I think most of the comments here are missing a key ( and in my opinion the most detrimental) effect of stack ranking at microsoft: it prevents talent from clustering around good projects (unless they are so good as to be exempted from it).
Because someone always ends up on the bottom, a fair number of devs don't want to end up on who already has a top quality dev. Worse yet, in order to keep good people, managers don't want / will promise not to bring in more good people. Thus there is an active incentive to recruit( at least internally) mediocre talent since a team needs to hire people to keep headcount and needs to pad the middle of it's stack ranking.
Yeah, in theory this shouldn't happen because the rankings for each team are merge and those on the bottom of a good team should come in above the bottom of a bad team. In practice that seems not to work because both ICs and managers seem to have the above philosophy.
Because someone always ends up on the bottom, a fair number of devs don't want to end up on who already has a top quality dev. Worse yet, in order to keep good people, managers don't want / will promise not to bring in more good people. Thus there is an active incentive to recruit( at least internally) mediocre talent since a team needs to hire people to keep headcount and needs to pad the middle of it's stack ranking.
Yeah, in theory this shouldn't happen because the rankings for each team are merge and those on the bottom of a good team should come in above the bottom of a bad team. In practice that seems not to work because both ICs and managers seem to have the above philosophy.