Wow, I never saw this type of advice before, but I like it. In short: If you are required to do stack ranking, where at least one person must get a shitty score/grade, then recruit someone internally who is below average and will take the hit. Brutal, but practical.
Or externally! I posted an idea here a while ago, where I thought I'd start a staffing company called "Scapegoat Consultants" and we would offer your team a "low performer" that you could hire and then fire after a year, to protect the rest of your team from stack-ranking. Our consultant will join your team and do as little as you want, or even nothing at all! We'd guarantee that they will at least not actively make your code base worse, but that's it. After a year of this, you can easily make the case that our recruit was a low-performer and manage them out. Don't worry, he won't mind--his job was to be the low performer, and we'll hire him out to the next BigTech company who struggles with stack ranking.
It used to be tongue in cheek, but maybe the industry actually needs something like this.
That's the standard strategy to survive stack ranking.
Have you heard any story by someone that was hired into some megacorp just to be sent into a PIP or fired by low performance before they had any chance to even do anything? Stack ranking is the most common reason those happen.
