
Ask HN: What is “Stacked Ranking”? - gamesbrainiac
Hi folks! I&#x27;ve been hearing a lot about stacked ranking these days, and recently when Intel decided to mass fire some of its employees, I thought I&#x27;d get a better understanding.<p>So, what is it? What kind of variants are there? Who wins in Stacked Ranking?<p>Looking for something canonical here since I think there are lots of ways in which this policy manifests.
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mtolan
The short form is that in a Stacked Ranking performance measurement system,
you rank every employee in an ordered list. Most often the next thing you hear
is that the top X% of employees are the ones who will be given raises/bonuses,
and the bottom Y% of employees are the ones who will be finding new jobs.

Reasonable references to get you started:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve)
[http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/stacked-
ranking](http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/stacked-ranking)
[http://www.businessinsider.com/stack-ranking-employees-
is-a-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/stack-ranking-employees-is-a-bad-
idea-2013-11)

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greenyoda
_" Who wins in Stacked Ranking?"_

The winners are the people who can convince their managers to give them the
best performance reviews (upper X%). Of course, your review isn't necessarily
correlated with your contributions to the company - it can be based on your
political skills, e.g., making your manager look good, making your rivals and
your manager's rivals look bad, etc.

