quote:

---

Outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer’s beloved employee-ranking system made me secretive, cynical, and paranoid.

---

quote:

---

The system was called the stack rank.

---

quote:

---

I had to evaluate others and be evaluated myself under this system. And I can say that yes, stack ranking is as toxic for innovation and integrity and morale as media reports made it out to be, and then some.

---

quote:

---

People would then be assigned one of three grades: 4.0 (Above Average), 3.5 (Average), and 3.0 (Below Average). The very rare 4.5 got you a set of steak knives; a 2.5 meant you were fired (more or less). I’m not sure if Alan Turing himself could have gotten a 5.0.

---

quote:

---

It destroyed trust between individual contributors and management, because the stack rank required that all lower-level managers systematically lie to their reports. Why? Because for years Microsoft did not admit the existence of the stack rank to nonmanagers. Knowledge of the process gradually leaked out, becoming a recurrent complaint on the much-loathed (by Microsoft) Mini-Microsoft blog, where a high-up Microsoft manager bitterly complained about organizational dysfunction and was joined in by a chorus of hundreds of employees. The stack rank finally made it into a Vanity Fair article in 2012, but for many years it was not common knowledge, inside or outside Microsoft

---

quote:

---

Strangely, this charade would sometimes happen even between managers and their managers, both pretending that they didn’t know about the stack rank that they had recently participated in. This kind of bad faith is more common than you might think. I saw it most vividly in a certain number of party-liners who seemed wholly oblivious to the dissonance between the performance review and the stack rank, as though the two would always magically line up, even though they never did.

This sort of organizational dissembling skews your psyche. After I left Microsoft, I was left with lingering paranoia for months, always wondering about the agendas of those around me, skeptical that what I was being told was the real story. I didn’t realize until the nonstacked performance review time at my new job that I’d become so wary. At the time—inside Microsoft—it just seemed the only logical way to be.

---