In defense of stack ranking, it does solve a very common problem -- managers who never fire people who deserve to be let go.

This ultimately rots an organization from the inside, as it leads to attrition of higher performers because they're forced to work with useless people.

You see this a lot in companies that rarely fire people, because managers optimize for accumulating direct report count (whether or not those direct reports are doing valuable work).

companies need to do much better about letting managers go. I get it, they are hard to find. and those that actually have any engineering management skill at all are even harder to find. and every time you hire a new one you're taking a risk that they'll be a absolutely terrible manager. a terrible manager can cause a huge swath of destruction.

but the answer can't be an army of useless middle managers diluting the impact of the people who actually do want to help the company and providing cover for people like them that are just phoning it it.

Absolutely. I'd like to see companies get more serious about driving manager requirement from span of control.

As well as regularly rotating managers, like the military does (e.g. 3 year reassignment).

> This ultimately rots an organization from the inside

Hum... So instead you decide to immediately rot the organization from the inside.

I can see how it avoids that one problem. The important problem is the waiting, right?

Try working for IT in a utility, insurance company, or other stable business. You'd be amazed how high the bar for termination is.

No disagreement here. But you are falling for a very bad logical fallacy.

Nah you make sure X% of your team is staffed with losers. It's a nutty system I know. But I'd imagine that's how things worked at companies that have stack ratings. Managers probably traded low performers like baseball cards.