It's not a complete answer to your critique, and I don't have any experience working with stack-ranking, so I'm not sure the following is true. But: it seems like the worst problems of stack ranking might come from not having good people doing the ranking. In other words, it's a system that would be a complete disaster if used in a normal organization full of normal people. But Valve strives to be (and, I think it may be fairly said, is) neither. True?
Back in my days at Andersen Consulting, annual reviews were done by getting everyone at manager or higher level to assess everyone they had worked with over the preceding year and the nature and duration of the working relationship. This weighted your ranking. Within seniority levels, every person's scores were then calculated, sorted, and then assigned to one of five bands which determined raises.
This sounds a lot like stack ranking except it was top down. This was, by far, the best system I have ever seen for handling a difficult and often unpleasant process, and I think making it work across levels versus top down would only improve it. Incidentally, I only found out about this process once I made manager -- but I had consistently been in the top band for my entire time at AC despite having a senior colleague trying to screw me.
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It's not a complete answer to your critique, and I don't have any experience working with stack-ranking, so I'm not sure the following is true. But: it seems like the worst problems of stack ranking might come from not having good people doing the ranking. In other words, it's a system that would be a complete disaster if used in a normal organization full of normal people. But Valve strives to be (and, I think it may be fairly said, is) neither. True?
Back in my days at Andersen Consulting, annual reviews were done by getting everyone at manager or higher level to assess everyone they had worked with over the preceding year and the nature and duration of the working relationship. This weighted your ranking. Within seniority levels, every person's scores were then calculated, sorted, and then assigned to one of five bands which determined raises.
This sounds a lot like stack ranking except it was top down. This was, by far, the best system I have ever seen for handling a difficult and often unpleasant process, and I think making it work across levels versus top down would only improve it. Incidentally, I only found out about this process once I made manager -- but I had consistently been in the top band for my entire time at AC despite having a senior colleague trying to screw me.