although normal attrition can usually take care of this. Two, it's management admitting that they have hired the wrong people at some point and have dead weight. Of course management never wants to say they screwed up, but if every hire was a perfect hire then there were be little reason to try and remove people.
The problem is that stack ranking on an individual level puts the employee focus on themselves instead of the team and the company. All employees should be focused on doing what's best for the company as a whole and not what's best for themselves. Stack ranking sets up the exact opposite situation.
If there are poor employees on the team then speak with them, put them on corrective action, etc... If you already have a team of great performers, ranking them will only work to align their goals differently from the company and that can lead to all sorts of problems.
To be fair to Valve, it sounds like you're talking about rank-and-yank, which is not necessarily the same thing as stack-ranking. I made the same mistake in my response: assuming that stack-ranking meant that those who come up in the bottom get PIP'd or fired. That's not strictly true. However, most stack-ranking systems end up as de facto rank-and-yank.
Objective, across-the-board incompetents are very rare. Generally, companies that are well run are going to have very few people (at lower levels) who actually should be fired. Oddly, the levels at which firing 10-30% of people make sense are the managerial levels where people almost never get fired (and if they do, they get huge severance packages that include outplacement assistance).
Most hiring mistakes are bad matching, not bad hiring. The right person was brought on and put in the wrong place. So the correct solution is to pivot: help the person find a transfer to a more appropriate team.
In very small companies, this may not be an option. If there's only 1 project, and you hire someone who's a bad fit for it, you have to fire him, because there's nowhere else to put him. But companies at that size generally don't have HR departments or company-wide stack-ranking.
> Most hiring mistakes are bad matching, not bad hiring. The right person was brought on and put in the wrong place. So the correct solution is to pivot: help the person find a transfer to a more appropriate team.
Maybe at google. But objectively bad hires are not uncommon in general.
In "objectively bad", I'm talking about competence.
I've met 5 times as many unethical people as incapable people. Easily. The unethical people should be fired once found out, but that's a given. The problem is that unethical people are usually impossible to spot until after they've screwed you.