I'm only a recent graduate; I've yet to work in any corporate environment so my experience is somewhat limited. I also do think it's easy to be critical of large companies and to regard their organisation as stupid. In this case, Microsoft is run by smart people. If it wasn't effective, I'm sure it wouldn't be used. At the same time, it's hard not to think that there are problems with that kind of system or that there are more effective methods to get people to work harder. One benefit to the stack ranking seems to be that it's pretty universal - other methods could vary more in effectiveness depending on the managers involved etc.
As said - I've yet to run any large corporation so I can't have too much of an opinion on stack ranking. :thumbsup2:
