Huricane called me out on my short post about forced ranking... "You simply state that you believe in the curve system, yet you link to a blog entry that makes a number of arguments against the curve system. How would you defend your belief against these arguments?"

Let me give my own personal belief (standard disclaimer, these are my own personal views and don't reflect that of my employer, etc.)...

Ranking on a curve is a good thing. We live in a competitive world and having to compete for the promotion, raise, bonus, review score, is all part of it. I have been asked before about how to get a better review score at Microsoft - find a team of crummy people. The issue is that most people came to Microsoft to work with the best people they could find, not try and eek out a few more bucks.

Now, the next question is that a firing the bottom portion of your staff. That I don't neccessarily agree with. I am not aware of any policy like that at Microsoft. What I do agree with is that companies tend to cary around too much dead weight. If you have a team of 10 super stars, that is awesome - however I don't believe most teams are like that. I see time and time again a combination of problems with teams:

1. Horrible performers - you have one or more people on your team that just don't perform. Sometimes it's a motivational issue, sometimes a raw IHP (intellectual horse power), other times there might be some personal issue. Whatever the issue, you owe it to your company and the employee to attempt to make the employee successful. Of course, this takes time and energy. One bad performer can suck down the performance of an entire team as they rally to try and help that employee up. I'm not saying this is the wrong thing to do, but it takes a lot of energy.

2. Barely acceptable performers - you have one or more people on your team that just barely squeek by. They aren't doing their job adequately, but they do enough that it isn't immediately apparent that they fit into #1. These are the hidden land mines in your team. When the time comes for a big push you will find that they can't deliver...

The #1 group is an obvious problem, and clearly should be either helped to perform up to level, or should be given the opportunity to find a job (either inside your company or outside) where they will be more successful. Teams will automatically take the initiative to resolve the issue with #1.

The #2 group is the one that I think policies like "cut the bottom N%" try to address. In a team of 10 people it takes only 1 or 2 people in the #2 bucket to completely drag the quality of the team down. They say the best developers are 10 or 100X more performant than the average developer. I believe this is true for most industries - and when you have several "low bar" people on the team you suddenly go from a team that can deliver on time and with quality to one that is struggling constantly.

So, to summarize - I don't believe in the draconian enforcement of any policy that says you must fire the bottom N% of your staff... however I do believe that you should be constantly evaluating your team to understand how to make the bottom N% of your staff more successful...