I'm a 10 yr MSFT veteran who spent 5 of those years in management. I got screwed plenty of times by the stack ranking system before I leaned how to manipulate it by playing the office politics game. I actually even achieved the coveted 4.5 review one year which meant I was #1 on my team but there were plenty of other years that I worked just as hard and had fantastic results but it "wasn't my turn".
After being promoted to management my opinion of the company continually declined as I was forced time and time again to lie to employees or provide weak excuses to fit them into the right spot in the stack rank. This is an incredibly flawed system and no matter how HR chooses to dress it, it won't change until there is a serious shake up among all levels of management.

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As a 10+ yr employee, I found Steve Gall finding quite accurate except for the fact that he missed how stack ranking directly perpetuates discrimination. Even though MS has grown increasing diverse with minorities comprising nearly 40%, management has steadily remained about 90% male / Caucasian.

How can this happened in a supposedly enlightened company? Easy, managers stack rank employees weeks before they ever read a performace review. Lacking objective peformance data, managers instead rely on their gut instincts in this "lifeboat" exercise. Inevitably, the employees they throw overboard are the ones that are least like them. It should also be pointed out that there is NO training for stack ranking and HR even goes as far to disavow its existence. Couple this with the fact that managers are not required to receive civil rights or diversity training (less than 1% ever enroll in the HR course) and you have an environment that self perpetuates discrimination.

The disastrous effects of this management "in-breeding" are self evident: lack of innovation and competitiveness in a global marketplace, talented employees being purged from the company simply because of their race, age or gender, and legal consequences such as the $4B class action lawsuit in 2002 that was filed by African American employees. Although the company claims to have done away with stack ranking as part of an HR overhaul last year (including the firing of the prior VP), as an insider I can tell you that the practice is still alive and well, just more cleverly hidden. Its no wonder that other competitors are flying past Microsoft when their managers stubbornly cling to stack ranking and a 1950's like fear mentality towards diversity.

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This is Kevin Schofield, the one quoted in the article. The author show a very poor understanding of how stack ranking is intended to work, and has clearly not done his homework. He also quoted me out of context -- I was making the point that I found stack ranking to be a useful exercise for many purposes. The threads on mini-Microsoft make the point over and over again that there are groups that were applying it the wrong way: they used it as a shortcut to decided performance review scores, when it was never intended for that purpose. Stack ranking is a very useful diagnostic tool AFTER performance reviews are complete to point out when there are anomalies.

The tactics you cite are true in pretty much any organization; it's important to get noticed for good work that you're doing and to have a good relationship with colleagues and superiors. That is completely indepedent of whether an organization chooses to use stack rankings, and is certainly of equal importance in an organization that relies upon 360 reviews.

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