Valve Employee Handbook
There are a lot of good ideas in here, but stack-ranking is a terrible one.<p>First, it makes people hate each other. Anyone who comes up in the bottom half is going to be looking immediately to move to another group simply because he ended up in the bottom half. And if someone ends up near the bottom and ends up with no bonus or on a PIP, he's going to be spending the next few months trying to figure out who screwed him, which creates this whole side game that has nothing to do with actual work.<p>Second, it encourages people to work on the projects that are most visible, which are not always the most valuable.<p>Third, it creates a general atmosphere of distrust. People are constantly watching their back for others who might screw them in the peer review process.<p>This is an outsider's view and a microgripe, and I think a lot of the ideas in that book are good ones. I just saw the words "stack ranking" and knew I had to speak up. It's seriously not a good idea. If someone's going to get whacked, it should happen for a real reason, and not because that person ended up in the bottom 15% because only a couple people knew what he was working on. Maybe he was working on something important but unglamorous. I've seen that kind of shit happen all the time with stack-ranking systems.