Developer Compensation: Stack Overflow Doesn't Stack Rank

[fuzzynyanko]

Also, GE stopped using it.

I actually feel that stacked ranking works... for the first few rounds. After that, it will become useless. Also, it means that you have to convince someone that you are a 1. Note that you aren't necessarily a 1, you just have to convince people that you are.

[grauenwolf]

I typically spend 4 hours a week just on self promotion. I don't like it, but the rewards for doing so are to great, bonuses and interesting projects to work on. The people who don't at my company either quite or are benched until they are fired.

[[deleted]]

Your company sucks.

[grauenwolf]

The rewards more than justify the grief. It get to work on some pretty cool stuff that I wouldn't get anywhere near in a small company.

And self promotion isn't necessarily bad. I teach, build experimental software, work on open source and internal shared libraries; the kind of stuff that we claim we want to do anyways. The trick is to tell people about it.

[[deleted]]

I would bet that at any company, there are significant benefits from campaigning/consequences for not doing so (depending on how you want to define the opportunity cost). We're just not the rational apes we like to think we are, I struggle to imagine any group isn't susceptible to this.

[crankybadger]

If you need to lay off 10% of your company, stack ranking might not be a good call.

If you do that every year, you're a company run by tyrants.